Editorial content calendar for a coherent cross-channel strategy

Challenge: How do you stay on top of all the changing topics, contributors, and deadlines when managing your editorial content?

Solution: A contextual content calendar with customizable tags and filtered views to fit the needs of both the editor and the team.

A competitive content strategy requires the right cadence, depth, and breadth of content, not to mention a team of copywriters working across multiple channels and in various stages of the production workflow. That’s a lot of moving pieces to manage and align.

Let’s face it, kanban boards and spreadsheets can be useful for WIP content and keeping things moving down the line but they were never designed to meet the unique needs of editorial teams. It’s critical to have a content calendar solution that can manage all the parts of your program, including keeping teams, stakeholders, and higher-ups aligned against your plan.

Spreadsheet editorial calendars are the default tool of choice for some due to their familiar interface and ease-of-use across multiple teams. Where they excel in simplicity, they fall short in flexibility and automation.

How many countless hours have been wasted updating your spreadsheet calendar? They’re a fine solution for an editorial calendar if you’re averaging a couple pieces of content a month but start increasing content velocity, and keeping work organized, transparent, and up-to-date is a challenge with spreadsheets.

The Planstack editorial calendar

Planstack is purpose built for marketing calendars and planning, displaying your editorial content plan over-time and categorized and filtered to give you all of the views your teams needs.

How to create an editorial calendar to capture your different views

Execution of editorial-related tasks is easy, but the execution of your content strategy is what sets apart project management tools from dedicated planning solutions like Planstack. An editorial calendar should be a visual and organized representation of your plan, highlighting key themes, audiences, objectives alongside more executional components such as author and status.

What sets Planstack apart is the ability to quickly filter and refine content into different views and without having to duplicate content across multiple calendars. Let’s take a look at some different views that are possible with Planstack.

Editorial Calendar Organized by Audience

Defining and aligning against your audience is one of the most foundational components to a good content strategy. Often there are many different audience types or personas that have different needs and preferences. A strong editorial plan speaks to these different audiences.

In this view, content is organized by audience target. This provides a simple and visual way to see how different content is targeted to different personas. Gaps in your content plan are easily identified with this view.

Editorial Calendar Organized by Marketing Channel

Editorial teams are producing omni-channel content for distribution across the company blog, social media, visual assets, etc. It’s often important to see the distribution of content across marketing channels to ensure brand continuity and consistent messaging.

Editorial Calendar Organized by Content Author

Organizing your editorial calendar by author helps ensure your production workflow is being maximized. In this view, content is organized by author to easily keep your team of copywriters at capacity, visualizing the content gaps and adding work-in-progress content to their backlog of deliverables.

With Planstack, there’s no need to maintain and update different calendars. Planstack views are easy to create and automatically updated. When the content in one view changes, all other views are simultaneously updated.

Watch the video below to see how easy it is to create, manage and share your editorial calendar with Planstack. 

Move your editorial calendar to Planstack and start experiencing the benefits of an easy-to-use, automated and presentable calendaring solution.