What can marketers learn about content quality from a news outlet? Plenty, if that news outlet is Quartz. If you read my post How to Grow Your Audience From Zero to Millions in Less Than Five Years, you know that Quartz (“a new kind of global business news outlet”) creates content that people “freaking love.”
Yes!! Freaking love it! And immiscible, what a delightful word!!
— Jen Brass Jenkins (@chrliechaz) January 18, 2018
What would you give to have people freaking love your content?
The pointers here come from a talk that Jay Lauf, co-president and publisher of Quartz, gave at Content Marketing World: Deconstructing Quartz (QZ.com): How One of the Most Popular Mobile Destinations Grows Audience, Extends Reach in Digital, and Creates a Superior Content Experience.
Here are a few things that Jay and his team do that give Quartz readers palpitations:
- They base their stories on their audience’s obsessions.
- They surface each story’s “Thing” (kernel of interest).
- They nail their company’s voice.
Base stories on your audience’s obsessions
Does your content team base its stories on what your company wants to talk about? Or do you dig into topics your audience is obsessed with?
At Quartz, journalists don’t call their topic categories “beats,” as in a traditional newsroom. They use the term “obsessions.” The distinction goes deeper than semantics. From the beginning, this team has been choosing which stories to create based on their answer to this question: “What do we think are the obsessions of our target audience today?”
Quartz hires journalists who have the same obsessions as the readers Quartz wants to reach. “Every single piece of content on Quartz is somebody’s obsession,” Jay says. This approach “gives the content a greater chance to be engaged with, to be shared, to be a delightful thing.”
The labels in the screenshot below are what Jay calls “longitudinal obsessions” – categories that have remained part of the news app for a long time:
- Future of finance
- Language
- Science of learning
- “America First”
- Glass
- Fashion
In addition, the Quartz team adds timely obsession categories, such as:
- Modi-nomics (added during India’s 2014 general election)
- Olympics (added … take a guess)
- Bitcoin (added for six months during 2017)
Obsessions take other forms at Quartz. (It confused me at first that they use the term obsessions not only as a label for their news categories but also as a name for the weekday newsletter, which I talk about next.)
Last September, Quartz launched an interactive email newsletter called the Quartz Obsession. Each weekday, this newsletter delves into a topic a Quartz writer found fascinating (and thought the audience would too).
Here’s an example of an Obsession newsletter devoted to lava lamps:
The newsletters inform and entertain, mixing stories and facts with GIFs, videos, quizzes, and polls. The writers have fun with language – asking in the lava lamp article, “How did that bubble up?” – while going deep and wide into their topics with a diligence and delight evident in…
