Four steps to discovering your newscraft story

Here's an excerpt from my latest book, "Newscraft: How to produce brand-journalism content that attracts customers and sells more product."

Getting through the research phase may seem tedious, but it is essential. The good news is this process will shorten greatly if you write several times for the same client, or if you work in a niche like health, or fashion, or finance.

But let’s assume we have a new client in an unexplored field. How do we approach the research?

My approach to research is adapted from the three years I worked as a financial reporter for the Dallas Business Journal.  I took on the beat knowing little or nothing about the world of finance. By the time I left the DBJ to join Levenson Public Relations, I had written extensively about commercial banks, thrifts, credit unions, investment banks, merchant banks, venture capital, stocks, bonds, initial public offerings, reverse IPOs, leveraged buyouts, angel capital, equity events, turnarounds, and that’s just off the top of my head.

Each time I wrote about one of those subjects for the first time, I had to bone up on the subject. It was more difficult then than it is today.  We didn’t have Google (though we did have Yahoo and Alta Vista). We didn’t have Wikipedia. So I would usually search for whatever I could find online (usually scraps of background information I had to knit together into a whole). I would also look for books on Amazon and documents on government sites.  Much of the financial world is highly regulated, so there tends to be a lot of background material available from state and federal agencies.

Once I had a working knowledge, I would look for an expert in the subject who would be willing to brief me over a lunch or over drinks.  Only then did I feel ready to pursue an actual news story on that particular subject.

Home-court advantage

As a brand journalist, you have a major advantage. A lot of that information is yours for the asking from your client’s archives and your client’s in-house experts.  Whatever you can’t get from your client is now readily available through Google and Wikipedia.

Usually your clients know the product they want you to promote. They often already know the audience they want to target. You can get about 80 percent of what you need just by studying whatever the marketing department has already generated: studies, fact sheets, brochures, white papers, Power Points, advertisements, radio commercials, TV commercials and such.

Rarely does a client ask the brand journalist to generate these materials. Most often, the client is just looking for you to present the most important, most interesting, more pertinent, more persuasive, most saleable elements of all this information in a way that most appeals to customers.

So ask. Then go study.

When I’m going through these materials, I’m using a highlighter and I’m taking notes.  What am I looking for?

The four goals of your research

When you start your research, there are four primary things you looking to find:

1. A general understanding of the problems that the product solves, and how it solves them.
2. A general understanding of the product’s market, and how the product is matching up against the competition, and any under-served niches within the market that the client’s marketing may have missed or ignored.
3. A specific understanding of the wants and needs of the product’s customers: What problems do they have that the product can solve?
4. A specific understanding of what your clients want to accomplish with their story: What specific audience do they want to influence and what action do they want that audience to take?

Once you understand your goals, you may not find the research quite so tedious. I actually enjoy research. I act like an archeologist, digging interesting artifacts out of stacks of company materials, and then arranging what I find into a story that will capture an audience. That’s what journalists do. We dig out stories and put them on display. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, and certainly more satisfying than writing news releases.

I approach my research in four phases.  You’ll get about 80 percent of what you need from reading and watching whatever the company has generated about the product for both internal and external audiences. You’ll get the other (and vital) 20 percent from talking to people in and around the company: the product’s designers, its marketing chief, its PR team, its copywriters and designers and its salesmen.

So here are the four steps I use to gather my research:

First: Study every document you can about the product, both internal and external.

The process of creating a new product – from research to development to production to marketing – creates a stream of materials: reports, white papers, brochures, advertisements, slide decks, web pages, research materials, speeches, presentations, and more.  Get your hands on everything you can and study it diligently.

Even a new product will produce volumes of market research and product reports. Get them. Read them.

David Ogilvy, one of the great copywriters of the 1950s, started his research with the product. He would get copies of everything his client had produced about a product the client wanted to advertise.  He would hole up in his study at home and just read, read, read.  His goal was to internalize the information until he saw a benefit he could hone into an appeal that would sell the product.

