Brand Publishing: Be the Media Outlet
Struggling to find the right outlet to target your ICP? Cultivate your audience by creating a branded outlet.
If you are in charge of building your company brand and have a passion about your offerings and the market you serve, then brand publishing might be a terrific engagement strategy for you. The continuing decline of newspapers, magazines, and media outlets ironically has created a stellar opportunity for savvy companies - to create a brand publication. To become a media outlet.
While that may sound incongruous given the landscape of boarded up news outlets, the reality is, people are hungry for information and are looking for authoritative sites to guide them. Here’s what you need to consider.
Examples of Brand Publishing
Brand publishing is not a new concept. Outlets like Acorns, REI, and John Deere’s The Furrow are just a few examples of branded outlets that are emulating media companies.
In fact, John Deere, the farm people, started The Furrow in 1895. You read that right, 130 years ago. Its editorial is a rich mix of sustainability, securing your data, how tequila is made, fifth generation farming families – all of the thorny and even heart-warming issues that people who use John Deere machinery might be interested in.
When you take a look at The Furrow, you clearly see a media outlet - versus a typical marketing site. And that’s the point. The Furrow is a media outlet, with an editorial strategy to provide content that the visitor wants - versus the messaging the marketing department wants to send out.
But you have a company blog - isn’t that a branded publication? Yes and no. Let’s peel back the layers.
Difference Between Content Marketing and Brand Publishing
Content marketing emphasizes the use of great content to move people into the pipeline funnel.
The delivery mechanisms can be email, carefully orchestrated inbound, and paid campaigns. Typically it starts with a top of funnel piece to whet people’s appetites and alert them to a problem that they may not be aware of. Think of it like a did-you-know type of piece. “Did you know content marketing can increase pipeline?”
That piece should then guide people to other content that pulls people into the funnel. And while the stated purpose might be to educate people, there is a constant pressure on marketers (usually by sales management) to gate the content to see if a lead emerges.
With content marketing, the focus is on delivering information on the product, and success is measured by campaign lead attributions. You often spend money to drive people to content.
Brand publishing on the other hand is a much larger strategy. It is both the delivery system - and the sum parts of the content. It is not only about the funnel - but what the brand stands for. It’s a means of connecting an audience to its passions, thereby creating fans, followers, and yes, customers. The focus then is on the audience and creating content that meets the needs of the audience. The content is not just a tool but the product that can carry the brand to market and be monetized.
Success, then, can be measured by adoption, engagement and even monetization.
I reached out to Anne East, content marketer and strategist for John Deere to ask how she makes the distinction.
“Maybe it is just semantics, but I see content marketing as utilizing editorial or “advertorial” content to increase sales,” she said. “With brand publishing, I think that the brand itself has to be credible enough, and established, that it is not just aimed at increasing sales.”
It takes an enlightened management team to support this type of effort.
Why Content Marketing Is Not Enough
As noted, an ongoing challenge marketers have is that when people download content - we expect prospects to be ready to buy. That might work if you are selling cheese – and the content is a recipe for fondue. But as the ticket price or complexity of the sale increases, more deliberation is necessary, both from an individual purchaser and potentially, an entire buying team.
It gets even more difficult in B2B marketing when you are trying to convince an organization to rip out and replace technology.
If management is only measuring success by whether or not a person wants to speak to an inside sales rep, it is likely you will be disappointed. That’s a large expectation for a single piece of content.
“Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”
― Tony Robbins
If this is what you are dealing with at your company – then your company is not ready for brand publishing. They are looking for content to be attached to campaigns - and for it to be transactional.
In other words, with brand publishing, the emphasis is on the content itself. It understands that the content is not just a tool but it’s the product that can carry the brand to market and be monetized. The goal is to move people through their own personal knowledge funnel and establish your brand as the authority that your audience can count on. Here’s why the Knowledge Funnel approach works.
