5 Reasons To Use Editorial Calendars in Content Marketing

Posted by Christin Alex on March 31st, 2018

Content production lies at the heart of Content Marketing. An efficient production process that minimizes the time taken to create the final asset from an idea is a pre-requisite to creating content at scale. An Editorial Calendar is a key aid that, if planned and implemented properly, can help Content Marketing Teams greatly simplify and streamline the scheduling and delivery aspects of content, thereby freeing up more time to actually plan, research and create content. This is precisely why you need to invest time and resources into setting up a Content Calendar to reflect your content production targets and editorial workflow.

What is a content calendar?

With a content calendar, you can put more time to creating and sharing compelling content rather than being troubled for hours at end about what to write and when. It is basically a document (generally in the spreadsheet format) that is used to schedule your postings. It is the one-stop-shop for all your questions like when what, and where to post.

Benefits of a well-structured content calendar:

1. A Sense of direction

A well-maintained and regularly updated content calendar can indeed go a long way. It helps you focus on the tasks that are coming up and prepare in advance for important posts which would require meticulous efforts and no haste.

2. Contributes to the overall consistency

Since you have it all sorted out systematically, you find yourself at this vantage point. You can address questions such as

• How many posts would you need per week? Of what format types and themes?
• What would be the percentage of seed vs. re-purposed content?
• Are all Campaigns represented uniformly in the Calendar?

You can monitor your entire process of content creation for arbitrary periods. With a content calendar, pushing unique content and having your audience coming back for more becomes easier.

3. Organization

A good content calendar does more than just give you an overview of things. It makes life easier in ways more than one. Now that you’d have all your content and associated research well organized, you would not have to dig deep for references and online statistics.

4. A context for your content

Adding meaningful context to your content holds water when it comes to good quality content. You need to understand all of what has been said about the topic at hand and add it to your benefit. Reading content online gives your post an edge like no other and for to accomplish this goal, you need to know of things well in advance.

5. Helps you track down and review posts that didn’t work

There may be instances when your well-organized post didn’t fire the way you expected it to. If such a case arises, you have nothing much to sweat over. Having a content calendar helps you go back to the strategy you resorted to the last time and not repeat the exact same mistakes this time around.

Using these aids, you can make your content spread better than before. So the next time you find yourself frustrated or searching for hot topics, make sure you use a content calendar and go about your content writing process in a strategic manner.