How to write an Editorial Brief

With lots of brands investing in content marketing, there’s a growing need for some of the tools and resources that make it possible to produce creative and effective content on a regular basis. One of the supporting documents that all content marketing campaigns need is an Editorial Brief.

This is the document that sets the rules for your content. Just as a newspaper or magazine has house rules for style, tone and subject matter, as well as a company line on recurring or controversial topics, your content marketing strategy needs clear guidance for your contributors.

At Castleford, we create and maintain Editorial Briefs for each of our clients, so it’s something we have plenty of experience with. Here are 10 tips from around our business to help you create a useful and effective brief that will keep your content marketing on the right track:

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First up, you need to define your audience. When you start building your Editorial Brief you need to think about who you’re targeting. What are they interested in? What are they Googling? Who has their attention and interest right now?

Your Editorial Brief should set clear objectives for what you want your content to achieve. This could be specific conversion metrics (social shares, newsletter sign-ups, form fills, purchases) or broader editorial aims (educate our customers, promote our USPs).

“For me, the whole point of creating an Editorial Brief is to determine the best way to reach your target audience. Consider what they find useful or informative, and customise your content to capture their attention. By defining your audience, not only will it make your content more effective, but it will also make your job a lot easier.”Dylan Brown, Content Marketing Executive

“I think the most important questions when building an Editorial Brief concern what the ultimate goal is. Promoting your business, thought leadership, increasing inbound traffic, boosting sales - different aspirations require different styles of writing and different types of content.”Eric Wendt, Senior Content Writer, Property & Finance

1. Define your target audience

2. Think about what you want to achieve

As well as editorial objectives, your brief needs to set out your commercial objectives. If your content marketing strategy is going to deliver for your bottom line, it needs to be closely aligned with the core functions of the business. Clear commercial objectives in your brief will help you justify your content marketing spend to your higher-ups.

For some businesses, writing an Editorial Brief is the first time they’ve sat down and thought about the tone, style and topics that fit their brand. For your content marketing strategy to really hit the mark, your brief needs to set out not only your USPs, but also how you want your brand to be perceived.

3. Be clear about your commercial objectives

4. Think about your brand voice

“An Editorial Brief helps you properly understand your business and then feed that understanding through to the content you create. You should use your brief to clearly set out your commercial objectives so that your content strategy lines up with how you make money. Getting this right at the start will keep everyone focussed on proving ROI.”Kate Davidson, Commercial Director

“Editorial Briefs are absolutely essential for content marketing. Without a good brief it’s difficult to deliver content that is on-message and consistent with your brand voice, especially if you have lots of people contributing content.”Amanda Gross, Managing Editor

Deciding what you don’t want is almost as important as deciding what you do want. Your brief needs to set some clear rules about topics that need to be handled in a particular way or shouldn’t be covered at all.

Editorial Briefs are more effective if they really drill into your business and get specific about your subject matter, your tone and style, your target and your conversion objectives. Your brief is going to evolve overtime, so as well as covering new areas your updates should also dig deeper into issues you’ve already covered.

5. Decide on off-limit topics

6. Get really specific

“Editorial Briefs are essential for getting your content right. If they’re accurate, thorough and regularly-updated they’re one of the best ways to keep your content marketing strategy on track and avoid mistakes like mentioning topics that are off-limits.” Samantha Caughey, Content Editor, Travel & Lifestyle

“A good Editorial Brief needs to outline your USPs and business objectives. It should really dig into the detail and give an accurate sense of what the business is about. A good brief will make your content business-specific, rather than just industry-specific.”Ines Shennan, Content Writer, Property & Finance

Even if you think SEO isn’t your top priority, making your content easy for Google to find and index is going to get more people looking at it and increase the chances of hitting your conversion metrics. With that in mind, you should set some house rules for optimising your content. This could include guidance on internal linking, use of keywords, how to write meta tags or how your content is organised.

Ensuring that your Editorial Brief is regularly-updated will make it a really valuable asset because it will keep your content strategy lined up with your commercial objectives. If your contributors can rely on your brief to be right, you can use it to control your output. When something changes – you break into a new market or you want to change your linking policy – your brief becomes a tool to make that happen.

7. Include house rules for optimising your content

8. Keep your brief regularly-updated

“The most important aspect of a strong Editorial Brief is that it be a living document. Any good content strategy will change over time and the Editorial Brief must change with it. A brief that hasn’t been properly updated has lost all its value, and can actually cause more harm than good.”Liam Carnahan, Content Marketing Strategist

“Editorial Briefs act as a realtime reference point to allow all contributors to consistently produce content in the same tone. Without a good brief, your content could be pitched at the wrong audience, use inconsistent style or not be optimised for search.”John Son, Senior Content Writer, Business & Technology

A good tool should always be easy to use. If you want your contributors to feel confident about using your brief then they need to be able to identify the key information quickly. Sometimes how you organise your brief is just as important as what you put in it.

Our last tip is to think of your Editorial Brief as the starting point of your content marketing strategy. If you’ve set out clearly what your content should look like, you’ll be well-placed to start thinking about some of the different content types, channels and promotion strategies you’ll need in order to prove ROI.

9. Set out your information clearly and logically

10. Build your strategy on top of your brief

Castleford is Australia and New Zealand’s leading content marketing business. If you want to see how our Editorial Briefs are helping us create quality, tailored content for client websites and social media, book a demo today.

“A pet peeve of mine is untidy briefs. Even if all of the information is there, a brief with 50 different typefaces, cluttered guidelines, no categorisation or illogical structuring is just as bad as a brief with hardly any information at all. If the brief isn’t user-friendly all the good work creating it is undone.”Hayley Clark, Associate Content Editor, Travel & Lifestyle

“Having a strong Editorial Brief in place is the first step and the foundation upon which your content strategy should sit. A well-structured brief will give you the flexibility to engage your target audience with different types of content and ensure that your content remains relevant and consistent.”Sam Freeman, Account Director