Is there such a thing as a stress-free day in the world of content marketing?
To do content marketing well, you need to create a lot of content on a consistent basis. Content may be created daily or three days a week. It may be produced for a news feed or for outreach purposes. It could alternate between news, features, blog posts and guides. There may be certain dates crucial to the industry that you plan to create content around.
Has your brain melted yet?
Don’t worry – there is something to return it to a functional state, and that’s a well organised editorial calendar.
What is an editorial calendar?
The Oxford dictionary defines editorial calendar as ‘lifesaver’.
Ok so it doesn’t but it might as well. An editorial calendar is a single place where you collate all of your marketing initiatives. A good calendar not only keeps a written record of dates but also helps you to organise content by campaign, arrange content around various themes and topics and track who has responsibility for each campaign or piece of content.
With all contributors up to date with the progress of singular pieces of content or entire campaigns, marketing initiatives will ultimately be more successful and planning ahead becomes a far more feasible possibility.
Map out the whole journey
If a big campaign is about to get off the ground, an editorial calendar allows you to work backwards from the proposed end date, scheduling every individual task or piece of content that will build the campaign. That way, your team will have a comprehensible timeline to work to starting from brainstorming title ideas to eventual publication of a big content order.
Organise multiple campaigns
With numerous campaigns running concurrently, an editorial calendar is your best chance of keeping track of them all and ensuring that you don’t miss any big deadlines. You can also shift things around to create a balance if, after drawing up the calendar, you notice an uneven spread of content.
Consistent creation
Without a calendar, there are a lot of dates and facts swimming around your head and trying to remember and implement them all can make you feel stressed out and overworked. A calendar alleviates this burden, ensures that content creation is consistent and prevents you from missing important deadlines or brainstorming sessions.
Jenny Maclean
