Content for non-media companies
In the last edition of this newsletter, I expressed reservation aound the old cliche that “every company is a media company”.
First coined by former Financial Times journalist Tom Foremski almost 17 years ago - and later popularized by Gary Vaynerchuck - the idea that every company is a media company admittedly can be useful.
It can get you to what I would say are the two most important jobs of owned media - earning your audiences’ attention, and then building a relationship with them.
The problem is, as I’ve noted, that the job of a media company ends there. By the time it has achieved those two things, you’ve already seen the ads, and maybe you’ve signed up for a subscription. Now all that’s left is to keep it going from here.
That’s not going to work if you’re an asset manager, or a tech startup, or a consultancy, or almost any other kind of company that’s not a media company.
So what do you need to make it work? That’s what I’ll look at in this edition.
The anatomy of an owned media programme
Media companies can use what I refer to as a ‘bottom up’ content strategy: simply put, if your job is to get eyeballs, you can afford to throw a lot of content out and see what sticks.
If I’m a news website, I can publish and promote articles on a wide range of topics that my readers might care about, gauge the response, and then build on what I learn to get to something that my readers love.
Over time I’ll learn what areas to hire correspondents to cover, how much space to dedicate to each topic, and what areas to sell ads against. The product is the content itself, and any further products (such as events) can emerge naturally based on what the audience is interested in.
If I’m a company with an existing product set, I don’t have that luxury. I already know the problem that I solve and the audience I solve it for. Having the attention and engagement of my audience is great, but I can’t afford to dedicate time and effort to earn it only to learn that what they really care about is something other than what I’m trying to sell.
Of course, that doesn’t mean they have no room to adapt - a fintech can’t start doing cooking videos, but they might discover that their audience prefers case study content to thought leadership, or build in public-style updates to either. They can still learn, but their actions are more constrained.
Media companies can follow their audience almost everywhere, but others need to make sure they stay relevant to the wider business offering.
It feels truer to say that “every company is a political campaign”. They need to work with what they already have (whether that’s candidates and policies, or executives and products/services), and thread the needle between what the audience is interested in and what the company offers.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, because I’ve been trying to identify the different components needed for a successful owned media programme.
It’s not the same as what a non-media company needs.
Here’s what I have so far:
Components of an owned media programme
A clearly defined audience that you can build a community or coalition around.
An insight into what that audience actually wants. As I’ve said, media companies can learn this by publishing and seeing what sticks, but companies and campaigns need a source of real (and ideally continuous) insight into what their audience wants. This includes things like customer interviews, surveys, focus groups and analytics to test impact. This is important even for companies that have a settled offering, because they still need to test their frame and messaging to see what appeals. Having access to a source of insight (or hopefully multiple sources of insight), is what allows you to develop the next component.
A content strategy. Spray and pray doesn’t work, there needs to be a solid plan for what message to deliver, to whom, when and where. I would say that owned media requires that you take this one step further; identifying the areas to develop content that both keeps your audience engaged and brings you closer to your commercial goal.
’Strategy’ is one of those words that means something different to basically everyone who says it - some people mean a tagline, some people mean Clausewitz. For our purposes, a strategy has two components:Messaging - the key topics you cover, and how you cover them. In owned media this often includes a thought leadership strategy, with a compelling, differentiated view on the market you serve or problem you solve. In owned media, this also includes the value proposition of the content you’re producing.
Distribution - how you make sure those messages reach their intended audience at the right place and time, for the right price. This is where it starts to stray into tactics, too, because everything from which executives to choose for executive positioning to how to game the LinkedIn algorithm falls under distribution.
This is often where people spend the most time focusing, but without insight and a messaging strategy it’ll never have a meaningful impact. That said, once the other bits are in place this is the most fun part.
An organisation and systems that can keep the content machine running consistently. Owned media takes longer to show a return, and it can be a challenge to maintain quality, cadence and executive attention for the time it needs for the returns to compound. During that time, there needs to be people and processes in place to keep things running. This is easier if you have insight, monitoring and strong execution to help you land on something people want quickly, but in any case it’s a treadmill and that needs to be acknowledged and accounted for.
Finally, alongside people and processes, there needs to be some kind of feedback loop to measure impact and allow you to improve over time.
My plan is to use these areas as the basis for what I’ll cover going forward. This world is changing constantly, and if I focused on, for example, the type of posts that do best on LinkedIn, I’d quickly be out of date.
My hope with this is to focus on the timeless principles that will allow you (and me) to stay ahead even as AI accelerates and social media algorithms change.
Of course, AI is the elephant in the room here. I’ve left it out on purpose. My reasoning is this: it can help with all of the areas above individually, but it’s not essential to any of them. We’ll explore how to implement it, but that side of things is changing quickly, so best to cross that bridge when we come to it.
Of course, this is not a settled science, and the playbooks for making owned media work are still being written. So I’d love to hear what you think.
I’ve been blown away by the calibre of people who have signed up to this so far, so I want your opinion! Is there anything you would add? Hit reply and let me know!
Research & Reading
A well-known UK political operative just published a (very) in depth piece of research into UK voters. This is an apolitical newsletter, I don’t endorse any of the opinions in the research, but this kind of research is critical to parts 1 (defining an audience) and 2 (gaining insight into what they care about) as described above.
In the interest of balance, here’s an excellent interview with Zohran Mamdani’s comms director about how one of the most effective campaigns of recent memory was created (I think there’s tons to learn from political campaigns. It’s something I will definitely be writing more about in future).
Some more insight into what goes into LLM responses.
How was that?
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