Every brand wants to release a product video that’s received like Game of Thrones. They want Modern Love download numbers on their podcasts. But that’s not going to happen. We all have to keep our definition of success relative.

To shed light on what marketers should try to learn from their media brethren, I’ve broken down some common (and successful!) media strategies across ideation, production, and distribution. When you add them all together, these skills will help you create content your customers actually want.

Be patient with your audience

It’s useful for marketers to think of top-funnel content as the “dating” stage. You wouldn’t tell a first date you’re planning on naming your future children Huey, Dewey, and Louie, so don’t jump down a reader’s throat with your product the first time they read an article.

 

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Use audience data to serve people relevant content on the platforms they already use. Group Nine Media posts social video from two of its sites, The Dodo and Now This, on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The company found that uplifting animal videos (Dodo) and informative, emotional political videos (NowThis) connected with viewers scrolling through their social feeds. As a result, they specialize in content that lives directly on these heavily trafficked channels—you don’t see a ton of investment on search.

Marketers should focus on subjects and channels that matter to your audience. Leave the “do you wanna get out of here?” moment for further down the funnel.

Do some shoe-leather reporting

The internet connects most of the globe, but it also tends to flatten and hollow out the definition of “news.” Many full-time reporters receive tips from remote sources, and they’re so caught up in the existing news cycle that they don’t have a spare moment to find their own stories.

Social media has made it harder to break the cycle. What might seem like a globally trending topic may only just be “trending” on Twitter for a small bubble. You don’t really know what your target audience cares about if you’re only scrolling through social. To bridge the gap, you have to talk to people.

That’s why it’s important to treat your content marketing job like any journalist would approach a beat. Take contacts out for coffee and pick their brains. Ask them questions on background and get their numbers in case you need a quotation down the road. Show up to community events, trade shows, and trainings ready to ask questions.

If you’re looking for a model from media companies, consider how local news websites cover their beats. In addition to features, BKLYNER sends a reporter to every town hall meeting and small political event in Brooklyn, anticipating that interested readers may not have the time or wherewithal to attend themselves.

Since you’re a marketer, you can always start by talking to existing customers. If someone is paying your company money, you should know their experience inside and out.

Choose your public figures carefully

Even if your audience likes the gist of your articles, humans are pretty unforgiving when it comes to listening to someone speak. When the focus is on video and audio content, you don’t have to be Daniel Day-Lewis to know the difference between a great actor and an uncomfortable performer.

Just because someone is a great leader or writer doesn’t mean they have to be the face of your brand. You never want to put a marketer in front of a camera or a crowd without being sure they’re the right person for the spotlight. Not every reporter is great on camera, and not every video host is a gifted writer, but all of the above are technically journalists.

Borrow this concept as you structure your content team. If your managing editor is hyper-organized and great at breaking data into actionable, creative insights, but he’s too anxious in front of crowds to lead an in-person event, that’s fine! Your brand is allowed to tag in media-trained professionals for hosting videos, MCing events, and giving keynote speeches. You can also invest in media training for internal employees. Some professionals don’t become good on camera until they’re given enough practice reps

Use additive or divisible content to keep things fresh

As Marketing Showrunners founder Jay Acunzo puts it, media companies “promote their shows by taking an existing asset, then using that asset to create an endless stream of useful assets, all of which are used to grow the original asset. Everything they create compounds in value.”

According to Acunzo, no one is better at making people care about impressive content than media companies. “They know how to publish a core asset, like a show, then get a serious return on their investment on that show—building a passionate fanbase for the program as they do so.” He believes marketing falls short when it comes to promoting and packaging great content.

One way to promote and repackage content is to break a successful piece down into smaller chunks (aka divisible content). When I was a reporter in a newsroom, I knew it was going to be a good week when my editor said, “Hey, that story last week was great. See if you can get me a follow-up ASAP.”

Sometimes I’d have stray quotes left on the cutting room floor, which I’d work into a second piece on the same topic. Sometimes I’d call up my sources again to see if they’d sound off on something else for me. If all else failed, I’d research ancillary news stories in the same general area.

When I published a feature on the commercial success of Adult Swim’s cartoon Rick and Morty, the traffic was compelling enough to merit a follow-up. I investigated the question “what’s wrong with Rick and Morty fans” because it was a key search term that came up in Google Trends. From there, I interviewed the creators of a different Adult Swim cartoon to see if the interest carried over—it didn’t. I stayed on the Rick and Morty beat for a while, writing up news from my skeptical point of view.

