Amplifying content smartly

Content marketing is the freshly awakened giant, and consumers are flocking to brands that have engaging content to support their marketing. However, the media has had great, engaging content at its heart for centuries. Here are tips for marketers on how the media amplifies its content to reach the widest possible audience - focusing on a very personal case study where an article published in 5,000-copy magazine became a talking point.

How my content created national debate in Australia

True story: I once wrote a feature article for a doctor's magazine about the high rate of surgical births (Caesarean sections) in private hospitals in Western Australia. It touched on the 'too posh to push' sentiment, and the statistics I obtained caused a big stir. The article eventually snowballed into national media (TV, radio, newspaper) debate on the issue. People I knew outside of work were talking to me about it - and they had no idea I started the whole thing off.

So how did the story take off? The magazine where the article was published only had a distribution of about 5,000. The articles were intended to be read by those 5,000 doctors. However, the publishers were savvy enough to have a policy that whenever we published a story that could have wider appeal, I would write a media release about it and send the article and release to my colleagues in the mainstream media.

That's what happened with the Caesarean story. I sent the information to colleagues I had cultivated at the state's major newspapers, The Western Australian and The Sunday Times. The article was of interest enough for them to publish news stories about it.

At this point, my content had been amplified from 5,000 readers to approximately 500,000. Media has a habit of cross-pollinating, so TV newsrooms might glean news for their 6:00 pm programmes from breaking news they read about in the daily newspapers. Radio stations could pick up on the TV news and their talkback DJs would spin the issue into that evening's talkback discussions with listeners.

This is what happened with my article. From my initial 5,000 readers in a specific profession, the content had been amplified to 25 million people who were exposed to the TV and radio coverage. It is one of my proudest moments as a journalist and content producer.

Channels, channels, channels

Content marketers can replicate this success simply by using their channels. It's easy to do if you have a content amplification plan in place for your channels. For example, if you publish an informative article on your website, you can tweet about it or post a link on your brand Facebook, Google Plus, or LinkedIn company page. In my newsroom (for a niche trade and custom publisher), we have six regular print and digital titles.

Our first channel is print. This print content is published every two weeks to two months, depending on the publication. The print magazines have links to our websites and social media channels. At this point, we're priming readers to go there rather than trying to amplify anything.

From there, we republish the content on our publications' individual websites. This is the focal point for the amplification process. The journalists who work on that title then tweet about the article and post about it on Facebook. We also have fortnightly or monthly email newsfeeds, so the website article link is included, along with any new breaking news stories.

The author is Shane J Cummings, editor-in-chief, APN Educational Media. Re-printed with permission.

Link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse /article/20140917011952-218492316-content-marketing-lessons-from-the-media-about-content-amplification?trk=prof-post