“The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it,” he says in “Ogilvy on Advertising,” a book you should definitely read. “When I got the Rolls-Royce account, I spent three weeks reading about the car and came across the statement that ‘at sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the electric clock.’ This became the headline, and it was followed by 607 words of factual copy.”

You can find Ogilvy’s Rolls-Royse ad online.  It is generally considered a classic of 1960s advertising. You should study this and other Ogilvy advertisements carefully, because we will apply several of his techniques to creating the newscraft story.

Second: Ask a lot of questions about the product.

Document all its features and its benefits.

A feature is a specific aspect of the product.  A benefit is what it does for the customer. (A car may have a V-8 engine (feature), but the benefit is that it allows the customer to drive like a bat out of hell.)

Work hard to identify the most important benefit. But keep in mind that “most important” can change with the target customer.

Look for qualities like reliability, durability, economy, luxury and efficiency. How do those qualities stack up against the completion?

Is this a niche product or a mass product? What qualities does it have that the competition has missed?

Try to find someone is the company who is an expert on this specific product. Talk to the guy to lead the product’s development, or to someone who is selling the product in the field. They know a lot of things that never shows up in the marketing materials.

Third: Ask about the target audiences.

  

Who buys this product? Who is it meant to serve? What motivates customers to buy this product over the competition?

Remember, you are looking for something interesting that you can present as either a How-To story or a Ways-To story. Look for anything out of the ordinary. Are customers successfully using the product in unexpected ways to cure unexpected problems? Is there a problem the product solves that hasn’t been promoted heavily? Look for outliers. They can be gold.

But don’t just listen to the folks at headquarters. Go outside. Talk to the customers. Definitely talk to the companny’s frontline sales pros. They may have found uses or qualities that the client’s marketing department has missed entirely.

Branding pioneers Jack Trout and Al Ries call this “going down to the front.”  This means to go into the mind of the customer by observing behavior and asking questions.

“You are looking for an angle,” Trout and Ries say in their book “Bottom-Up Marketing,” one of their lesser-known books, but one you should own. “A fact, an idea, a concept, an opinion on the part of the prospect that conflicts with positions held by your competitors.”

The angle you are looking for is a common or emerging problem that customers can solve using your client’s product or service.

That angle is the nugget around which you can build your story

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Tony Schwartz, a highly regarded broadcast copywriter during the 1960s, called this process “pre-search.”  The goal, he said, is to find out as much as possible about a specific audience: Their dreams, their desires, their problems, their opinions and their attitudes. This information, he said, helps you to hone a message that resonates with this audience. If a message resonates with an audience, then the audience is far more likely to agree with the message and act upon it.

By the way, Schwartz wrote a book you should have in your library and you should study often: “The Responsive Chord.” It is out of print, but you can buy a used copy online.

Fourth: Find out what your client expects from your article.

Have a candid discussion with your clients. Ask point blank: What do you want customers to do after they read this story?” What is the call to action? Do we want them to:

• Race down to the store and buy the product?
• Ask for more information via a toll-free number or a web site?
• Share the story with their friends and family?
• Embrace the brand?
• Try using the product in a new way?
• Buy the product in greater quantities?

You have to know what the client wants your story to accomplish. Without that information, you can’t judge your success. You can’t hit a target you can’t see.

As a brand journalist, you will apply both Schwartz’s and Ogilvy’s approaches to research.  You will carefully study the audience that your client wants to reach. You will also carefully study the product your client wants to sell.

Your job is to find a connection between the two. You have to find something in the product that resonates with customers. Something they will find interesting. Something they will want to act upon right now. And you will have to find a news peg that will catch the customers’ attention and cause them to want to read your story right now.

Creating that connection between the product and the customer is everything: Catch their attention. Spark their interest. Keep their interest from beginning to end. Inspire them to act on what they learn.

That’s the job of the newscraft.