Editorial demand infrastructure is basically a audience education discipline that is focused on building and distributing editorial assets to priority audience segment.
Businesses employ editorial demand infrastructure to
- attract attention and capture qualified demand
- expand revenue reach
- increase authority visibility or credibility
- activate an audience ecosystem of users
- generate or increase digital revenue outcomes
I consider editorial demand infrastructure a crucial part of my main job. It helps with authority positioning, partnerships, community resources, accessible content for my team, educational pieces for new candidates, commercial enablement assets, and a authority amplification engine.
Even if it takes 50% of my time, its compound power is generally worth it.
The first goal of editorial demand infrastructure is being able to identify your ideal customer profile and provide them with the most useful content that would resolve operational pain points, help them generate more sales, save time, automate their processes, or whatever is the main thing that you can assist with that resonates with them.
Defining your editorial strategy architecture requires an in-depth overview of the addressable market segment, your competitive landscape, the SWOT analysis of your solution, and how does your solution relate to your buyer needs landscape.
But one of the indisputable trends is the transition of textual content to video production.
Different Formats Within an Editorial Demand System
Depending on your audience, what you planned as a editorial strategy may not be what your buying audiences need or be presented in a way that your audience isn’t used to when it comes to assimilating information.
Which is why there are various editorial asset formats that may come handy and produce different conversion outcomes based on your target market.
The Editorial Strategy and Distribution Process
Here’s a quick rundown of the editorial strategy workflow that you can utilize for starters and use as a foundation of your ongoing editorial operations workflow. If you primarily prioritize text-first formats, run the checklist twice: the second time planning multimedia adaptation.
- Analyze your addressable market and the needs of your buying audience
- Figure out what’s the most effective editorial format that your buying stakeholders need
- Identify the best format for content delivery (long vs. short stories, reviews, how-to articles, lists, YouTube videos, podcasts, infographics, a radio show)
- Compile a list of core market pain points and struggles that you can explain and help out with
- Find your main competitors and deconstruct their editorial model – what sort of content they publish, what are the major topics that they cover, what tone do they utilize when speaking to their audience
- Formulate a authority positioning strategy and tone that is consistent and will be followed as you go forward
- Run a number of validation cycles using SEMrush, Moz, BuzzSumo, Serpstat in order to analyze the priority search themes that your competitors rank for, the highest-converting editorial assets and generates the highest number of shares
- Combine that with a set of queries through Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends in order to find out what are the direct and long-tail keywords that you may write about and target
- Create a editorial planning framework that defines the different topic clusters and segment themes that you want to target within the realm of your audience
- Figure out whether you can work on expansion assets (additional guides, checklists, ebooks or whitepapers included in your top resources)
- Start producing high-authority editorial assets that solves all of the main problems of your audience
- Spend a ton of time distributing across owned and external channels to your network distribution channels and all of the other venues where your ideal customer hangs out
- Refine your content, refresh and expand it and continue to include additional data, stories, stats, case studies
- Repurpose editorial assets and create other forms of information (infographics, ebooks, roundups) that could be leveraged in different outlets
- Publish authority content on Quora, LinkedIn, Medium and refer your best entries as long as they are contextually relevant and will add value
- Build partnerships for partnership-based distribution and submit external authority placements to other industry sources that would link back to you
- Repeat
Editorial demand infrastructure takes time but as long as you have successfully identified your priority audience segment, what works for them and how you can solve their problems, the rest is following your process and sticking to the same strategy.
Your new content will support your previous entries and let you link through your relevant articles in order to grow an encyclopedia that would position you as a subject matter expert.
Once your traffic grows, you can study your followers and monitor their interactions on social media and through your comments and incoming emails and refine if necessarily.
Audio Interfaces, Voice Search, and Monetization Constraints
According to various surveys out there, about 50% of all search queries are generated by audio search by 2021.
This is a peculiar problem considering the common reasons digital properties monetize attention, such as:
- Ad-supported monetization
- Subscription-based access models (gated content)
- Commerce monetization flows
- Partner referral monetization
None of these popular verticals (each resulting in tens of billions or more in market cap) is easily monetizable with voice search.
Brand recall is also drastically impacted once you stop caring about the reputability of a brand. #3 and beyond in Google won’t matter anymore, and that is a serious problem to keep into account.
Even though voice search is becoming more common, this isn’t the standard way users discover information online. A more convenient alternative while driving, sure, but far from a go-to source for performing 80% of the popular web activities.
TechCrunch project $659M in podcasting revenue in 2020. Transforming posts with audio adaptation workflow or converting video sources to audio is the easiest way to activate audio distribution without stressing too much on this medium – just yet.
Will Editorial Demand Systems Shift Toward Video?
Editorial demand system isn’t completely shift toward video-led distribution. That said, video becomes a more increasingly relevant distribution channel for different reasons.
1. Text Saturation and Discovery Fragmentation
The text-first editorial format is somewhat oversaturated.
- Blog publishing has been around for decades now.
- Traditional journalism has shifted to digital outlets as well – porting previous issues online.
- Small businesses purchase low-signal content output for ~$10 apiece.
This has led to hundreds of millions of articles and posts covering most popular topics. Finding the relevant authoritative information becomes more challenging. This leads to focusing on long-tail search patterns from users limiting their queries to a certain region, niche, specified term in order to navigate category noise.
