How an Editorial Strategy Can Incorporate Business Goals
An editorial strategy is a plan for how your team manages, uses, and measures content, contributors, channels, analytics, and feedback to support the company’s goals.
Editorial content must support business and corporate communications outcomes.
Understanding and aligning with business goals is a key component of an editorial strategy for internal communications. Remember:
- Goals are strategic.
- Tactics are the things you do to support those goals.
Two Sets of Goals
You must have clarity on at least two sets of goals before you design an editorial strategy:
- Business goals
- Team goals
Questions to ask about company goals:
- What are the company’s stated goals?
- Are the goals achievable?
- Or are the goals aspirational?
- Is the goal broad? Specific? Or purposefully vague?
- Are the goals company-wide? Or are they specific to a department or region?
This article focuses on understanding how business goals can help design your editorial strategy.
Thought Exercise
Suppose you work for a company that, over the next three years, wants to improve outcomes for:
- Sales in new geographic markets (e.g., China, India)
- Innovation (to be seen as an innovative company)
- Ensuring that client data is secure
- Recruiting and retaining top talent
Knowing these are your firm’s priorities, you now have some direction for your editorial strategy.
You will manage gobs of content, much of which will fall outside the company’s objectives. That’s par for the course.
- But…but…you should put more work and emphasis into supporting company goals than in other initiatives.
The outline of your editorial pursuits is dictated by company goals. The padding could, for example, come in the form of an editorial series dedicated to each of the objectives. Imagine:
- One article per month that provides sales tips on how to sell to clients in China. Or,
- A six-part video series on how the Security team is building new tools to keep data out of the hands of criminals.
- Here’s an example of how to create a sustainable editorial series.
Bonus: The content you create — an employee profile, for example — can then be shared with colleagues in Marketing and External Communications to support the “recruiting” and “innovation” goals. Marketing and PR can publish the same content to outside channels, like the company blog, LinkedIn, and third-party sites like The Muse to get the word out about how great the people are at your company (and look at all the innovative things they do!)
- When internal content goes external, you vastly increase the value of your work and boost the return on investment (ROI) of your efforts.
This is a broad outline of how you must consider business goals when designing your editorial strategy. The implementation is unique to each company, but the ideas are universally applicable.
(Don’t miss a follow-up blog I’ll publish on Medium next week on how your editorial strategy must align with team goals).
A version of this article was published by IC Matters.
