Now Is The Best Time To Invest In Content (And Buy Newspapers)

Covid happened and suddenly all startups need to extend their runway, and everyone is in survival mode. Depending on who your customers are, you might need to focus on retention rather than acquisition, and so you need to rethink your marketing priorities: campaigns are pulled, new initiatives shelved, people furloughed.

I’m convinced that there’s no better time than now to build a good content marketing strategy to drive not only sales and increase revenue but help companies build better brands and ask themselves what they stand for. This is an opportunity to speak directly to your customers and key opinion leaders – including journalists. Create an authentic dialogue which, if done right, will persist way beyond the crisis and the rewards of which a strong brand you will reap when it comes to turning the marketing engine back on again. In the article, I try to share what’s top of mind right now within our industry.

WHAT’S HAPPENING FOR MARKETERS RIGHT NOW

With the coronavirus crisis, we are experiencing the biggest need for digital connection in human history, but many marketers have been pushed outside of the picture — well, furloughed or laid off. Marketing is often treated as a nice-to-have expense, so when the storm is coming, those teams are likely the first ones impacted. A lot of startups are now running with a very lean structure and outside performance marketing, all taps are turned off.

Naturally, due to the pandemic, there’s an explosion in digital content production as people are hungry for news and have time to produce more (e.g. web traffic to nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com has grown more than 50 percent over the last month as Nathaniel Popper from The New York Times highlighted). Brands have been seeking alternative routes to reach customers. People have more time to consume digital content and so community niches are becoming the new standard — just look at podcasts and newsletters.

Companies are fighting for customer attention and need, now more than ever, to retain them through annual subscriptions or nurture their relationship with them through content. Marketers are slowly transforming into attention hackers: they need to grow the sales pipe without spending a penny on advertising or external resources, which they used to rely on a lot — providers, freelancers, agencies. In fact, marketers are switching from creating pipelines to customer retention, which is a whole new world to explore.

MEDIA ARE IN DANGER. AND YOU DON’T WANT THEM TO DIE.

My take on this explosion of content creation is that it’s even more powerful (and necessary for them right now) to work with existing channels. It’s a unique opportunity to build a real relationship with journalists and opinion leaders, and see them as long-term partners instead of quick broadcasters of your messages, as often they are considered — by startups.

Most successful journalists are now their own media. Substacks has completely reinvented the game, disrupting the existing publishing model where a journalist with a big brand is tied to a media outlet. Niche is the new gold standard (some VCs even recently entered the paid newsletter market, like Nicolas Colin at The Family).

This crisis show us that free content doesn’t exist. There’s no better time to subscribe to annual media subscriptions — somehow we have never built a Spotify of media, which would be really helpful right now. The business model of media is really hard to maintain with advertising — now that advertisers are cutting all budgets, events not happening, all of the media have a serious cash issue. And you want them to survive.

We cannot stay forever on a freemium model and complain about behind paywall articles (or worse, switching all media to a native-ad ads model, like The New York Times is already doing). Journalists don’t convey messages (your fundraising, product launch) but are observers of the world, and here to bring information to the masses. What are the journalists you read heavily because they cover your market? Contact them and tell them what you’re going through. They are humans and also bored by covering COVID19 — they need stories and cases to build a better future and help spread good practices.

BE THE LEADER YOU WANT TO FOLLOW

I’m also particularly impressed by the answers of some leaders of the world, and I hope you are too — to engage with their existing communities (as opposed to making the growth machine turning faster). How you show strength and brand values through adversity is the most important thing for a marketer.

Salesforce’s pledge for a better local ecosystem in San Francisco, showing how local communities are important to these big giants, their commitment and brand strategy (with the superstar Brian Solis). Airbnb Brian Chesky’s open letter following their layoffs and how they are supporting their former employees is an incredible brand win for Airbnb. It speaks to the importance of communication, values and company brand not just within marketing — and it has a big spillover effect.

Queen Elisabeth’s speech on coronavirus is also one of the best examples of leadership in the world. She sticks to what’s important, the fundamentals, family and culture — as remembers Miguel Head, former Chief of Staff for The Royal British Household.

There’s hope. If you buy newspapers, invest heavily in your core values and share what you’re going through right now, we’re all going to be fine. We’re all faced with the same challenge, and it’s time to build what’s next for our brands — what do you want to be remembered for after this crisis? What do you stand for? Is your old narrative still applicable?

During a crisis, no matter which one, you want to cut intermediaries between you and your customers and have direct access to them. But that also makes you vulnerable if you have nothing to offer — your external (or internal) marketing proxies that existed to protect you from risks no longer exist (or you can no longer afford them). Go back to the basics. What you stand for as a company. Write this. And share it. Give back. You’ll be rewarded.

Thanks to Willy Braun, Sofia Lundvall, Marta Sjögren and Sarah Nöckel for their help on crafting this article.