Agile Creator

Journalism is based on a number of rules that happen to work well in a buyers driven market where content is king. Good journalism isn’t just about writing skills, but also research and increasingly also about distributing the content across a plethora of channels.

With journalism I refer to content creation by journalists who are at least partly dependent on you for their income. In other words, I’m referring to sponsored content without the control this normally entails.

How can journalism help your B2B communications and marketing? By showing your prospects and customers you aren’t scared back from objective content. When prospects and customers can find everything out about you and your products, as they can on the Internet, you can only get away with bad press if your product is like Apple’s iPad — a gadget everybody wants to have.

In B2B communications and marketing, gadget appeal doesn’t play much of a role, and even Apple doesn’t get away with everything. Think about what just got in the news: that Apple’s business partners are employing children. True, not really Apple’s fault, but the damage to their image has been done.

Journalism can help keep such damage under control by focusing on what you’re doing to turn bad situations around, and by diverting the attention away. Under normal circumstances, journalistic content will help your marketing efforts by delivering a broad context for your product.

The content should cover topics that are not directly related to your product or service, but sideways involved with it. If you sell lease cars, then a good approach to journalistic communications would be a newsletter or magazine not just discussing the pros and cons of leasing cars, but also how the government is trying to stimulate electric cars, for example.

Content marketing is buzzword. It means that you are using content — usually journalistic content — for marketing purposes. What few people seem to understand is that content marketing can be understood in a different sense as well: marketing the content.

Marketing content used to be brochure texts, customer stories, games even. Almost always marketing content was supposed to be not only informative but also fun. It was, and still is, part of the marketing mix that also includes Public Relations and advertising. In the ten+ years that I have been involved with it, it specifically related to content that was supposed to help business customers buy a product that only business buyers will use. As in large printing presses, Digital Asset Management systems, scientific measurement devices, etc.

All of these products had one thing in common: you can’t and shouldn’t try to be funny about them. A printing press costing in excess of 100,000 Euros is serious business and the prospect wouldn’t appreciate a fun approach, not even if the entertainer doing it were John Cleese. Instead, these B2B customers expect information which they can use to decide whether they should buy the thing.

Content marketing is a different story. In essence it takes the B2B approach, but applies it to B2C marketing. What you’ll be doing is inform the customer of the advantages and disadvantages of your product. The latter is very important. It’s what makes content marketing, content marketing. If you leave out the objectivity of the equation, you’re just creating brochure content and most people don’t need yet another format for advertising.

Objectivity doesn’t mean you can’t stress the benefits of your product. It does mean you’re honest about it. If you feel you can’t be honest about it — e.g. because too many factors out of your control determine the user experience (you thought I was going to say “because it isn’t any good”, weren’t you?) — content marketing creates information “around” your product.

For example, if you’re selling solar panels, you can create content explaining about the technology, how it evolves, how customers can optimise their installation, etc., etc.

Content needs to be marketed too

What few people seem to understand is that this content needs to be marketed too. You need to promote it so it can be found. This can be done in many different ways these days. You can curate, use social media to distribute and microblogs to further expand the coverage. All of these “channels” need to have their own content created — not necessarily brand new stories for each channel, but certainly not duplicate content either.

The marketing of content takes time and effort. It is not a magical thing that brings success overnight, and really demands an ongoing effort, and is quite labour intensive.

Some companies have journalists create content for them, or more precisely for a publication they pay for. The journalists are allowed a great deal of objectivity with a small degree of control over topics and tone of voice. Essentially, these companies run a publication and all they want back for it is some coverage when they release products of their own. What do they gain by that?

I know of at least two companies who have their own publication. I don’t mean a newsletter or a magazine that looks suspiciously much like a brochure, but an actual magazine like PC World or MacUser. They leave the journalists who write up the content free in their choice of subjects and comments — just like the real thing. And yet, these publications are marketing tools.

In terms of marketing, publications do three things:

• They create goodwill — a company shows its willingness to share and not just take from your wallet
• They show expertise — of course, the topics around which these magazines are published, are in the domain of expertise of the publishing party
• They create a constant stream of shares on social media — they create “buzz”

In one word: they create reputation.

Reputation is always valuable. If you have a reputation of being the best informed, the most inclined to share, the best support-giving organisation, people will want to buy your products. When something goes wrong, your reputation makes it less catastrophic than it would be if your reputation were bad. A publication can help maintain a correct brand image and good reputation.

Clever marketers invest in publishing…