Creating Compelling Content: Tips from a Journalist

One of the biggest issues that flummox marketers is how to come up with compelling content. To create great content, it pays to think like an editor or journalist. After all, a magazine’s stock in trade is creating interesting content month in and month out for a particular audience. When I was an editor at PC Magazine, PC/Computing Magazine, DBMS Magazine and several others, here’s how we came up with compelling content.

Define Your Audience

Successful magazines are razor focused on an extremely well defined audience. For example, during it’s heyday, PC Magazine focused on the people who had the most influence on purchase decisions in the IT departments, mostly in larger companies. DBMS Magazine targeted database programmers. As a marketer, you need to know exactly who you’re marketing to.

Understand Their Pain

At most magazines, the advertising and editorial departments will perform extensive research on their audience and surveys of their interests. Some publications even do focus groups to get audience response to various article ideas and/or existing articles as well as on the overall design of the publication. Similarly, marketers need to talk to customers and find out what they care about, what issues keep them up at night, and what they want to know in order to make a purchase decision.

Create an Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar is a high level plan that maps out the list of topics that you need to cover over a period of time, typically the next six months or year. At PC Magazine, the editorial calendar usually included a list of the most important types of PC technology on the market—from printers to spreadsheets to LANs—since that publication focused on testing the key types of PC products that an IT department was likely to purchase.

 The purpose of the editorial calendar is to help editors come up with coverage that hits on the key areas of interest for their audience. It also helps the sales people know which advertisers to approach for which issue, since advertisers often like to buy spots in issues that include editorial relating in some way to their products.  

 For marketers, an editorial calendar will map out the key areas the company needs to communicate about. These areas might include future directions or a product road map; the range of product lines that company needs material for; and the various stages of the buying cycle they need to produce materials for.

Find an Angle

Only after you  have a high level understanding of your audience, their key pains/areas of interest, and the areas that you as a company need to cover can you come up with ideas for relevant individual pieces.

Say you determine you need thought leadership pieces for various vertical markets. In this case, people won’t know who you are or why they should care about your product. You need to grab their attention by addressing topics that are pressing problems or issues that they think about every day. The following are ways to come up with a topic of interest for this type of piece:

1. Find a topic in the news that’s of interest to the role or industry you’re trying to reach, then shape your piece around that topic. For example, with the recent BP explosion and the Chilean mine disaster in the headlines, a thought-leadership piece that targets the energy industry will get attention if it talks about worker safety. 
2. Talk about how current economic conditions are impacting your customer’s industry or role. The Great Recession and fitful recovery are concerns for any industry. However, their meaning will differ for different industries.  For example, as the economy recovers and companies of all types look to grow their markets, financial services firms will need to regain customer trust to garner new customers. 
3. Find out about what problems keep your reader up at night—particularly ones that your product can address. You can address longstanding issues that don’t qualify as news, as long as they’re sufficiently critical to your customer. For example, the pharmaceutical industry faces longstanding problems of rising costs for research and development and increasing FDA regulation. While these problems are not especially newsworthy, they are grave concerns for the industry. 

Once you get further along the buying cycle, what constitutes a compelling topic of interest will change. As customers look more deeply into possible solutions, compelling topics often include case studies of customer that have solved typical problems, buyer’s guide comparisons of products and even technical discussions of how your solution works.

The key is to clearly define who your buyers are, what their problems are, what they want to know as they select a solution—and then design pieces that address their key questions. Just think of topics from your customer’s perspective at all times and you’ll never go wrong.

How have you created content that’s compelling to your audience?

Comments

[Carl Rachel]

Cheryl, Brothers & Sisters,

It must be me. I'm sure like everyone else reading these words, I keep very busy studying the content of a myriad of mags, emags, cable, even radio talk. For sake of space, I'd like to focus especially on print mags for the following observation.

In your article above, you say: "After all, a magazine’s stock in trade is creating interesting content month in and month out for a particular audience."

I think we all agree with the overall mission implied in that statement. But I personally don't think mags are concerned about creating interesting content as much as they are in creating interestingly different heads for the very same, static content month in and month out.

I can't tell you how many times and under how many different titles I've read "The Way To A Man's Heart Requires A Baking Pan!" Or, "How To Meet the Woman of Your Dreams While Repairing a Leaky Pipe."

Now, I'm not just talking Redbook, here. All the other like-kind mags are just as guilty. Same content: Different titles. Wait 6 months between runs.

I long for the day that editors actually demand something new. That will be an epiphany not only for readers but also for writers.

You are so correct to encourage "Finding an Angle." For me, that angle is more like a perspective from which no one has yet tackled the subject. Coming in from a different trajectory could very well open the minds of readers while enabling the writer to escape the trap of just rewording what already has been said. It's the "creative" part of creative writing.

Thanks, Cheryl, for the opportunity and for your insights. You always put up stimulating concepts.

Carl

[Cheryl Goldberg]

Hi Carl,

Thank you for your comment.

You're right, often women's magazines repeat the same topics over and over, though I have to admit that some of the topics are evergreen for a reason--in my weak moments at the dentist or waiting to pick up the kids at dance class, I'll read them. However, in this article I was really referring to service or trade magazines that target specific business audiences. I think they really do think about what topics are compelling for their readers. After all, who's going to read about DBMS programming unless the article will really help them in their job.

Cheryl

[Rick Clark]

Great article. Right on point. I have been a sales and marketing consultant for more than 20 years with a journalism (Communication Arts) degree from Cornell University. My major problem with business owners and managers is getting them to wrap their minds around this very concept. Thanks.

[Mukesh]

Oh no oh no oh no Cheryl,
Hopefully got your attention!
Great summary of Markting as it should be. I would add engage....
Another tip from journalism, which I believe to be key is a captivating headline. This has much more significance in the Social Media (a different, but very exciting story..) space (esp twitter). The purpose of headlines etc is to engage the audience by arousing there interest. Copywriting is an art (noticed the error in previous sentence?), which us technical folk need to embrace; for example subtle use of words:
Learn what productX can do for you
Discover what productX can do for you
The headline will get users to at least skim the article ; the content then has to be relevant and on target.

[Cheryl Goldberg]

Thank you Mukesh. You make a good point. I should have included that here. However, I have covered headlines extensively in this blog--in a six part series. You can find the first of the six posts here:http://hightechcommunicator.typepad.com/hightech_communicator/2010/02/white-paper-headline-series-why-white-paper-headlines-are-different.html#tp
The rest of the headline article follow sequentially. Thanks again!!