What is an editorial calendar and how to create one: [Examples + templates]
Hannah Wren
7 min read
Written by
Hannah Wren
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Marketing
Editorial calendars are an indispensable part of any content marketing or social media team’s toolkit—in fact, for anyone who produces content. At any given time, behind the scenes, teams work to brainstorm, develop, and publish articles, social posts, emails, press releases, and so on… which means there are many moving parts and content in various states of readiness.
When it comes to scaling content production, managing content readiness and publishing cadences becomes difficult to track and to manage without an editorial calendar. The goal is generally to publish consistently, as your readers or viewers come to expect that, and for the content to feel timely—and never tone-deaf. This is how editorial calendars help: by providing a visual tool that allows you to plan, track, and adjust what’s publishing, and when.
We’ve made your blog editorial calendar creation easy
What is an editorial calendar?
An editorial calendar is a tool that organizes and tracks your content pipeline from planning to publication. At their core, editorial calendars display what is scheduled for publishing, on which date, allowing you to plan ahead and make adjustments as needed. Editorial calendars are also used to orchestrate content around themes and campaigns and manage production in one place. Sophisticated editorial calendars may use automation or AI to help track the status of content readiness and all relevant details: deadlines, authors, designers, reviewers, budgets, and so on, and can even serve as searchable repositories for all the content your team has produced.
Editorial calendar benefits
Each organization’s editorial calendar is by nature unique to your business (or publication) and how you choose to organize it, but the benefits of using one are largely the same.
Strategic planning
Editorial calendars provide a bird’s-eye view of your publishing plan and an overview of your content pipeline. This allows you to identify content and topic gaps, or mitigate when there are overlapping or duplicate efforts. Depending on your industry, you may need to align content around strategic business objectives, product launches, cornerstone events, or seasonal trends. Editorial calendars help you prepare to address these needs in advance. For example, in retail, marketing content tends to ramp before seasonal events like Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, and back-to-school shopping. An editorial calendar helps teams to map out the assets that fall under each theme and plan resources.
Visibility into asset status
An editorial calendar becomes a central source of truth. There’s often more flexibility around timelines when it comes to digital publishing (compared to print), but consistency is important. Editorial calendars become the tool that your editors use to track status, make adjustments, and use to walk-through upcoming plans with key stakeholders. Identifying any bottlenecks ahead of time helps you to redistribute content accordingly. Writers and designers can also lean on the calendar to help manage workloads or hold themselves accountable to deadlines. The benefit of modern cloud-based editorial calendars is that they can be shared with and independently accessed by multiple teams, who sometimes may be working on similar content themes for a particular region or industry, for example.
Searchable repository
Cloud-based editorial calendars offer multiple configuration options, and are generally searchable and filterable, which is helpful when you need to see what content already exists. In many SaaS B2B companies, for example, content marketing teams receive new content requests on a quarterly or ongoing basis, and it’s helpful to see what content can be reused, repurposed, or refreshed before building an entirely new asset.
Who should use an editorial calendar?
Editorial calendars benefit any team producing content. Traditionally they’re used by publishing houses, magazines, and other online publications—even by individual influencers and content producers. They are also beneficial to businesses and agencies producing media and content on behalf of clients.
Within SaaS B2B marketing, content marketing and social media teams typically rely on editorial calendars, but many other teams within an organization also produce different types of content and might also benefit from an editorial calendar. Here are a few examples:
Content marketing teams
Content teams often create a wide range of marketing materials across channels—everything from long-form guides to blog posts to videos or podcasts. Editorial calendars not only track each type of deliverable, but help you to see which topics you’re covering on which medium.
Social media teams
Similarly, social media teams create posts across many platforms, working closely with content marketing and other teams to understand what will need promotion, and when. Editorial calendars help social media teams stay organized, consistent, and aligned to key events.
Public relations teams
Communications or PR teams managing press releases, Newsroom announcements, executive bylines, sponsored media content, and other thought leadership, like executive speaking opportunities and scripts, can easily benefit from an editorial calendar. PR teams must plan their content strategy to align with overarching business needs and goals.
Teams providing regular internal communications
Many teams within an organization create internal communications and resources. Teams in Human Resources or People Operations, for example, may create a series of emails, Slack messaging, and FAQ documents whenever there are planned changes for the organization, new benefits enrollment periods, corporate employee events, and so on… an editorial calendar can help teams plan ahead and track progress on deliverables.
