How to Create an Editorial Calendar? + Free Template

Creating an editorial calendar is a task that may seem much more complicated than it actually is.

At the same time, it’s a task that has far more advantages than it appears to have.

The primary function of an editorial calendar is to guide your team in producing materials, especially those that involve collaboration among multiple team members.

It is a democratic document, useful for many people at the same time. Almost everyone involved in the production will need to consult the calendar at least once a day to make sure everything is on track.

Unfortunately, many agencies and in-house marketing departments end up neglecting the editorial calendar or not setting it up the way it needs to be.

Today, let’s talk about this. What is the importance of the editorial calendar, and how can you set it up for different functions? Let’s dive in because this is an important topic:

What is an Editorial Calendar?

An editorial calendar is a document that determines all the production of a specific marketing strategy within a certain period.

Normally, this document is created to organize the monthly content production of a brand, and it’s an absolutely necessary ingredient for content marketing.

🤿 Dive deeper: Content Marketing in 2025 – What Changes and Good Strategies

With an editorial calendar, the entire team has a simple visualization of what needs to be done. Because of this, it’s the big prerequisite for any process.

For example, to conduct a sprint, you need to know what materials will be produced and their deadlines.

Or even to ensure that the production flows smoothly, without necessarily involving organizational techniques, the calendar is fundamental.

Through it, process managers can organize the stages of material production, which rarely concentrates on one person.

For example: through the social media editorial calendar, the process manager can understand the final deadlines for each post and organize when each person involved in production will complete their tasks.

The editorial calendar also serves clients: it’s through it that information related to production is formalized, ensuring that clients know the deadlines and justifications for producing each material.

But to fully understand where and when an editorial calendar is necessary, we need to talk about its types and the specifics of each production scenario.

Let’s do that now. Come with me:

Where is an Editorial Calendar Used?

Wherever there is content production and deadlines to be met, an editorial calendar becomes essential.

This is for all the reasons we’ve mentioned above: work organization, team and management visualization, and formalization for clients.

Where the calendar is used is a pretty open question, right? It’s used in all production situations with deadlines.

But in this section, we’ll detail the types of material where this happens specifically, and the particularities of the editorial calendar for each of them.

Come with me:

For Social Media

This is one of the most basic and necessary editorial calendars for any marketing team, whether in an agency or in-house.

Posts for social media are among the most chaotic things to produce.

Anyone who doesn’t create social media posts might read this paragraph and doubt: “But they’re just posts! What’s so chaotic about producing them?”

But anyone who does this work frequently will agree with me.

The thing is, producing for social media involves several different people, and the approval process is usually very hands-on.

Just quickly listing—producing a post for social media requires:

• Coming up with the post idea;
• Understanding what will be written inside the image;
• Deciding if the post will be sponsored or not;
• Writing the post caption;
• Designing the post artwork;
• Getting internal approval for the artwork and caption;
• Getting the full post approved by the client;
• Making changes;
• Posting the content.

All of this for every post, and we’re still skipping some steps and showing just the essential ones.

Because of this, the editorial calendar for social media needs to provide at least the idea for the post and its posting date.

This way, the process management team can organize dates for each of these stages, ensuring the final production deadline is respected.

For Blogs

Editorial calendars for blogs are absolutely crucial for their production.

It’s through them that you organize the routines, of course, but they also come with a key component for your SEO and organic traffic strategy: formalizing the keyword study.

🤿 Dive deeper: Keyword Research for Result Generation

A company’s blog needs to focus on one main concern: finding the right keywords to bring more and more traffic to the website.

And the client needs to be aware of this. They need to know the keywords, their search volume, their indexing difficulty, and the justification for their choice.

These points, along with the article title and publication date, are mandatory in the editorial calendar for blogs.

Typically, organic traffic professionals conduct in-depth keyword research ahead of time, highlighting dozens or even hundreds to work on with the client over the course of the contract.

The editorial calendar for blogs is where a selection of keywords for the period is made, offering a strategic view for both the entire team and the client.

For Newsletters

Editorial calendars for newsletters are not that common for a few reasons.

The main reason is that an editorial calendar usually sets the agenda for an entire period, typically a month.

Once approved, the editorial calendar becomes law. And this law can be quite problematic for newsletters, which often discuss current events, sometimes even things happening on the very day the newsletter is created.

But there are different types of newsletters. For example, some are used to promote materials and articles created in your content marketing efforts.

These do benefit greatly from the editorial calendar, especially when it directly aligns with the calendar created for other types of materials.

But for broader newsletters that primarily deal with current events, the editorial calendar usually only includes the sending dates so the process management team can organize their creation.

✈️ Fly higher: 10 Project Management Tools and How to Choose

For YouTube Videos

YouTube videos are at the top of the list, alongside social media, in terms of needing an editorial calendar.

These videos involve more people than social media posts.

You need a scriptwriter, proofreader, presenter or voice-over artist, art director, videographer, editor, and, finally, final approval.

Just the final approval of a video is the most difficult of all materials we’ve discussed so far and still have to talk about. There are many changes, and in many cases, they’re quite complex.

