What if there was a single tool that solved your content creation and maintenance problems? While there’s no such thing as a magic bullet, using an editorial calendar as part of your content marketing strategy does help with many common problems.

An editorial calendar is an organizational system that lays out the dates, subjects, SEO keywords and other important information for your content throughout the year, such as social media posts, white papers, or blog posts. It’s created in advance, so it’s a plan for the future, not a list of what’s already been done. And it can make a content marketer’s life much, much easier. Here are a few issues that an editorial calendar solves:

• Not knowing what to post. Editorial calendars don’t solve writers’ block—there’s no way to get out of coming up with ideas, even if you don’t have any. But coming up
  

  office things/a calendar and a pen

  with ideas in advance means that you won’t have to deal with writers’ block on top of a busy workweek. With a planned database of ideas, you always know what you should be talking about on any given week. Not having to rely on a brilliant flash of inspiration for great content removes a lot of the stress from content creation.

• Posting without a strategy. Have you ever felt that your social media or blog posts were too random to connect with your audience? Or gone to write about a topic and wondered if you’d already covered it this year? Using an editorial calendar gives you a big-picture view of your content. You can plan posts around key themes or questions that resonate with your audience. You can align posts with important dates or times of year. You can be confident that you’re not repeating yourself and that your content covers all your strategic bases.
• Disorganized content production. Scrambling at the last minute to get all your content together is stressful for you and your team. With a plan made in advance, you have a chance to delegate tasks and bring your content team together earlier on in the creation process. It also gives you extra time to pick strategic focus keywords, find compelling images to accompany your text and make sure your content is well-designed. The content production process runs more smoothly when everyone is on the same page and ideas are planned in advance.
• Not keeping track of past content. The primary purpose of an editorial calendar is to plan for the future—but it also serves as a record of the past. At the end of a month, quarter or year, a glance at your editorial calendar will remind you what content you produced. This record comes in handy if you want to mine past content for future ideas, create an end-of-year retrospective, or find old work to demonstrate your capabilities to a client.
• Lack of analysis. A record of past content also comes in handy for understanding data trends. Did your blog posts have anything to do with your increased website traffic in the past month? Are more people sharing your tweets when you talk about a specific theme? By matching your editorial calendar with your data trends, you’ll be able to better analyze what they mean and adjust your future content plans accordingly.

Using an editorial calendar gives your content strategy a boost and allows you to approach content marketing with clearer goals in mind. It may be a simple tool, but it can be a problem-solving powerhouse.