John Bonini’s Post

One thing I’ve continually observed over dozens of discovery calls over the last few months: The aspirations don’t match the output for most marketing teams. *The aspirations* 💡 Establish more thought leadership, trust, and authority in our space 💡 Publish content that our audience shares and engages with 💡 “Be the favorite” content resource in our space 💡 Stand out from competitors (“everyone copies everyone right now in our space”) *The output* 😴 “Our current strategy is just publish more stuff” 😴 Use a spreadsheet of keywords to prioritize content efforts 😴 Never publishes first-person perspectives, either internal or of the audience 😴 Send a newsletter once a quarter (mostly links to company/product news)  😴 Dump links on social media to blog posts (mostly transactional keyword-driven posts) and product updates We need more marketing leaders, execs, and content marketers to spot the contradictions in their approach. Publishing more undifferentiated content will help no one –– not your audience and certainly not your goals/aspirations. Start marketing like a content brand. Not a content bland. (Sorry, I had to 😄)

Marketers from 9-5… 🚫 Use data from keyword tools everyone else is using… 🚫 Essentially re-write other top ranking posts for said keywords… 🚫 Use AI to help write more content faster… 🚫 Link dump on social media when the articles are live… Marketers after 5pm… 💡 Search Reddit forums for more authentic conversations around questions they have… 💡 Ask friends/coworkers/network for advice and recommendations… 💡 Seek out the perspectives of people they trust via content, interviews, etc. 💡 Join Slack communities to see how others like them are solving problems… In other words, we create undifferentiated content in our day jobs yet seek unique, differentiated perspectives when it’s our turn to seek out help, inspiration, or solutions. It's never been easier to stand out. That latter set of activities centers around first-person perspectives based on experience, observations, and just general points of view. You and your audience have these in spades. Why is that not the central input to your content and marketing strategies?

Content that is transparent, authentic, and written from a first-person perspective has always worked––well before AI. So why does it seem like everyone is talking about it now? For good reason––because going forward, it might be the *only* thing that works. Make the shift from undifferentiated, "here's how you..." content to "here's how I/we/us..." content. Your team's, and audience's, collective perspective is the way forward. Start there. It's never been easier to stand out than right now.

This just happened. Chopped it up for almost an hour with my friend Jimmy Daly for Louder Than Words. We talked a lot about what's working for both of us in terms of content. (My favorite/most important part of the discussion was how both of our philosophies have changed re: first person POV content in the last couple of years. Feeling stuck? Write/record something from your own perspective.) This one was a lot of fun –– the best episodes always feel like catching up with old friends. Look for it in a couple of weeks.

Most of my clients reference my newsletter, podcast, or LinkedIn content during our first discovery call, and, in most cases, I don’t recognize them as having engaged directly with my content before. There are so many people consuming your content (and buying your product/services) who will never like, comment, or hit reply. So, stop using engagement as the be all/end all metric for whether content works. Engagement does not equal resonance. You don't realize how many people you are reaching. Keep going.

You’ve got to condition your audience to expect great content from you. If you publish for a week and get little to no engagement, that’s not necessarily a signal for you to stop. So you published on LinkedIn for a week and got 5-10 engagements per post… Or you published 5 podcast episodes and are seeing 50 downloads per episode… Or you started a newsletter a couple of months ago and have “only” 350 subscribers… Give your audience a chance. Especially if, up until now, you’ve only invested in more transactional, keyword-driven content. You have to condition your audience to expect a different type of approach from you. That takes time. Sometimes, succeeding in content is a test of endurance –– how long can you and your team go on publishing in what seems like anonymity? The longer you can go, the greater your chance of success. Don’t quit before it gets good. 

Community is not a marketing tactic. There was some confusion in my post yesterday where I listed “No community” as one of the biggest problems/points of failure with content right now. “Oh, so we should create a slack community?” No. Community is the result of a message and content that deeply resonates with a particular audience. You can't go and “do” community like any other marketing tactic. It happens. It's when people reply back to your newsletter. It's when they write to you to ask when/where your next episode, email, etc., is coming because they're looking forward to it. It's when they bookmark, favorite, and save your content so they can always come back to it. It's when, unsolicited, they share your stuff with others and help expand and further your message in ways you can't do alone. The only way to "make" this stuff happen is by first investing in the other 2 points in yesterday's post –– original thinking and original research. Content that's uniquely you and your team. Could, at some point, create a Slack community to harness the existing community around your content? Sure. But that's not where it starts.

I want to talk to people who have ignored, or even bucked, keyword/SEO trends and have grown through content anyways. This is for Louder Than Words. Who should I be talking to?

Content strategies that *do not* heavily leverage the following will become increasingly more irrelevant over the coming months/years. Right now, these are also the 3 biggest problems/points of failure I’m observing across B2B. 😴 No original thinking: The earned experience and unique perspectives of your internal team are not represented in the content you create. You’re struggling to outsource expertise in your content and are wasting time and effort by looking at the same keyword data, from the same tools, as everyone else to find your angles. 😴 No original research: Your audience does not see themselves represented in the content you create. Your audience shouldn’t only be consumers of your content, but also participants through your own research. A one-to-one interview on a podcast. Webinars with industry experts. An email interview series. It’s all research and acts as raw material to create content that resonates in every other channel you care about. 😴 No community: Most teams focus their content strategy almost completely on keyword-driven SEO content. It’s purely transactional. It doesn’t build relationships. No one is waiting for your next content piece. They’re not sharing, bookmarking, or talking about your content. There’s no community of readers to help create the editorial momentum needed to break through any channel. The result? Undifferentiated content. If you think it's hard now to cut through the noise, it'll be ever harder next month, year, etc.

Add 👏🏻 value 👏🏻 natively. We’ve heard Amanda Natividad refer to this concept as zero click content. Now, we hear Ross Simmonds share that he learned what good distribution was by essentially doing bad distribution first. He did what so many of us have done –– link dump. (Who else can relate to Ross and has been kicked out of a subreddit for doing just that? 🙋🏻♂️) Link distribution *is not* content distribution. Distribute the insights, stories, data, etc., from the content. Not only links to the content. Play the long game. Louder Than Words #47 is out today wherever you get your pods.