📰  Journalists make better marketers

She calls herself the human exclamation point. 

Stacy Fernández started her career in journalism before pivoting into content marketing. But the nickname still holds within more recent marketing roles across fintech and video API. 

“Human exclamation point” is about the energy she brings to the room — but the real story is what happens before she ever gets there.

“The core of being a journalist is being a storyteller,” says Fernández. “I think that is the main thing that has carried over into the rest of my career.” 

Meet the Master

Stacy Fernández

Marketing Manager, Mux

• Claim to fame: Intent on making technical products sound human, she rebuilt a company’s brand voice, trading a stiff, encyclopedic tone for something warmer and more approachable.

Research first. Strategy second.

Before Fernández commits resources to a content direction, she spends time understanding the landscape. It’s the journo in her.

“Sometimes taking a week or two to take a step back, do an analysis, understand the landscape of something, can save you so much time in the end,” she says. 

That approach has served her well in strategies like tying evergreen financial content to breaking news, so a reader googling a recent event would land on something genuinely useful with the company’s name attached to it. 

“It’s helpful for us as a company if, when someone is researching a timely thing that they’re kind of worried about, we have an article that connects our product to what's happening in the news,” says Fernández. “You’ll be meeting people when they have curiosity around something, and when they have an emotion around it.”

Most marketers have in-house experts; Fernández emphasizes that marketers should always be leveraging these relationships. 

Where a journalist has to track down a source, email them, and wait for a reply, an in-house marketer already has the CEO, the finance lead, the resident expert sitting a few desks or a Slack message away. “You have these people at your fingertips,” she says. 

You can never ever overexplain.

During her time at StellarFi, a fintech company helping people build credit, Fernández’s journalistic instincts shaped the whole team’s content approach. 

Recognizing that their audience needed something that felt friendlier than stiff, jargon-heavy writing, Fernández spent months giving thorough instruction as the de facto editor on anything that went out the door. In the process, she shaped a new brand voice standard. 

“If you name a term, then you explain it right after,” she says. Terms like “utilization rate” required unpacking. Big blocks of unbroken text were out, too. “We need subheads, guys. We need bullet points. We need numbered lists, pull quotes — anything to make it more visually engaging.”  

The goal wasn’t to dumb things down. It was to make people connect to the content and want to keep reading.  

KPIs and ethics can coexist.

“That was the biggest difference between being a journalist and being a content marketer — suddenly having KPIs to hit,” says Fernández. “As a journalist, you’re an artist, man. You’re pitching what matters to you.”

Done right, that artistry can still carry over into marketing. “If you’re creating content that you know is genuinely useful to people, you don’t feel bad about it coming from a company,” she says.

As the connective tissue between creative and product teams, holding onto creative control can get tricky — but it’s still possible. Her soft skills have come in handy here. 

“Something that I try to do is be emotionally intelligent with people,” she says. If a team member pitches an idea that can’t move forward right away, for example, she’s direct about it: “It doesn’t mean that we can’t do this one, it just means that we are funneling more resources here, so that might have to wait a few weeks.” Her solution has often been to get all stakeholders involved in the same room or call where appropriate.

It’s the kind of journalistic judgment she’s thankful for, and applying every day on the job. Bottom line: “Hire journalists as marketers,” says Fernández. “We’re great, we’re thorough, and we’re on time.” 

Lingering Questions

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION

What will always be true in marketing, despite all of AI's advances?

 —Raffi Salama, Passionfruit 

THIS WEEK'S ANSWER

Fernández says: Good content requires curiosity. 

I write a lot of customer stories and love a narrative-driven piece — I find them a whole lot more engaging.

AI can write a solid anecdote, but it can’t get the anecdote out of a person.

I got the detail about how surprised a CTO was to get a call from Lady Gaga’s team by asking the extra question. I noticed a Slack thread about a customer who used Mux to get their lost videos back and turned it into a public-facing story. And more than once I had to let go of what I thought was the story and follow what was actually there.

Ask the follow-up. Get the description of what they saw and how they felt. Go beyond the “What?” into the “Why?” Pivot. Trust your instincts. Give your audience something worth the read. 

And it’s not just with writing. 

With email it’s understanding what motivates a person or blocks them. With events it’s going beyond the traditional happy hour and integrating an activity that creates connection (which is how we ended up running a Pogs tournament). 

AI can help shape an idea, but your curiosity is what finds it.  

NEXT WEEK'S LINGERING QUESTION

Fernández asks: What was the last piece of marketing that delighted you and why?