Before my days as a marketer, my education and first career came as a journalist. They share some similarities in the tasks and skills needed, which is why my move is not that unusual in the industry.
Marketing departments are littered with former reporters who made the shift for one reason or another – potentially for less unusual hours, better pay, or because (in my case) you come into the market at a time when the print medium couldn’t figure out how to monetize this whole Internet thing.
One of the reasons we see such a crossover of talent from one area to the other is in those similar skills. And it’s a few of those skills that have led me to a core belief: if you have the opportunity, every marketing team should hire a former journalist. If that’s not possible, then you need to train your team to think like one. Or, as a solid alternative, seek out a partner who can serve as one.
I’ve told many interviewees over my marketing stops that one of the responsibilities of their role was to serve as an investigative reporter of sorts. I don’t mean that they should turn into Bob Woodward and find the next Watergate. But I do mean they should possess the following traits.
Why?
The job of a reporter is like getting tossed into the deep end as a child and told to start swimming. Editors hand out assignments with little information attached. Go find out about this story and have 400 words submitted by 6 p.m. End of communication. So you show up to a location or make some calls, completely clueless, and start putting pieces together until it makes sense.
Because of this, I learned (out of necessity) to be curious to the extreme. If you watched The Office, there’s a scene where Oscar is telling Michael why they need to spend a surplus by the end of the day and Michael’s response is, “Why don’t you explain this to me like I’m five?”
That’s what it often feels like, asking these questions, but it’s a critical step. Because forcing someone – even yourself – to answer seemingly simple questions out loud either vets the answers or shows their holes. Never take what is given at face value. There’s always more details and greater context. Most of the time, the people you’re talking to aren’t withholding the information, they just aren’t thinking about it (or don’t know how to verbalize it). And if they really don’t have more to say, then you’ve avoided wasting time on fluff and can get to more important tasks.
As it pertains to marketing, are you asking questions when receiving direction from the powers above, or just executing tasks passed down to you? Why do we need a new website? What problem were we trying to solve with this product? How is this platform better than this other one? Why did customers engage in this promotion and not the other one? Why are we focusing on first-time buyers and not loyal subscribers?
It’s not about being difficult, and you have to be careful to not come across that way. It’s more like homing in on a target. It’s tough to market what you don’t understand, and sometimes what is being asked is not the actual problem. The call for a new website may not actually be because of a specific issue with the platform itself. It could be the channels and activations not driving enough, or the appropriate, traffic to the site. Your $300K web refresh may be for nothing. Similarly, customers might not be using a new feature because it’s broken, but because of a lack of awareness. This context isn’t uncovered without asking questions.
It’s critical to press and dive deeper, both because you can’t get very far at face value, and because what happened is never the whole story. Why it happened is much more powerful.
There’s so much content at people’s disposal that in order to break through the noise, you have to find ways to make seemingly ordinary topics resonate with audiences. The readers have to feel something for them to remember it.
And what you learn is that the best stories are when the what is just a vehicle for the why.
My coverage of the opening of a new physical therapy business resonated more powerfully when telling the story through a boy with Cerebral Palsy who had tried countless other therapies but nothing worked until he discovered their horseback riding program.
The what of a company profile doesn’t stay with you as much as the story of resilience from a teen battling an illness. The same approach should happen with your marketing.
A two-for-one offer isn’t as enticing as a story of who your customers could be sharing it with. Nike’s marketing is successful when shoes are just a vehicle for physical fulfillment and healthier lives. Southwest’s Wanna Get Away campaign wasn’t centered on cheap flights, but rather how you can break free from the monotony of your life and experience something new.
Or, in another real example, a new ecommerce site allowed the company to manage greater volume and update content easier, which is great. But what resonated most with other prospects was the story of the new site allowing the marketing team to be home at Thanksgiving instead of being stuck in the office fixing the old site that crashed every holiday season, as they had been year after year.
Have you sensed another theme? News assignments and marketing projects alike are about events and goods. A city council meeting. Holiday shopping. The launch of a new phone. But the more interesting why always includes people. Make sure your marketing does as well. People help you build trust and remove CX friction.
But these stories don’t just appear. In a world driven by hard numbers and commoditized products, it’s up to marketers to ask the questions that get deeper into the heart of the topic. It’s something the best journalists do all the time, and marketers should follow suit.