Exploring the Knowledge Funnel Approach
With the Knowledge Funnel approach you are meeting people where they are today - perhaps not aware of your product. Instead, look to cultivate a desire and a curiosity to know more by hooking them with rich, informational content. In essence, you are creating a built-in audience who may someday buy your products. And maybe they won’t. But because of how search engine algorithms work, interested readers beget more interested readers.The Knowledge Funnel is similar to the Pipeline Funnel in so far as you are looking to move them from one stage to the next. But you should not think in terms of measuring success by how many MQLs you get. Instead, think of the Knowledge Funnel as the PreQL.
This audience is not ready to buy - in fact buying might not be on the horizon for years. But they are investing in their own education. When they are ready, they are fortified with knowledge - knowledge that you have provided, and will be likely to be loyal to you and your offerings. Smart companies understand this.
REI’s uses product placement above a recipe - and includes a link to the Yeti tumbler in its store.
REI’s blog creates content for people who love the outdoors. Articles on Climate Change wins people’s hearts. A story on Why You Should Visit National Parks This Winter might get folks excited to stomp around in the snow. And if they do that often enough - they will be more likely to open their wallet to you to buy some reliable foot gear.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that is just a strategy for consumer goods. It’s the same for B2B too.
Brand Publishing for B2B
When I was establishing the branded outlet for Coveo, we knew people were often confused by the meaning of AI. Virtually every product out there is fortified by AI. But not all AI is the same. AI can run the gamut from simple rules (e.g. automatically put an email in a folder if it’s from a certain person) to deep learning. We wanted our audience knowledgeable so that they would ask us - and our competitors about the terms being used in marketing. We ran articles on the periphery: What was the difference between AI and machine learning? Generative AI and large language models? What is clustering vs classification? What is Word2Vec?
People reading those stories were not going to say, yes! I want a demo. Instead we were showing them that we knew what we were talking about to build credibility, and educating them on how to suss out the differences between us and our competition. When companies were in the market for a search and AI solution - they already were predisposed to look at our solution.
See the difference?
Yes, this approach requires patience, but then again, in B2B, companies loathe replacing software solutions. Depending on whom you believe, churn can be 5-60% a year. So if you are intriguing them today - they may not be in a buying cycle for some time. You can have your high-priced sales team flying all over the country, pushing out the estimated close date quarter by quarter. Or, you can continue this passive nurture and when your prospect is ready - they will knock on your door.
Monetizing Your Branded Publication
One of the advantages of a branded publication is that you can monetize it. Monetization might be in the form of actual paid ads, affiliate sales, or internal “ads” - such as a promo block to a white paper or to see a demo. The Furrow has advertisements, as it still wants to sell equipment and services at the end of the day but that’s certainly not The Furrow’s mission.
“The ads within the pages of The Furrow are doing the “awareness” work,” explained Anne, “so we’re lucky enough to be able to focus on our customers and their very real stories in the editorial content.”
The Furrow also has crossover pieces of how John Deere Precision Ag - (the harvested data from all your connected John Deere products) is helping farms become more profitable, more sustainable. This helps with moving people into the funnel as well.
And the images are glorious. No offense to purveyors of stock photos, but The Furrow (and its sister publications The Dirt and The Landing) is a master class in product placements.
Once you have a built-in audience coming to your branded publication - you can push out all types of offers. Think about what you would pay to have access to that ideal customer profile (IDP) at any other outlet!
More About John Deere’s The Furrow
The Furrow has been so … sustainable … because of its salt-of-the-earth approach to providing authentic information that farm employees - from management to its workers – are interested in. And it’s also a tribute to the management team at John Deere that they have embraced this type of brand marketing - successfully, for more than a century. That’s an investment in brand that few of us have ever been lucky enough to witness.
“The goal of The Furrow has remained the same for nearly 130 years - to tell stories that people enjoy reading and provide them with knowledge that they can apply in their operations,” John Deere’s Anne East said. “We tell stories of the human element of farming and ranching. And we share other farmers’ experiences in hopes of helping everyone improve their own bottom lines, or improve the environment. Or, we just tell an entertaining story that might hit home – whatever the case may be.”