It should go without saying that one of the goals of your company’s content strategy should be to entice your audience to consume your content. To increase the chances this will happen, you need to take the necessary steps to make sure your content is as thorough, timely, credible, relevant and engaging as possible for your audience.
How can you achieve that? A good way to start is to shift your mindset from marketer to journalist. You can still achieve the marketing objectives you want to achieve, even if you are applying journalistic practices to your content creation.
Here’s a quick look at some journalism practices that can help boost the chances that your content will be consumed—and effective:
- Be objective. Your ultimate goal is, of course, to sway people to your company, product or service. But sometimes the best way to get there is to create a reputation as an unbiased source of information. Educate your audience by providing objective content about the topic at hand, and let your expertise and performance record speak for itself.
- Ask a lot of questions. Thorough reporting is one of the most reliable roads to objectivity. Listen, evaluate, report.
- Cite multiple sources. One of your objectives is to position your company as a thought leader, and in the course of doing so position your company’s people as subject matter experts. Just don’t lose sight of the fact that they’re not the only experts. You probably don’t want to source the competition—but find third parties like industry analysts, association heads and others who will balance your company’s views.
- Put things in context. Part of being an expert is demonstrating your ability to analyze and contextualize. Use your expertise to put a topic in context, thereby showing your audience that you are the best source of educational content.
- Show where the story is going. This takes context one step further, and shows the audience not only why the topic you’re covering is important, but also where it is going. Forward-looking content further demonstrates your thorough grasp of the subject area and bolsters your company’s reputation as a provider of relevant content.