Whether in corporate publishing or in journalistic editorial offices: Every team has probably heard of an editorial plan to prepare content activities efficiently, manage them easily and present them clearly. So the theory is often clear. But what does it look like in practice? How do you create an editorial plan 2025 that your team can work well with? What do you need to pay attention to and what information should not be missing? And how does software help you with your content calendar? We’ll let you in on it.
There are numerous channels for publishing your message – as well as there are topics that are suitable for distribution. An editorial plan for 2025 is an indispensable tool for keeping track of topics, channels, responsibilities and deadlines in corporate publishing, newsrooms and social media marketing. But one thing before we start: there is no one best way to “create a content calendar” – we can reveal that much. Every company or team has different requirements and needs as to how they can best work with an editorial plan. So how can you create a practical content calendar for social media, your website or internal communications?
How to start your editorial plan 2025:
You can record your initial thoughts for your editorial plan 2025 on paper. Brainstorming within the team helps you to select topics, but monitoring the competition, for example, can also provide you with helpful ideas. Also take a look at what special days there are in 2025: You may want to take certain holidays that fit in with your theme into account when planning your content. Think about which topics make sense in which month or quarter and avoid large content gaps. Of course, you can always add something spontaneously. To prevent interruptions during practical implementation, it is important that you transfer your ideas from paper to digital or start directly in digital form.
For many, a digital editorial plan 2025 still starts with an Excel list, as there are many Excel templates for editorial planning online. So Excel or Google Sheets can be a good start for collecting topics, but it won’t help you to prepare articles more smoothly afterwards. That’s why content professionals use a content management system or a special editorial planning tool for their content creation and schedule. Ideally, such an editorial system supports story-centered work so that you don’t have to worry about the channels for the time being: Content First! But more on that later.
Editorial plan 2025 – What needs to be included?
Your editorial plan should therefore reflect your topics and communication goals. Have you gathered lots of ideas and general topics? Then you go on to detailed planning. Because apart from the topics, there are a good dozen pieces of information that can help in a editorial calendar. The most important ones are:
You can organize this information in a table using columns to create a good overview. Some companies also use Kanban boards for planning and compile all the information on the individual topic cards. Feel free to try both and see what suits you and your team.
It should be clear and concise!
Once the most important information is clearly presented, you can add more information to your editorial plan. But remember: your plan should support you in your work and not overwhelm you.
So weigh up what will help you, e.g:
- Key points of the content
- Scope of a contribution
- Category to which a story is assigned
- Call-to-action that encourages to click further
- Editorial deadlines
- Relevant dates (campaign and public holidays, company events, etc.)
From the idea to the actual publishing
To work efficiently with your editorial plan and prepare your ideas effectively for the various channels, it’s best to take a topic-centered approach: This means that you first work on your “topic” and enrich it with all the information without thinking about Instagram, a blog article or LinkedIn (i.e. the channel). This way you avoid redundant work if you want to reuse content and publish it in a media-specific way.
In your content calendar, you have already defined the channels for which you want to use the topic. It is only in the next step that you create media-specific drafts, which are always based on the information in your topic, and you can then publish quickly – adapted to your channels.
Good to know: If you are working on a topic as a team and it can be accessed centrally (i.e. digitally) by everyone, you will always be up to date when something has been changed.
Creating a content calendar or editorial plan: How can software help?
The variety of topics and channels is usually far too great to cope with manually. Large editorial offices have therefore also long relied on technological support for editorial planning, for example in the newsroom – both in terms of finding and collecting topics as well as preparing and publishing articles. Planning, editing and publishing go hand in hand with the right tool.
Take our AI-based editorial system Newsmind Stories, for example. It supports you in your planning for 2025
- to manage content and topics efficiently, compile them in a targeted manner and publish them cross-media.
- to prepare content for specific purposes and channels in a WYSIWYG editor.
- to process content efficiently and use it multiple times.
- to access stored content regardless of time, place and device.
- to find information instead of searching for it, for example in daily, weekly and monthly views.
- to keep track using Kanban lists, with responsibilities and status.
- to assign access rights for different users (groups) as required.
What’s good: Editorial planning software can also save you a lot of work when it comes to finding topics. Newsmind Stories, for example, uses AI technology to help you with research and monitoring. Incoming messages are prepared and pre-sorted for you in clearly organized feeds.
You want to know more?
Then take a look around our content hub: You can find more information as well as helpful tips and tricks for creating your editorial plan on our dedicated pages on editorial planning, editorial planning for social media and newsroom software. And if you want to find out more about Newsmind Stories and are interested in a free demo, click here.
