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Marketers Act Like Publishers, with One Exception

By Joe Pulizzi | Published: July 22, 2010

Jeremy Victor just published two excellent articles on how to think and act like a publisher (part 1 and part 2).

It’s strange, all this talk about being a publisher today. Who would want to be a publisher today? I’ve seen many of my friends, both executives and support staff, lose their jobs in publishing over the past three years.

So why all this talk about thinking and acting like a publisher?

Believe it or not, people are consuming more information than ever before. Even as newspaper print circulation declines, more people are reading the news today. When cutbacks were made at any one of the magazines where my friends were downsized, in almost every case, readership and engagement was at an all time high.

Engagement has never been a problem for publishers.  Today’s issue for publishers is monetizing the content.

As a marketer, you don’t have that problem. There is one clear exception between marketers and publishers.  Marketers monetize their content by selling products and services, while publishers sell advertising or subscriptions.

NOTE: Have you noticed the number of publishers that are creating products and services.

As a marketer, you need to prepare for the following:

  • Your marketing department is transforming into a publishing department. Just look at the activities performed by a marketer today (blogs, podcasts, videos, newsletters, webcasts and more).  Lots of publishing going on.
  • In the recent past, good content was enough to deliver on your marketing objectives.  The bar is rising fast.  Marketers who were early to the content marketing game only had to compete with publishers in their industry.  Today, we are competing with everyone.  Today, we need to own our content category.
  • Start understanding content curation. Our roles as publishers is not just to create content, but to position ourselves as the experts by being filters for our customers.  Get used to hearing about content curation over the next many years.

Still need some more motivation?  Check out this one minute clip on becoming a publisher.

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  • http://www.makegoodmedia.com Jeremy Victor

    Joe,
    This is so right on:
    Marketers monetize their content by selling products and services, while publishers sell advertising or subscriptions.
    Great insight -
    Jeremy (and thanks for the kindness.)

  • http://www.buzzedup.co.uk/ Mick Dickinson

    I wholeheartedly agree that content as a marketing tool is a no-brainer given the context you outline.
    The interesting thing is that a lot of marketing teams don’t yet have the writing skills – or the publishing mindset – to fulfil a content calendar.
    Some are now employing ex-journalists or business writers, a smart move. Others outsource (praise be!) and keep their overheads down, even smarter.

  • Mary

    Mark, you are absolutely correct. In fact, I AM an ex-journalist who was just hired as a marketer. The president of the company told me I was hired because of my writing skills. He chose me over several candidates who had “real” marketing experience. Just thought I’d share.

  • Mary

    Ooops. My apologies. I got your name wrong, Mick.

  • http://www.phaseware.com Jody Pellerin

    Having now read many of the articles this one links to and the links from those articles, I would like to inject the observation that many of the responsibilities and activities being ascribed to content curators have been performed by librarians in the past and these may be the people with the training to participate in content curation.
    Librarians have always been charged with determining whether a resource was authoritative (reference librarian), gathering information about a topic (research librarian), and keeping the collection “weeded”, among other things.
    Library and Information Science schools such as the School of Information at the University of North Texas teach and perform research about the very topics of most concern to those on both sides of the curation debate.

  • http://blog.junta42.com Joe Pulizzi

    It’s interesting that writers and (to Jody’s point) librarian-type skills are key to our marketing departments. I love it.

  • http://wealthwizard.imoneycenter.com Cody’s Marketing Tool

    Hi Joe, I absolutely agree with you that we are competing against more and more people every day. I write articles for some of my marketing and submit them to article site’s.

  • http://www.ediweekly.com James McKinnon

    Very good stuff. I love the concept of owning the content category, though it’s really difficult to do. Like owning top of mind when you sell something banal like plastic container caps.
    Thanks for the insights.