Editorial Calendar Template & Example

The editorial calendar enables you to follow an editorial line over a given period (a month, a quarter, a year). It’s an essential tool for implementing a relevant and effective content strategy that will enable you to be well referenced on the results pages of search engines such as Google or Bing. This way, you and your team are never short of topics, and you can anticipate your work to be more productive.

The advantages of a content calendar for your publications

Saving time : finding the right topic at the right time can be time-consuming and stressful. Thanks to editorial planning, editors always know in advance what subjects they need to cover, so they don’t have to waste time looking for ideas and avoid the anguish of a blank page.
A global view of all your publications : thanks to the dashboard, you know which topics have already been covered, and you’re informed of upcoming topics.
Better organization of ideas and content : the publication calendar helps you stimulate your creativity, define relevant topics in advance and organize your ideas precisely for greater efficiency.
The creation of a coherent editorial line : you cover subjects around the same theme or from a specific angle, and avoid repetition.
Better management of work between editors : the editorial calendar lets you easily organize and distribute tasks between the different members of your editorial team. You’ll know immediately who’s responsible for publishing which content. It also enables you to anticipate vacations and absences, so publishing continuously all year round becomes child’s play.
Anticipation of specific events: by planning your content over the long term, you can schedule specific content for certain events in the year that are important to your company, such as your brand’s anniversary, Christmas, summer, etc.

There are two ways of designing an editorial schedule:

a calendar for each of your media (website, blog post, social networks, magazine, etc.);
a global calendar for all your media.

It’s up to you to choose what suits your needs.

The stages of an editorial calendar

Follow these steps to build an effective editorial calendar.

1 – Identify your target and your objectives

To begin with, you need to determine who your content is aimed at (professionals, individuals, what age bracket, what socio-professional category, etc.). This will enable you to define the tone and language used for your publications. Will your content be engaging, optimistic, critical, enthusiastic, educational?

Next, define the objectives you want to achieve by publishing your content. Do you want to promote new products? Improve your SEO? Create a community of fans on social networks? Etc.

2. Define your content strategy

Determine which types of content will help you achieve your objectives.

Here are a few examples:

blog posts,
videos,
computer graphics,
white papers,
podcasts,
webinars,
case studies,
e-mail marketing,

You also need to decide on publication frequency, distribution channels (website, e-mail, social networks, etc.) and the people responsible for writing, proofreading, publishing, infographics, etc.

3. Choose the information to include in your editorial calendar

Here’s a list of the key elements your editorial planning should contain. It’s up to you to personalize it according to your needs.

The publication date: this is the deadline for each article.
Title: this is the title of your publication.
Content type : define the type of content to be created.
Theme: what is the main theme of this content (news, health, travel, business, technology, etc.)?
Status: specify the status of each subject: submitted, accepted, planned, in progress, validated or published.
Destination : on which medium(s) will this content be published?
Author: indicate the person responsible for creating each article.
Target: indicate the audience for each piece of content.
Purpose: why did you write this content? What is its purpose?
SEO : specify the keywords to be included in your publication to ensure it is well referenced by search engines.
Revision date: essential for regularly updating your content.

Use cases

To maintain a regular rhythm of publication while respecting deadlines, the editorial calendar is an essential element. There’s no such thing as a perfect editorial calendar, but some formats will be better than others at helping you achieve your team’s objectives. Once you’ve chosen a format, you’ll also need to decide how you’re going to implement it, choosing a tool or platform that offers the functionality or interface your organization needs.

Model content

With the Wimi editorial calendar template, your marketing team has an efficient process for writing, editing and planning your organization’s content. Everything is designed to enable you to centralize all actions linked to content creation and publication.

How to use this model

Use task lists to define the different stages of your content creation process. We recommend that you clearly define when a task can move from one list to another, to maintain clarity in the process.

A task corresponds to a piece of content. You can enrich each task according to your needs (date, author, theme, target, etc.) using tags or by adding custom fields. In both cases, you can easily create filters to quickly find certain content.

Once a piece of content has been published, we recommend that you add it to the calendar in the agenda module (event name = content title and description = link to content).

Finally, we recommend that you use your space’s documents module to store your content and links in dedicated folders. This will save you time when you need to make updates.