Five content marketing lessons you can learn from magazines

You have probably heard the term ‘think like a publisher’ when it comes to successful content marketing, but, unless you’re familiar with the publishing industry, you may wonder what this actually means.

Your initial thoughts might, quite rightly, lean towards the vast range of content that you see in a magazine. Imagine for a second flicking through your favourite magazine…first up, you’ll come across news and short, easily digestible pieces. Next, there’ll be some longer features, maybe an interview or two, a review of some new products on the market, some competitions, photos and stories sent in by the readers and so on. All peppered with beautifully-designed images to make the whole experience much more aesthetically pleasing. That is exactly how you should think about your own content portfolio, however, there are other crucial lessons that you can learn from magazines:

Lesson 1: Employ a journalist

Magazines employ editors and professional journalists so if you’re thinking of expanding your marketing team then it’s definitely worth considering employing someone with these skills instead of, say, another marketing executive.

If you’re wondering how their skills would transfer, then check out this CV below:

Journalists are:

Trained to write in a commercially-neutral manner: this type of content gets shared much more than self-promotional content

• Highly skilled in storytelling: they are continually looking for stories and are able to re-create them using unique angles, making the stories unique to you
• Sticklers for quality: you’ll rarely see typos, bad grammar or poor sentence construction in a magazine
• In-the-know about media law, copyright, use of images etc
• Strict about editorial reviews, meaning no content leaves your building without being checked (if you’ve invested time and money in creating content, you want to be 100% that it’s spot on!)

Lesson 2: Create an editorial calendar

Magazines live and die by their editorial calendars – it tells them what content is being published on which dates throughout the year with all the necessary deadlines. Now, I’m not saying that yours needs to be quite as strict but having a fairly good idea of what you’re going to publish over the next few months will certainly be a massive help. I tend to have a 3-month agile calendar which includes planned content but also allows for reactive content depending on what’s happening in the industry.

An editorial calendar will:

• Allow you to give your employees/content marketing agency lots of notice about what you want them to create
• Ensure that your content marketing maintains momentum – the number one reason that companies fail at content marketing is because they stop!

Lesson 3: Don’t create content for content’s sake

A lot of thought and consideration goes into what content is included in a magazine. I’m pretty sure you’ll never hear an editor say: “We’re short of content so we’ll just have to throw that piece in!” Yet, I imagine there are many companies that, faced with an out-of-date blog on a Monday morning, will do just that.

They haven’t thought about who it’s targeting, what role it will play in the sales funnel or how to link it to older pieces to breathe life back into them. If you don’t consider these beforehand, you can’t expect a piece of content to generate a return to your business. So by asking the questions that a magazine would ask, this ensures that every piece of content enhances your portfolio as opposed to detracts from it.

Also worth mentioning is that your audience is fickle. As soon as they read a lower quality piece, they are likely to migrate and get their content fix elsewhere.

Lesson 4: Think commercially about your content

A magazine needs to generate revenue – if it doesn’t, it simply gets pulled from the shelves. Whilst your content marketing certainly needs to generate leads and sales further down the line (remember it takes time to build momentum) that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be thinking of it as a commercial entity in the meantime. It always needs to generate a return, whether that’s increased brand awareness, Google rankings, engagement on social media, time spent on your website etc.

Lesson 5: Don’t talk about yourself

And finally, the biggest lesson of all that you can learn from a magazine when it comes to your content marketing is this: You’ll never see an article in a magazine talking about how great they think they are or why you should buy their magazine.