Create an editorial plan: How to plan your content efficiently

Creating an editorial calendar for your marketing is like renovating a house. You can plan everything perfectly, hire the right craftsmen and buy the most beautiful materials, but reality rarely matches your plans.

Marketing planning is time-consuming and tedious. Why should you even bother with it?

Editorial plans provide more lead time for large projects and serve as the infrastructure for any campaigns you plan. They also allow you to plan promotions and special sales and create space to plan campaigns that include partnerships with influencers, other companies, or extensive design work.

The key to a successful editorial calendar or marketing calendar is to start with your overarching goals and build in flexibility in case things don’t go as planned.

Why is an editorial calendar so important?

Creating an editorial calendar provides an opportunity to focus on solving bigger problems up front, rather than tackling campaigns with disjointed, creating your brand last-minute tactics.

• Better overview: An editorial plan provides a clear overview of all content measures. This means that those responsible always know who is responsible for what and by when.
• Clear deadlines: In practice, content creation is often short-term, spontaneous and stressful. With an editorial plan, you can ensure that you have plenty of time and that clear deadlines are met.
• Better quality: Instead of making spontaneous, hasty decisions, you can ensure better quality by planning your content appropriately. This leaves you time for corrections and addressing your target group precisely.
• Time saving:  Many tasks in content projects occur regularly. Instead of jumping back and forth between work steps, china phone numbers fixed deadlines can be set.
• Monitoring:  The editorial plan can also be used for simple monitoring of the articles that have already been published. Integrate relevant KPIs and see which content pieces are performing particularly well.

An editorial plan allows sufficient lead time for well-thought-out and creative campaigns. It creates creative space for planning collaborations, which often take time. If you take the time to create an editorial plan, you can consider which campaigns and strategies will achieve the desired effect.

What should be included in an editorial plan?

Your editorial plan should make your work processes easier. The most important components include:

• Current annual calendar: This determines the structure of your editorial plan. It is important to note holidays and special promotional days here.
• Topics: You can enter the focus of your content in the form of meaningful headings in your content plan.
• Responsibilities: Who is responsible for each contribution? This information is especially important if you work in a team.
• Deadlines: Your editorial plan should definitely include the date by which the planned content should be completed.
• Release: Decide when you want your content to be released. This is the only way to ensure you have enough time for production.
• Platform: Where should your content appear?
• Editing status: Record the editing stage of your planned content (e.g. “Unedited” or “In progress”)

In addition to this important information, there is also other information that can be important for your editorial plan. This includes, for example, photo or video material, keywords or certain KPIs that the content should achieve. Which elements are ultimately important for your individual editorial plan depends on the size of the editorial team, the publication interval of your articles and many other factors.

How do you set goals for an editorial calendar?

The process of creating a marketing calendar should start with a set of concrete goals. What exactly do you want to achieve as a company?

Alex Greifeld, an e-commerce expert who has been in the industry since 2011, recommends starting with the big picture rather than being tactical. Essentially, you decide what you want to cook for dinner instead of starting with step three of the recipe.

“Many online marketers and e-commerce practitioners jump straight from a vague goal to tactics. We start the year with a sales goal and then make a list of optimizations or new technologies we want to use to achieve it,” Alex writes in an edition of the “No Best Practices” newsletter . “As a rule of thumb, if a strategy can be applied interchangeably to any business, it’s not really a strategy.”

By creating a well-thought-out editorial calendar or marketing calendar based on your business goals, you reduce the risk of trying random tactics and missing your content goals. This allows you to plan your topics more effectively and make big leaps when they make sense for you.