It’s not fake news — content marketing is just like journalism
Content marketers can make more effective, punchy, and readable content by taking these 3 lessons from journalism
Think back to the last news article that you read (and given the current state of the world, I’m sure that you’ve been reading quite a few.
What do you remember about its construction? What drew you into the article in the first place? And once you started reading it, what kept you interested?
Astute content marketers will recognize those problems as issues that they face almost daily. Content marketing, after all, is just another question of applied interest gathering. As a content marketer, youre’ competing with dozens, if not hundreds of other marketers who all want the same tiny slice of readership as you.
Even worse? Not only are you competing for the same readership, you’re all probably writing about the same things. There are only so many ways that you can phrase an article about the “Nine Ways to Improve Your Medium Readership!” or “How to Increase Your Content Marketing Click-Through Rate!”. The truth is that there is exceedingly little “how-to” or “guide” content that doesn’t already exist.
They key to all this is how you author your content. Our previous series have gone into writing style and textual tricks, but there’s one last level we want to go into before closing out this series: how to actually structure an article to keep a reader interested.
Copying Journalistic Structure
Much as people like to think that they’re “disrupting” or have figured out a “new innovation” in the basic art of writing things down — odds, are, it’s already been figured out. Let’s take a moment, in that case, to look at a field that’s been doing this for centuries before content marketing was even a thought on anyone’s mind.
Most news articles start with a basic structural premise — the inverted narrative pyramid. As much as it may seem better to immediately provide the information that you assume your reader is looking for in the first initial paragraphs of your article, hitting them with that information can actually be somewhat overwhelming for your readership.
Instead, news organizations have innovated a concept known as the inverted narrative pyramid to ease readers into absorbing the content that you’re trying to provide to them. The beginning of the article is lighter on detailed content, focusing more instead on the exact and specific answer to a question that is being asked by the reader when they happen upon your headline. Given that XX% of readers stop reading content about a paragraph into articles, you want to provide your answers as soon as possible.
As people keep reading, however, it’s worth it to add more details and information to your content. This is where you add paragraphs of background information, for instance, or detailed tables and charts. The idea being that if you have a reader who has stuck with you until this point, they’re probably the kind of reader who wants the sort of details that the former provides.
Think of it as your simple, editorial pyramid scheme, if anything!
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines
We’ve all seen the articles that start with a provocative question:
“Are you doing this completely wrong?”
“Is the government secretly doing this secretive thing?”
Want to know a secret? They’re almost always answerable with “no”.
Betteridge’s law states pretty simply that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”. How does this work into content marketing? Simple. The point of the question isn’t to actually ask a question, but instead to foster a sense of interest in the reader.
The point of questions in headlines is to make somebody think about a topic that you want to think about as well. The answer to whatever your question is may absolutely and obviously be no. But the idea is to plant a suggestion in your reader’s head to think about a specific topic or trope.
So in that case, we’re taking another lesson from journalism. The point of our headline question isn’t to ask a question, but rather to subtly present a suggestion for your reader and readership to think about. It’s something that journalists have been using for years.
In fact, if anything, it’s the sort of thing that gives your readers a nice little self-affirmation if they read it and say “well obviously the answer is no”. Then they read the headline and the article, looking to either disagree or agree with the outcome, and get a nice feeling of satisfaction when they discover that they had gotten it correct.
Publishing in Series
As you can tell, we like publishing series here. We’ve done quite a few, from content marketing, to the Google Analytics API guide linked below.
Turns out this is another classic lesson learned from journalism. Journalists, especially investigative journalists, love publishing in series as well.
There’s a way to explain that cynically — if you publish a particularly meaty investigation and its results over the course of multiple weeks and newspaper editions, you get to sell more copies. Fun fact — the same theory applied to Charles Dickens. One of the reasons his novels are so long is because he was paid by installment, and wrote each chapter as a new installment in a periodical.
More relevantly, however, publishing something in a periodical series allows your readership more time to engage with your content and really learn about what you’re trying to tell them. Publishing everything together in one massive compendium can and is overwhelming, so breaking it up keeps things fresh and readable. Larger scale content is better suited for e-books and podcast series. That said, many of the series guides that you see online do end up being published as e-books, just like Dickens!
On a deeper level though, publishing as a periodical also allows you to get a better understanding of the various issues and nuances involved with each particular part of your series. Want to know more about a particular topic? Break it off into another chapter or part. Need to publish something ASAP, but your entire series isn’t going to be ready in time? Publishing in a periodical format allows for you to continue to keep your readership up and for people to keep getting your content, instead of waiting for it to all come out.
On a more tactical level, writing as a periodical gives you more hits on a blog and opportunities to improve your SEO. With multiple posts and articles, you increase the number of entry points for people to find your content and services, and hopefully get linked back to what you are doing.
So what’s the point of all this?
Journalists have spent years and years perfecting the craft of getting people to read dense and technical pieces about various topics. Not only that, but there are dozens of other articles and publications writing the same exact topic at the same time.
So in that case, all content marketers could do well to take a few pages out of the handbook of journalism and change how they write!
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