Working without an editorial calendar for videos means failing to deliver consistency. You end up being held hostage by the production, which is lengthy when there are no reference deadlines.

Typically, an editorial calendar for YouTube requires the launch date, the video topic, its justification, and the keywords addressed both throughout the video and in its caption.

For Rich Materials and Lead Magnets

This is similar to blog texts, but with an added layer of complexity.

You need to identify the topic of the material, the chosen keyword, its justification, and the launch date.

Typically, rich materials are included in the same editorial calendar as blogs since the content is similar, and the production volume for Lead Magnets is much smaller than for any other material we’ve listed here.

🤿 Dive deeper: What is a Lead Magnet? 10 Types and 5 Examples to Know

One or two per month are enough to cover nearly all the production of a small marketing team.

However, companies with dedicated departments for producing rich materials may need to create a separate calendar.

This is not common, but it does happen, especially in larger companies.

HubSpot itself, when it started its operations, had one department for blog production and another for rich material production.

The calendar for rich materials would inform the blog production, and vice versa.

Here is the translation of the article:

For Other Purposes

The editorial calendar can also serve other purposes related to its own production.

Maybe you need an editorial calendar for your internal marketing efforts, for example.

Or perhaps you need a calendar to organize the production of flyers, billboards, or other types of outbound materials.

You can even organize your paid media posts with an editorial calendar.

In any case, my suggestion is that you determine in advance the information that the material needs to be produced and include everything along with the date in the calendar.

An editorial calendar is like a regular calendar. Anything that depends on dates and the production of other people can be organized with it.

What are the Advantages of an Editorial Calendar?

An editorial calendar brings significant advantages just by existing.

At least in my case, it’s unimaginable to start any content production without having a calendar in hand first.

In many cases, the lack of this formalization causes severe issues in production. How can you know who is doing what? And how can you tell if the person is working quickly enough to meet the deadline?

And the worst: how do you know what the deadline is?

The editorial calendar is, above all, a way to organize and formalize the production. It’s the best remedy for advertising anxiety!

Let’s discuss the three main benefits an editorial calendar brings to your company:

Work Organization

We touched on this point throughout the article, but here we need to discuss it more frankly and directly.

The production of any graphic or written material within advertising will always involve teamwork.

A writer alone is nothing. To get the material out, someone needs to review their work. In the case of social media, someone needs to produce their idea.

And of course: someone needs to have the idea before the writer begins writing.

If you don’t have an editorial calendar, you’re practically telling the writer that they’re responsible for thinking about what to write. And that shouldn’t be the case.

This is because everyone on the team has a defined role. When you start bypassing these roles, the quality of the work drops.

The creation of an editorial calendar is a management task. It’s creative, but within the scope of management.

Therefore, those who produce should produce, and those who organize should organize. Only this way can both activities be done effectively.

Easier Tracking

And if the client asks you, “What post are we making on April 25th?” Can you answer?

And this happens. Dates that may seem completely random but have some significance for the client, and therefore require a post or other material to be produced.

Even for holidays: an editorial calendar allows you to strategize everything in advance, enabling you to design campaigns and approve them weeks before launch.

And all with simple tracking. When the client asks what post is going to be launched on April 25th, they’re already frustrated. They don’t want to ask you. They want to see it on their own and draw their conclusions.

This is the job of the calendar when we think of an agency client, for example. But even within the agency or in-house marketing departments, this is also necessary.

The editorial calendar is like a content dashboard. A quick look, and everyone can know what will be produced and when the launch will happen.

And all of this without needing to ask, which has the potential to cause communication errors and delays.

Creation of a Strategic Document

The formalization of strategy is also a crucial point of the editorial calendar.

Through it, it becomes easy for clients and managers to perceive the progress of production and understand what can be added, subtracted, or altered.

Once an editorial calendar is complete, it goes directly for approval from the stakeholders involved.

At this point, all production for the period defined by the calendar will be specified in advance.

This way, the stakeholders in the production process can understand the volume and know what can be changed or added, avoiding last-minute requests and facilitating communication between everyone.

How to Create an Editorial Calendar for Organic Traffic

The editorial calendar with the most information we’ve seen so far is the one dedicated to organic traffic and YouTube.

However, a YouTube calendar is quite similar to the one for blogs and organic traffic in general. The only difference is the format, but research and content creation follow a similar model.

🔭 Go deeper: Blog for Generating Leads — 10 Essential Strategies

Because of this, I have listed the editorial calendar for organic traffic as our main model for presenting what it needs to contain.

Some steps are common to all editorial calendars, while others are not. In each of these items, I’ve included a subdivision showing which types of calendars these activities can be used in.

Ready to start? Let’s go:

Keyword Analysis

The first step is to determine which keywords you will address in your work.

This is very important because these keywords will essentially inform what you are going to write about.

This research is usually done through Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, SemRush, SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and other similar platforms.

Highlighting Google Keyword Planner, which operates on a freemium model. You just need a Google Ads account to do your research.

However, it’s freemium because, to see the exact search volume results, you need to have active ads running.

This information is crucial for any editorial calendar, and it’s usually the starting point for its creation.

