When we talked in our second module about the applicability of a journalistic mindset to content marketing, we imagine if you remember, a coherent brand narrative as a multi-section newspaper, where everything is a source of ideas. Of course, depending on the brand you're promoting, some topics or fields of interest will be much more appealing than others. But ideas for good stories like hidden everywhere, reality never disappoints a good content producer. Being original is ever more difficult in content work due to the volume of publishing every day. The tuning of the perfection for storytelling is quite a long process. You can't instantly teach people to have insights like experienced publishers. It demands looking at life and society in a certain way, and from our particular angle, from a certain distance, if you like. Connecting the dots between apparently unrelated facts, issues, areas. The term curation appears again with strength at this stage of the editorial process. Fewer activities will render more profits that looking carefully at media, analyzing which stories are clicking with people, and shedding a new light on subjects which have not been addressed properly or people whose story under a different approach could express your brand values in a much more powerful way than a more or less colorful description of products or services. The rise of How To Videos or podcasts is a very good example of this amplification of the thematic spectrum. There is almost no practical action performed by humans, which isn't demonstrated by a number of videos in YouTube or other platforms. They are the second most successful video category on the web. With the passing of years, they've condemned many specialist magazines to disappearing, why spend money on content I can find for free online and very brief instructional, easy to understand pills? Sometimes a secondary detail is more than enough to start a completely different story. Newspapers, in this respect must be a huge source of inspiration for content marketers. Does this certain topic I found on the arts or the sports' section really stimulate readers or viewers in any way? Have they maybe left the most significant elements outside may be due to haste? Can the characters portrayed offer connections through our brand in an unforeseen way? Should we maybe talk to them and do some research to find out if they could relate in positive ways to our content mission? Many time doing this search process, we'll find hidden gems that we hadn't even imagined, and we'll end up producing stories far more interesting than our initial purpose. Nothing is beyond the scope of human interests. If you start at tuning your vision to the discovery of valuable hidden stories, you'll soon achieve the goal of publishing content, which is interesting at many levels, where there is a brief short span entertainment piece or a longer more thought provoking effort. The sources of inspiration are out there every way, but it takes time and investment to produce good content. Fake news are cheap to produce. Genuine and relevant content is always more expensive, valuable, and worthwhile.