Wait until you have a truly good idea for a podcast or video

Never make new content just to show you can. I know it’s enticing. You read a piece in Adweek about how podcasts are the new frontier, or your LinkedIn feed says TikTok is taking over the world, and you start to get that itch to try it out for your. But jumping into a new format without a strategy is a mistake.

That’s not to say you have to avoid every new platform. Just do some reconnaissance and figure out who’s flocking to the space. Your brand doesn’t have to exist on every social media platform, but it should be on all the channels that naturally fit your voice. The Washington Post led the way for other media companies when it joined Reddit and TikTok, but you’ll notice that publications like Financial Times and Money haven’t followed the siren’s call. What they have done is develop strategies for promoting their content via channels their target audience already uses: FT makes podcasts, and Money focuses on email newsletters.

Keep your eye on the behaviors, preferences, and desires of your audience, and you’ll never go astray. When marketers or media professionals go off the beaten path and start creating content to feed their own egos, that’s when things spiral out of control. As in any industry, the customer knows best.

The post 5 Useful Skills Marketers Should Learn From Media Companies appeared first on Contently.

All these creators have been able to tell stories in innovative mediums because the companies they work for see multimedia as complementary to the written word. Video isn’t just an optional medium for duplicating the original information.

Unfortunately for many video producers, some brands can’t see past social video in its most basic form. They only want to turn their most heavily trafficked articles into social-optimized clips, cutting a post into captions to place on top of B-roll. They splice in stock music, throw the videos on Facebook, and repeat the process, ignoring all the ways multimedia creators can work in concert with writers. This isn’t inspiring stuff for video producers or your audience.

Trust the video creators you hired

A few months ago, I attended an event for Vox Creative’s Explainer Studio, the media company’s branded content arm. Ezra Klein, Vox founder and editor-at-large, and Joe Posner, Vox executive producer, said that empowering their video producers to create content independently from their reporters paid off in multiple ways. When video producer Estelle Caswell pitched an explainer mini-doc on the prevalence of Grey Poupon references in hip-hop lyrics, Posner and Klein said her passion for the weird subject won them over. She made the video, it laid somewhat dormant for months. Then Kendrick Lamar released his album Damn., referencing the condiment on the first single, “HUMBLE.,” and engagement exploded.

Looking back on the video’s success, Klein and Posner attribute it to an empowered video team that felt comfortable creating on-brand content based on their own passions. By hiring a video producer and researcher who cares deeply about hip-hop, Vox was able to benefit from Caswell’s natural affinity for the subject. The editors even claimed that having a video team comfortable pushing back on initiatives was an asset.

If you’re interested in producing top-quality video projects that get results, here are a few other important steps you can take.

Complement your writing, but don’t copy it

Turning articles into videos might seem like a no-brainer, but audiences can tell when a video was just churned out without a clear purpose. Plenty of publishers just take an article and clone it as a short video with stock clips and text captions. That approach lacks creativity and isn’t going to add much to your content strategy.

Your teams may ultimately decide that some projects are best delivered as a single video or a single blog post. In some cases, you’ll also be able to cover a topic in both mediums. But being selective here is key.

For example, I wrote an article last year for Inverse about Michael Myers. At the time, Inverse was experimenting with adding conversational videos clips to every article, which meant I had to record one for my story. It fell flat, in my opinion, because my partner and I were tasked with recounting the body of my research-heavy article in a punchy, concise way. It just wasn’t a natural fit, and you can tell watching the video that I’m feeling out of my element. If I could go back, I’d bring my article notes to Inverse’s video team and we’d come up with an original video idea together; maybe a supercut of all the times Michael Myers should have died, but didn’t.

On the other hand, when editors asked me to pick a couple of my published articles to turn into videos, that approach tends to lead to better content. In those situations, the video team was able to collaborate with me on choosing the right subject matter, scripting, and animation. The process isn’t as forced. When Newsweek asked me to turn my Marvel explainer article into a short video, I was able to inject a sense of humor by speeding through explanations, which happened to be a better match for the written component.

Let creators own the story—and the results

One way to ensure your creators are inspired and interested is to keep your content calendar filled with stories they pitch themselves. Contently’s head of strategy, Joe Lazauskas, puts it this way: “Your greatest weapons are passion and creativity. To bring that out, you need a system that lets people on your team pitch stories that interest them the most.”

