Mark Rogers’ Post

Content marketing fails when it lives in a vacuum. When each piece of content covers a standalone topic, your content marketing motion burns out quickly. Creating blog post after blog post without a cohesive strategy that ties them together and leverages other content mediums is a recipe for failure. The move away from this vacuum and toward a cohesive, repeatable, self-sustaining content motion is what I call "Idea-Centric Content Marketing." In this motion, rather than distributing individual pieces of content, you're focused on distributing an idea. To do this, you have to work cross-functionally with product teams, sales, demand gen, product marketing, and others in your org to figure out what they need to distribute your idea. With the help of Tim Metz, I wrote about the concept for the Animalz blog. Want to read it? Just comment below!

We're hiring a product marketer - come work with me!

👀 I'm looking for a content-adjacent design freelancer. Basically, I need someone with design skills who understands content marketing. Content marketing at Freshpaint is as much visual as written. Yes, we publish written content, but I need someone to take that written content and help turn it into visuals -- slides for presentations, carousels for social media, video clips for social ads, etc. Sound like you? Sound like someone you know? Comment below 👇

Long, drawn-out content strategies are a waste of time. The most effective content strategy is often the simplest. I should know. I used to spend too much time creating long, drawn-out content strategies. They looked impressive. They sounded impressive. But ultimately, they were exercises in busy-work. Simplicity wins because it's easy to communicate, repeat, and adapt when necessary. A few rules to live by for content strategy simplicity: 1️⃣ Your content strategy should nest neatly inside the marketing strategy. What are the main goals for marketing as a whole in your organization? How can content impact those goals? 2️⃣ Your content strategy should work cross-functionally. Content can be the foundation of all sorts of marketing initiatives. Work with your other marketing counterparts to understand the content they need. Find commonalities between those needs, which brings me to number 3... 3️⃣ Your content strategy should result in remixable assets. You should get the most out of every single piece of content you create. If you're creating a series of video case studies, cross-cut them to create new blog posts, use clips from the videos as social content, create clips for the interviewee to share on social to help with distribution. The list goes on and on. Just don't overthink this. Write down your strategy in 20 minutes, and get straight to executing content. You'll learn more about strategy by executing.

Great freelancer content marketers are hard to find. I'm lucky that I've worked with a number of them over the years. If I had enough content work to hire all of them, I would do it in a heartbeat. But, I don't. So, if you need a freelance content marketer in 2024, start with this list: 😎 Aida Knežević - can quickly get up to speed with complex subject matter and write about it like a seasoned pro. 💥 Dominic Vaiana - leads content programs for powerhouse e-commerce brands and excels at turning SME interviews into compelling narrative content. 💪 Hsing Tseng - an expert in breaking down tough concepts and handling complex subject matter with nuance. 🚀 John Shieldsmith - a knack for learning niche subjects and experience with everything from emails to landing pages to ebooks and beyond.  ⚡ Emily Byford - brilliant writer, experienced across many industries, and can quickly flex into new subject matters without breaking a sweat. Know anyone else who belongs on this list? Let me know in the comments 👇

I've been quiet on LinkedIn for the past few months while planning a few big content initiatives at Freshpaint. One of those big initiatives is the "center" of our content universe. Every content strategy needs to have a "center." The center is a core concept that allows you to consistently come up with great ideas that can be repurposed into dozens of other content types. For Freshpaint in 2024, our center is our podcast, Marketing RX. We'll be launching in just a few weeks. I know everyone rolls their eyes when a B2B company announces it's launching yet another podcast. But, I'm actually not too worried about the performance of the podcast. What I'm most interested in is how we'll remix each episode to get the maximum usage out of it. Podcasts are great for finding unique insights and original ideas. We'll use those insights and ideas to inform: 📖 Blog posts - NOT show notes. The blog posts take the Big Idea from each episode and break it down. Readers should be able to read a blog post and understand the Big Idea without listening to the episode. 📺 Social clips - we record both audio and video so we can create short clips for Freshpaint's brand account. ✍ Social copy - similar to above, but doing both formats because sometimes people don't want video. 🤝 Sales enablement - guest interviews can inform competitive intel and sales messaging. ✉ Email copy - each episode will be featured in our weekly newsletter and other email. 💸 Advertising - episodes can be diced up into snippets for social advertising That's only a small sample. Remixing is my expected outcome. I don't plan to even pay attention to traditional performance metrics for podcasts like downloads and listens. I'll look at the whole remix package to understand the performance. (And in case you're wondering...yes, I'm still ignoring SEO in 2024)