What is an Editorial Content Consultant?

Take it from a top editorial content consultant: In today’s content-saturated world, simply producing more content is no longer an effective strategy for businesses looking to truly connect with their audiences. Quality, strategic, audience-centric content is what cuts through the noise. It’s the space where editorial content consultants operate.

Someone in the field is an experienced writer, editor, and content strategist that organizations hire to assess their existing content operations and develop forward-looking editorial roadmaps. They bring a unique combination of creative skills, content marketing expertise, and editorial sensibilities to overhaul how companies approach developing resonant, impactful content.

On a basic level, editorial content consultants help define purposeful content visions and strategies aligned with key business objectives. They immerse themselves in an organization’s industry landscape, audiences, products/services, strengths, opportunities and challenges. Doing so allows them to pinpoint ways a robust content framework can facilitate goals like brand awareness, thought leadership, demand generation, customer loyalty and more.

Once content priorities are identified, consulting experts will devise editorial mission statements, content pillars, topic portfolios, and audience-centric narratives that create compelling, unified content experiences. They map out comprehensive content calendars and distribution plans to ensure a steady cadence of diverse, high-quality assets through the most effective channels.

Perhaps the biggest value that top editorial content consultants provide is instilling the essential editorial rigor traditional publishers have leveraged for decades. Consulting straetgists implement processes like content governance, creator guidance, compliance reviews, and quality scoring to raise standards and efficiencies. Under their oversight, content functions more like finely-tuned media operations with well-defined roles, workflows, best practices, and performance benchmarks.

All manner of top editorial content consultants are also skilled in helping companies build entire content Centers of Excellence from the ground up if needed. Think developing content teams, production processes, tech stacks, success metrics, and long-term operating models with the right mix of insourced and outsourced resources.

As seasoned content leaders and trendspotters, consulting pros also keep a pulse on emerging formats, platforms, and optimization strategies to keep content programs adaptive and modern. They identify new tools and techniques to deliver more engaging experiences like interactive content, voice/AR activations, advanced personalization, data-driven content intelligence and more.

At their best, editorial content consultants help organizations transform haphazard content production into disciplined, optimized, audience-first publishing engines that fuel value creation. They put the “media” back into content marketing by bringing an editorial mastery that elevates content’s strategic impact across the entire user journey.