Why Marketers Need a Publishing Process

Can you see the demand for marketing content growing yet?

If you haven’t seen it, you soon will. Two big trends are driving this need. First, the trade press is dying. Revenues for B2B publishers for the first five months of 2009 were down a total of 26.3% and ad pages were down 30.3%, according to American Business Media, a B2B trade association. Online isn’t helping. Add in digital revenues, and total advertising revenues for the first half of 2009 are still down 19%.

As magazines shrink, the opportunity to place your thought leaders in those pages shrinks, too.

As an old, rusty spigot of content gradually clogs and shuts down, a bright, shiny new one is opening up all the way: social media. Blogs, communities, Twitter—they all demand fresh and insightful content. Meanwhile, the constant drip, drip of the lead-nurturing process demands the kind of in-depth thought leadership that trade journalists used to create for us.

But if we can no longer rely on their content, we can steal their process. You’ve probably heard this one before: marketers have to become publishers. But how?

How to Adapt the Publishing Process to Marketing

To fulfill an ever-increasing demand for content, you need a process. And the publishing process works better than the marketing content development process because the publishing process comes with the threat of extinction. The publishing process is intended to identify a target audience, develop an understanding of that audience, and deliver targeted, relevant content. To consistently beat competitors, that content needs to remain relevant and targeted. If it doesn’t, circulation drops, ad revenue drops, and the publication goes out of business.

In other words, relevance is the primary measure of success.

That’s how we should think about our marketing content process. Here are some aspects of the publishing process that drive relevance:

• Identify the target audience. Publications fail if they don’t grasp exactly whom they are trying to reach and why. Marketers need to do a similar kind of segmentation.
• Create an editorial calendar. Every good publication has an editorial calendar. The calendar-planning exercise generates a wealth of ideas. Since much of the content we offer as marketers is “evergreen” (i.e., the topics will be as relevant next year as they are today), there’s no reason not to have a plan for content. If nothing else, it gives you something to wave in salespeople’s faces the next time they come screaming about a brochure.
• Research the issues. Most magazines do annual reader surveys to ask subscribers what they think of the magazine and to flesh out key issues. Marketers can embed survey questions in their content to help build an understanding of timely issues to drive future content.
• Cycle through top reader interests. Magazines develop a short list of topic areas that matter most to their readers and hit those topics regularly as part of the issue-planning process. Marketers need to develop a similar list as they plan their content calendars.
• Interview the players and the experts. Journalists aren’t experts in the fields they cover, but they’re experts at finding people who are. They’re also good at finding the people who live the stuff they’re writing about every day. All good journalism comes from expert insight and real-world examples. Marketers need to talk to subject matter experts inside the company, influencers outside the company (analysts, academics, bloggers, journalists), and customers. All you need to do is ask questions and the content will flow out of these people.
• Audit content. When surveying readers, magazines also ask whether readers like specific articles and subject areas covered in the magazine. Marketers need the same feedback from customers and salespeople. If you don’t have the money to do research, consider asking for feedback within printed materials and adding a review button or comment feature to online content.
• Diversify content. Most magazines are a mixture of long and short, graphic- and text-heavy stories. Marketing content needs to be similarly diverse.
• Be timely. Editors always try to leave room in the planning process for the timely, exclusive scoop—the story that identifies an important trend before others do. For marketers, being timely also means having content that matches every stage of the buying cycle, so that you have a chance for an “exclusive” at each stage.

Have you created a publishing process for your content? Please tell me about it.

3 Responses to “Why Marketers Need a Publishing Process”

1. Shawn Says:
   December 11th, 2009 at 4:43 PM

   I’m convinced that our organization needs to get more into the content creation business – and by “more,” I mean producing the right types of pieces such as thought leadership materials (and leveraging them, at least in part, through social media). To help me make my case, I’m hoping to be pointed to articles that list/describe other companies that are going the content creation route. Anyone know of such pieces?

2. Dawn Says:
   March 10th, 2010 at 3:07 PM

   Not only do we have to be content creators, we have to evolve content delivery from push to pull and deliver information when the client wants it. That’s when we can foster bi-lateral communication and get to the on-going dialogue that adds value for both us and the client.

3. Chris Koch Says:
   May 12th, 2010 at 3:07 PM

   Hi Dawn,

   Great point. We need to create a holistic lead management process so that we can give customers reasons to keep visiting our websites and engage with us.

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