What Journalists Can Learn from Content Marketers. Home : Media : What Journalists Can Learn from Content Marketers In this guest piece, regular B&T columnist, Storyation’s head of content, Lauren Quaintance (pictured below), argues content creators can learn plenty from their equivalents over in the marketing department… Not long after I made the move from a media company to start a content marketing agency I wrote a piece for Marketing Magazine called ‘5 Things Brands Can Learn from Journalists’. My point was that creating content that audiences want to consume doesn’t necessarily come naturally to career marketers. Brands need to act more like publishers and drop the sales pitch in favour of entertaining, inspiring or informative content that aligns with their purpose and values. I’ve talked about it in blog posts, in client workshops and on dozens of conference stages Everything I wrote in that post three years ago still rings true, but I’ve also come to believe that marketers can teach journalists a thing or two. Audience personas are absolutely critical to creating content that emotionally – or rationally – connects with your customer. Media companies, in my experience, rarely invest in uncovering sophisticated behavioural insights. Or if they do then those insights are not used by journalists on the editorial floor. We never really knew exactly who was reading the politics section of The Age or the travel section of The Sydney Morning Herald. The power of strategy The truth of the matter is that publishers aren’t nearly as strategic as you might think.
In this guest piece, regular B&T columnist, Storyation’s head of content, Lauren Quaintance (pictured below), argues content creators can learn plenty from their equivalents over in the marketing department…
Not long after I made the move from a media company to start a content marketing agency I wrote a piece for Marketing Magazine called ‘5 Things Brands Can Learn from Journalists’. My point was that creating content that audiences want to consume doesn’t necessarily come naturally to career marketers. Brands need to act more like publishers and drop the sales pitch in favour of entertaining, inspiring or informative content that aligns with their purpose and values.
I’ve spent the last three years evangelising for utilising editorial thinking in content marketing. I’ve talked about it in blog posts, in client workshops and on dozens of conference stages Everything I wrote in that post three years ago still rings true, but I’ve also come to believe that marketers can teach journalists a thing or two.
Know your audience
At Storyation, we occasionally still come across marketers who only have basic demographic information about their audience but mostly they are working on developing better insights. Audience personas are absolutely critical to creating content that emotionally – or rationally – connects with your customer. Media companies, in my experience, rarely invest in uncovering sophisticated behavioural insights. Or if they do then those…
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