Marketing Together #1: Market Like a Journalist

Hey Market[ers]!

Welcome to the first episode of Market[ing] Together!

I'm so glad you're here.

In 5 minutes MAX, you’ll read:

→ Peter Caputa, CEO of Databox, shares his hot take on content marketing

→ Databox's process for creating high-quality content at SCALE

→ A quick musing on creating content in B2B

Market like a journalist, not a columnist

“It's not about getting our perspective out into the market. It's about getting the perspective of multiple people, sometimes with varying or different opinions or perspectives, in one piece of content and putting it out there, like a journalist would.”
- Peter Caputa, CEO Databox

How a small team published 1,000 articles and brought together 30,000 contributors

If you want to create a content machine like Databox, Pete Caputa shared their 7-step process. Hear him explain it in the podcast episode at 13:00 minutes.

  1. Outline your research brief
    Include your angle, the people you want to contribute, and the questions you want to ask.
  2. Ask your questions
    You don't need to wait for anything formal. Take the questions you outlined in the brief and begin asking them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or your favorite social platform. To get the most out of your social posts, tag people you know, ask follow-up questions, and note interesting replies.
  3. Build a formal survey
    Create a formal survey and ask a couple of open-ended questions as well as some multiple-choice. The goal of the survey is to get facts you can leverage in your content piece.
  4. Outreach
    Ask people to contribute to the conversation and the survey. This will include invitations through social posts and newsletter mentions as well as 1-1 outreach. Allow your angle to be your North Star in choosing who to reach out to.
  5. Analysis and survey results
    Take everything your team has compiled and begin structuring it to fit the angle.
  6. Write the piece
    Databox has a team of 5 freelancers who are trained in their process. After the Databox team has compiled, analyzed, and structured the information they've captured, they have the freelance writers write the long-form piece.
  7. Make them famous
    Publish the piece and highlight contributors.

Watch the full episode

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Market Musings

In B2B marketing we talk a lot about the power and the impact of storytelling but we often don't talk about the importance of story finding. As I reflect back on my conversation with Pete Caputa, it stands out to me that his small team of marketers were able to create such a volume of quality content. Part of how they did that was their investigative process and part of it was their ability to hire folks who could ask good questions.

The other thing that stands out in this idea of story finding is that they dedicated a lot of time, energy, and effort to refining their outreach process. If you're going to be marketing together, then you've got to think a little bit like a sales team. How do we manage outreach? How are we going to get people to respond? How are we going to get them to want to contribute? You can't just send out five messages and expect five responses.

In tailoring their questions and in thinking about outreach, Pete and the team at DataBox have been able to create a ton of content primarily through contributors. If you're a marketer, you might want to look into story finding rather than storytelling.

(What do you think? Share your thoughts on LinkedIn and tag me!)

Until next time!

-Logan Lyles

P.S. If you want your company to adopt Databox's content approach, share the episode with your teammates and stakeholders!

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