Marketers Must Think Like Publishers And Publishers Must Think Like Brands

Reviewed and updated – Sep 2020

Quality content has become an integral part of the digital marketing and content arbitrage landscape, but both marketers and publishers find their efforts don’t correlate to higher traffic or conversions. Though this sounds discouraging, low returns don’t mean that investing in content isn’t right for marketers and publishers. The problem is that many marketers and publishers aren’t thinking of content creation correctly and end up squandering resources and time with an ineffective strategy or content creation solutions.

Publishers as Brands

Don’t know what we mean? Let’s take a deeper look at this idea. Every brand has a product or service that they sell to make money, right? An e-commerce website drives users to its website in hopes they will purchase something and the website earns money. It’s easy to comprehend. Drive people to my site for $X and hopefully, they purchase a tangible good that costs more than $X. The best way to ensure they make a purchase? Have a quality product for sale.

But what if you’re not selling a tangible good? What if the way you make money is by keeping the user entertained on your site through content? Going back to our previous example this means you need to drive people to your site for $X and hopefully, they click around on enough pages that you make more than $X in ad revenue. The best way to ensure they continue to click around your site? Have quality content for them to click to.

So, that’s just it. As a publisher, your product is your content and you need a quality product in order to effectively monetize your traffic.

How Publisher’s Mindsets On Content Are Hurting Their Bottom Line

There’s no way around it. If you’re a publisher who wants to monetize your site, then you must view content as an investment rather than an expense. Substandard content will hurt the reader experience, lower your ability to work with big ad networks, and easily have you banned from the big platforms like Facebook and Native Ad networks.

So, where does it all go wrong for publishers? Well, publishers need a constant flow of fresh content to keep their readers engaged. An always-on content tap often results in publishers compromising on lower quality content in order to just show new posts, but this is a dangerous habit. It can lead to diminishing trust among your audience, lower engagement, and decreased monetization numbers.

Writing an article, 2 hands on Macbook keyboard

Unsplash

There’s nothing better for a publisher than when a visitor likes the first article they read so much that they click on another. It means the content you’re publishing is of such high quality that people want to keep reading. It’s the Holy Grail of publishing, but if you’re not putting in the time, effort and money to create or obtain quality, original content, then your site will suffer.

This is why publishers have to think like brands. They need to understand that if their quality suffers, then their brand suffers. Readers will stop considering your site as a source of entertaining, trustworthy, and quality content, and you will begin to lose money. With poor content, those who should become regular readers instead stop by once and never return. You want an audience that reads multiple articles, engages in the comments and on social media and will come back again and again.

It also impacts your bottom line. The more quality articles you have, the more likes, shares, and backlinks you obtain. It translates to people reading more articles, and your revenue increases. Without that trust and loyalty, the bottom line drops and you’ll find yourself continuing to spend your days paying an overseas writer on UpWork only to never see that money come back into your pocket.

Marketers as Publishers

Many brands are under the impression that content is all that matters. Content is king, right? But low-quality content makes a content marketing strategy pointless. According to Neil Patel, only 42 percent of B2B marketers actually believe they’re effective at content marketing.

Publishers understand that the content that gets views and shares isn’t the humdrum copy that gets created in 15 minutes by some college student or for pennies from someone overseas. The content that produces results is the copy that is researched, curated, and crafted by someone proficient in writing creative, engaging copy.

Here’s a quick checklist of everything good content needs in order to succeed not only by Google standards but those of your target audience.

Attention Grabbing Headline and Lede

If you’ve ever thought “there’s just too much content out there,” we have some bad news — it’s only going to increase. More channels, more competition, more content. You need to find a way to separate your amazing content from everything else. In fact, according to Statistic Brain, only about a quarter of any given article is actually read. If a potential customer or client has 15 articles to choose from, or the opportunity to download an eBook, you need to catch their attention right away. A professional writer can come up with catchy headlines and ledes that get your articles read.

Grammar and Spelling

Have you ever been engrossed in a book or article and then suddenly hit a glaring spelling or grammatical error? It completely takes you out of the narrative, and your opinion of the book and author is diminished. English isn’t an easy language to understand, and many people have lost the nuances of grammar they learned in school. A sentence might look great to you, but in actuality, it might contain errors that spellcheck won’t pick up on. Good content has to be perfect enough that your audience isn’t distracted, and your authority isn’t challenged.

Write Something Worth Reading

There are countless blog posts and articles out there that recycle the same old insights and fail to offer or suggest anything new (or worth reading, for that matter). They instead focus on keyword stuffing, brevity and just having something finished and posted. Good content needs to be well-researched and answer questions or concerns that people have. It doesn’t matter If that content is a blog post, article or eBook. It has to be insightful. Don’t think about it as what you want to say, look at it from a customer’s perspective. What interests you may not be as valuable to your audience.

Set the Tone Accordingly

Take the time to discern who you’re writing for and what they would want to know. A business customer has more niche knowledge, so you can write at a higher level. There are many types of audiences out there, and each one is looking for something a little different than the next. If your target audience is comprised of business executives, then the tone should be professional and contain practical advice. If you’re writing for the general public, then it can be less formal, use more general insights or be part of a larger series.

Use NativeAdBuzz to discover which quality content is working today for the competition in your niche.

Give Credit Where Credit is Due

One of the most important aspects of any good article is providing credit to other articles or reference materials you used to create it. If there are statistics, then make sure there is a link attributing the study. If you use information or quotes from another source, make sure you include a link. This not only helps give relevance and authority to your article, but it might catch the attention of the original source material’s owner, and they might share your post.

Brands that have quality content and publish regularly on active websites get an SEO boost, better treatment by ad platforms and earn trust and loyalty from customers. Many times, it’s not within the power or ability for a business to craft this content on their own, so companies hire professionals to take care of it.

With content being king and the #1 solution for providing authority, trust, and engagement to your brand and website, it’s imperative that publishers think like brands, and marketers think like publishers. But, remember, it’s not the quantity of content that matters, it’s the quality.

Let’s use this blog post as an example. Hopefully, you found value out of this read and now the brand name, “Presto Media,” will stick with you in the future when it comes to your content needs. How meta is that!?