Editorial Integrity
PSA: If you want long-term success, you can’t do it all.
You can’t reach all of your objectives. You can’t cycle through different strategies, cater to every audience, or opt for overnight success.
If you want fleeting, short-term results, you can. If the goal is to make money today but not worry about making money a year from now, you don’t need to worry much about your digital marketing strategy.
But if your goal is to grow sustainably over the long-term –– you’ll need to play the long game.
Are you in? Great. Let’s play!
Let’s start with the most important rule of the content marketing game: Editorial Integrity.
What is Editorial Integrity?
Editorial integrity is a principle journalists (should) live by: to serve the people ethically, honestly, and organically. It’s their job to report information in a way that prioritizes their readers first and their agendas second.
It’s all about providing value –– which is the whole name of the challenger content marketing game.
Increase the amount of value you deliver in your marketing, and you just increased the value of your company.
How to Strengthen Editorial Integrity in Your Content Marketing
1. Choose one objective and stick with it.
Whoever is in charge of creating the content needs to be tasked with maximizing value for your audience. That’s it. If you mix the objectives, ask them to drive leads, or generate revenue directly, it will significantly limit the potential of the whole approach.
2. Be consistent.
The content marketing formula is simple: quality + consistency = value.
A content marketing strategy takes a long-term approach. It builds brand, community, and eventually customers by adding value consistently over time.
3. Separate short-term goals from long-term goals.
This is why so few businesses do it well –– it takes a long-term commitment and investment that, by definition, should not focus on driving short-term returns.
Maintain editorial integrity to add max value. Work separately on how you drive your short-term digital marketing and sales KPIs.
4. Prioritize transparency.
If you view marketing as a way to trick or convince your customer to convert, you might win the short game, but you’ll strike out in the long run.
When you’re transparent in your digital marketing strategy, putting your customers’ needs first, you inherently provide value.
You don’t just build a sale –– you build a relationship. And that’s what makes a business.
5. Be organic.
If you’re going to serve the people first, you have to become one of them.
By now, your audience has been trained to scroll past any content that even smells like an ad. Your content marketing strategy should be organic. Make your content look native to the platform, educating, entertaining, or engaging first, driving a sale second.
Try following the 80/20 rule: 80% of your content should be content-based, and the other 20% sales-based.
