Last updated on September 14th, 2017 at 10:42 pm

If you have no idea where to start in creating a content marketing plan and how an editorial calendar fits into that, then we suggest going back to THIS POST to see how we walk through creating your content marketing strategy.

Today, we are going to take all the information you already have and put it into an editorial calendar. You must already have a strategy around:

  • the top 2 or 3 social media networks your audience are already spending the most time on
  • how often it’s recommended to post on those networks
  • the type of content you feel the most comfortable producing on a regular basis and
  • how your audience prefers to consume your content (podcasts, writing, videos?)

Creating an Editorial Calendar for Content Marketing

An editorial calendar is essentially a large calendar for the year broken down by month. It includes all of your promotions, known specials, holidays, themed days, and all the content topics and types to correlate with those elements. Imagine being able to sit down just once a month and having all of the content topics and types at your fingertips. All you have to do is create the content in one big batch and it’s done! Without a proper calendar, we get stuck either never creating and posting content, haphazardly posting random content unrelated to the promotions or important aspects of our business, or being too overwhelmed to do much of anything.

Once you know what type of content you’re going to produce, the networks you’re going to promote that content on and how often, then you can begin to design yourself an editorial calendar that will give you organization and a solid plan to follow. Start with a year long calendar and outline all the holidays, themed days, seasons and your business’s promotions throughout the year. Then go through and add in potential topics for blogs, video schedules, and other social content ideas you chose.

Once you have your calendar complete, we recommend signing up for a social media scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite.

Related: 3½ Apps To Streamline Your Social Media

Next, block off some time in your calendar– a couple of hours per month– to create all your content and schedule it all right then. Find a good rhythm that works for you. For example, make it a point that 4-5 hours per month, you’ll create and schedule 4 videos, 4 blogs, 10 custom social media image posts, 10 retweets/regrams, and 10 quote images. Focus 100% on creating and scheduling that content during your designated time each month and you are set!

Creating an editorial calendar can be as easy as using an Excel, Google sheets or numbers spreadsheet. However, there are also these cool, free templates you can download via CoSchedules Blog HERE or you might consider just signing up for CoSchedule altogether. With CoSchedule, in addition to a ready-made calendar, you can take advantage of integrations, automated scheduling, social media analytics and other cool features right from your WP dashboard that’ll make your social media marketing strategy a breeze.

CLICK HERE to get CoSchedule

Comment below what your social media bundle is going to be every month. What content are you committing to producing and when are you going to do it?