The American Chemical Society uses content marketing to attract scientists to their products - journals, which contain more content. How do they do it? How do they persuade scientists to publish in their journals?
Of course scientists care about Impact Factor. But that is a feature. ACS goes beyond that to tell a story about the journal and the editors behind it. The idea is to make scientists want to be part of the same story.
Wendy Wise, the Assistant Director for Content Marketing described for me some of the approaches they take.
One is to focus not on the journal itself but the editors behind the journals (active researchers themselves) their work, and their vision. To cut through the clutter, they produced a series called In the Lab, telling the story in a different way. They employed a 360-degree camera to take photos of the editors own research labs. Curiosity about where people work and learning more about them creates an affinity toward them.
For the launch of a new open access journal, they did a novel teaser campaign with interactive content. The team took advantage of digital scratch-off (like a lottery ticket) to give clues about the new journal. This tactic gathered 10,000 subscribers to the email list for the new journal. That worked well because scientists want to solve problems.
Wendy says the key to all their content marketing is to make it stand out. It needs to be different enough to knock people off guard and make them pay attention.
Share this post