Your organization has embraced content marketing and you’ve gotten into a good rhythm of creating content, including several weekly blog posts, a monthly infographic, and quarterly white papers. You’re getting terrific feedback from your audience, and the sales teams’ conversations with prospects are being conducted on a higher plane — focused on benefits rather than features.
You’re off to a great start. However, you’ve only started to scratch the surface of the content possibilities because your audience reach is still limited — while your corner of the world is engaged, you aren’t quite at the center of the wider industry conversation yet.
If we agree that the goal of content marketing should be to enable your content creators to function as brand journalists (we do, right?), then it’s fair to equate your content effort to that of a weekly community paper. However, there’s an even bigger opportunity here, because online content can help you extend your reach far beyond your current community and create an exponential opportunity for your business.
Operate like a newsroom
To excel in your role as a brand journalist, you need to go beyond what’s happening in your own organization to provide coverage and analysis of key industry events. You need to feed the information-craving beast in order to establish your organization as the go-to information source. You need to make prospective customers say, “I wonder what ‘X’ thinks about this?” whenever there’s a new industry development. If you help your audience interpret new events, you’re performing a valuable service for them — the same service that trusted news organizations have been providing for centuries. Doing this means functioning like a newsroom, i.e., being audience-centric, prolific and agile. Your current content creation efforts prove you’ve got the audience-centric part down, but what about the rest?
Here’s why it matters: Newsrooms and news organizations influence opinion because they are the first ones to inform us of new events and, importantly, readers rely on them to interpret and explain those events. When a brand journalist does this reliably, audiences come to believe in them — and place their trust in them. And that is precisely the goal of your content strategy – to build trust with the audience.
Of course, doing this isn’t necessarily easy; on a day-to-day basis, newsrooms operate very differently from most businesses. They can work at frenetic paces, but they still have organized patterns they follow every day. Your team can do this too — if it has the collective will. Applying the following four common newsroom practices to your content marketing efforts will create the foundation for a more robust and successful brand journalism program:
1. Have editorial meetings every day: Newsrooms generally review story ideas twice a day, in the morning and in the mid-afternoon. Yes, that’s a lot of meetings, but it keeps the writing team organized and united in its efforts. This is not to suggest that you need to engage in “death-by-meeting.” But you do need to make sure everyone is moving in the same direction, assignments are clear and fit together well, and that you’re properly covering the most relevant news.
Our recommendation is to start by holding an editorial meeting once a week, ideally on Monday mornings, when your team reviews the story ideas that are on the editorial calendar for the week, and makes sure each one has been assigned to a responsible party. However, the meeting agenda should not stop there: Your team should also discuss breaking industry news (or other newsjacking opportunities) that your brand can provide analysis on, new story ideas, and any interview opportunities that may have sprung up. To keep these meetings on track, plan for them to last no more than 30 minutes.
2. Go out in the world: Great reporters (i.e., great brand journalists) don’t stay locked behind closed doors. I like to say that great reporting is like playing great defense in basketball: You’ve got to move your feet. Yes, you can do a lot of research without leaving your desk, but we all know that face-to-face communication is better.
Your content marketing newsroom will be much more successful if your team is vigorously interacting with others in the industry on social media and comment boards, attending trade shows and conferences, and swapping and debating ideas. The contributors to the very robust SAP Business Innovation blog do this well. If you visit regularly, you get a real sense that they are truly covering the news — they go to industry events, they conduct interviews and, overall, are aware of what is happening outside their walls.
3. Obsessively follow the news: Newsroom employees are very aware of what is happening in the world; arriving at work ignorant of the day’s big story is a surefire way to fall behind your competitors. Your content team must have an obsession for keeping up with the latest news, as well as the ability to quickly discern what it means for you and your customers. That means being plugged in to social media, devouring relevant news reports, and having a working knowledge of the latest tools and technologies being used in your industry. The New York Stock Exchange’s recently launched Big Stage seems committed to this — and, in the hyperkinetic world of Wall Street, they’ll need to be if they expect to connect with their fast-moving audience.
4. Work quickly: The content team needs to have what we like to call a Twitter Metabolism — an understanding that the world is moving fast and you’ve got to be faster in order to make an impact. If you’re going to stay in front of the competition and lead the conversation — and thought leadership should be a primary goal of any content strategy — you need to move fast.
Content teams must be agile. That does not mean moving so fast that work becomes slipshod; it means that the team must be fully engaged and have the skill to react quickly. And it means having defined processes in place so that content production becomes systematized and can be moved through efficiently.
To accomplish this, everyone on the team should understand their assigned roles and how content should flow from the original idea, to research and analysis, to production, editing, and publishing. On most (small) teams, people will have multiple jobs across this flow — for example, there may not be an assigned editor, but peer-editing works just fine as long as the team is accustomed to it.
Sometimes, you need to sprint, and that means you need the right athletes on your team to be able to win. How quickly do you need to be able to work? Recently, Digiday had a great breakdown of how much content various media properties produce per employee per day. Are your team members equipped to write four articles a day when the need arises?
It takes time and resources
If you’re thinking that this might be a lot of work, you’re right, and many businesses don’t necessarily have the organizational metabolism to execute a full newsroom-caliber content creation process. But if you do have the time and resources, it will really make a difference in your efforts to stay ahead of your customers — and be recognized as a brand they can rely on to help keep them informed.
For more tips on creating a newsroom-caliber content marketing program, be sure to check out “Managing Content Marketing,” by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi.
Cover image via Wikimedia Commons
