Content Marketing: Starting with first principles

An approach to content marketing that is bound to drive better content that your audience wants to consume

Content Marketing has many facets and can encompass a lot of different strategies and tactics. At a fundamental level, content marketing is a strategy geared toward engaging a brand’s target audience by offering, well, content that they find useful, entertaining, educational, inspiring, or delivering some other benefit that they care about. The goal of this engagement is typically to get the brand in front of future customers to build a level of trust, demonstrate expertise, show empathy, and connect at a deeper level with them. Content marketing is not a direct-response, high-intent conversion strategy. It is a long-term play.

A typical approach that many brands follow while coming up with a content strategy is to start with the channel they want to share content on. This results in questions such as “We need to be more active on LinkedIn. What should we be sharing?”. “Podcasts are growing in popularity. How about having our own to reach our audience?”. Or, “Blogs are a great way to share our thought-leadership. We could also get SEO benefit out of it”. While this is so common and feels intuitive to many, the problem with this approach is that you are force-fitting your content, which is not yet created, into a certain format and distribution channel. This invariably leads to bland, undifferentiated content in an already crowded marketplace.

If we flip this around and start with the audience and the content, the distribution channels and format will become naturally apparent. Not every brand needs to be on LinkedIn or have blog content as a way to show expertise.

Here are the steps to follow to come up with a solid content marketing strategy. They are built on first principles.

1. Voice of the customer
   Market research and understanding your audience is the first step. We often believe that our gut sense about what content an audience wants to consume is right, whereas it most often isn’t. At one of the companies I worked at, we did in-depth interviews with a sample of our target persona and found that 80% of them preferred reading long-form content rather than listening to podcasts. The reason 100% of the time was that they could glance through it fast and only read the most relevant portions of the content. A podcast episode is way too time-consuming to listen to not knowing where the relevant nuggets of content are. Trying to follow a trend would not have served us well at all, and would have led to tremendous frustration after months of investing in a podcast, or a YouTube channel, without any impact.

2. Identifying Content Gaps
   The is a ton of content out there. And there is little benefit and a remote chance that a brand will create the same content in a much better way. It’s possible, but probably not the best use of resources. Based on market research and desk research on content availability, content marketers should identify a gap they can fill. Again, the gap should not be viewed from a channel lens, but rather from, what Clay Christensen puts it as, “a job to be done” lens. What pain point or need will my content address for the target audience?

3. Gauge the potential and scalability of the content
   Once you identify a content gap, start working on expanding on the content area by exploring the possible formats to create the content in, how you’d distribute it so that it reaches the audience, and creating a 9-12 month rough/hypothetical content calendar. This will tell you whether there is enough meat in the content area to scale it over a considerable period.

4. Derive Inspiration from the right places
   The worst approach to benchmarking and deriving inspiration is to look at competitors. It will invariably lead to undifferentiated content. You do not want to have a podcast because a competitor has one. A great place to get some inspiration is from individual creators. Platforms such as Substack have given creators the tools and the stage to showcase their expertise. Most buyers trust content coming from individuals rather than brands, and brands strive hard to emulate individuals to connect with the audience. Creators can provide a ton of insight into how to talk about a certain content area, what format to use, and where to distribute it.

5. Who should the content come from
   Building off of the previous point, a key decision in content marketing strategy is to determine who the face of the content is going to be. Content could very well come from the founder of a company, rather than the company’s social handles. Videos can just as easily come from expert employees, as from the company’s YouTube channel. This is not just true for startups. Even the largest and most recognized brands have elements of content strategy that are tied to individuals, not the company brand. For instance, a lot of insights provided by Visa on macroeconomic factors affecting various industries and sectors are owned and shared by Visa’s chief economist. There is a different level of trust when content comes from an expert, rather than a company.

Some Inspiration: Here are two examples of content that may feel unconventional, but are beautifully executed.

1. Mailchimp Presents
   Mailchimp Presents is, in the words of the brand, “a collection of original content that celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit.” It is a streaming platform with documentaries, films, and inspirational series about entrepreneurship, marketing, small businesses, and more. Now, even if someone consuming this content is not in the market to buy an email marketing tool, when they eventually are, which brand do you think is going to be top of mind? How much more effective is this content compared to a series of blog posts on writing the best email subject lines, best practices for cold outreach, etc.?

2. Acquired Podcast
   This is a one-of-a-kind podcast that, believe it or not, has episodes that are 3 to 4 hours long! Albeit not part of a company’s brand, there is a lot to learn from the creators of this podcast. The purpose of the podcast is clear - to tell the stories behind some of the most successful companies and inspire founders and investors to apply the learnings. Once the purpose and content are established, the format becomes secondary because your audience is going to want to hear what you’ve got to say. If a brand starts by saying, “Let’s have a podcast”, they would never envision 4-hour long episodes. But if they establish that they want to go deep into the stories of great companies, there is no way they could fit that in a 30-minute episode. So if a podcast is the chosen format, then 4 hours it is!

So, let’s control our urge to create a blog, publish 2 white papers and an e-book each quarter, or share something on our company’s social handles twice a day and start with first principles to create a content marketing strategy that is bound to pay off in the long term.