Editorial Marketing: The Most Powerful Awareness Tool in Your Toolbox

Influencers, activations and sponsorships are three pillars of the corporate marketing world. They’re buzzwords that drive excitement about potential and unlock budgets at the C-Suite level. Even more so than display ads. I’ve watched teams full of brilliant people spend far more than I’ll ever make in a year pursuing awareness metrics, pouring vast sums into strategies that strike every corporate note for “how to not come across as corporate.”

It’s straight out of the traditional agency playbook. I’ve watched it happen in slow motion, rooting for everything to work but knowing full well what the result would be. Ultimately, the needle barely moved. The reason was always apparent to me: we’re humans, with human attention spans and human filters. When we know something is part of a branded campaign that tries to tell us what to think, the natural human response is to tune it out. That’s borne out in your awareness studies.

Editorial Marketing Gives The Audiences What They Want

Think of it this way: your audiences pay you with their time. If you don't give them something of value in return, you’ve lost before you even start. Why would someone want to engage with you if you’re only telling them what you want them to hear instead of giving them what they want?

I’m not saying there’s no place for influencers, or even branded messaging – they remain valid tools in the marketing toolbox. I am, however, saying that if your goal is top-of-funnel brand awareness or driving deeper equities like trust, simply borrowing an influencer’s equities only gets you as far as the duration of the contract. Those equities are also inherently limited to the influencer’s audience, which doesn’t care about your brand, only that of the influencer. It’s a short-term play, and, depending on your industry, awareness and conversion remain long-term plays.

The Downstream Impact Lifts All Ships

This is where editorial marketing has an edge over traditional awareness campaigns. When you leverage editorial marketing in paid distribution as a driver of awareness, the entire marketing world opens up. You reach every persona, develop and enrich audiences, build your brand, and do it all in a way that allows you to actually measure awareness as a cost-based ROI. I know because I did it. As a brand, editorial marketing enables your brand to become an influencer to each persona. It boils down to trust. 

• Tell people you can save money by doing XYZ with your company’s products. Launch a campaign and measure the results. 
  

Sure, you might drive some incremental conversion. The overwhelming majority will forget it when they scroll to the next post. Your voice? Lost in the static. Just another company trying to make a buck.

• Explain to people how they can save money by doing XYZ, and that you’re here only to do what’s best for them, however, and over time, something incredible happens: Brand trust goes up. 

That crucial equity opens doors for consideration. Do you sacrifice short-term acquisition? No, because editorial marketing doesn’t preclude all your other campaigns. It enhances them. 

That’s just the beginning, though.

Done Right, You Can Target Every Persona Individually

Let’s say your brand marketing team has identified five personas you want to hit. No single influencer, no single activation, and no single sponsorship will hit all five effectively. Those are big-ticket items for such an inherently limited reach; each one will require a bespoke strategy.

With editorial marketing, you can create five articles, each with a different topic designed to drive engagement with a particular audience. Check the engagement. Monitor what works. Refine.

Integrate your editorial marketing into a full-funnel distribution strategy, and you’ll see opportunities you never thought possible.

Suddenly, you’re creating a matrix of audiences. Personas are just the top level. Who reacts to what content? How-to content might work for one audience, while foundational education works with another. Double down on KPI analysis. Push your agency to find the commonalities between audiences as you go. 

That’s how a good editorial marketing strategy gets you not just brand awareness, but enriched audiences that are inherently more open to receiving those down-funnel branded messages over time. Create lookalike audiences that you know are receptive to each type of content. Retarget them sequentially: Follow editorial with your more traditional branded messaging or display ads. See how much lift you get compared to leading with the message-laden assets.

I call it the BASF approach. Editorial marketing isn’t about replacing all the other tools in the toolbox. It’s about setting the stage for them to work better.

Editorial Marketing Drives Measurably Cheaper Awareness ROI

You want to establish ad recall and aided and unaided awareness first, followed by downstream equities like trust, reputation, loyalty, and consideration, right? As you establish all those, your audience will listen to your branded message more.

That’s why leveraging editorial content as a marketing tool works. Better than even I could’ve imagined, frankly.

In a proper, scientific brand survey with holdouts and separate audiences exclusively shown either influencer or editorial content, editorial didn’t just outpace influencer content for things like ad recall and aided awareness, it more than doubled it. Not only that, but price per conversion – in this case, going from no brand recognition to recognizing the brand – was cheaper than the cost-per-engagement of content that included branded messaging.

When I say cheaper, I’m referring purely to distribution performance. If you consider the up-front production costs, the much-cheaper-to-produce editorial content virtually lapped the field.

It all comes down to establishing trust and not coming across as a corporation trying to convince you that it’s not a corporation. That’s why editorial marketing works.