Teams producing sales enablement resources
Teams focused on creating internal resources to support sales teams better understand products, promotions, and who their customers are, typically create a lot of content. This includes things like slide decks, battle cards, case studies, and outreach emails and scripts. As teams map out sales strategies or sales plays throughout the year, an editorial calendar can capture all the assets that need to be created.
How to create an editorial calendar
Creating an editorial calendar might seem daunting, but there are many tools and templates that can help you get started. Here are a few things you’ll need to think through along the journey:
1. Map your content goals and content types
Before diving into an editorial calendar or template, you’ll want to ensure you’ve thought about how the calendar should be organized and how it will be used. For example, are you creating content for different audiences or different regions? Or content around monthly or quarterly themes? Identify the primary way you want to view the content at a glance—perhaps by format or distribution platform? Everything else can be captured in fields or tags. Make sure to document the attributes you’ll want the calendar to capture, things like: content owner, reviewer, stages of production and approvals, audience, etc.
2. Input key milestones
Once you know how your content will be organized and displayed within the calendar, you can start building it out. That said, before you get to the deliverables, you might begin by layering in major product launches, campaigns, and events, as well as any industry-specific conferences and holidays that your brand recognizes in some way. Making these visible helps everyone to plan ahead so there are no surprises.
3. Establish publishing frequency
Editorial calendars are most effective when they are accurate and dependable. Many platforms now include built-in AI that may help you determine the most optimal publishing frequency and times to post based on audience engagement or even to find content gaps and brainstorm new ideas. Generally, consistency is king—you don’t want to deluge your audience or go quiet too long. Some content is by nature time-sensitive while other content is more flexible. Think about what’s realistic for your organization and establish a regular publishing cadence. This is especially important for serial content or a branded series, which your audience may routinely return to you to consume—choose a day of the week to launch this content (e.g., a podcast) and stick to it.
4. Plan content and conduct a gap analysis
As you build out deliverables, across channels, themes, or stages of the marketing funnel, you’ll begin to see where you’re well-covered and where there are opportunities to fill in some gaps (which AI can help with). There’s no need to publish new content for the sake of it, especially if you don’t have the bandwidth or something valuable to say, but an editorial calendar helps to provide a visual view of everything you’re covering.
5. Share your editorial calendar
Editorial calendars also help visualize your enterprise content marketing strategy to stakeholders. Once you have your calendar in place, share it with other content creators or those who are dependent on the content you create. Editorial calendars are dynamic and things will change, but your calendar becomes a central source of truth that everyone can refer to, as long as you keep it updated. Depending on the tool you choose to create your calendar, you may also be able to integrate it with publishing platforms or data sources to pull in analytics around content performance.
Types of editorial calendars
A spreadsheet is the age-old approach to planning. Tools like Excel and Google Sheets are low-cost and shareable within teams. That said, spreadsheets don’t offer the automation, visualization, and analytics functionality that many modern platforms can.
1. Visual board calendars
Visual board calendars use underlying tools to create database-driven content calendars with multiple view options. These platforms combine the flexibility of spreadsheets with visual organization through kanban boards, timeline views, and filterable databases that can display the content information in various formats. These can be great for organizing large content libraries with detailed tagging and categorization options.
Pros:
Multiple viewing options
Complex sorting and filtering
Template libraries and pre-built calendaring options
Cons:
More complex than spreadsheets
Slow performance if datasets are too large
Limited real-time collaboration functionality
2. Project management tool calendars
These calendars are created within project management platforms that organize content as tasks and projects. As content moves through stages of production, team members are updated with assigned due dates. Calendars built for project management are valuable when you need to track content through production workflows (vs. simply show when something is publishing).
Pros:
Built-in collaboration and communication features
Automation that considers dependencies and that can adjust tasks
Real-time updates to help with project planning, and integrations with other tools
Cons:
More complex than a simpler planning tool
Calendar view may be less intuitive
Steeper learning curve to configure and adapt the tool to different use cases
3. Dedicated editorial calendars
Some tools on the market are custom-designed to support content marketing and/or social media marketing campaigns. These often offer comprehensive features like drag-and-drop calendar interfaces, social media scheduling, team collaboration tools, and detailed analytics. If you know you need a purpose-built tool, these can be a good choice.
Pros:
Advanced scheduling and automation capabilities across channels
Built-in analytics and performance tracking
Approval workflows and team permission settings
Cons:
May be higher cost and isolated from alternatives
May include features you don’t need
May not integrate easily with the rest of your tech stack
Editorial calendar templates and examples
There’s no need to start from scratch—Airtable has done the templating work for you. Below are a few samples of what’s available. Looking for more? See our full list of editorial calendar templates.
