How Editorial Calendars Improve Content Creation for Real Estate Agents

Creating and producing high-quality content takes more than simply writing a 500-word blog or posting a photo across social media channels. It takes establishing a smart strategy, goals setting, and lots of planning beforehand if you want to see any results from your content strategy.

If you want to improve your written content, social media, or your overall content objectives, you need to establish a strong editorial calendar.

Today, we are going to show you how to build an editorial calendar and demonstrate how it can help streamline all of your content needs. All real estate agents can benefit from using an editorial calendar, let’s find out how!

What Is an Editorial Calendar?

An editorial calendar is a visual timeline that maps out all of the content you will publish and with specific times for when you plan to publish it. Editorial calendars can help any size real estate team thrive as having an editorial calendar will keep your team consistently producing fresh and strategic content.

Since everything you plan on creating will be laid out in one clear and organized calendar, your team will never be left guessing what to post next.

Editorial calendars help everyone, from your real estate content creators to those who schedule and monitor your social media and blog posts.

Editorial calendars ensure that your team is organized and always on the same page when it comes to pumping out engaging content.

Why Do Real Estate Agents Need an Editorial Calendar?

There are a variety of reasons why your real estate team needs to adopt an editorial calendar to plan your content strategy. Some of the top reasons include:

• Helping you maintain and/or increase your presence.
• Ensure your time-sensitive content gets posted in the right moment.
• Making sure your team is always on track and meeting deadlines.
• You will continue to deliver the best content for your audience.

Questions to Ask Before Creating an Editorial Calendar

Before any great content strategy, it is always important to think about the why so that you can better understand how to implement your content strategy and organize your calendar.

Here are some helpful questions to brainstorm with your team before you begin the planning stage of your editorial calendar:

• What type of content do you want to create?
• How many people will be using this editorial calendar?
• What are the various stages the content will go through before it’s published?
• What format will you use to edit this calendar?

Streamline Your Team’s Content Marketing Process

Organization is key with an editorial calendar.

Being able to clearly establish content and deadlines will help your team improve your output and grow your real estate brand.

Here are some key reasons how an editorial calendar will boost your content marketing strategy:

• You won’t be spending time posting every day.
• You can delegate tasks to your team so you can focus on client-facing projects.
• It can better equip you to track your metrics.
• Help you understand your weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals.

How to Plan an Editorial Calendar in 5 Easy Steps

If you are new to planning an editorial calendar, then this section is for you. We broke down building the best editorial calendar for real estate agents in 5 simple steps.

To get it just right, like any strategy, it will take some time and trial and error.

But following this progression will get you to a place where you can really watch your content strategy grow, monitor its progress, and adjust until you hit a spot where you are able to reap all of the amazing benefits.

1. Create a Content Marketing Strategy

The first step in building an amazing editorial calendar is to focus on your content. They type of content you decide to plan for your editorial calendar will vary depending on your overall marketing goals.

Build Client Personas

You need to understand your client personas if you want to understand how to better plan your content. Having strong client personas in play will give you an idea of exactly what your target audience is looking for.

Determine the Types of Content to Create

Will you use your editorial calendar for all of your content needs or are you focusing on just one piece of the content strategy, such as social media? Decide exactly what content you are planning to create and how you want to track it so your editorial calendar stays organized and output is maximized.

Determine Goals and KPIs

You need strong KPIs in play so that you can best track your results. Not all content is good content as you will likely find out.

Common real estate KPIs you can plan your content around include:

• Time spent on page
• Number of shares, comments, and likes
• Unique site visits
• Number of downloads

2. Perform Content Research

In order for you to know exactly what to schedule, you will need to know the type of real estate content that your target audience is interacting with. You can do this by simply scoping out the competition as well as taking an inventory of your top-rated pieces of content.

During this time, take the extra time to research some out-of-the-box content ideas that are sure to generate buzz within your community.

You can’t start making content blindly. You need to look at what the influencers and industry leaders are doing and analyze how and why it works so well. Then take those ideas, differentiate, and make them your own and relevant to your niche.

Research is a never-ending process and content is always changing, so continue this process as you are working on your content strategy and creating your editorial calendar.

3. Generate a List of Topics

A great way to make sure your content is always fresh and don’t face writer’s block is to generate a long list of topics through research so that you always have new ideas to pull from.

Having topic research to fall back and scheduled in your editorial calendar will allow you to always able to write and create freely.

Create a Swipe File

A swipe file is an excellent resource for all real estate teams. You can store all of your content ideas and as you come across new ones, you can place them in there to add to your next editorial calendar.

A swipe file is a collection of proven topic ideas that your team can draw from when you are wondering what to create next.

The point is to continuously generate topics you can fall back onto so that it is easier to make your editorial calendar when the time comes.

4. Create Your Content Outlines

Whether you are preparing social media or blog posts, having a strong outline will only be able to help you plan your copy and your content.

This can typically take place on an Excel or Google Sheet, where you can plan the content, images, and platform types.

Take a look below at our social media outline.

You can see we organize by date, social media platform, written content, and design expectations. This helps us organize and keep a consistent posting schedule.

5. Start Building Your Calendar

Now that you know exactly what you want to post and you have created your content outlines, it’s time to start building your calendar.

This might vary from real estate agent to real estate agent. While some might find that planning 2 weeks at a time suits them best, others might plan 6 weeks at a time.

Build Your Marketing Tech Stack – Tools for Efficiency

Marketing tools will help you streamline and create your editorial calendar. You can use marketing tools for both creating and editing content as well as scheduling it.

Best Editorial Calendar Planner: CoSchedule

We love using a content planner like CoSchedule. It makes life so easy. This platform will analyze your blog headings and social media copy and will provide you with a score to maximize engagement.

You can color code and schedule all of your social media and blog post. CoSchedule even takes it a step further and provides suggested time for posting to generate the most engagement.

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