The editorial strategy is part of content marketing. Its goal is simple: to help you plan, prepare and publish your content consistently and efficiently. She is your best ally and your future guide. Indeed, as a business manager you must ensure a digital presence in order to gain notoriety and find new prospects. It also requires the implementation of a well-constructed editorial strategy. How to set up a content strategy ?
In this article, we explain what an editorial strategy is, how to do and deploy it, and the benefits you can derive from it.
Editorial strategy: definition
An editorial strategy is a guideline for your future publications. It defines the way of communicating, the tone used, the style …
When creating a website, once the graphical charter has been defined, you feed your site with your content. These texts fill the pages as well as your “blog”. Regularly writing quality articles on your blog helps develop and improve your SEO. Then, these articles are shared on social networks. Publishing articles or posts on social networks is scheduled in advance in an editorial calendar and not from day to day.
All this is determined upstream and planned. This is where editorial strategy comes into play. It aims to frame all of your content before distribution.
Why create an editorial strategy?
You have every interest in creating your editorial strategy in order to organize all of your publications.
A good strategy:
- ensures the consistency of your messages and your image on all of your content;
- plans to feed your site with high value-added content for your readers;
- takes into account natural referencing (SEO) to improve the position of your pages in search engine results;
- provides for publications on your social networks for a regular presence on your media.
- improve your commercial performance .
Editorial strategy has now become essential for any entrepreneur who wishes to develop on the web. With your well-woven editorial strategy, you become your own media, which saves you from spending a whole budget on advertising.
How to create an editorial strategy?
Often called content marketing, content marketing or editorial charter, editorial strategy is closely linked to natural referencing. She plans the actions that serve to increase your positions on search engines like Google ™ without investing a colossal budget in an Adwords campaign. To build your editorial strategy, you must first of all define the goal of your strategy i.e. why you write and on what subject, who you are talking to, when you decide to do it and where.
You have to set goals for yourself! Remember that a “good” goal must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound. This is called the (SMART) method. It can be to get more than 10,000 visits per month, to double the conversion rate… However, it all depends on your activity, your turnover, what you plan for your future company…
If you love to wield your pen like Voltaire, you will enjoy your editorial strategy. However, unfortunately you do not write to prose, but to meet a need for information and referencing. Your strategy is a great help in order to publish regularly and effectively. Rigor and regularity are the key words of your strategy.
If today many of you have understood the challenges of content marketing, you must redouble your efforts to stand out from your competitors. Discover in the rest of the article, some tips to get a head start in your editorial strategy.
Writing beautiful, valuable texts that no one can find and read is a shame! This is why you must know your targets perfectly, adapt your content and optimize SEO.
Buyer persona: know your targets
Without the perfect knowledge of your targets, you risk missing out on your strategy. Indeed, your content is aimed directly at your prospects. Content that doesn’t meet demand simply causes a high bounce rate. Your Internet user clicks on your article thanks to a promising title, he hovers over the article not finding the information he is looking for, decides to close the page and it is back to square one. This is all you need to avoid and for that, no miracle, a perfect understanding of your readers is essential.
the buyer persona is an easy tool that takes a little thought. It is a user profile that you put together that brings together demographics, general characteristics, and social and psychological habits. The idea is to understand your targets in order to offer them suitable content. , that is, content that meets their expectations.
Targeting Keywords: Optimizing Your Content Marketing
Writing content isn’t all about write articles at random. Good content should:
- contain enough value to appeal to your readers;
- respond to a problem that your targets are looking for;
- be optimized to appear in the first results of search engines.
So for your strategy to work, you need to do some keyword research to see which are the most sought after and which are worth your time. For this, we advise you Ubersuggest to rank your site!
This free tool allows you to know the search volume and analyze the position of your competitors. With a search by topic, you feed a table of priority articles to write according to the search volume for example.
Choosing the right content: a winning editorial strategy
Today there are a multitude of types of content: blog, white paper, webinar … It is up to you to determine which tools seem best suited to you. It all depends on your internal resources as well. Writing takes time, optimizing your articles for SEO even more. It is also part of your strategy to define who is responsible for writing and publishing. Organization is a very important part of your editorial strategy. If you don’t already have someone dedicated to content marketing, it makes more sense to focus only on one type of content, such as a blog portion, in order to develop your SEO.
The important thing is to focus on a goal and put all the necessary resources into it to achieve the results you want. Subsequently, continue to adapt your strategy again by integrating new means.
