Content marketing will eat magazine publishers in 2016
I was recently scanning the marketing news for interesting articles, analysis, and trends.
After reading for an hour, I discovered I’d not once visited a website of an established publishing brand, such at Marketing Week. I’d, instead, jumped from blog to blog.
This is how I seem to consume content now. And it’s not just marketing content — it’s technology analysis, political news, and financial opinion. I rarely, if ever, consume my reading material through a major publishing brand.
And I don’t read magazines unless I pick them up physically, usually in an airport.
Like a water strider (those insects that walk on water) I skit around on the surface of the Internet, guided by social news websites and social bookmarking sites, rather than going to marketing websites which are owned by publishers.
The death of magazines?
Content marketing has eaten the magazine industry.
And this year, I predict, that content marketers will take the next, and perhaps final, step towards the death of the magazine industry once and for all.
So far, content marketers have concentrated on creating pieces of ‘destination content’.
Standalone articles and resources that draw in eyeballs. This content usually touts the content marketers’ products and services, or establishes their reputations, encouraging readers to register for more articles.
This differs from publishing brands. Publishing brands don’t specialise only in creating content, but instead in curating a reading experience across a number of different articles. Pick up a magazine; that’s the easiest way to see this.
A magazine might start with a short, punchy summaries of industry news. Then, there might be longer news articles. Then, a longer feature article. Then, it might go back to shorter interviews. The publisher is curating your reading experience across multiple articles. Creating a reading experience.
All these separate articles in the same magazine will be knitted together by the brand’s values and tone.
In 2016, content marketers will move beyond creating standalone content to — instead — creating immersive reading experiences across multiple pieces of content. We will see the emergence of more corporate branded online magazines.
How did this happen — and why we prefer content marketing to magazines
Why will content marketers turn into publishers?
First, a short bit of background: The emergence of the Internet has been a decentralising forced in the publishing industry. It has lowered the barriers to entry for people to create their own content and get it read by the masses.
The magazine industry, before the Internet, had the luxury of a strong brand, which meant that they did not have to invest in promoting their content heavily. They could rely on a stable subscription base and a captive audience.
Content marketers disrupted this model, funneling readers through social websites and driving readers to their content through SEO.
By the time that magazines had realised this, their audience had already been fragmented. It is only now that magazines are properly starting to recognise the importance of Twitter, email newsletters, free ebooks, infographics, how-to videos, and other content marketing tools.
Who trusts the general media now? No one
At the same time, the magazine saw its most valuable asset eroded — trust in its brand. Trust in traditional publishers’ brands has collapsed.
In the US, trust in the general media by the public stands at a terminally low 32%. This has been caused by a combination of a rising concern about the political agendas of large media brands and their perceived lack of accuracy.
This made the landscape ripe for content marketers to sweep in and swoop away disenfranchised users from established media properties.
The general perception among people that the general media is in throes of monied political and business interests, has also meant that readers are more willing to read content that they know has an ulterior agenda.
This means that the content that marketers write — which may have turned off previous generations for being an obvious advertorial — is now acceptable.
Content marketers are starting to adopt the practices of publishers
Against this background, we are now starting to see content marketers start to transform themselves into broader content publishers.
This makes sense from the marketers’ perspective. They get to keep the reader on their website — or in their broader content network — for longer.
Psychological evidence shows that the more a reader consumes a producers’ content, the more they trust that producer. Hook them into a content journey, and the marketer comes out with a reader that likes and trusts them more — and at that point, you go for the sale.
Content marketers are starting to recognise this now. We also see marketers adopting the processes that were traditionally reserved for traditional publishers, such as flatplanning.
This is where a publisher would schedule a combination of a diversity of content — from Q&As to news to features — which take readers on journey.
Many content marketers now have individual content schedules for clients, blending a diversity of different types and forms of content to keep their audiences engaged across many different pieces of content.
Greg Satchell, a business columnist, points out content markets should do just that in an article for HBR:
Content is a new idea for marketers, but publishers and producers have been doing it for a very long time. Over the years, they have developed best practices that have evolved and survived the test of time. Magazines have flat plans, radio stations run on clocks. TV shows have clearly defined story structures, character arcs and so on.
More revealing yet is that content marketing guru Simon Penson, MD of Zazzle Media, has suggested that content marketers start to think about their content pillars and editorial mission statement. He writes:
Any good content team will have this burnt into their retinas, such is the importance of having a statement that outlines what you stand for. This is your guiding light when creating content, focusing on who your audience is and how you’ll serve them. It should be the measuring stick by which you evaluate all of your content.
This is something that only magazines would previously think about. It reveals that content marketers are not only thinking about their content in isolation, but thinking about principles and values that unify their content.
So, where next?
It is clear that content marketers are now making a go for publishers’ most valuable asset — their reputation as curators of editorial journeys through content which is shares both tone and values.
As content marketers have over the last few years have built up marketing lists by collecting people’s emails, they now often have larger audiences than traditional publishers.
If they take this large audience and immerse them even deeper in regular narrative journeys, it is unclear where that leaves magazines.
Some people will say that there is always a role for the independence that magazines and independent publishers provide.
But look at facts: readers don’t think publishers are trustworthy any more, and the amount they care for editorial independence has also been diluted.
It looks like things will only go one way, and 2016 will be the year where these trends come to fruition.
2016 will be the year that content marketers finally eats magazines.
— Matthew Castleford
Matthew is a PR and marketing expert, who previously founded and edited a number of specialist trade titles. He wants people to send their reaction to this article to m@telecomspr.com.