Once videos go live, encourage creators to analyze engagement metrics. They will pitch more effectively if they’ve grappled with the results their videos drive. Ideally, your video team will reach a point where their pitches are partly inspired by their own passions within your industry and partially inspired by audience insights. If, however, your video team ends up trying to satisfy no one but your brand’s target audience, things will get worse than simple burnout. Your team will stop innovating, and your audience will end up bored.

Consider the uber-popular YouTuber Jake Paul. If you don’t know who he is, your kids definitely do. H3Productions, another beloved YouTube channel co-run by Ethan and Hila Klein, recently analyzed what’s become of Paul after too many years trying to please the same exact audience. The 21-year-old YouTuber has built an insane, lucrative empire through video content aimed at children. In order to retain that audience, Paul has become very reliant on things he knows will get their attention: gamification, high-energy stories, and shocking imagery.

In Paul’s most recent video, which Klein analyzes here, he comes off like a desperate salesman, screaming at his young audience to spend money on what looks like a shady online scam. With Klein’s help, you can trace Paul’s trajectory over the years, his likability deteriorating as he became more insistent on growing his channel as quickly as possible. In 2013, he began uploading goofy, day-in-the-life vlogs, but in 2019, he exclusively posts heavily edited, frantic, get-rich-quick advertisements. If he had been encouraged to try out new formats or dip into a more mature market early on, he may not have become one of the most reviled figures on the internet. Is he still making millions in ads? Probably. But his target audience will soon grow up. He’s also alienated most of his creative team, making him a cautionary tale for publishers and marketers hoping to retain their staff and target audience.

Schedule check-ins between video creators and writers

Though it might seem appealing to hire video producers who work on assignment and never ask questions, demanding compliance from your team will damage your reputation. That’s not just an artistic mistake, it’s a revenue mistake.

Encouraging your video team to frequently collaborate and compare notes with your writers will ultimately boost your brand’s reputation. You’ll be investing in the creation of interesting stories in multiple mediums, and the creators you empower will be far more likely to invite creators from their networks to get involved.

In these meetings, encourage your writers to bring published articles they believe might work as videos. On the flip side, invite your video team to sift through evergreen stories in your archive and pitch the ones they find interesting as video content. Your video creators can also explain to writers what they’re looking for: Maybe a subject that requires clips and on-site footage, or detailed explainers that could use animation. Deep dives tend to work well as long explainer articles and videos, as do interviews with charismatic subjects.

Like Vox, you owe it to yourself to assemble a video team that brings more to the table than simple editing skills. If you lead them in the right direction, they’ll work as curators, too, recycling your best written content into something new and worthwhile.

The post How Brands and Publishers Can Empower Their Video Creators appeared first on Contently.

Her article describes how an editorial background can infuse useful values into a content marketing strategy, pointing out that most writers who’ve worked at independent publications are trained to produce content that’s free of clichés, narratively engaging, and universally readable. Best of all, she makes this argument in 1,400 words. Though I appreciate her argument, if it were expanded into a different format with more words, she might start to lose her audience.

That’s the thing about additive content—piecing together small bits of content like articles into something more substantial, like an e-book. It only works if your blog post is the tip of an iceberg. In Brown’s case, her argument is just a really well-shaped piece of ice, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Content marketers are often on the hunt for ways to adjust and repurpose their most successful projects. So how do you know if your idea is worth an e-book or a blog post?

When to write a blog post

Blog posts can be op-eds, news analysis, listicles, reportage, case studies, Q&As, profiles, or trend pieces. There are a million ways to fill that space, though an ideal range probably spans 400 words to 1,500 words. There are some cases, depending on the complexity of a topic, when 2,000 words makes sense. Anything longer than 2,000 words has become its own category of “longreads” (excuse the Orwellian term). Those pieces of content tend to be feature stories that require diligent reporting and research that could belong in a print magazine.

Let’s say you have an idea and you’re not sure where it belongs. Is your idea just a hot take on Facebook’s latest algorithm changes? Is it timely news analysis on a new report about emoji usage? Not every e-book has to be perfectly evergreen, but you shouldn’t stall your team to put together a long-term project that will feel dated by next quarter.

Consider your resources as well. If your design team isn’t available to add illustrations or graphics for an e-book, perhaps they’re willing to break up the art into chunks and release your idea as a series of blog posts. If you’re still in the early stages of developing an audience, your series of blog posts can help advance your SEO and give potential a reason to keep coming back.

Additive content can also provide a nice little runway for launching an e-book down the line. If a blog post or two takes off, engagement metrics can give you the proof you need to justify further investment.

