How do you create a successful B2B editorial line?

Do you create marketing content? And is your B2B company visible on social networks? That’s good news. Now for the tricky question: what’s the common thread running through all these communication initiatives?

If the answer isn’t crystal clear, it’s probably for this reason: you haven’t yet defined (or refined) your editorial line.

The editorial line is at the heart of an editorial strategy. It’s the common thread that ensures your content is consistent with your brand image, objectives and target audience. It reinforces the credibility and visibility of your B2B company, while acting as a lever for generating leads and engagement.

But how do you define it? How do you implement it and measure its effectiveness? And how can you use it to optimize your existing B2B content?

Let’s talk about it:

What is an editorial line? Definition.

A company’s editorial line corresponds to a set of rules to be followed, in order to carry out its Content Marketing strategy effectively and consistently. It’s also referred to as the “fil conducteur”, the “fil rouge” or the “fil d’ariane” of content. The role of this thread is to establish a clear and precise editorial framework, to guarantee :
- The harmony of resources and information over the long term.
- Alignment of content with your mission, vision and corporate values.
The twofold challenge of the editorial line is to create clear, consistent communication over the long term that reflects your brand image. Long relegated to the background by B2B companies, the definition of an editorial line is now a priority: like a media outlet, B2B brands can no longer afford to communicate in a disjointed way, with 25 subjects and 72 formats. At the risk of turning off Internet users.

Especially at a time when 70% of a prospect’s journey takes place on the Internet… and 65% to 90% in total autonomy (Source: Forrester). It’s urgent to offer consistent, high-quality content. The starting point for achieving this, as you’ve guessed, is to define an editorial line (and understand its benefits).

Why is an editorial line crucial in B2B?

An editorial line is a frame of reference for effective communication. And if you have any doubts about its usefulness in B2B, you should know that it serves to :
- Improve overall consistency : it makes it easier to maintain a uniform tone and voice. Even if several people are writing for the website or social networks (LinkedIn, Instagram, X, etc.).
- Reinforce credibility: your brand is twice as credible when your messages are aligned with your values, mission and positioning. Thanks to a well-defined and valued editorial line, every Internet user will have a clear idea of the content that awaits them on your website or social networks… Which reinforces your credibility.
- Optimizing visibility: defining an editorial line involves defining content pillars (also called “clusters”, in SEO). And by choosing certain formats, such as blog posts, which are appreciated by search engines. When you invest in content marketing with your editorial line, you also maximize your visibility and your natural search engine optimization (SEO).
- Generate traffic: once the framework has been established, you’ll know which resources to create and publish, at what frequency, for which persona, according to their position in the buying journey… Such a precise strategy will help you generate qualified traffic to your website.
- Engage the audience: in addition to attracting traffic, editorialization also helps to engage the audience (new or existing). The more precise the objective, the target, the messages… the higher the quality of the resources, which encourages interaction and the creation of a sense of belonging to the brand. It’s a virtuous circle: an editorial line attracts and engages an audience… sometimes even transforming it into a genuine B2B community!
How do you define your editorial line (in 6 steps)?

The editorial line is a strategic document, effective for structuring your resources, boosting your lead generation and enhancing your credibility. Inside, here are the different components to consider:

Content objectives

There’s no point in trying to be complicated, when you can be simple and effective. At this stage, the idea is to define clear objectives that will guide your content strategy. And associate them with performance indicators, to ensure that they are monitored.

Indeed, a precise objective is systematically associated with a KPI. For example:
- If your objective is to increase brand awareness, track the number of comments or shares on social networks.
- If you want to attract traffic to your site, monitor the number of unique visits month after month. Then cross-reference this indicator with the time spent on your pages, or the bounce rate.
- If you’re aiming for lead generation, evaluate the conversion rate of your resources and channels.
This first step is essential: it enables you to identify the phases of the buying cycle you need to cover. Depending on your objectives, you may want to create and publish messages aimed at your prospects in the Discovery phase (to gain visibility or awareness), or in the Consideration phase (to increase your number of leads)…

And if you need help deciding which content to create for each persona and their position in the buying tunnel, Plezi is there for you: our Intelligent Campaign advises you on which resources to write, to best cover the buying tunnel. It’s the only feature capable of instantly personalizing your marketing scenarios for each of your prospects:

Personas analysis

After the objectives, it’s time to focus on the target: who is your content aimed at?

