Maisie Lloyd
I'm passionate about recording the world, but most of all driven by creativity and collaborative environments. My experience revolves around the production of digital content, pertaining to graphic design, writing copy, and video and audio content.
What’s an editorial calendar?
Editorial calendars are documents that allow a business to manage and coordinate content production. They enable team members to track content production from ideation to publishing.
A content calendar can be made for any duration of time, ranging from weeks to a year. This is one of the many things that should be established ahead of its creation. Other things to consider when creating your editorial calendar include:
-Who is the content for?
-What platforms are your audience most responsive on?
– What content is more likely to drive success for your business?
-How frequently do you need to post content?
What’s included in an editorial calendar?
- Any information about the content will be included on the editorial calendar. That will be what the content is about, the format of it, as well as who is creating it.
- The date it needs to be published.
- The location it needs to be published to, i.e. social platforms or a website.
How should my editorial calendar look?
An editorial calendar should include a number of things in order to provide enough information and to be able to effectively track and plan.
- Content ID – A number or code that is easy to navigate and identify.
- A location column which outlines the final destination of the content.
- A due date & publishing date. This ensures content is being produced ahead of its deadline.
- The name of the person proposing the content.
- The name of the creator/owner of the content.
- The status of the content.
- The title of the piece of content & a summary of the content (which includes the information about the content).
- A column for formatting.
- A column for additional ideas and notes
What are the advantages of an editorial calendar?
An editorial calendar provides businesses with a clear content strategy. A content strategy provides a clear plan for what content will be posted and when it will be posted. A content calendar is created with forethought, making considerations around the best hours to post, what style of content to post, as well as on what platform. This can boost productivity around content production, as well as eliminate any issues around unnecessary content production. This ensures the quality of the content and the posting remains consistent.
An editorial calendar outlines the dates and times of deadlines and publishing, as well as the status of the project. This level of organisation makes the start-to-end process easy to trace, especially when the content is a shared document between team members. Using tools like Google Sheets enables all team members to update and check on the editorial calendar in real time, reducing the time spent conversing about where the content production is at.
As well as being able to track current content, it also enables you to track and analyse previous pieces of content. This can be particularly useful for resource management, as content can be easily found and navigated within the editorial calendar. This leads to overall better campaign management and, ultimately, the production of successful content.
Having an editorial calendar benefits everybody on the team. Transparency across projects can nurture the collaborative process, with members being able to streamline their efforts across projects.
