What Rory Gilmore Taught Me About Content Marketing
If you’ve seen Gilmore Girls, you know that Rory is a light-academia icon. She rocks her plaid skirts and rolls with Sylvia Path but, is Rory really a scholar? Or is she secretly a born marketer?
A Marketer in Star’s Hollow is Born
In Season 6, Episode 5 “We’ve Got Magic to Do”, Rory is tasked with her most frivolous, yet perhaps most intriguing, project of the show — to make the D.A.R. fundraising event a success.
Organizing elite social events is not something Rory is familiar with. In fact, she is repeatedly shown to be a studious, introverted person with an enormous ambition to succeed in academics. But upon discovering that the event is turning out to be a flop, she immediately jumps in with ideas about starting an email list, advertising online, and creating a theme for the event in order to drum up attention. And it works!
Her ideas make this event the most widely known, and widely attended, D.A.R. event ever.
And yet, in the episodes leading up to this particular storyline, we watch Rory fail as an intern journalist. This is shocking to Rory because she doesn’t understand how all of her studying, and years of preparation, led her to become a failed intern in her chosen profession.
What was she lacking as a journalist that made her such a success at marketing the D.A.R event?
Attracting and Delighting the Rory Gilmore Way
After watching this episode too many times to count, I think I finally figured out what made Rory a stand-out star for marketing, but a less than stellar journalist or scholar.
Two reasons stand out to me:
She is interested in how stories can achieve results.
She is not interested in the art of story-telling from a literary perspective.
This might sound a bit dramatic at first glance, but I ask that you reflect on this for a moment, and really think about what good story-telling looks like from a marketing perspective.
For example, how do you think your audience would receive an email that opens with a 599 word sentence? I’m willing to bet it wouldn’t be received too well.
Yet, that is the length of the first sentence in Marcel Proust’s “Swann’s Way”— widely regarded as one of the finest works of literature, and read by Rory in an earlier episode.
A good content marketer doesn’t write to make art; we write to help businesses reach their goals. Sometimes this involves artistry; and other times, it means getting an email list together while wearing a WWII- style army beret.
And Rory innately understands this concept. In order to get people to an event, they need to know about it and want to attend it. Attract and Delight. Plain and simple. Anything more is distraction.
Content ≠ Literature ≠ News
While reporters and scholars can make fantastic content marketers, (and vice versa) the jobs are not exactly the same. Someone naturally suited to one type of role might not take so easily to one of the others.
Why?
Because journalists and academics can, and should, write about an interesting story for the sake of it being an interesting, bizarre or profound human experience; but the same is not true for content marketers.
“There is no content strategy without measurement strategy. Before embarking on a content initiative, irrespective of medium or platform, it’s important to know what you want to achieve.”
– Rebecca Lieb
In content marketing, there is a concrete goal in mind for every article, social post, email, podcast, and white paper. No content marketer worth their salt is writing something to express themselves or experiment creatively.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t express yourself or experiment with your content. It just means that, if you want to succeed in this field, your creative output should be tied to an end goal.
And while working for the sake of an end goal is another innate quality that Rory posses, she lacks the intense curiosity for its own sake that is required for both reporters and academics.
She doesn’t read A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway because she wants to understand what being an ex-pat in the 20s was like. She reads Hemingway to learn how to write better for journalism.
Rory is a utilitarian learner through and through. And when it comes to marketing, this results-oriented type of curiosity is a good thing.
In marketing, you can’t be so enamored with writing a beautiful opening sentence that it takes you a full day to finish the email. That kind of inefficiency can literally kill a content strategy.
Nature vs. Nurture: How I Became a Marketer
There are so many different kinds of people in the world, and we are all good at different things. In my opinion, Rory is a born marketer, but she teaches herself to become a scholar, and later a freelance journalist.
Like Rory, I also followed a career path that sat just outside of my comfort zone. Learning how to be a better content writer, strategist and marketer has been one of my greatest adventures and challenges.
And, it takes time to get it figured out. But, by embracing the methods and mindset of people like Rory Gilmore, I have been able to find the art in content marketing that some might miss.
Because the art of content marketing is the art of Rory Gilmore — it is graceful, methodical, focused, ambitious, and always with a strong goal in mind.