Content marketing think like a publisher chapter 3 you’re a publisher think like one

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You’re a Publisher.
Think Like One.
“Rolling your own media brings with it a new set of challenges.”

IBM recently published research finding that about 80% of
those who begin a corporate blog never post more than
five entries. They stop. Give up. Leave it abandoned by
the side of what was once called the information superhighway.
And that’s just blogging.
The Internet is littered with never-updated websites, neartweetless Twitter accounts, expressionless Facebook
pages, and no-one-home YouTube channels. In the rush to
adopt content marketing as a tactic, too many marketers
forget that if you’re continually publishing, you have to
think like…a publisher.
Increasingly, marketing is no longer about buying media
(the advertising model). Media is cheap—or often even
free. But rolling your own media brings with it a new set
of challenges. Chief among those challenges is coming up
with enough content to fill all those blank pages, blog
posts, profiles, and such, and doing so on a regular basis,
not just in a one-off burst of week one enthusiasm.


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Part I

Content Marketing Basics

And hey, this is really nothing new. Coming up with new stuff to say has been an

issue for content marketers since the days of the corporate newsletter. Only now,
there are even more virtual pages to fill with even more information—and in more
multimedia formats.
Who’s good at solving that dilemma? Publishers. If you want to win at the content
game, it’s time you started thinking like one.
In short, brands are media. Marketers are editors, or at least need to start thinking
like editors and producers if they don’t want to come up shorthanded. So herewith,
steps toward publisher-think help marketers get beyond that accusatory blank
white page and start thinking like a true content professional.
Here are 14 steps to get you there:
1. Know your audience—This couldn’t be simpler or more self-evident,
but the importance of knowing who you’re producing content for cannot be overstated. Customers? Prospects? Fans? Industry peers?
Colleagues? The media? Some or all of the above? Selecting topics and
tailoring messaging is a whole lot easier when you know who’s on the
receiving end.
2. Define key themes and messages—Now that you know who you’re
addressing, what is it, broadly speaking, you want to communicate to
them? Don’t just focus on your product, service, or business here, but
do some thinking as to how it relates to an audience’s real-world concerns. If you’re a local business, you may want to weave broader local
themes into your content. If you’re hawking something with a high
consideration curve, education and learning may be part of your messaging. Use your knowledge of your audience, your tone of voice, and
the broader informational environment in which you reside to inform
themes and messaging.
3. Establish a frequency framework—Half the journalists I know (and
being one, I know quite a few) say they write for periodicals because
they need deadlines to produce something. In the trade, it’s called feeding the beast. You may not need to blog, or write, or tweet, or statusupdate every day, but once per month is probably not adequate, and
you risk the whole endeavor tipping off the cliff. Create a schedule for
content updates, and adhere to it. Map out potential stories, features, or
other content in advance so that when the deadline looms, you’ll have a
sense of what’s due. Falling into a rhythm beats falling out of visibility

altogether.
4. Create a detailed editorial calendar—An editorial calendar plugs
directly into the frequency framework. Just as your local newspaper has


Chapter 3

Yo u ’ r e a P u b l i s h e r. T h i n k L i k e O n e .

a food and dining feature on Wednesdays, an expanded entertainment
section on Fridays, and home and gardening every Thursday, mapping
a type of content to your frequency framework is a great step forward
in terms of making relevant content happen on a reasonably frequent
schedule.
5. Develop regular features and rubrics—Creating a few regularly
appearing content elements is one of the oldest editorial tricks in the
book. Comics, horoscopes, weather, and film listings help round off a
newspaper’s offerings and keep readers coming back for more.
Moreover, when you have these regular features, they’re all but autopopulating. Highlights of the week, links to other relevant content, or a
quote of the day are just a few down-and-dirty ideas to keep the flow of
content constantly bubbling.
6. Interview—Interviews probably belong in item #5, but they are notable
enough to warrant discussion on their own. Are your own ideas drying
up? Talk to others, whether they’re experts in your field, enthusiastic
users, or people in your company. Make a list of potential interview
subjects, and consider making interviews a regular content feature.
7. Go multimedia—Content isn’t limited to text alone, of course. Images,
photos, videos, and audio files expand and enhance your content offerings. Blogging? Posts accompanied by a graphic image draw attention
to themselves and attract far more clickthroughs than naked-text posts.
Don’t take my word for it—give it a shot. Your web metrics bear this

one out.
8. Enlist expert contributors, and provide them with guidelines—You
don’t have to go it alone. Look around at your coworkers, colleagues,
and professional network. There are lots of potential content contributors out there. Often, all you have to do is ask, either for one-off contributions or regular features. You’ll want to consider a budget item in this
category to incentivize timely and authoritative contributions from
really desirable commentators.
9. Create User-Generated Content—User-generated content is, of course,
a whole new route to ensuring content is created for you, be it comments, ratings and reviews, or contests. With clearly defined guidelines
and expectations and a little bit of polite asking, you may be surprised
at how much content is created for you rather than by you.
10. Opine and editorialize—A frequent stumbling block to content creation is when the creators think they’re obligated to be first to break a
piece of news. Unless it’s news about you, this is not a winning strategy.

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Part I

Content Marketing Basics

It’s a big Internet out there, and news is
traveling at the speed of fiber optic cable.
News has become commoditized. It’s not
easy to get the exclusive scoop on a revolution in the Middle East, or who just
won the pennant. By the time you’ve
typed it, it’s on the web wall-to-wall.
Leave breaking news to the pros. Divest
yourself of the notion that you’re a

reporter and instead become an expert
observer and interpreter of what news
means to your audience. Establish yourself, your company, or your brand as a
thought leader, not as a deadline reporter.

“Divest yourself
of the notion that
you’re a reporter
and instead
become an expert
observer and
interpreter.”

11. Turn on comments and feedback—Whatever digital platform you’re
creating content for, ensure comments and feedback mechanisms are in
place, easy to use, and monitored. This not only creates a platform for
participation, it’s a gauge of how well you’re doing, what excites and
interests your audience, and will doubtless feed in ideas for shaping and
improving future content. Communicate, but don’t lecture or preach.
12. Listen—Listen to what others in your space are saying, and do so outside the parameters of your own comments section. Set up topic alerts
for your relevant themes. Get out there and participate in what others
are saying within your arena of expertise. It’s the editorial, not to mention the social media equivalent of leaving the house.
13. Recycle—Once a piece of content is published, nurture and evolve it.
Publishers follow up on news, track trends as they develop, and return
to stories to examine long-term effects. They may cover a news item
and then editorialize or voice an opinion about the development. They
add video or graphics to embellish a point that was made in print. You
get the idea: Create more opportunity for the content that you have to
get out there.
14. Capture—In a number of respects, publishing has always been a form

of lead-generation. Consumer publishers use subscriber, viewership and
newsstand information, and data to profile customers, and they market
those numbers and demographics to their advertisers. Business-tobusiness (B2B) publishers capture leads for that purpose, and often also
to market ancillary products and services to that audience, be it
research reports, conferences, or other special offers.