What Is an Editorial Strategy for Internal Communications?
There are five components
High-functioning internal communications groups operate with an editorial plan for reasons practical and strategic.
- Practically there must be a way to organize the vast amounts of content the team curates, creates, publishes, and distributes.
- Strategically the team needs to ensure that its work supports overarching company 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 objectives.
Implemented correctly, the strategy:
- reinforces your team’s role within the company
- creates changes in behavior and mindset in ways that support company goals
- builds trust among employees (and internal business partners) in your workplace
Five components make up a sound editorial strategy:
- Business goals
- Content
- Audience
- Operations
- Optimization
Each of these components requires elaboration and further discussion in ways that are unique to each company.
Briefly, you should know:
- Editorial content must support business and corporate communications outcomes; if it doesn’t, don’t do it
- Content should be multimedia, multichannel, creative, diverse, and inclusive
- The audience encompasses all levels of the organization, no matter who they are or where they sit
- You must have a process that covers the spectrum of your work, from idea generation to reporting
- You need to constantly work to get the most return on investment out of the time and resources you expend
Business Goals
Read more about an editorial strategy’s very first component: How an Editorial Strategy Can Incorporate Business Goals. (This is part one of a two-part series on the topic. The follow-up article discusses incorporating team goals.)
In future blog posts, I’ll discuss the other four components.
