Planning your editorial content to boost your content strategy

The start of a new year is a great time to plan your content strategy.

In this post, I will go through the reasons we use editorial calendars to better manage our content strategy and how we can put them together.

Why

When you draft an editorial calendar, you are identifying communication opportunities for your organisation. This gives you enough time to develop a topical and valuable content strategy for your audience. It also means your organisation is releasing useful information on a newsworthy topic, potentially earning you coverage.

Planning communication in advance will help you organise your editorial calendar, and will reduce your stress. It keeps our content strategy organised and focused.  I would grow anxious looking at a two-week blank in my calendar. This technique was even helpful to me during my time as a reporter, when I could flag annual events, e.g. council tabling budget.

You can always turn to evergreen content which is not time-bound. But when you have time to investigate opportunities, you can come up with interesting angles and new ways to participate in the conversation.

When

It is best to develop your content strategy and editorial calendar at the start of the year, so you don’t miss any potential opportunities. But it’s never too late.

How

There are a few ways you can do this:

• Check which commemorative days are relevant to your industry. For instance, Tourism Day provides a possible opportunity for a tourism business about the significance of the industry, or an update on their offering.
• Flag release dates for important international reports, e.g. if you are in the finance sector, diarise government announcements (economic growth or new labour numbers)
• Holidays, such as Christmas or Easter, can be useful to tailor messaging around, depending on your industry.

How do you format your calendar? That’s entirely up to you. You can use a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet.

Below is an example of a editorial calendar for a fictitious tour operator based in Cape Town, South Africa.

I use Google’s calendar, which allows me to access my calendar wherever I am. Below is a snapshot of my calendar. It is colour-coded according to channel (e.g., Facebook) and type of content (e.g. video).

If you have no current editorial calendar, why not start simple and perhaps focus on one channel. There are also several free templates available online.

Image credit: Pablo