London Shamen: Content marketing needs a newsroom mentality

Welcome to London Shamen, the FirstWord blog site. It’s a silly name but we like its implication of trusted guidance and dance music. When it comes to content marketing we think we’re pretty good at the first part.

FirstWord is here to help businesses translate their marketing goals into editorial that will be read and shared by their target audiences. You can read on our site about what we offer and why we think we’re good at it. I just want here to discuss newsroom mentality. It’s something we have discovered is often missing even from those companies that already “get” content.

What is a newsroom mentality? It’s about the rigour that’s needed to produce a newspaper or news website of dozens of pages and over a hundred stories every day. What is going on in the world? What are all our different departments working on? How do we synthesise that so that it fits into our world view and what our audiences expect? What are our competitors doing? What did we do yesterday that worked? And didn’t work?

Most companies engaged in content programmes ask themselves some of those questions, but not all and not regularly enough. I’m not suggesting that they need to publish hundreds of stories a day, but it’s no good publishing a newspaper yesterday and then not again until Thursday next week, and again the week before Christmas. Google and your audience expect a regular diet of engaging stuff, and for that you need some discipline to discuss your rolling editorial agenda on a weekly basis.

We are helping people to put editorial calendars together, which starts with understanding what the main messages of the year need to be. Then we can help you stick to them. It’s rigour that comes from a newsroom and is increasingly needed in marketing.