It can also be used in:

Keyword research works for YouTube as well, although not as concretely as for blogs.

This is because Google Keyword Planner considers only the keywords searched on Google, not their search volume on other Google-owned channels.

To research keywords for YouTube, you’ll need another tool that specializes in this task.

Or you can use Keyword Planner and then check those keywords in YouTube’s search bar.

Depending on the number of views on the videos that appear, you can get a good idea of search volume and the difficulty of ranking in the top results.

SERP Analysis

After finding a keyword, you’ll also need to quickly search for it on Google and analyze the resulting SERP.

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s the page of results that appears when you search for a term.

It’s important to do this work so you don’t get misled by keywords, and this happens a lot.

It’s happened to me more than once. I once worked with a client in the wholesale sector, writing a blog targeted at retailers.

I found a great keyword once: “sound car.” Naturally, I wrote an article about the advantages of sound cars for retailers and how to hire one.

But when I searched this keyword on Google, the SERP returned only results for companies that rented sound cars.

Google understands that these companies should rank higher than my content because they represent the true search intent of users.

So, always do this analysis to understand what the search intent truly is. This step is crucial in building an editorial calendar.

It Can Also Be Used For:

The same applies to YouTube.

On social media, this is more apparent in the hashtag research used alongside posts.

Finding the best hashtags also involves this research, looking at which posts are using them to avoid inserting yourself into the wrong conversation.

For example: #cleaning can mean different things depending on the post.

Setting Deadlines (Production, Review, and Publication)

Normally, the editorial calendar determines the final deadline for publishing material.

It’s rare to find calendars that explicitly state the deadlines for each production stage of content.

This task usually falls to process managers, who are familiar enough with the team to break down the main deadlines into segmented ones.

Always consider that the editorial calendar is a tool that is also useful for clients and stakeholders.

And these people like to ask for updates. In fact, their job is to ask.

If you specify all your deadlines indiscriminately, you risk having more requests for aspects that are entirely operational and the responsibility of the agency.

Therefore, only include final deadlines in your editorial calendar. At most, include the deadlines you’ve agreed upon with your client or stakeholder.

For example: if you’ve agreed that the briefings for the materials being produced will be evaluated before production, you should include the dates when the briefings will be ready as well.

It Can Also Be Used For:

Any material you produce at your agency or in your marketing department.

Deadlines are absolutely universal and apply to any type of material and editorial calendar.

The same rules apply to all cases.

Offering Explanations for Each Piece of Content

This part is also crucial but is often overlooked by many. And it shouldn’t be.

The justification for each content piece is essential to avoid changes in your editorial calendar.

Don’t get me wrong: it can certainly be changed, and in many cases, this benefits the work as a whole.

However, some content pieces are strategic and need to be in the calendar. If you don’t provide any justification, these crucial pieces are seen as regular content by those doing the approval.

And that’s where the danger lies.

Always include one or two paragraphs in your pieces explaining why that material is necessary.

What is its strategic purpose? What are the expected outcomes? How will your content stand out from other content already on the market at that moment?

By doing this, you increase your chances of approval and also build a good rapport with the approvers, improving your relationship.

It Can Also Be Used For:

All types of editorial calendars, without exception.

No matter how simple a piece is; there’s always space for a justification and explanation of its strategic value.

Validation with Stakeholders

We’ve touched on this part before, but it’s essential that you allow ample time for your editorial calendar to be approved by your stakeholders.

And these stakeholders can be many. If you’re an agency, they are the heads and directors of the agency and your client.

If you’re from an in-house marketing department, they are your directors and immediate supervisors.

Validation is crucial to avoid surprises. Creative production isn’t the property of creatives — it’s the property of the brand.

Therefore, the true guardians of the brand are, in the end, the brand owners.

Many people make the mistake of producing unapproved material only to throw it away afterward. Don’t be another one!

It Can Also Be Used For:

All the editorial calendars we’ve discussed so far need stakeholder approval, without exception.

Routine Follow-Up

Once the calendar is ready, justified, and approved, the project management team’s work begins.

This team is responsible for setting the timelines. How much time will be needed for each stage of content production?

This work is holistic and will involve everyone. The deadlines need to be negotiated between those requesting the calendar, those producing the pieces, and, of course, those approving them.

Everything also depends on the production realities in your department. Everyone has a different routine.

It’s the project management team’s job to identify this routine and plan the deadlines accordingly.

Simple Editorial Calendar Model for Download

So, are you ready to create your first editorial calendar?

Remember the key points that always need to be present, no matter what type of material you’re creating:

• Date;
• The idea behind the material;
• The justification for its existence;
• Keywords with volume and competition (in the case of blogs and YouTube);
• Channels where the content will be posted.

Everything else depends on you. I have a model here that I’ve been using for editorial calendars for years.

You can download and modify it as you wish by clicking on this link, okay?

And with that, we’ve come to the end of the article. I hope you enjoyed it and are ready to create your first editorial calendar.

But look: an editorial calendar is for Content Marketing, and the main function of Content Marketing is to bring people to your website.

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A hug, and I’ll see you in the next article!