Why Digital requires an Editorial Strategy
Most companies in the publishing vertical are devoting time, energy and resources to their editorial digital efforts. Whether they want to improve and reach new audiences, change their distribution channel or simply attempt to broadcast a new message for their brand, having an editorial strategy encompassing messages, channels and medium is a must to succeed in capturing eyeballs. For a long time websites and apps have been a place where stories were neglected, simply buried under a corporate section or just presented to be read in a format without much thought on context and distribution. This tends to lead to a less ambitious plan to tell a brand’s story. Users’ behaviour, the availability of social platforms specializing in different content formats requires any brand looking at expanding their reach online to consider a dedicated editorial strategy in order to achieve the best outcomes. The Editorial Strategy should embrace branding and the core products
For any brand to retain relevance in today’s publishing space the experience of finding, exploring and consuming digital content needs to be an extremely compelling experience in reading, watching and listening. In order to achieve this goal it’s far easier for brands to partner with brands and product teams (products intended as the core product / services a brand intends to promote). Both content producer, brand and product specialists need to understand readers behavior, platform unicity and content opportunity to develop a sharp view of the media landscape and understand how different areas of content opportunity fit into the broader brand experience.
It’s imperative that each group understands what the other does. We have consulted with many clients and those that have been successful in creating an Editorial strategy have gone through the effort to understand each role in this process. This understanding allows to have a full end to end picture of how the Editorial strategy can come to place from the branding exercise, the necessity to communicate the message, the core proposition of the product and how the editorial team can produce the best content to achieve so. In today’s landscape it is fair to say that an editorial strategy which simply repurposes content across multiple social media channels isn’t going to drive value.
The flaw in a set up where the editorial team ends up focusing on short term initiatives while the core product / service focuses on the customer satisfaction to use the brand, while the brand team tries to broadcast their message above / below the line is going to sound like a band out of sync. Unless the editors still aren’t involved closely enough in thinking about how the overall process of communicating brand value and what the strength of the product proposition results can be underwhelming.
A closer working relationship would cause both the Editorial team and the other functions more effectively.
A core part of an Editorial Digital Strategy is to own vertical
When a brand wants to foray into a vertical or make their name standing out in few areas the approach towards digital content should be focusing on sections or specific topics which are polarizing attention. The creation of subsections in their content or blogs dedicated to the area in need to audience can gather quickly a niche of cult followers and subscribers which ultimately (granted the content is up to scratch) helps to propagate it further with their own following. One of the great examples on this is The NewYorker, a magazine focusing on topic like commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. The NewYorker created a few dedicated sections like Culture Desk, Page Turner and Currency, which helped to reach to the audiences, create a degree of cult following and accelerate the speed of which web users are expected to find, read and share content valuable to them.
Airbnb magazine
In our very own home, we have seen the South China Morning Post, the Hong Kong English language newspaper of records, launching new dedicated sections like Abacus, China Tech City; becoming a reference point for the western media on China tech giant.