Wrike is introducing more and more features to help marketing teams manage and track all their work in one centralized place. Our marketing team completely relies on Wrike to collaborate and get work done, so we're doubly passionate about making Wrike the best workspace for Agile marketers.
One of the many ways we use Wrike is to track our blog's publishing calendar. For example, this post has been on our editorial calendar since March, and we've been tracking its progress from just an idea all the way through the publishing date today! Now we want to show you how we use Wrike as an editorial and marketing calendar, so you can efficiently manage your company blog, too.
5 Steps to Set Up Your Marketing Editorial Calendar with Wrike
1. Create a folder to hold every post that you'll publish on your blog. Our folder is called "Blog Posts". Every time you create a new task to write a blog post, make sure it's tagged into this folder.
2. Create a Custom Workflow that accurately reflects all the different stages that your blog posts go through on their way to being published. For example, at Wrike our Custom Workflow for our blog calendar looks like this:
Sometimes, posts jump back and forth between "In Review" and "Writing", ifthe author has received feedback on their post for additional edits, and Wrike makes it easy to adjust your task to that back-and-forth workflow.
3. Create a Shared Dashboard to give your team visibility into the publishing schedule. We call our Shared Dashboard "Editorial Calendar". It will look like this when you're done with every step:
4. Now you need to create the two widgets for your Dashboard:
a. One for all posts that have yet to be scheduled, e.g. "To Be Scheduled". These will be tasks in your folder without due dates.
i. Create the widget by filtering inside your Blog Posts folder for tasks that are BACKLOGGED.
ii. Also select all Custom Statuses you care about for this widget. At Wrike, we filter for 'planned', 'writing', 'in review', 'in design', and 'ready to post' because we want a list of everything that is definitely going to be published at some point. We leave out 'idea', since those ideas may never make it to the publishing calendar.
iii. Once you've filtered for tasks to show only what you want to see in your widget, add the widget to your Dashboard!
b. Now create a widget for your current publishing schedule, e.g. "Publishing Schedule". These will be tasks in your folder that do have due dates.
i. Create the widget by filtering inside your Blog Posts folder for tasks that are PLANNED and MILESTONE
ii. Also select all custom statuses you care about for this widget. At Wrike, we filter for 'planned', 'writing', 'in review', 'in design', and 'ready to post' because we select publishing dates before posts are fully ready. We choose NOT to show posts that are already 'published', but you can decide to show them if you'd always like to see previously published posts on your Dashboard.
iii. Finally, make sure you organize your task list "By Date" to make sure the widget lists your tasks in the correct order, and then add your widget to your Dashboard!
5. Now you're all set up! When you're looking at your Dashboard, you can click the quick scheduling button on your task card to choose publishing dates. If you've set up your filters as described above, your task will automatically move from the "To Be Scheduled" widget over to the "Publishing Schedule" widget once you've selected a date. You can use the same button to quickly rearrange posts in your publishing schedule, in case new posts need to be added into the mix and things need to move around. It gives your marketing team the ability to stay agile.
Note:Because our Editorial Calendar system uses task due dates to set publishing dates, we cannot use due dates to note when we'll be done writing, when editing needs to be completed, or anything except the final publishing date. If your team relies heavily on due dates to move work through every stage of your workflow, you will need to modify our process described above to fit your needs.
It is crucial to plan ahead so you always have ideas at the ready. It's even better if you have finished and recyclable content pieces that can be published at a moment's notice. That's the purpose of this blog post: to walk you through a three-part process for planning out your content in advance of deadlines and sudden needs.
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