Brand journalism

Story-telling can help make brands resonate with customers. People love good stories. Stories help brands feel more "human" and allow brands to build loyalty and attraction.

Brand journalism can help all stages of the customer relationship--from the early, prospect stage to increasing retention with existing customers. Brand journalism is a form of content strategy and creation that can power news content marketing and Inbound marketing. Typically brand journalism focuses more on industry trends, developments and contextual stories than strictly promotional copy.

Brand journalism is about creating an experience for customers, leads, prospects, brand advocates, and even critics. Many stories within a company go untold, but could have meaning outside the walls of the organization.

Examples of brand journalism

• Interview employees (testimonials, backstories, career development, etc. to help provide texture to behind-the-scenes style stories)
• Expert interviews
• New approaches to product development within the company
• New hiring processes, and the decisions and pain-points that led to a change in hiring
• The small victories that help define a company: breakthrough ideas, collaboration challenges that lead to a new process, etc
• Any company quirks that help define and shape the culture
• Unique processes that shape solutions and outcomes
• Things that inspire team members (an inspiration board, team diary, etc)
• Whitepapers that provide challenge, goals, solutions and results for a project
• conference coverage
• keynote expert takeaways
• Video tutorials
• Company news updates
• Slideshows
• Employee or project team interviews
• Project team events with event reporting
• Business survey data that can be used to provide insights into services, processes or brand strategy

Beginning brand journalism

Brand journalism can be produced in-house or via an agency. Some brands benefit from a collaboration between an in-house team and agency. In-house teams can be privy to the internal events and potential stories that may go missed by an external team. An agency will most likely be better positioned to produce and position the stories and content, as well as measure the results.

Even companies that do not possess a PR team can practice brand journalism. For example, an enterprise could appoint members with brand journalism tasks from teams vested with existing online marketing, communications, brand management, social media or website management responsibilities. There is a natural overlap with these skills and responsibilities. Here are a couple starting tasks to begin a brand journalism practice:

• Establish an internal story-telling team. These team members should be vested with marketing / communications responsibilities for the brand. They should be on the lookout for story-telling material.
• Build an editorial workflow. Get approval on the story theme early in the process, before producing the story.
• Define internal stakeholders with decision-making capabilities for a brand's communications. With this stakeholder, goals should be established.
• Create an editorial calendar based on the goals your organization wishes to achieve.

Utilization of content

The brand journalism content can be used throughout all the standard marketing/communications channels, but the content may also allow the brand to expand their channel options with the introduction of new content. For example, enterprises that don't currently use social media as part of their marcomm strategy, may find the channel more approachable with the right content in hand. Also, brand journalism stories can be repackaged and reformatted for different channels, when appropriate.

• Website landing pages
• Homepage content features
• Blog articles
• Micro-site content
• Social media posts
• Social media channels (Youtube channels, etc)
• Paid promotions on social channels that point to landing pages
• eBooks, whitepapers or brand stories (downloadable PDFs)
• Videos
• Media: photo slideshows, galleries, embedded sidebar highlights
• Dedicated blogs
• Press releases
• Social accounts dedicated to brand journalism