When to write an e-book

Deciding which ideas merit their own e-book can be trickiest of all. It’s not just a matter of deciding how many words you need to make a point. To download an e-book, your audience needs to hand over contact information, and if a customer gets partway into your e-book and regrets giving you their email address, then you’ve effectively put a lot of time and energy into damaging your relationship with your audience.

The general consensus is that an optimal e-book starts around 2,500 words, but some go all the way up to 15,000 words. (For reference, most publishers consider a work of fiction to qualify as a novel if it’s between 50,000 and 110,000 words.)

Imagine your e-book’s readership the way you might plan for a house party. Don’t announce a party if you suspect only a handful of people will come—there’s nothing worse than a “party” that’s just three strangers in a room eating chips.

If the potential readership is waiting for your e-book, conduct some research on how you’ll prepare for the launch. I personally had no idea how much analysis is necessary before a book comes out until I read Shane Snow’s plan that started a full year prior to his publication date. He broke his potential audience into segments and analyzed their reading patterns, used Docalytics to track where his editors were getting bored, set goals, and brainstormed ancillary content he could publish to encourage people to buy his book. An e-book and a non-fiction book are different beasts. But if that process sounds much more complex than what you had in mind, consider the idea that you’re not yet prepared.

Finally, consider the content itself. An e-book isn’t really the best venue for thought leadership, although you can certainly weave that in. Data-based research like an independent study is more likely to satisfy audience expectations. Think of your e-book as a product with a price tag that says “give me your email address.” Then ask yourself whether the average member of your audience will believe it was worth it after they finish reading. If someone turns away disappointed from a blog post, the residual damage will fade after a few days. But if someone gives you their private information and feels duped by the content, that regret could last forever.

Ultimately, if you suspect you have an idea worth a long-term feature project like an e-book, your idea deserves to be vetted by all sides before you commit. Err on the side of caution. Sometimes the negative impact of publishing a half-baked idea outweighs the potential success of adding an email address to your list.

The post How to Decide If Your Idea Should Be an E-book or a Blog Post appeared first on Contently.

There’s no question that I’m in the former camp. During my time at The New York Times’s T Brand Studio, I saw the impact that a creative mindset can have on the quality of branded content. Since then, I’ve spent the last several years advocating—in writing, during corporate workshops, and from countless conference stages—for marketers to adopt the storytelling skills that make journalists successful.

But the learnings can, and should, flow in the other direction as well. By looking at brands investing in ambitious stories, journalists can benefit from understanding and embracing the skills that marketers use to maximize their returns.

Know your differentiators

One of a marketer’s greatest fears is that the client, product, or service will be indistinguishable from the competition. Successful marketing depends on leaning into uniqueness, and marketers go to great lengths to define and explain their differentiators.

Journalists now have the same task. There’s so much content out there, much of it aggregated. Readers have a lot of options for every story. How can you—as a publication, a department, or an individual—make your content different? Why should someone come to your site instead of looking elsewhere?

As a reporter, you might differentiate yourself through a unique voice, perspective, or level of expertise. If you can break a story, that speed will help you stand out. If your organization has access to certain sources, that could be a hook as well.

A good example of this is Gawker Media’s properties, like Gizmodo or Jezebel. They tend to aggregate stories every other publication is aggregating, but with a unique voice and perspective you can’t find anywhere else. The result is big-time traffic. Same goes for a publication like BuzzFeed, whose friendly, idiosyncratic style is recognizable to just about anyone.

You may be covering the same story as everyone else, but you always need to tell it in your own way.

Nobody is “just a writer” anymore

Creating content is expensive and time-consuming. If brands invest in content, they generally try to maximize efficiency by repurposing their work. Without too much work, e-books can become blog posts, infographics, and webinars.

For journalists, preparing to augment your work challenges you to think about storytelling in new ways and, over time, increases your value to your company.

If you’re compiling statistics for a story, look for other ways to visualize that data, the way Mic did with a video compilation about presidential debate interruptions. If you’re interviewing someone, include the recorded audio as a standalone clip, or pair it with with photos to create a slideshow, which BBC News did for a recent story on an archeological discovery. If you’re on location to shoot photos, grab video as well, then shorten those clips for social posts.

As you’re planning future stories, take a few minutes to think like a marketer so you can offer your audience more ways to interact with and understand your content.

