How can you make content marketing work with a nitpicking audience, Goliath competitors, and a startup's budget? It's a challenge many small teams face. One of them, Parabol, an online meeting tool, turned to us to solve it.
We embraced Parabol's culture of experimentation to discover an approach we call content journalism: a mix of content marketing and brand journalism that catapulted Parabol's blog to more than 150k monthly visits.
Gareth Davies, Parabol's content lead, never questioned the potential value of content marketing as an acquisition channel. Their ideal customer is tech-savvy, searches for solutions online, and can immediately jump from an article into a Parabol-facilitated meeting because the product is self-serve SaaS.
How to make content work was the big question:
All these challenges are formidable, but number two especially so. How can you write for an audience averse to anything reeking of marketing, particularly when you're new to the subject matter and community? Gareth: "You can't sound exactly the same as everyone else and write these 20 articles that your competitors also wrote to show up on the search engine results page."
We noticed a pattern when Gareth, our strategist Kayleigh Taylor, and I immersed ourselves into the agile community and Google keyword rankings. Eighty percent of relevant content was created by either:
The result? Many useless content marketing pieces dominating the search results versus insightful but hard-to-find-and-even harder-to-read articles from experts.
We saw an opportunity to combine agile authenticity with Animalz's high-quality content marketing practices. We call it content journalism.
Content journalism sits between traditional content marketing and brand journalism. A content journalist blends in-depth research, interviews, and storytelling with SEO optimization and well-defined marketing goals. This approach results in high-quality articles that are authoritative and deliver business results.
The right approach for content journalism didn't come to us overnight. We iterated our way to this strategy over many months, made possible by three factors:
The Parabol blog has attracted more than 1.2 million pageviews since we first started experimenting with content journalism together. But you don't have to work with an agency or be focused on agile to apply this approach. Here are four tips that can turn any content marketer into a content journalist.
As a content journalist, you're never off duty. Like a reporter, you're always looking for interesting topics, people, and angles for future articles. You need to plunge yourself into the customer's field for a long time to become authentic and, perhaps, one day, authoritative.
Content journalism isn't for you if you prefer the narrow perspective of a well-planned content calendar. You're constantly reading, taking notes, and talking to folks to learn and discover new story ideas way beyond the regular call of content marketing duty.
Interviewing experts is a critical element of content journalism because interviews:
Traditionally, journalists are good at telling stories, whereas content marketers excel at SEO-optimized how-to recipes. Content journalists can do both.
You should, of course, consider the current keyword rankings for a topic if your article's goal is to rank high in the search results, like this Parabol article on Sprint Goals, a pure recipe. But keywords and search intent can also inform story ideas or the angle you should take for a piece of content.
On the flip side, a story might still be able to rank for a keyword, like this piece on agile implementations. It relies on and features many SME quotes but still ranks for the keyword "agile implementation."
Content journalists have enough SEO and journalism chops to know when to focus on SEO, when on stories, and when to combine both.
Seven high-ranking articles saying something is true doesn't make it so. And the agile community so hotly debates many concepts that their original meaning or intention gets lost amid the jargon.
"Tim did a really good job of cutting through the nonsense and the dogma and being like, let's actually look at what this thing really is and explain it in human terms versus lots of people claiming they know what it is and just copying each other."
—Gareth Davies, content lead at Parabol
Our content journalism approach allows us to create accessible, accurate, and educational articles about important agile topics. These pieces rank well and clarify subjects that confuse people. An example is Story Points: The Simple Explanation You've Been Looking For, which explains the controversial and often misunderstood concept of "story points."
Even if Parabol's challenges – critical customers, competition, and cash constraints – don’t resonate with you, the results of content journalism probably do: half a million organic visitors in just 12 months, over a dozen articles in Google’s top three, and monthly blog visits passing the 150k mark.
But before concluding content journalism is the marketing miracle you’ve been looking for, remember that this approach only works in the long run and requires an extraordinary commitment from everyone:
With the right team and support from your leadership, content journalism can be a rewarding and enjoyable approach. As Gareth summed it up: "Animalz’s content journalism strategy has helped us do an incredible job of building our brand through our content and helping us win authority in a very competitive content space.”
Tim is the Director of Marketing and Innovation at Animalz. He's also the creator of Lifeline, a pomodoro timer app for macOS. Tim lives in Koh Samui, Thailand. 🏝️