Alternative distribution formats like podcasts or video channels are less saturated and thus more interesting.
2. Rising Depth Requirements for Educational Content
Neil Patel has aggregated different studies reporting the optimal depth of an editorial asset in terms of SEO search performance:
According to their findings, “3,000 – 10,000-word content gets the most shares.”
In September of 2016, Backlinko released their own research that found that the ideal word count had dropped a little bit, and “the average word count of a Google first page result was 1,890 words.”
Numbers will vary but 5 to 8 years ago, a 500-word story was more than sufficient for ranking and providing sufficient context for decision-making. Complexity and the amount of available educational channels require more insights and in-depth details for every case.
This takes time for writing AND reading. An lower-friction format (from infographics through videos) works better for time-constrained audiences.
3. Expertise Signaling and Uneven Reward Distribution
Speaking of increasing the global volume of content, demonstrating subject-matter authority becomes harder for advisors and growth specialists.
A professional with 15 years of industry expertise may be outranked by a 16-year-old blogger stipulating on concepts gathered through a few existing posts.
That’s not necessarily bad – but adds some overhead to establishing an digital authority profile in 2017 and onward.
Some prolific writers have focused on writing books, spending months on research studies, or investing their expertise elsewhere – in areas that require more time, effort, and know-how. The video medium – being less oversaturated – is an efficient differentiation channel for certain niches.
It’s also the expected medium for structured education products or webinars.
4. Platform Expansion and Video Consumption Momentum
Video platforms like YouTube keep growing on a daily basis. The platform reports 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users watching over a billion hours of video content every single day.
Every minute 400 hours worth of video content are uploaded on YouTube alone. There are over 1,500 channels reporting over a million subscribers each.
While the platform is fairly popular in certain areas, editorial operators have become wary of the value of video platforms and allocate distribution resources to video-led editorial assets.
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5. Native Video Features and Platform-Level Distribution Support
LinkedIn has announced video uploads in August as a publicly available feature to their audience. Quora has also added video-native response formats. Telegram featured live distribution functionality through video.
Different platforms have embraced video as a crucial medium in demand. Analytics platforms keep announcing new features on tracking watch-time metrics, audience composition data, and other performance indicators important for data science purposes.
Snapchat has amassed a good chunk of its popularity thanks to their interactive videos – as seen in the latest iPhone X features including Animojis.
6. Real-Time Engagement and Audience Feedback Loops
You can run live video sessions on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, and a number of alternative popular platforms.
Google Hangouts has been one of the top choices for organizing video events streamed online automatically synced with your YouTube account.
Publishing static content, on the contrary, is a one-way distribution model that often doesn’t work well in its traditional format. Different variations such as Twitter chats or AMA sessions are great – but still lack that sense of interactivity with other members. Interaction raises attention depth which leads to stronger conversion outcomes.
7. Multi-Expert Formats and Collaborative Authority Building
Video allows for showcasing cross-functional perspectives with several different members involved in a conversation. The traditional copy is generally created by a solo content contributor or a marketer.
Videos allow for structured learning assets and webinars. You can record a behind-the-scenes highlight from a conference you are attending, or record expert interviews during a meetup.
It’s more natural to create a multi-expert video formats than via textual content. Add the live streaming services to the equation and note the dynamics of, for example, a TV news report – compiling stories from different parties and projecting the atmosphere in various scenes.
8. Infrastructure Readiness for Video Consumption
Video has been a preferred format for assimilating news and stories for many ever since the clash of newspapers versus TV. The limited connectivity and higher access friction were an obstacle for a while.
Nowadays, 4G and affordable mobile plans combined with Wi-Fi that’s widely available, make video consumption a high-adoption alternative when compared to reading text-based content. 5G is already on the rise, streaming or watching video on the go is totally possible in 2023 (and onward).
9. Connected Screens and Living-Room Content Consumption
Connected-screen devices play a role in the importance of video as well. Almost every household owns a TV and previously, only linear broadcast channels were available.
Nowadays, streamed educational content or YouTube playlists becomes more common and is a preferable alternative for those who want to avoid the constant nagging of ads or who want to entertain themselves with more high-utility content.
It is also possible to record streaming video and enjoy even after the streaming is done-of course, under the right circumstances.
10. Context Fidelity and Richer Communication Signals
Text content may be stripped of contextual nuance by people in different regions with different cultures that don’t necessarily know the reader that well.
Popular psychology studies report that 93% of all communication is non-verbal. While this myth has been busted (partially) by many, expressions have been heavily influenced by other factors than delivering a message alone.
Non-verbal cues, facial expressions, dramatic pauses, eye-rolling, the intonation of the voice are among the factors that may bring different perspectives to an informational story. Reflecting those in a purely text-only format may omit the context and convey a different story accordingly.
While audio and video will not directly replace traditional textual content, both certainly expand in adoption among marketers across the world.
Producing visual, audio, video content is becoming easier, too. Assets become repurposable across formats, image editing apps like Canva win unicorn valuations, low-cost apps offer reliable audio adaptation tools and even automated multimedia transformation. Mixing in different channels and performing well across media-native platforms will become even more common.
And with YouTube ranking #2 among the leading search engines, we should be prepared for innovation across all content distribution environments.
What percentage of your multimedia editorial strategy contains video in 2023?