Pull back the curtain

According to a 2015 infographic from Bonfire Marketing, 91 percent of customers value honesty about a brand’s products and services. As content marketing has grown in popularity over the last few years, marketers have emphasized transparency as a way to earn consumers’ trust and showcase what their companies do.

While journalists spend a lot of effort advocating for transparency in stories about elected officials, public companies, and so on, they could still do a better job turning that focus to their own work and organizations. Being open about editorial processes and decisions should give readers a reason to trust your content. Instead of just relying on press releases, companies ranging from GE to Harry’s are reporting on their own corporate developments to give audiences an idea of what’s going on.

A few editorial operations have also started to experiment with these initiatives. The New York Times, for example, launched Times Premier, which shows how big stories and projects come together. Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) does something similar with its “Behind The Story” series. Depending on your budget, you can even just use Facebook Live or other social channels to briefly take your readers behind the scenes.

If you make your readers feel like they’re part of the team, it could lead to deeper relationships and more engagement. So whether you’re a marketer, a reporter, or a hybrid, remember that it pays to be upfront.

The post What Journalists Can Learn From Marketers appeared first on Contently.

That’s not just an excuse to avoid the daunting task of building a strategy from scratch. In the past decade, films from the Marvel universe have not only raked in over $10 billion worldwide, but have also become an incredibly effective blueprint that can help anyone who works in media. Part of Marvel’s success comes down to two concepts that are becoming prevalent in content marketing: additive and divisible content.

For those unfamiliar with the concepts: Additive content combines previously published stories into larger content assets. Think of four blog posts about a similar topic coming together in an e-book. Divisible content is the reverse, when someone takes a big piece of content and breaks it down into multiple posts. The goals are similar. Both additive and divisible content save money by taking advantage of creative work you’ve already done. There’s a more nuanced benefit as well—setting up a storytelling arc that can rapidly build an audience.

Let’s take a closer look by starting with the fun part: the first films in Marvel’s cinematic universe. Marvel introduced the characters of Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America between 2008 and 2011, with standalone films that explore the superheroes’ origin stories. These films existed separately until the heroes joined forces on screen in 2012’s The Avengers. It was a gamble, trusting that the audience’s investment in each individual character would carry over into the ensemble story. Saying it worked is an understatement.

The Avengers went on to make $1.5 billion worldwide and sits as the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time. Granted, there were other factors here, such as loyal fans waiting for adaptations of comic books that had been around for decades, and the film just being really good. Regardless, it was a perfect execution of additive content. None of the individual films made more than $650 million, yet here was The Avengers with almost three times the box office haul. Marvel capitalized on the audience’s investment in the individual stories and, as a result, was able to reach a much larger audience.

This shouldn’t be too foreign to content marketers (other than the billions of dollars at stake). HubSpot, for instance, published a story in 2012 about misleading SEO myths. Last summer, HubSpot covered the importance of mobile optimization in relation to Google’s new algorithms. Finally, at the end of 2015, the company published a comprehensive e-book titled “17 SEO Myths You Should Leave Behind in 2016.”

Of the 17 myths described in the e-book, six come from those two previously published stories. Doing so makes sense, since marketers may be repeating some of their mistakes from a few years ago. More important, though, is how HubSpot repackages an old story with new information to create an original asset. This additive strategy saves HubSpot time and money, and capitalizes on its audience’s interest in those topics.

Eventually, these larger stories can then morph right back into divisible content. After The Avengers dominated the box office, Marvel went back to expanding the stories of individual characters without the whole ensemble, and the money followed. Iron Man 3 raked in $1.2 billion, more than the totals of the first two Iron Man films combined. Captain America: The Winter Soldier made over $300 million more than its original, and Thor: The Dark World made almost $200 million more than its origin story. Each case suggests that people were more interested in these characters and this overall story after seeing them together.

We’ve noticed a similar ripple effect on The Content Strategist (again, on a much smaller scale). In December of 2015, we published “The Marketer’s Guide to Facebook,” a long e-book that broke down the evolution of Facebook and explained how companies can effectively use the platform. One key section that explained Facebook targeting worked so well that we repurposed it as a separate blog post, for no cost. While it didn’t include a plot twist as monumental as the one in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it performed well and continued to drive leads weeks after the original asset went live.

Bottom line: When it comes time to tweak or craft that content strategy, the classic conversations about brand voice and publishing cadence are essential. But while you’re picking up that whiteboard marker, don’t be afraid to reach for the hammer or the shield.

The post What the Avengers Can Teach Us About Divisible Content appeared first on Contently.