Editorial Calendar Template
Plan out your publication schedule and organize your editorial process.
About the Editorial Calendar Template
Every content team needs an editorial calendar. From ideas to writing, editing, and publishing, use our editorial calendar template to make sure everyone knows what stage of the process something is in, and who's responsible for it. Assign writers and reviewers, and move each piece along the publication schedule to stay organized and aligned.
What is an Editorial Calendar?
If you’re like most organizations, then you’re constantly pushing content, marketing campaigns, ads, and more. To keep customers and prospects in the pipeline, many businesses have a regular cadence of blogs, newsletters, and social media campaigns. But how do you keep all that content straight? And how do you formulate a cohesive content marketing strategy?
Organizations use Editorial Calendars to build their content strategy. An Editorial Calendar is a schedule of content that you will produce and deliver to customers and prospects. Though Editorial Calendars vary by team and organization, most of them map out the content, stakeholders, persona targets, delivery methods, and dates.
What do you put in an Editorial Calendar?
You can adapt your editorial calendar template to meet the needs of your team. Many teams track title, topic, description, writer, and due date. You can also add target keywords, target persona, buying stage, and distribution channels.
Why use an Editorial Calendar?
Without an editorial calendar, content teams often struggle to plan strategically. When you have a calendar, you can proactively map your content to different marketing campaigns, company initiatives, and seasons.
Creating a structured production flow (such as in a Kanban board) also makes it easy to visually understand the stage of every article and content pieces, for better organization.
The 5 elements of an Editorial Calendar
1. A list of content. Start with the content you plan to produce. To keep a steady flow of content, it’s a good idea to list the pieces that are in development in addition to those that are scheduled. The list might include short-form content like blogs or long-form content like ebooks.
2. Stakeholders. Keep a running list of all stakeholders for each project, including writers, contractors, designers, editors, and social media associates. Stakeholders can then refer to the editorial calendar to keep abreast of projects that are coming down the pipeline.
3. Deadlines. By when should the content be created? Reviewed? Proofread? When should it be published? Posted to your content management system? Put all of these key dates into the editorial calendar.
4. Call to action. Each piece of content should have a call to action. Once someone consumes your content, what’s next for them? Is there a link at the bottom of the blog where they can go to learn more? Is there an ebook they can download?
5. A list of channels. Enumerate the channels you will use to deliver your content. Once you write an ebook, for example, what’s next? Will you break it up into blogs? Will you distribute the ebook on LinkedIn or through your newsletter?
Get started with this template right now.
Ansoff Matrix Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Operations, Strategic Planning
Keep growing. Keep scaling. Keep finding those new opportunities in new markets—and creative new ways to reach customers there. Sound like your approach? Then this template might be a great fit. An Ansoff Matrix (aka, a product or market expansion grid) is broken into four potential growth strategies: Market Penetration, Market Development, Product Development, and Diversification. When you go through each section with your team, you’ll get a clear view of your options going forward and the potential risks and rewards of each.
Opportunity Canvas Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Decision Making, Strategic Planning
Features and capabilities — they make or break a product, which is why companies spend so much time and effort focusing on them. Sound like you? Try it with an Opportunity Canvas. This streamlined one-pager gives you and your team the power to improve your product by exploring the use cases, potential setbacks, strategies, challenges, and metrics. An Opportunity Canvas is ideal if you’ve already built a product, because you don’t need to consider the operational or revenue model.
Brand Guidelines Template
Works best for:
Design, Marketing, Documentation
What makes a strong brand? It’s having a well-defined personality, expressed with consistency at every touchpoint, and brand guidelines can help you do it. Brand guidelines are a clear list of rules—all the dos and don’ts—that cover details like colors, fonts, logo usage, photography, and brand voice. They help ensure that employees across a whole company or organization know how to display or speak about the brand. Miro’s whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas for creating brand guidelines, sharing them, and updating them.
Competitive Analysis Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Decision Making
Developing a great product starts with knowing the lay of the land (meaning who you’re up against) and answering a few questions: Who are your competitors? How does your product or service compare? What makes you stand out? A competitive analysis will help find the answers, which can ultimately shape your product, value prop, marketing, and sales strategies. It’s a great exercise when a big business event is about to occur — like a new product release or strategic planning session.
Data Migration Plan Template
Works best for:
Data Migration, Planning
The Data Migration Plan Template is a useful tool for any data migration project, providing a simple and flexible structure. The template outlines the various stages of data migration and can be customized to meet the specific needs of your project. This ensures that the plan remains relevant and effective regardless of the scale or complexity of the migration.
Goals-based Roadmap
Works best for:
Roadmap, Planning, Mapping
The Goals-based Roadmap template enables teams to set clear objectives and chart a course for achieving them. By defining specific goals and milestones, teams can track progress and adapt their strategies accordingly. This template fosters accountability and transparency, ensuring that everyone is working towards common objectives. With a focus on outcomes, teams can prioritize initiatives that drive the greatest impact and value.