If you want your brand to be competitive as a content creator, you need to be really focused in your approach to ensure that you have consistent high quality content that people care about. That sets the stage for discussion and hopefully provides a window into brand editorial versus content or content marketing.
Purpose, the number one thing that you need to nail down early on in a in a clear and accurate way. This is the mission, the vision, the values that are guiding your editorial decisions. It's so important to take that step to really align all the key stakeholders on what the purpose of your content is in order to take the right approach and make the right decisions. This is why you're publishing and communicating with your audience, and in many ways, the value that you're going to bring to them.
As you're creating your point of view, this is your unique perspective, your editorial identity, your positioning relative to other brands. You want to think about how you're showing up for your target audience relative to other publishers and brands in the ecosystem, and ensure that you're saying something original, and bring bringing something unique to conversation.
The editorial point of view brings that mission and values to life through voice and personality. This is how you speak, how you communicate visually, how you execute, how you say what you want to say, and deliver your message. It's the color and details that make your brand unique and easy to connect with because you've got that strong point of view.
These are the content topics that you'll cover. This is the easy part. It's usually pretty obvious where you need to establish a foothold or what your subject matter expertise is going to be. But clearly defining, at a high level, what is the space that we're playing in? What are the specific topics and subtopics that are fair game and relevant for our brands to be conversing about, is the other third essential component to that editorial foundation, which I'll talk about in a second.
This is the what. This is what you're talking about, what you have to say, what your subject matter expertise is going to be. Oftentimes, brands have this defined early on. They've got clear SEO goals, and they know where they want to rank or they know what they want to be speaking about. And they think they're ready to go start producing content, but they skip those other two steps. So it's really important to pause, establish these other guardrails of, what is the purpose of our content, what's the point of view that we're putting forward? And then that allows you to execute the subject matter with a clear brand identity and in a manner that really resonates with your audience.
This is the workflow; this is how you get it done; this is having a system in place that allows you to create content in a really streamlined way that serves your goals.
Just making sure your content sees the light of day, you have to think about this upfront. And then in execution, you have to feed your channel, your content, out through all of your distribution channels to make sure that it's driving toward the goals that you're aiming for.
Those first three points that I brought up on the last slide, purpose, point of view, and content pillars, are really pivotal in this dynamic. We view them as this triangle, where each component relies on the other. Without one of these, things are going to fall apart.
Quality is a great editorial mission, first and foremost. It defines the value that you bring to your audience. This is a tenent of service journalism, which is the type of magazine editorial that our roots are based in. And basically, it means putting your customer or your audience first. Identifying what value you're bringing, how you're improving their quality of life, what you're delivering to them through your content. And from a larger point of view, beyond the individual, thinking about your brand's future impact. So, as you connect with these individuals and deliver value to them through your content, what are you contributing at a societal level? Or, what kind of perspectives are you shifting through your ongoing content and communications? On the contrary, your editorial mission should not be focused on KPIs.
So obviously, you're going to use KPIs to judge how your content is performing. You're going to be looking at conversion, you're going to be looking at traffic, SEO is going to come with your content efforts. But the purpose here is to focus on how your audience will benefit from your content, not what your brand hopes to gain through its publishing efforts. KPIs should definitely be used as a metric for success. They can be used as part of your editorial strategy, making decisions about what you should publish and what you shouldn't. But it can't be the reason for being for your content.
Their reason for being is to deliver something of value to your audience, and if you don't put that first, then you won't gain that trust and gain that engagement that you need in order to deliver on those other performance metrics. The other things your editorial mission should do, which should offer a unique brand position or point of view, that's its own on the triangle, but it should also be ingrained in your mission statement as well. So always using the vernacular that you want to be a representation of your brand and just identifying and pinpointing in really clear terms what you're bringing to the table that is unique to you. On the contrary, you don't want to replicate what others do.
There might be another publisher, another brand producing content that's high quality, and you want to replicate that success. You still need to figure out what your unique position in that content marketplace is and what unique value you're bringing to people. Because if your content could exist on any other site, or if your brand mission, your editorial mission, could just as easily apply to another publisher or brand out there, you won't have the impact that you could as if you were bringing something unique to the table.
And then lastly, your editorial mission should be an extension of your brand identity, but it shouldn't be just your brand guidelines cut and dry. Obviously, most brands that we work with are pretty well developed in their brand identity and point of view. They've got some voice and tone notes. They've got their boilerplate language on how they talk about themselves and their products. They have visual identity, which is great, but it's really a starting point for that editorial division, which is a much more robust representation or extension of what you might see otherwise on your brand's website, within its copywriting, in ads on social media.
Learn more from Amanda here.
Revel leverages its three founders’ service journalism backgrounds to deliver meaningful content, backed by science and experts, that aligns with both the customers’ interests and needs as well as the brand’s mission and business goals. Revel serves a variety of industries, including health tech, femtech, fitness, pregnancy and parenting, mental health, home care, and more.Prior to founding Revel, Amanda was the digital director at Shape magazine, the founding editor of the yoga and wellness website Sonima, and an editor at Prevention, Men’s Health, and Microsoft. Revel is quickly becoming a go-to agency for both mission-driven clients and top-tier talent.
