How an editorial strategy can incorporate your team’s 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.

Understanding and aligning with business and team goals is a five key component of an editorial strategy for internal communications. In another blog post I address how your editorial strategy must incorporate business goals. Company goals and team goals must be wed to have a successful editorial strategy. 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:

1. Business goals
2. Team goals

Questions to ask about your team’s goals:

• What are they?
• Who sets them?
• How is success achieved?
• How do they align with your personal goals?

This article focuses on understanding how team goals can help design your editorial strategy.

• Read more here about understanding business goals and how doing so supports a strong editorial strategy.

Thought exercise

Suppose your team’s goals are to increase:

• Volumetrics
• The number of employee contributors to your platform
• The return on investment for your work
• Relevancy of content

Pro tip: Don’t forget to add your personal goals to the list!

Knowing these are your team’s priorities, you now have some help in crafting your editorial strategy.

• Remember: An editorial strategy is a long-term plan! Don’t get bogged down refining short-term tactics like “add closed captioning to all videos” or “redesign the intranet logo.”

Quantitative and qualitative measures need to be used to gauge your team’s success. And of course, you should have benchmarks against which to mark progress (unless this is your first year doing X activity—if that’s the case, you’re establishing a baseline).

Quantitative measuring is straightforward. For example, you can use hard numbers to determine whether your newsletter’s open rates increase or decrease. If you can count it, it’s quantitative.

Qualitative measuring is tricky. For example, how do you know whether the content (e.g., videos, town halls, pantry posters, intranet articles) is relevant? One way is to conduct surveys, where you can get a mix of quantitative (yes/no answers) and qualitative (open-ended questions) feedback from employees. Another way is to host focus groups, which provide qualitative input.

Counting the number of employees who, say, submit photos to your digital signage campaign or write content for the intranet is easy enough (goal: increase the number of contributors). Setting up a system in which employees can submit material, and then vetting, editing, approving, publishing, distributing, and measuring that material is a strategy within a strategy.

Regardless of the team goal, you must understand what your team is trying to achieve over the course of a one-, two-, or three-year horizon, so your editorial program can help get you there.

This is a broad outline of how you must consider team goals when designing your editorial strategy. The objectives and their implementation are unique to each group, but the idea that these goals must be considered when designing your editorial strategy is universally applicable.

Click here to learn about how your editorial strategy must align with business goals.