An editorial calendar sounds a lot fancier than it is; yes, it is a strategic planning tool that’s valuable for organizing your output, whether you’re a one-person brand or a giant organization — but in the end it’s A) a calendar for B) the media you publish. Some might say “content.”
Really, so much of the success of your online presence — and through extension, business itself — can be traced back to the (quality) content you contribute. And a big factor in that success is influenced, in the long term, by clearly visualizing what you want to publish, why you want to publish it, and when you want to publish it. Scheduling and consistency matter.
That’s why the editorial calendar is so valuable.
Generally speaking, most people are not too great at conceptualizing moving parts if there isn’t a visual aid. That’s why graphs, charts, and other forms of data visualization are so valuable compared to just a list of raw numbers. This is especially true if you have a team or many teams of people who all need to be on the same page.
Your editorial calendar will be your central document outlining what you’re talking about when you’re talking about it, and how you’re distributing it to the world.
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This means topics and themes, formats, dates, and distribution channels. It means articles, blog posts, social media updates, videos, podcasts… whatever you put out there. It will help you maintain consistency and subsequently will help you avoid long gaps in publishing. This also allows you to visualize and plan your strategy. The latter is particularly helpful for complementing marketing campaigns, seasonal trends, and audience engagement patterns.
What else?
More about the benefits of a well-maintained editorial calendar
While all of the benefits generally can be unified under the umbrella of what we described above, they can be further broken down into the following:
- Improved organization and better long-term planning.
- Enhanced SEO strategy.
- More efficient resource allocation, including better time management.
- Better-diversified content.
Let’s start from the top:
Improved organization and better long-term planning
As we discussed earlier, the editorial calendar helps visualize and clarify the timeline and nature of your content. This in turn acts as a structured framework for scheduling content in advance and planning accordingly. Crucially, that helps prevent last-minute “oh crap, we have to push something out!” publishing that results in low-quality, transparently “content for content’s sake” media.
Remember that: Not only does this organization help you better plan everything out, but through extension, it helps maintain a standard of quality that’s valuable to users, who will in turn value your brand.
Similarly, because an editorial calendar allows you to cover longer timeframes — months or quarters at a time — you can A) plan your media well in advance, but also B) plan content that complements each other, builds on each other and can work in tandem. It also allows you to visualize seasonal relevance, too.
Enhanced SEO strategy
A good editorial calendar also gives you a natural space to flesh out your SEO proactively, too. This tends to result in more inherently optimized posts, as opposed to the all-too-common content where the author or brand clearly just is trying to foist keywords and other SEO-ish terms into the piece. Well-thought-out keyword research and valuable information build on each other.
By planning your SEO ahead of time alongside future posts instead of as A) an afterthought or B) the sole driving force of a piece, you’ll create work that’s optimized for search engines without sacrificing quality for hacky shortcuts. This increased quality then increases users’ likelihood to stay on your site longer, return to your site more, and in turn search engines will recognize this. (Are you seeing a trend?)
Efficient resource allocation, including time management
Related to what we’ve discussed above, proactively visualizing longer-term projects allows you to in turn better visualize who and what needs to be allocated where. Depending on the scope of the project, that could be writers, designers, social media managers, and others. It makes sure you’re not overloading some people and underutilizing others. It helps people stay on the same page. And that’s just the human element.
This also includes making sure the time required for everything adds up. A clear roadmap for creating and publishing work, including what’s required from different people involved, helps manage time more effectively — including research, writing, editing, promotion, and more.
Diversifying content
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One of the last benefits (and this can be easily overlooked) is how an editorial calendar assists in diversifying content; it’s easy if you’re not visualizing and planning things out, to accidentally end up with a lot of published material that’s kind of all different versions of the same thing.
Now, it’s good to have content that compliments each other, but you don’t want to end up hyper-fixating at the expense of all the other topics and angles out there. Similarly, if your publishing plan includes multiple types of media — that could be blog posts, videos, podcasts, tutorials, infographics, product launches, seasonal content, guest collaborations, and more — you want to give each of those media the consistent attention they deserve.
Diversity in your media is great — but ostensibly having, say, a YouTube channel or podcast or tutorial series isn’t helpful if you only have tunnel vision for, for example, blog posts. The editorial calendar helps you make sure you’re nurturing all your content channels and media appropriately.
This is just the start of the hows and whys of the editorial calendar’s benefits. Look out for part two on building an effective editorial calendar, creating a content plan, and interpreting the insights shortly.
