Looking for a Great Content Marketer? Consider a Journalist

A couple of weeks ago I published a LinkedIn article introducing a content relevancy test, a five-question evaluation that every marketer should ace before beginning the content-creation process. (Does Your Content Pass the Relevancy Test?)

Those five questions, designed to ensure each piece of content you or your team generates delivers value to its intended audience, closely correlate with the Five Ws of Journalism — Who, What, Where, When and Why. That’s not a coincidence.

The overlap reflects the similarities between the core mission of a journalist and content marketer:

Provide an audience with new information that is relevant to their lives

That’s a purposely high-level job description. But it wouldn’t take much tweaking to make it more specific to B2B content marketing. Just replace lives with jobs and maybe insert clearly defined in front of audience, though many journalism-oriented publications are also aimed at a narrow demographic.

The point is that the skillset of a professional journalist aligns almost perfectly with the ideal job description of a content marketer.

Both, for example, should possess a natural curiosity, an innate wonderment for understanding the way things work. The ideal journalist and content marketer are also life-long learners, humbled by the immensity of the disparity between what they know and what they have yet to learn, but driven each day to decrease that deficit.

The two should also possess the ability to make sometimes complex information relatable to a broader audience, translating highly technical and often jargon-riddled source materials and data into something accessible to the intended audience. They also understand the difficulty of doing so without introducing inaccuracies or diluting its core importance.

Journalists and content marketers are also storytellers, experts in wielding the language and imagery (maybe with a little assistance from generative AI and graphic artists) into something informative and interesting. Both recognize the value of a narrative that leads content consumers through an end-to-end journey without getting them lost or distracted along the way.

Empathy is also a common trait among journalists and content creators. Generating relevant content almost always requires some strategic shoe swapping, putting yourself in the place of your audience. Without a sense of what your audience does, its interests, its challenges and goals and the obstacles in its path, neither the journalist nor content marketer will be able to deliver meaningful information — the “why it matters” of relevant content.

Good journalists and content markets also stick to the facts, i.e., the truth, and avoid bias.

I’m betting that last qualification induced a few eye rolls. Journalism, factual and unbiased?

Marketing, isn’t it supposed to be biased?

Fair questions, for sure.

Journalism has changed dramatically since I last worked in the fourth estate. Walls that separate editorial from corporate interests have crumbled or are now thin enough to see through. Reporters routinely bring their biases to work, or work hard to make sure their content conforms to their audiences’ biases. The binds between truth and journalism have weakened substantially.

Paradoxically, marketing — content marketing, specifically — over the past couple of decades has moved in the opposite direction. Putting out a white paper, case study or blog that doesn’t conform to the facts, that doesn’t align 100-percent with a product datasheet, blows a gaping hole in a company’s credibility and makes it an easy target for competitive attacks.

But what if the products you’re promoting, you’re probably asking, really aren’t the best on the market? How can you stand out without at least some hyperbole or exaggeration?

The core of content marketing is finding and focusing on the intersection of what your customers need and what your company does well. If your products or services can’t credibly be promoted as providing relief for even a single customer pain point or don’t have at least one unique selling proposition, then an army of marketing professionals (or a brigade of half-truths) isn’t going to help ring the register.

Which brings us to another similarity between journalists and content marketers: both are top-notch investigators. If there’s even a hint of a differentiating value or USP in your portfolio that links to a customer need, a content marketer who thinks like a journalist will sniff it out.

So, if you’ve got a content gap in your strategic marketing plan, consider filling it with a content specialist — in-house or contractor — with a background in journalism.