Spoiler: no, the right answer is not (only) : “Google”. At this stage, you need to identify your marketing buyer persona . This is your ideal target customer.

This ideal customer is bound to have needs, expectations, motivations, business objectives, web habits, interests, content preferences… And above all, issues that you can address through your content.

To get to know these buyer personas at the tip of your fingers, here’s our advice: get in touch with your sales and CSM teams. These customer-facing teams are invaluable allies, helping you to co-construct the targeting and future content of your editorial strategy.

3- Themes

To identify the editorial pillars (or main themes) that will be at the heart of your content strategy, here’s the question to ask yourself: what’s the big message you want to get across to your target audience?

For example, at Plezi, we want to help busy marketers and busy executives with their entire B2B marketing strategy. So we use mind mapping to define different content themes to help busy marketers and executives with their marketing issues. Mind mapping then enables us to visually define our semantic cocoon, as shown below.

Each theme can include sub-themes. And the themes are consistent with each other, as well as with our positioning, mission, values and brand image.

At this stage of the editorial process, we advise you to list all your themes and topic ideas. This can be done using content mapping.

Discover our template for mapping all your ideas:

4- Content formats

Are you going to write blog articles? Distribute a newsletter? Publish case studies and white papers?

Often, one type of format is more suitable than another. And this depends on the themes addressed and the persona’s position in the buying journey. To define the right formats, adapted to the right level of information to be disseminated and the right stage of the customer journey to be covered… Rely on the buyer journey:
- Discovery phase: the prospect has just become aware of a problem or question, at this stage of the journey. Offer them resources that educate them and provide a level of information adapted to their search, such as SEO blog articles, educational podcasts, quick-action checklists, white papers and ebooks, etc.
- Evaluation phase: the prospect begins to compare different solutions. To meet their expectations, distribute case studies, offer product demos or create user guides for your solution.
- Purchase phase: the prospect is ready to become a customer. Offer them content that engages them in a commercial relationship: customer testimonials, sales and pricing pages, etc.
When choosing your different formats, give preference to evergreen types of content: these are timeless resources that remain useful and relevant over time. Examples include how-to guides, case studies, SEO articles dealing with timeless concepts, etc.

5- Tone

Tone is at the heart of your content marketing strategy: it’s how you express yourself. Will you choose a writing style with sustained language? Or a more accessible style? Do you prefer short, dynamic sentences? With a touch of humor? Are you going to be on first-name or last-name terms with your readers?

In your copywriting, the tone must obviously be adapted to your target audience, but it also mirrors your branding: even if it may vary slightly from one type of resource to another (for example, between a short, actionable LinkedIn post and a longer, more technical white paper), your mission is to maintain a certain consistency. It’s this consistency that creates a unique identity and strengthens your differentiation from other media brands that publish content.

Our advice: share the rules of style and tone with all your teams, so that they can get to grips with them. It’s an integral part of your company’s content culture!

6- The editorial calendar

The editorial calendar (or editorial planning) is the backbone of the editorial line: it serves to organize, plan and manage the content strategy and its implementation. It’s an indispensable tool for managing your marketing and communications strategy over the long term.

There are 5 steps to creating the perfect editorial plan:
- Create your personas in advance
- List the questions these personas are asking themselves
- Classify themes and topic ideas
- Formalize the editorial calendar
- Continuously readjust your schedule
To create your own B2B calendar, use our template :

How to set up your editorial line?

1- The content creation process: a team effort!

Your new motto? One for all, all for one…the same editorial line. When it comes to implementing this strategy, teamwork is essential. Our advice: prioritize a team-based content creation process.

We’re talking about teams (in the plural): the idea is not to work in silos, in marketing. The editorial line is a collective, collaborative effort. The sales, product or CSM teams must be involved in the editorial choices proposed by marketing. Let’s not forget that these teams are closest to the customer, his expectations, his problems…

At Plezi, we define our editorial planning on a quarterly basis, to meet 3 challenges:
- Our personas’ expectations
- Our SEO objectives
- Our resource requirements to feed our lead nurturing strategy
This work is driven by our marketing department, but also involves other teams. For example, we have regular exchanges with our sales teams, who help us to better understand our targets’ current constraints, interests and needs. They also guide us towards new ideas to incorporate into the editorial calendar, to facilitate decision-making.

