What is an Editorial Plan?
An editorial plan is a roadmap, tool, and process for creating, publishing, and promoting content. It helps businesses align their internal and external stakeholders around content strategy, guidelines, and goals.
It’s a vital component of a strong marketing strategy. It can help increase search engine rankings, drive traffic and social shares, and make fresh conversions.
It’s a roadmap
An editorial plan is a roadmap for how you leverage different resources, tools, and content to meet your online business or digital publishing goals and serve the user’s needs. It’s a must-have tool for online businesses and digital publishing agencies, whether they publish on social media, blogs, news sites or other formats.
An effective roadmap outlines each detail so your entire team can stay on track and understand the big picture. This can drive employee engagement through meaningful shared goals and convince skeptical or potential stakeholders that investing in your company is worth it.
The first step in creating an effective roadmap is to establish your project scope, deliverables, milestones, people involved, resources required, risks and other elements that affect the project. This information will help you prioritize your efforts and determine how best to communicate your goals and timelines.
Next, map out high-level schedules for project activities and milestones to describe the order of events. These schedules can include dates for the start of projects, end dates for tasks or milestones, and deadlines for delivering final products.
As you work through the planning process, be sure to keep your roadmap separate from other planning documents such as backlogs or customer requests. This helps you maintain your strategic focus, and it also gives you a better chance of adjusting your priorities as they shift.
One of the key aspects of a good product roadmap is to make a strong case for including any given feature or epic. A list of features or epics without a clear strategic rationale will not be persuasive to the product manager or other key stakeholders.
In addition, a solid product roadmap should be visual and easy to read. The format of your roadmap, the type of content you include, and the audience for which you’re presenting it will all have a significant impact on how it looks and the information it displays.
A product roadmap is a crucial communication tool for product managers. It allows them to explain to internal teams and stakeholders what the product strategy is, how it will deliver on company goals, and why each feature or epic is essential. It should be a cohesive story, with themes, epics, and individual features all coming together to achieve a unified product vision.
It’s a tool
An editorial plan is a marketing tool that helps you and your team track content ideas and schedule them in a timely manner. It’s a great way to ensure you’re producing quality content and keeping your readers engaged, while also saving time in the long run.
An editorial plan can be found in a variety of formats, from a simple Excel spreadsheet to a visual dashboard. There are also several free and low-cost online tools that can help you keep track of your plan.
A content plan is a vital part of any B2B content marketing strategy, and can be used to map out content themes, topics, and channels to drive engagement and boost traffic. It can also be a handy way to document the progress of a campaign and keep track of milestones, goals, and key metrics.
The best part is that it also helps you identify which content pieces are working the best, and how to optimize them for maximum impact across your various marketing channels. For example, if you find that your blog posts are performing well, it may make sense to promote them more often, or repurpose them as other types of content for social media and your newsletter.
An editorial plan is a must-have for B2B marketers looking to improve their content performance and save time in the process. A robust and effective content strategy will enable you to deliver more relevant, higher-quality, and engaging content on a more regular basis, which can ultimately lead to better business results for your company. From there, it’s just a matter of putting the right people in the right positions to get the most out of your content plan.
It’s a process
An editorial plan is the roadmap to your content marketing strategy, defining all of your assets and materials you’ll use to produce your editorial content. This plan is a crucial component of your content marketing operation, helping you stay on track to meet your goals.
An editorial process is a set of related activities that transform inputs into outputs, which create value for your audience. It’s important to define and document the process explicitly, so that everyone on your team understands how to execute it successfully.
Wikipedia defines a process as “a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that together produce a specific result.” This definition is useful for a client-centred approach and emphasizes that a process is about the end result. It is also helpful to think of roles and responsibilities in terms of processes, as it’s more natural for people to relate their tasks to the end goal they want to achieve.
The next step in creating an editorial plan is to create the content itself. This includes identifying the topic or idea that you want to write about, as well as the format and channels where it will be published. It’s important to keep this part of your editorial plan as straightforward as possible, because it will help you create the best content.
This can include preparing the relevant images and text for your blog article, as well as creating a teaser for social media that will give readers an overview of the story and encourage them to read it. It’s essential to assign roles to each of these tasks, so that everyone knows where they need to be at any given time.
After the content has been created, it needs to be promoted and distributed across your digital channels. This can be done via email, social media, or other methods. You should promote your most successful content over and over again at regular intervals, as this will ensure that you’re continually generating new traffic for your website.
Having an editorial plan can be an invaluable tool to boost your team’s productivity, increase your content creation capacity, and drive traffic to your site. It’s a great way to align your internal and external stakeholders on your editorial objectives and KPIs, and it helps to facilitate content creation throughout the entire lifecycle of the asset.
It’s a collaboration
An editorial plan is a collaborative effort, as the name suggests. It consists of all the marketing assets and materials that you need to create your content, based on your goals and deadlines. The right plan can boost your productivity and free up time for more creative endeavors.
In the digital age, innovative collaborations are as common as public hand sanitizer stations (and more). While the concept of teamwork is nothing new, the ability to bring together people from diverse backgrounds and skill sets has never been more important.
There are many ways to do it, but we recommend a well-designed, well-implemented plan. Using an editorial plan as your guide will help you make smart decisions that benefit your business and your customers. The resulting content will be more engaging and provide greater value for your readers.
Have you considered making an editorial plan for your next project? Click here to learn more about how it can benefit your company. The best part is that it’s free! You can even customize it to your specific needs. It’s the simplest and most effective way to organize your content and your marketing efforts. With an editorial plan in place, you’ll be able to focus on the most impactful aspects of your content strategy.