Why You Should Trust a Journalist to Succeed in Marketing

The words on the page are the tip of the iceberg of writing. When you look underneath, you see a mammoth amalgamation of all the hard and soft skills needed to excel in marketing.

Because every article and essay they’ve published is a piece of collateral, and the writer has owned almost the entire content lifecycle for each of them. They pitched an idea about a subject, argued for why it would connect with readers, conducted research, reached out to sources to coordinate and conduct meetings (interviews), chosen questions to build a narrative/tell a story that has a meaning, transcribed conversations and combed through them to pull out the quotes that best told the story, and synthesized all of that to develop and then refine their message (aka story). 

And it’s not until after all of those steps that they actually put words to the digital page, creating the final deliverable (writing the piece). This is where they shine, determining where words should be placed in order to tell the right story at the right length, drawing the audience in to read, learn, enjoy, and hopefully respond in some way. Their parameters are driven by goals like accuracy/truth and getting eyeballs on the piece and all the way through it. Before publication, they receive feedback from their editor and they’re often asked to clarify, specify, explain themselves, justify their choices. Collaborating with an editor involves give-and-take and, typically, at least a couple rounds of revision. Often, the inclusion SEO keywords are considered at this stage. Then there’s proofing (QA/QC). 

Once the piece is actually published, the outlet itself promotes it on social, and 99% of the time, so does the writer. That means they run mini social media campaigns, putting on the “marketing” persona, after having exercised the “pitch deliverer,” “researcher” and “writer” personas. Many writers have newsletters these days, so they promote their work in those as well.

Once the story is live, there’s the data analysis. An in-house writer has access to all their publication’s internal analytics, so they can monitor and guide future stories from nearly all the same data a marketing professional uses – visitors, readers, time spent on the page, clicks through to other pieces, number of comments, social shares, click through rates, and likes/shares from each social post the publication does about the piece. Freelance writers can access some of that information, because comments and social shares are often public, and they can also measure the performance of their own social posts/newsletters, and perhaps invest in their own analytics platform memberships to go deeper. And there’s the qualitative data as well: what the readers say about the piece in comments, social shares/posts and reaction emails, as well as what the editor and publication say about the work. Writers process all of this information and use it to make decisions about what to write in the future, how to write it, and for whom.

Finally: writers are never working on just one piece. They're usually balancing several stories, working through many different stages of the process simultaneously. Each story has its own timeline, unique audience, length and tone parameters, and structural differences.  

Almost nothing about writing marketing content (whether it’s a branded blog post, a white paper, a newsletter, a landing page, a product catalog, etc.) is going to be new to a good, professional journalist except terminology and formatting. They might need to adapt to writing much shorter material, and/or material shaped in very specific, perhaps unfamiliar ways, but that’s going to be a quick process because they’re used to meeting word counts and adapting to the needs of different types of stories and different publications. The thinking, communication, research, analysis, synthesis, collaboration and time management skillsets they bring – without even mentioning their skill at actually combining words to construct phrases, statements, sentences, etc. – far outweigh the brief learning curve required to “become” a marketing professional. They really are the embodiment of the “placid duck paddling furiously under the water.” Put another way: the words on the page are the tip of the iceberg of writing. When you look underneath, you see a mammoth amalgamation of all the hard and soft skills needed to excel in marketing. That's why you should trust a journalist to succeed in marketing.