CSMs also help us to fine-tune our strategy, by giving us insight into our customers’ needs and issues. Let’s not forget: a content strategy is not just dedicated to prospects, it must also cover customers’ needs, to engage and retain them.

2- Measuring the effectiveness of the editorial line: an ongoing process!

Implementing an editorial line involves various stages:
- Defining the editorial line
- Content creation
- Measuring effectiveness
- Optimization over time
Now we come to the third step: how do you measure and evaluate the performance of your editorial content, once it’s been created and published?

At Plezi, we use various tools, such as Ahrefs, Google Analytics, social network dashboards like LinkedIn… And of course, Plezi!

Ahrefs initially helps us to analyze our keywords, our SEO and the performance of our web resources:

For each page of our website, Google Analytics allows us to go into detail about bounce rates, new users, session time, etc. :

To track our engagement and interactions on LinkedIn (the social network on which we are active), we use the platform’s statistics tool. Other social network dashboard solutions exist, such as Hootsuite, Buffer or Agorapulse :

Finally, Plezi enables us to automatically measure conversions and the customer journey.

Firstly, our resources are automatically centralized in one place, on our content manager. Thanks to integrated reporting tools, we can track the performance of each piece of content in real time, with precise data on its impact: open rates, downloads, new leads, conversion rates…

This continuous performance monitoring enables us to measure performance in terms of SEO, lead generation and lead nurturing. All this data enables us to identify new ideas for resources to be created… And above all, existing pages that require optimization or redesign!

Advanced marketers: how to optimize existing content?

You now know how to define an editorial line, to structure your marketing and communication actions. But if you’re already creating and distributing B2B content… Structuring an editorial line is just as useful! In particular, it helps you to spot the holes in the racket, and optimize existing resources. Here are a few levers to integrate into your editorial line, to improve your resources:

1- SEO optimization of content

At least once a month, we advise you to monitor the SEO performance of your resources. At Plezi, we analyze :
- Our articles whose Google positioning is slipping : these are articles or pages positioned on keywords on which we are dropping out.
- Our keywords with high traffic-generating potential : these enable us to identify new topics to write about, so as to position ourselves on them… Or certain existing content to be optimized as a priority, to maximize our chances of increasing our traffic and lead generation.
Henri, our acquisition manager, regularly measures the effectiveness of our keywords and the performance of our web pages: thanks to these actions, we are able to move our editorial strategy towards greater performance.

2- The use of engaging content

In parallel with SEO optimization, we recommend improving the engagement of your existing resources. For example, here’s what we do at Plezi:
- If we create a new lead magnet (such as a guide or downloadable template), we start by listing our published articles that are positioned on the same theme. Then, we modify our articles to integrate a redirect to this lead magnet. The jackpot? An article subject positioned on a strong, sought-after theme + a lead magnet to download, within the same content!
- If our existing articles are 100% textual, we update them by integrating resources that make reading more dynamic : images, videos, tables, infographics, and so on. Enriched pages make it easier to capture and hold web users’ attention.
- If some of our personas’ issues change, we go into “content recycling mode”. Let’s take a fictitious example, on the subject of B2B storytelling. If this subject is no longer an issue for our main persona, we can recycle our article by changing its positioning, so as to adapt it to another target. Another scenario? If (almost) all B2B marketers become B2B storytelling pros, and their maturity evolves on this subject… Then we can adapt the angle of the article, to make it less didactic and even more pointed in the practices shared.
To sum up, you have two main starting points for optimizing your existing resources: SEO and your target audience’s expectations. By optimizing the SEO of your resources, you maximize your chances of increasing your traffic. And by adapting your resources to the issues and preferences of your personas… your chances of generating leads increase!

Ready to create… And keep your figure?

When we talk about keeping in shape, we’re not talking about dieting, but Content Marketing. Because as a marketer, your mission is not just to define a clear, coherent and harmonious editorial line. We encourage you to disseminate this work to all your internal teams, as well as to the external partners you work with (agencies, freelancers, etc.). The aim? Keep a clear focus, without spreading yourself too thin, to reinforce your credibility and your B2B brand image.

Then, as you create and publish content (and according to your performance), you can make a decision: to stay on course… Or to evolve, re-evaluate and optimize. Nothing is set in stone. Listen to your prospects, analyze their behavior, track your SEO positioning and the achievement of your lead generation and conversion objectives.

All these indicators will help you move forward, step by step, towards a relevant and effective editorial line, over the long term. It’s up to you!