What is High-Quality Editorial Content?

As readers, we all know strong editorial content when we see it. It engages, informs, and entertains us. Though it's an integral part of a brand’s overall marketing strategy, good editorial content hooks its audience members by addressing their interests and needs rather than pushing for a sale.

With an estimated 1.88 billion websites on the internet (as of 2021) according to Statista, and 5.56 billion people online in 2025, the phrase “needle in a haystack” comes to mind. Your audience doesn’t have time for mediocre content. They deserve something much more.

By creating and distributing high-quality editorial work, you help your audience find what they are looking for and establish your brand as a trustworthy source of relevant and engaging information. 

In this article, we’ll explore how editorial content helps a brand stand out from the crowd, builds lasting customer relationships, and contributes to a successful content marketing campaign that gets results.

Key Takeaways

• High-quality editorial content is focused on audience needs rather than brand promotion.
• Editorial content engages customers in the short term, develops customer relationships consistently, and builds brand equity in the long term.
• Editorial content and advertorial content take different approaches to the same ultimate goal.
• Essential qualities of great editorial content include audience focus, original insights, journalistic integrity, consistency, and accuracy.
• Developing a successful editorial strategy requires commitment, audience research, content strategy, quality standards, and consistent review and adjustment. 

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What is Editorial Content?

Editorial content intentionally focuses on informing, educating, or entertaining its audience with relevant and valuable information. 

Great editorial content can be fact-based or opinion-based, serious or light-hearted, short-form or long-form. 

In marketing, what distinguishes editorial content from other marketing collateral is its focus on audience needs rather than the direct promotion of a brand and its products or services. 

Examples of editorial content include:

• Blog posts
• Guides
• Newsletters
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Infographics
• eBooks
• White papers
• Social media posts

The idea of connecting with an audience through helpful, relevant content is part of an inbound marketing strategy, which draws an audience in, as opposed to more sales-oriented outbound marketing, which pushes out promotional content. 

However, a brand can see several sales-oriented benefits from a content marketing strategy that prioritizes strong editorial content. 

Goals of strong editorial pieces

By sharing high-quality, informative, and engaging content with your audience, you are helping to sift through the haystack to deliver information you know they need. 

In return, this approach delivers some highly valuable results for your brand: 

• Establishing trust and credibility
• Displaying thought leadership
• Audience engagement 
• SEO benefits 
• Increased organic traffic
• Long-term brand equity

These strategic benefits emerge naturally when you prioritize audience needs over promotional messaging: engaged readers and improved search visibility — which both point toward increased potential for leads and conversions.

Editorial vs. Advertorial Content: Key Differences

Every effective marketing strategy needs promotional elements. However, the promotional elements don’t usually take the spotlight in editorial content.

Advertorial content, by contrast, blends promotional messaging with relevant, helpful information, serving as a middle ground between an advertisement and strictly editorial content. 

Understanding the difference and when to use which approach helps create a balanced mix within your content marketing strategy.

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15 Characteristics of High-Quality Published Content

High-quality editorial content consistently demonstrates these key traits:

1. Focus: Audience-focused, not brand-focused
2. Authority: Authoritative and credible
3. Researched: Thoroughly researched with reliable sources
4. Well-evidenced: Supported by timely, relevant data
5. Insightful: Offers original perspectives and insights
6. Valuable: Provides unique value not available from competitors
7. Brand-consistent: Maintains consistent brand voice and personality
8. Professional tone: Adopts an appropriate tone for the subject matter and audience
9. Integrity: Demonstrates editorial independence and journalistic integrity
10. Clarity: Features a clear, skimmable structure
11. Readable: Follows best practices for readability and accessibility
12. Ethical: Produced ethically, with proper attributions given
13. Accurate: Fact-checked for correctness
14. Polished: Thoroughly edited and proofread
15. Consistent: Standards are maintained across content types and channels.

Applying these standards and traits elevates your editorial content above others, revealing your brand as a source worth following. 

7 Steps to a Brand-Boosting Editorial Content Strategy

The first step in creating a strategy for high-quality editorial content is the commitment to it. Then comes research, creation, planning and ongoing measurement and refinement. These steps briefly outline the basics:

Step 1: Define and research your audience

Who are you creating the content for? Know what information they need, what problems they are trying to solve, and what type of content connects with them.

Step 2: Analyze content gaps

Audit your existing content and determine where your content gaps are, as well as what might be repurposed editorially. Analyze competitors and outline what they are missing that you can capitalize on in your own content.

Step 3: Develop topical authority

Establish what topics are relevant to your audience and allow your brand’s expertise to shine. Develop topic clusters for a depth of coverage and to boost brand authority.

Step 4: Set quality standards 

Set your editorial team up for success by providing the tools for consistency, including brand guidelines, a style guide, and a clear strategy for editorial content. 

Step 5: Develop an editorial calendar

Set up a publishing cadence. An editorial content calendar keeps the editorial workflow moving and provides your audience with fresh, regular content.

Step 6: Track your success and adjust as needed

Plan ahead for what engagement metrics you will track and how they connect to the overall marketing strategy and business outcomes. Use this data to adjust your content, publishing calendar and overall editorial approach over time. 

Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Needs Editorial Content 

High-quality, informative content delivers returns in the short- and long-term. 

Every time you publish, you immediately engage your audience and, over time, your brand builds relationships that are based on the value and relevance of the information it provides. 

By committing to first-rate editorial publishing as part of your overall content strategy, you build trust, establish authority, and set the scene for converting casual readers into customers. 

Get a best-in-class suite of tools to streamline your editorial workflow, including an AI Checker, Grammar Checker, Plagiarism Checker, and Fact Checker.

Learn more editing and content best practices in our top guides:

• How to Create a Style Guide
• Editorial Workflow: 7 Ideas to Supercharge Productivity
• Content Marketing vs. SEO: Top Similarities and Differences