What EPIC Content Marketing Teaches the Media Industry

I bought Joe Pulizzi’s book, EPIC Content Marketing when it first came out, but I’ve been a little slow in finishing it (life gets in the way of any good read). I’m glad I kept it on my desktop though because the value it provides me as a content marketer is pretty high. Why?

It’s a Content Marketing Guide

Whether you are just getting started or have been working in the field for a while, the guidance in this book is useful. Along with providing a view of how and why content marketing is important, you learn what the business model looks like and how to build a business case for your own company.

The book provides great advice and examples of how to build your own content strategy and manage the overall content process. For beginners, and even senior content marketers this information is invaluable because we all need to get back to basics at some point or another.

Do I have a favorite section or chapter? I really appreciate the strategy section. I had already read Pulizzi and Robert Rose’s book – , and this book covers some of that in a very practical way. But I think the key chapter for me is on measuring impact. There’s no one answer to measuring impact, the key is to “measure behavior that matters to your business”, but there is solid advice on how to figure that out and what some metrics look like. Another key point is to only give the C-level the information they need, and it’s not traffic or engagement metrics, these metrics may be important, but the C-level wants the bottom line.

This book provides me a set of examples and templates that I can use to put together my own Content Marketing Strategy Guide, a guide I use when I work with clients. But it’s also a guide use to develop my online magazine – Digital Tech Diary.

What EPIC Content Marketing Teaches Publishers

EPIC Content Marketing is a must read for anyone in the digital marketing industry, but I actually think it should be a must read for the media industry as well. I don’t have a traditional publishing background, I’ve never written for a paper newspaper (I did have an article published once when I was twelve, which was pretty exciting).

My experience has been completely centered around online publishing and what I’ve learned in the time I’ve been involved in this industry, is that the goal is about giving customers the content they want and need. It’s about knowing who your audience is and providing the right information to them when they need it. You can’t just publish content that you think is important. You can’t publish content that you think your advertising clients think is important. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality, it’s about format, it’s about voice, and most importantly, it’s about telling a story.

The content you create is based on your audience’s needs and you figure that out by applying the same content marketing strategy and principles. Create your personas, do lots of research, find out what type of content resonates best with your audience and figure out your engagement cycle.

But wait, publishers aren’t necessarily selling something, so what’s this about an engagement cycle? Aren’t they? They are selling their ability to more relevant than any similar publisher. That relevancy leads to stronger traffic and it provides a stronger base for advertising revenues. Maybe they are selling a print magazine, or a book.  Maybe they are selling a way to get more industry experts to write for them. Maybe they are selling “qualified” leads to advertisers. Everything has an engagement cycle, you just need to get out of the box and figure out what it is.

Creating a content marketing strategy for an online magazine isn’t easy, it’s actually a lot of work. The process isn’t identical, you will need to adapt some things, but the core ideas are the same. There is, to my knowledge, no book on publishing that provides the same type of guidance for building your online magazine/website. If there is, I’d like to get a link to it.

Pulizzi, and others, say that brands need to think like publishers. I understand that many of the principles of content marketing are based on the media industry.  But I think more publishers need to think more like content marketers. It is a symbiotic relationship and those that don’t recognize it from either side (publisher or brand) are in trouble.

Print this article

Share and Enjoy

---

---