3 Reasons Why You Must Have an Editorial Calendar

Whether you’re just starting to market your business online or have been doing so for a while, there’s one tool that can transform your efforts for the better. An editorial calendar is the perfect way to put your content marketing strategy into action. Here are 3 reasons why an editorial calendar is essential to your content marketing success:

1) Keeps Your Content Flowing

One of the biggest struggles that business owners and content marketers face is keeping high quality content flowing on a regular basis. This is especially true for small businesses, where content brainstorming and creation often falls on just one person.

Setting up an editorial calendar helps you manage your content flow in a few ways:

• Idea generation

Overcoming the hurdle of finding new, fresh topics to talk about is much easier with a content calendar. You can lay out the topics you already have and see where you can find more ways to expand on those existing topics.

• Consistency

Consistently creating and sharing awesome content is so much easier when you have a plan in place. An editorial calendar helps you space out your content and stay on track so that you aren’t posting randomly and taking long breaks between publishing content.

• Scheduling

A smart way to stay on track with your content output is by scheduling it in advance. Once you’ve got the content ready to share, you simply upload and set it to the schedule to be posted on a specific date. You can have months-worth of material ready to go.

• Updating Social Media

Social media can be an excellent source of traffic and a great place to content and engage with your target market. However, keeping it updated in today’s busy online world means posting daily or multiple times a day. By using a calendar you can add social media posts as you come up with them and keep a steady stream of content going out on each platform.

2) Helps You Stay Current

Not all of your content is going to be evergreen. Sometimes you’ll want to share content that’s time sensitive or that tie into seasonal topics. You can easily plan ahead, making sure that you have fresh content ready to go well in advance.

• Seasonal content

Many businesses plan seasonal content months ahead of time. Brainstorm and create content that’s seasonally-specific, whether it’s related to holidays, cultural events, weather conditions, etc. By laying out your content in a calendar well in advance, you’ll avoid rushing to get that seasonal material created and published on time.

• Ties in to promotions

Prep content for upcoming promotions, sales events, and special offers. It makes the promo roll-out that much smoother and simpler.

• Planning for events

Have content ready to go for business-related events and activities. These are great posts to give your audience updates and insight on the current events in both your industry and your own company.

3) Saves You Time While Reducing Stress

Running a business means juggling so many different tasks day in and day out. Anything you can do to save time without sacrificing quality is worthwhile. Having an editorial calendar allows you to do just that.

• Assigning tasks

If you hire writers or work with video production teams to create content, your editorial calendar can be the key to staying on track. You can review the upcoming schedule and assign tasks early.

• Keeping organized

Most marketers have content going out on several platforms, from blogs to social media profiles to emails and more. A calendar can be an invaluable tool to keeping everything organized and knowing exactly where and when that content is posted.

Setting up an editorial calendar can be a complete game-changer for your business’s content strategy. You’ll be more organized and better prepared for the weeks and months ahead.

For more ideas on optimizing your content marketing strategy for your business, feel free to contact us.