We invest a ton of time, money, and resources in content marketing. We know we need content marketing to even be in the game, but there’s a couple monumental problems that most teams neglect to fix about their own content marketing.
Problem #1: The way we were taught how to do content marketing doesn’t work anymore…and most teams still run the old playbook
I spend a lot of time thinking about the mechanics of effective content marketing. I’m habitual about evaluating the current landscape of content marketing and making sure I’m adapting to the changes. I’m a student not necessarily because I’m deeply interested in staying on trend. I’m a student mostly because I don’t want to waste my freaking time creating content that no one sees.
After studying content marketing in my role the last 3 years I’m confident that we need to stop doing stuff like this:
❌Hitting publish and hoping the search engines will do all the work for you is the easiest way for your content to go unseen.
❌Creating content where volume is the goal is the quickest way to burn out your team and get zero results.
❌Promoting your content with outdated paid strategies is the fastest way to get low quality results and create a disconnect with your sales team.
This type of content marketing is transactional and transactional content marketing does not create genuine results. If you can get by passing along vanity metrics to your boss and boss’ boss you’re probably fine doing content marketing the old way. You’ll scrape by for a bit or until someone inside your business finally asks the question, “What does our content actually do for us?”
Problem #2: No one cares about content marketing because no one on your team understands content marketing
We all want our content to help us grow, but before we grow we must resonate…and most importantly, resonate with the people who we work with.
I’ll never forget early in my career I had a CMO who would say, “We must market from the inside out first”. What he meant was that in order to get people on the outside to care about what we were creating we must get our people on board first. Many brands whiff on the internal marketing component of content marketing. When you miss this step your team doesn’t have the appropriate context and don’t care.
Sales will never care about a blog post that is published on Tuesday that results in a bunch of vanity metrics. In order to get sales to care about content marketing you need to include sales in your content marketing process.
Instead of creating and shipping in silos, start asking your sales team’s questions about their top prospects, pipeline, or customers who they’ve recently closed.
Content marketing 2.0 is reaching out directly to the future customers and getting them on your podcast, quoted in your next report, or simply mentioned on LinkedIn.
The best content marketing treats content like a product. You must develop a feedback loop with sales, customer success, and your leadership team. When you involve your people in content marketing your people start to give a damn about content marketing.
It’s 2024 and I’m coming in hot…and slightly over caffeinated.
Stop doing content marketing the old way. Start obsessing over the new.
Take care,
Brett McGrath
VP of Marketing, The Juice 🧃
P.S. I share a lot of data from The Juice on LinkedIn, too. Feel free to connect with me and drop a note.
The State of Gated vs Ungated Content Report
We dropped and promoted The State of Gated vs. Ungated Content before the holiday and feels appropriate to resurface it here as we enter a new year.
We analyzed the 300K+ pieces of content on our platform to understand how gated and ungated content performs. We share a few incredible data points in the report. A sampling:
- Most engaging content format for gated and ungated content (Templates)
- Average amount of time between a content touchpoint and deal being closed (162 days)
- Average number of content pieces that touch a deal (2.2)
- And lastly, ungated content is 26% more engaging than gated content when all other factors are equal.
TEASER: Next week we’ll start promotion on a digital event that will happen in January that will serve as a companion piece to the report…stay tuned!
How to Develop a Media-Led Growth Strategy with Rachel Downey of Share Your Genius
I’ve had a blast watching the Share Your Genius brand collaborate, partner, and do cool marketing with some of my favorite people in the community over the last year. It’s undeniable that Share Your Genius has implemented an impactful strategy to get their brand in more of the right places…that’s why I needed to have Rachel Downey on Modern Day Marketer to unpack her strategy with us. If you’re looking for a way to extend your brand reach the right way in 2024 you’re not going to want to miss this conversation.
🧃Listen to Rachel share her media-led growth strategy
What’s Catching My Attention on The Juice
The Aprimo Generative AI Guidebook
I had a blast talking with Felicia Newhouse, VP of Product Marketing at Aprimo during our digital event “How to Use AI Without Losing Your Brand Voice” in May of last year. Aprimo didn’t take their foot off the gas when it comes to creating valuable content around all things AI. Their Generative AI Guidebook has been a solid resource for me and many other marketers when trying to navigate the new world of all things AI!
🧃Read: The Guidebook
AI Writer vs. Human Writer: A Content Marketing Experiment from Hotjar
Well, it looks like AI is still a big theme going in 2024. I think we still have so much left to figure out and love how brands are delivering helpful content on The Juice to help us do that. I LOVED this experiment that Hotjar put together and documented regarding AI vs. Human writing. There’s a lot we can learn from this article and highly encourage you to check it out!
🧃Read: AI Writer vs. Human Writer: A Content Marketing Experiment
The AI-mazing Race: The Truth About AI and How To Use It For Far More Than (Bland) Copy from Goldcast
We’ll keep things consistent with the AI related content. I’m a big fan of Goldcast and all of the content that they regularly publish. This piece by the Goldcast team pushes us to rise about the run of the mill AI generated content and start using AI to stand out.
🧃Read: The AI-mazing Race: The Truth About AI and How To Use It For Far More Than (Bland) Copy
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