You can begin with a straightforward content calendar template and make it your own. It’s often helpful for content marketing and social media teams to have a calendar view, color-coded by different types of deliverables or platforms. The beauty of this template is that it offers several different views: calendar, Kanban, gallery—providing stakeholders different ways of viewing what’s coming down the content pipeline. Automations send real-time notifications via Slack, email, or in-app alerts, so stakeholders are updated when tasks are assigned, due dates shift, or content moves stages. Built-in AI helps to generate briefs, draft copy, or social posts.
To manage serial content in one format but across different topics, try the podcast editorial calendar template.
Another option is to use a content calendar generator to automatically build a unique-to-your-needs publishing plan across channels. AI-powered content calendar software helps you to brainstorm ideas based on your campaign themes or keywords; auto-fill post formats, headlines, and hashtags; generate publishing schedules across platforms; and stay aligned with key product launches, events, and brand moments. This template includes access to a dynamic dashboard of your content performance.
This template is designed for content teams managing multiple campaigns and deliverables, streamlining the process of organizing, tracking, and optimizing content creation efforts. It includes features like task assignment, deadline tracking, and progress updates, making it easier to manage multiple campaigns simultaneously. Start by inputting your campaign details, including goals, target audience, and key messages. Then, create records for each piece of content, specifying the type, due date, and assigned team members. Airtable AI can also help fill in some key fields.
A centralized communications plan is important for any team generating internal communications—and becomes even more important for remote and distributed teams, whether separated by time zones or continents. Use this template to see each piece of content through from ideation to completion to distribution, and to ensure that everyone stays on the same page. It includes text fields that allow you to explain the purpose or goal for the content, and key messaging.
Custom-built for social media marketing plans, this template includes two separate tables to provide a quick and visual way to see platform proliferation, attached URLs, hashtags, assets, and the actual post copy. It even includes a character counter, so that you know when a post exceeds the character limit. When creating your social media marketing calendar, you can also set your posting schedule or set up automations and integrations to automatically post to your social channels when you change the status to “Posted.”
The best editorial calendar
Not all editorial calendars are created equal. There are various options on the market that offer varying levels of flexibility and complexity—some aim to be complete publishing platforms, while others, like Airtable, are more agile. As you choose your editorial calendar, you’ll need to think about how the tool integrates with other systems, whether other teams and stakeholders can access and view the calendar, and what you really need.
Content marketing tools like Airtable can address many use cases, allowing companies to adopt a single solution that benefits many teams, and that everyone can use and share. Its database qualities allow you to make connections between data entered into the calendar, create sophisticated automations, and leverage built-in AI to make your workload a little—or, let’s be honest, a lot—easier to manage.
We’ve made your blog editorial calendar creation easy
FAQs
Content calendar and editorial calendar are terms that are sometimes used interchangeably, but there can be some distinction. For some teams, an editorial calendar provides a higher-level view, building out themes across the quarter or year. The editorial calendar provides a top-down framework to help guide content decisions and planning, and to share your team’s overall publishing plan and direction. So if editorial calendars paint the big picture, content calendars get into the details. They include the nitty-gritty execution details, like: review cycles, image production timelines, and distribution channels.
Typically, a managing editor creates, updates, and owns an editorial calendar. The person in this role shepherds content through production, pays close attention to what’s coming down the pipeline, and follows up with writers or reschedules content as needed. However, the specific role can vary depending on your team size and structure. In smaller organizations, this responsibility might fall to a content manager, marketing manager, or even the business owner. In larger companies, you might have a dedicated content operations specialist or editorial director overseeing multiple calendars across different channels or product lines.
Your editorial calendar can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. Ideally, though, it should include publication dates, content titles, formats (blog post, video, infographic, etc.), assigned creators or contributors, and current status (planned, in progress, completed, published). But to ensure your content serves its intended purpose, you should also track the target audience and potential calls to action (CTAs), URLs, relevant keywords, distribution channels, and content themes or pillars.
Update your editorial calendar weekly to add new content ideas, adjust deadlines, and track progress. Review it monthly or quarterly to realign with strategy, measure performance, and ensure you're hitting key goals.
Use a centralized editorial calendar with customizable fields to tag each content item by type (blog, social, email), channel, owner, and status. Create filtered views for each team or channel so everyone can focus on their priorities while staying aligned on timing and messaging.
Track leading indicators (planned publish date, status) and lagging results (traffic, conversions, engagement rate) to connect effort with impact.
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