Content marketing: the different processes
There are several phases in the journey of your customers:
- The discovery phase is called the moment when the Internet user has not yet identified a problem and therefore makes a global search on the web without a specific objective. It consumes your content passively to gather information without any real need.
- The second phase is when the person has a specific and identified problem that they are trying to solve. It therefore enters a phase of research and comparison. It informs specific requests in the search bar of search engines.
- The last phase is decision making. the prospect knows what he wants and chooses his partner.
For all these different processes, it is advisable to adapt your content. Regarding the discovery phase, your content is therefore oriented differently from the decision phase. You therefore propose an article with a video for the discovery phase, then more detailed content for the intermediate phase by arousing the emotion, to finally be a little more incisive on the last phase of the process (free trial, comparative…).
Editorial strategy: furnish internal or external resources
Knowing the targets, setting up a whole strategy, defining the objectives… All these steps are important! However, they don’t work if you don’t have the resources to develop them. Once you have defined the frequency of your articles, the themes, the means of distribution, you must find THE person who knows how to carry out all the missions with ease. If your goal is to get listed very quickly and you want to position yourself as the leader of the training in France for example, you can delegate the writing to freelancers dedicated to this. It is quite possible to have several writers, however, it requires rigor and organization. Don’t neglect your recruiting. Your employee is the guarantor of the smooth running of your strategy.
To make setup even easier, you can create a writer’s checklist. It contains the essential elements to do so that your strategy fits perfectly with your editorial line.
Editorial strategy: a written guide to support your employees
Concretely, what does an editorial strategy look like? As with your graphic charter, your editorial strategy can be in the form of a written document.
This may contain:
- your goals;
- the style and tone used;
- examples of what you can and cannot do;
- the terms to be banned;
- all the indications that are important to you (for example if you want each content on social networks to begin with an emoji or a quotation mark).
The idea is to be able to be as precise as possible to promote consistency and the publication of your content effectively.
Set up an editorial schedule: the key to your strategy
Now that you know your targets, the subjects of your articles, the means of distribution, all you have to do is clarify all of your actions in an editorial schedule! The schedule is a guarantee of success which ensures regular publication on your various media. For this, Excel, Google Sheet, Trello or Notion are excellent tools!
You can organize your table however you want it to be as clear and precise as possible. You enter, for example, the name of the editor, the subject of the article, the publication date, the editorial status, the proofreading status (yes / no), the publication date, the distribution medium (Facebook ™, LinkedIn ™…).
Measure the impact of your editorial strategy: return on investment
To understand the issues and analyze the returns of your strategy, you have key indicators (KPIs). Indeed, you monitor for example if the number of visitors increases on your site. For that, Google Analytics is a good element which gives you reliable statistics on the frequentation of your site. Be careful, it is not in a week that you see the results of your work. Patience!
On social networks, you also measure, thanks to statistical tools, if the engagement is stronger, if the audience has increased, how your fans interact …
Finally, with this data you calculate the conversion rate that you take care to note in a table to compare the evolution of your strategy!
Editorial strategy: definition and secrets of successful strategies, in conclusion
- Define all of your targets and know them perfectly.
- Think about the types of content and their means of distribution.
- Define internal resources and succeed in mobilizing them.
- Create an editorial schedule (and stick to it).
- Write your content with SEO in mind (create a checklist if necessary, especially if you work with multiple writers).
- Analyze the return on investment using statistical tools.
Editorial strategy: to sum up in 4 questions
Comment établir une stratégie éditoriale ?
Before embarking on a schedule, you must first know your targets perfectly and define your objectives. Once you have completed this step, you can start planning your actions.
Quelles sont les étapes de la création d’une stratégie éditoriale ?
The 4 stages are:
- Identify your targets and goals.
- Define your style, your tone, your content topics (thinking SEO).
- Establish a publication schedule on your different platforms: blog, social networks.
- Measure your actions using monitoring indicators.
Pourquoi respecter une ligne éditoriale ?
Your editorial line must be followed throughout your strategy. Just like your graphic charter, you don’t change your logo every week. It’s exactly the same with your editorial line. It is a guide that allows both to respect the consistency of the company’s image and to plan all content creation actions.
Qui peut réaliser une stratégie éditoriale ?
Are you a business executive looking to embark on an editorial strategy? Do not panic ! You know your targets and your objectives, so you can bring in a specialist, a writer or a communication agency, to help you design your content strategy. She is the mainstay for the coming months, which is why it is important to have a solid foundation.