By This week, I’m taking a full 8 minutes because I want to address an incredibly important email from Russell Wojcik of Liquibase that came in reply to my previous 5-Minute Whiteboard on Content Marketing Evolving Beyond SEO:
What distribution point do we rally around if it’s not just keyword rankings in Google? It’s a fair question because, for many content marketers and strategists, the last 15 years have focused on little else. It can’t just be a single social platform—none of them are singularly dominant enough with every audience for that to make sense. Nor is it any one metric in your analytics. Unfortunately, the answer’s complex, and has to be tailored to the places your audience pays attention (which can be broad indeed).
So, instead of a single metric or particular platform, my recommendation is to anchor your content efforts around 2 fuzzier concepts: Reach and Resonance. Let’s dive in…
Transcript Below:
We’re gonna have a brief but serious talk about content marketing and actually content strategy overall.
So I I saw this, this post on LinkedIn from Dale Bertrand who’s who’s over at Fire & Spark. Very smart guy, very smart agency, and and does a lot of impressive tracking. Look what look what Dale’s up to. So he he talked about how, he generates zero new clients at most of his speaking events. He does a lot of speaking at all sorts of conferences and events in the marketing universe.
And at INBOUND, HubSpot’s big, annual event, he generated a thousand leads for the services team and spoke at these three different sessions. Dale talks talks about how that blows out of the water, all the performance of the other conferences that he goes to. And he’s got this very sophisticated traffic tracking process. Right? So he knows what percent of event leads convert into signed contracts, compared to overall contracts.
Quite impressive. And here’s here’s the thing that frustrated me and a few other people who commented on his post: there’s the thing you do that makes people first aware of you. Maybe the first time you heard of, you know, our company, SparkToro, was maybe with our fake followers tool back when we used to be reliant on Twitter. Or maybe it was from, my blog post when I left my old company Moz and wrote about, starting SparkToro, or maybe it was when we did our, unique fundraising round or speaking at some conference or event.
And then there’s the thing that brought the customer to you just before they buy, sort of the last click attribution. This is almost always the only thing any customer customer will ever remember. So if you were to use a survey that asks people, hey, how did you find us? You’re gonna get a bunch of this, maybe some of this, and none of these.
The thing that you did that reminded them that you exist. The thing that you did that had a positive brand impression with not the customer, but someone who happened to talk to the customer and turn into positive word-of-mouth. The thing they never saw but that made you better at overall messaging. It was practice.
I do a ton of this. I do a ton of content that doesn’t work, but it’s practice. You gotta do it. What about the thing that convinced them that had that they had the problem that your product or service solves?
And I’m saying all of these things have value and none of them are gonna be trackable in in Dale or anyone else’s sophisticated systems.
And so, you know, Dale’s got this, should he question like, should he keep speaking at these events? And my question would be, well, what if those engagements are what got you the thing thing at HubSpot? What if, HubSpot’s, you know, team for inbound never would have invited you if they didn’t see you at some of these? What if it’s the reps that you put in at these other events that made you polish your presentations to such a degree that when you presented it at inbound, people loved it. They went crazy for it. They came to you as customers. Or what if it’s just because inbound happened to be around the same time that interest rates went down and now a bunch of companies are thinking like, oh, maybe we should start to put budget back into digital marketing, which I think will be happening over the next eighteen months.
I had this other question. This came from, Russell Russell Wodjic, from LiquidBase. And in, LiquidBase, you know, is is in SaaS, b to b SaaS. And he asks, like, I I appreciate the wisdom of this is a post from a couple weeks ago where where I talked about how content marketing needs to be bigger than SEO.
And he says, yeah, content marketers know this, but it’s such a struggle to get attribution beyond search metrics. It’s so hard to evaluate non SEO activities.
If I don’t anchor content around SEO, where do I anchor it?
Okay.
Let me just point this out. All marketing is just this. It’s just these three things. Right?
