John Bonini’s Post

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.

Investing in the long game, rather than taking the transactional approach to content, changed Ross Simmonds's life. Full story/conversation dropping tomorrow on Louder Than Words. Don't miss this one.

Free your podcast. That 45 minute conversation and/or interview you recorded? You probably have (at least) 3-5 blog posts expanding on insights that were shared… 6-12 social posts/threads highlighting your favorite/most surprising stories/insights from the conversation… A few editions of an email newsletter (repurpose those stories/insights from the aforementioned blog/social content here…) …All locked inside of your podcast feed. That's an entire strategy leveraging all of the channels/mediums your audience cares about. And if you’ve been podcasting for 6 months? A year? 3 years? Think of all of the stories, insights, and overall content you have locked up right now. Free your podcast. 

"The blog was just brand, period." Imagine not having to convince leadership that content is important and/or will work. That was Emily Triplett Lentz's experience at Help Scout where she led content for 4 years. They knew the impact that it would have in their efforts to foster an actual community around the content. This is what Content Brands do. From Louder Than Words #46. Out now.