How to Create and Manage Dozens of Editorial Strategies

An editorial strategy is a plan that outlines the content you plan on creating and sharing in order to reach a specific goal. Part of a marketer’s job is to create, manage, and implement these strategies for their clients. This means a marketer may be responsible for planning and implementing dozens of editorial strategies, each of which has countless moving parts. This can be overwhelming, but fortunately, there is a way to make this task more manageable. Follow these tips to successfully create and manage dozens of editorial strategies:

Set A General Plan

Before you dive into the details, it’s important to look at the bigger picture for each client. Start by establishing goals for each of your clients’ editorial strategies. Examples of goals may include:

  • Increasing traffic to a website
  • Establishing your client as the expert in their field
  • Increasing brand awareness
  • Converting more readers into loyal customers

Now you have established the purpose of creating content for each of your clients. Next, decide how often you want to publish content

Some experts suggest posting content two to four times per week, but the frequency of your posts could depend on your resources, what goals you are trying to meet, and your contract with your clients. 

You may also want to figure out the approximate word count of each of these posts. The average blog post is around 700 words, but longer content tends to rank higher in the search results.

Brainstorm Topics

Brainstorm Topics

The next step is brainstorming content topics for each of your clients’ editorial strategies. Your topics should be relevant to your client and their target audience. But each piece of content does not need to appeal to the client’s entire target audience. Instead, it’s best to break your client’s target audience down and brainstorm topics based on:

  • Personas: A persona is an imaginary person who represents a segment of your target audience. For example, a health and wellness company might create several personas for their audience, including people who are trying to lose weight, fitness fanatics, and vegans. In this case, their editorial strategy should include content for each of these personas.
  • Themes: Research your client to learn more about the main themes in their industry. An automotive manufacturer may want to write a lot of content around the theme of going green, for instance.
  • Buying stages: Think of topics for consumers who are in each stage of the buying process. For example, the content you create for consumers in the “problem recognition” stage would be very different from the content you create for consumers in the “post-purchase evaluation stage.”

Don’t forget to incorporate keywords, too. Each content piece should target one primary keyword and several secondary keywords. Both primary and secondary keywords should be related to the chosen topic. 

Choose the Right Writers

Don’t assign content tasks at random. Marketing agencies typically work with multiple in-house or freelance writers. If this is the case, take the time to thoughtfully choose a writer for each of your content tasks.

Evaluate each writer’s strengths and weaknesses. Some writers might be better at creating how-to guides, whereas others excel at in-depth, lengthy analyses of complex topics. Each writer may have their own area of expertise, too. If one of your writers is an expert on health and wellness, let them write this type of content. 

There are two reasons why choosing the right writer for each task is important. First, it’s easier for your team to complete their work if they are writing about topics that interest them in a format they are familiar with. 

Second, it will ensure that your team produces high-quality work. You won’t have to spend as much time going back and forth with edits or rewrites, which makes juggling dozens of editorial strategies much easier.

Use An Editorial Calendar Tool

Use An Editorial Calendar Tool

One of the keys to successfully managing multiple editorial strategies is using the right tool. Gryffin’s editorial calendar tool allows you to map out an unlimited number of editorial strategies. Use the drag-and-drop feature to assign topics, personas, themes, and keywords to different days on the calendar. This makes it easy to visualize your content strategy so you can quickly identify if there are any holes that need to be addressed. 

Once your content calendar is complete, use Gryffin to assign content to writers and editors on your team. You can customize the workflow for each project or client, so you can control which stages the content needs to go through to reach completion. Your workflow might look something like this:

  • Order content
  • Write content
  • Edit content
  • Edits needed
  • Out for client approval
  • Client edits needed
  • Client approved
  • Published

As your team completes each task, the project will automatically move forward to the next step in the process. 

You won’t need to wait for a response or play phone tag with your team to get a status update, either. You can monitor the progress of each piece of content simply by logging in. Your dashboard will display the status of each pending task so you can make sure that everything is running smoothly. 

This user-friendly tool makes it easy to plan, create, and keep up with dozens of editorial strategies for your clients. 

How to Create and Manage Dozens of Editorial Strategies

Measure Results 

A marketer’s work is never done–even when their content is finally published. Part of managing an editorial strategy is measuring its results. Some of the metrics you should monitor for every piece of content include:

  • Traffic
  • Impressions
  • Click-through rate
  • Ranking for each targeted keyword

Measuring the results of your content is the only way to see what’s working and what’s not. Use this information to adjust your future editorial strategies accordingly. 

You don’t need to manually pull these results to monitor your content’s performance. Use Gryffin to plan, create, manage, and measure the results of content all in one tool. Gryffin pulls data directly from Google Search Console and Google Analytics and presents it in easy-to-read charts and graphics. This allows you to see key metrics at a glance, regardless of whether you are managing editorial strategies for one client or one hundred.

Start your free 14-day trial today.