All the marketing you’ll ever do, content marketing, email marketing, paid media, I don’t care if you’re buying billboards. You’re trying to reach the right people in the right places with the right message. So the only questions you really need great answers to are who’s the audience you have to reach, what do they read, watch, listen to, engage with, search for in Google, consume, what where can you reach them, what what conferences they go to, what highways do they drive down if you wanna buy billboards? And what’s the content, the message that’s gonna achieve resonance and reach?
So right people in right places. Let’s go back to, Dale’s example. So he’s mostly targeting his agents. He’s mostly targeting b to b heads of revenue.
Right? That’s that’s the kinds of folks. So, you know, there’s a couple thousand people who have b to b head of revenue in their LinkedIn bio or whatever, and you can see the places they go, the the things that they engage with, all that kind of stuff. This is this is good.
Like, this kinda solves that problem.
The message. The message is I think the thing that Russell in particular was asking about and and is struggling with. And I wanna try and answer this with my personal take. This is the way I do it, we do it. It might work for you too. My personal formula is one of these.
A topic of interest that I know my audience cares about. That might come from keyword research, but usually it doesn’t. Usually it comes from talking to people one on one. It comes from surveys we run.
It comes from, yes, SparkToro itself. Right? Because we we use our own we do dogfooding, right? We use our own product for this.
But also comes a lot from my email and, comes from, things that I read online on on LinkedIn, on threads, on Reddit even.
Relevant stories, right, that I have to tell that I think are gonna be relevant to other people. Product news, we do a lot of product news. Product news is actually surprisingly good for that bottom of funnel stuff even though it it’s not so great at the top of funnel. And data journalism.
Data journalism is works absolute wonders in B2B and in B2C. Actually, I’ve seen a bunch of examples of that. And then I try and add to one of these as many of these other things as possible. Is it timely?
Is it unique? Does it provide unique value? Do I have personal passion and interest around it? Because this last one is so important because if I don’t care about it, there’s no way for me to create the resonance to get you or anyone else consuming it to care about it either.
And then I try and add as many of these as I can to things that will generate emotion, inspire curiosity, answer a burning question, especially one that is not yet answered, or make that person, make the audience member, the person that is consuming the content feel seen. Like Russell talked about. Right? In his email to me, he said, gosh, this really resonates.
I think sophisticated content marketers know this, but it’s such a struggle. He’s saying I felt seen by your post. When I watch that video, when I consume that, I felt seen. That that is huge in creating resonance.
And the the two anchors, by the way, for all of content are reach.
Right, either content that achieves lots of eyeballs, hopefully many of them with the potentially right crowd, or and or resonance.
It might not reach to as many people, but it truly hits the sweet spot. It really resonates, creates, you know, a memory association, creates a a drive to wanna take action with the right audience and a smaller audience. So so going back to Dale’s initial point here, when he’s got his list of speaking leads and contracts, right, he’s got in red the contract sign, the leads generated in blue. Right? And he’s showing the the webinars and conferences and events, which which is fine.
I’m really worried about whether this is dismissive of some of the power of serendipity and the power of second order effects and the power of putting in the reps and the power of getting noticed in the right places.
I’m not saying Dale should keep doing every one of these events. That’s for him to decide. I’m sure he’ll figure it out. He’s a very smart guy.
I am saying I’m worried about this this mentality overall of if I can’t track and prove that it turned into dollars, if you can’t show me the money, then I should stop doing it. And I don’t think that’s the way to do it at all. I I I’m not actually a super fan of this meme, but I think in this case, it it does apply, right, which is sort of at the, at the rough end of the bell curve and at the high end of the bell curve. It’s just reach the right people in the right places with the right message and do it over and over.
And don’t be scared.
Don’t be scared to waste a lot of your marketing effort. I actually think, weirdly enough, that if you’re not wasting some of your marketing effort, if you’re not wasting some of your content, if you’re not doing wrong things, you won’t be doing as many right things either. And it is not all about the money.