How to plan your editorial calendar
If you want to build an editorial calendar that helps you consistently create your best content, you need to take a calculated approach towards it. Start thinking in terms of where you’re at, where you’re headed, and what you intend to achieve.
Here are a few things you should consider before creating your content calendar:
1. Define your ideal reader
Before creating an editorial calendar, ensure you identify your ideal readers. Take a better look at your buyer personas, understand what they are trying to solve, and see where your expertise lies. It’s always easier when you keep a clear idea of your target reader and why they’d want to read your content in the first place.
2. Choose a tool for creating your editorial calendar
Whether you’re going with Google Sheets or marketing project management software, you need to ensure that the tool is:
- designed for holding data in a structured format,
- collaborative, so your team can pick tasks, make updates, provide feedback, and more
- simple to use so you don’t end up spending too much time on the software
- free project management tool equipped with all the marketing functionalities that meet your requirements
3. Choose the required data points
An editorial calendar is a long-term outline of where your content is headed. And so, to ensure you can track, measure, and keep an eye on what’s working or not, you need several key data points such as:
- publish date
- targeted keywords
- content category
- content type
- relevant images
- status
- author
- editor
- call to action
The data points you choose to track in your editorial calendar are essentially what determines how much you can plan and how much long-term value you can get out of it.
4. Define your process
A well-defined process will help you change your marketing strategy from having to plan everything from scratch, to repeating a proven formula that gets results every single time.
Your editorial calendar must include different process stages such as the:
- creative brief
- writing tasks
- editing, etc.
5. Roles and permissions
No matter how efficient your processes for creating and managing content are, without clear accountability, you’ll not be able to deliver results consistently. It’s important to assign tasks to relevant team members that’ll be responsible for carrying them out.
An ideal editorial calendar should be built with easy roles and permissions management features so that:
- individual members of your team can have particular stages of the editorial process assigned to them
- team members can move the editorial process along once their input is complete, and
- managing staff can control workflows with ease.
6. Track and measure
Tracking and measuring your efforts contributes significantly to your marketing success since this is the stage where you can look at your inputs to see whether they moved you closer to your organizational goals.
To successfully track and measure goals with an editorial calendar, you need:
- clearly outlined goals detailing what you intend to achieve from each marketing campaign
- definite metrics for measuring each goal you’ve outlined
- a software, preferably a dashboard, where you can see all your data and make sense of it with ease.
Create editorial calendars with Kissflow Project
Kissflow Project is designed to serve as a project management software for marketing teams who want something more powerful than Excel or Google Sheets, and with greater simplicity than both of them put together.
Kissflow Project offers one complete solution for managing your editorial calendar with features such as:
- Kanban boards for managing your flow of work and identifying bottlenecks
- notifications and built-in social, so you can collaborate with team members with ease
- task lists, so you can assign action items to specific team members
- Customizable forms to make the process your own
Take Kissflow Project for a spin today.
