Something to believe in

Content marketing should have a purpose, and every piece of content you publish should have a clear objective behind it. But despite this reasonably self-evident truth, way too many ‘content marketing’ programs involve little more than publishing one thing after another in the hope that sooner or later something will (and I really do not want to write these words) “go viral”.

I talked a fair bit about content a couple of weeks ago, and one of the takeaways from that piece was that successful content is about more than simply appearing in search results or indeed attracting a lot of viewers or readers. I stand by my belief that sometimes great content is created by one person, for one other person, and if it changes that one person’s mind, it has done its job.

There are two sides to making that particular equation work:

• Talking to the right people, and

• Changing those people’s minds

The first is about targeting. I’m not going to talk about that in this piece, I’ve written about account-based marketing before and no doubt I will again in the near future. The really short version: in modern B2B marketing who you are talking to is a lot more important than how many people you are talking to. All content should be carefully targeted and also written with a specific audience in mind.

Like I say, that’s a subject I will return to. For now let’s focus on the second of those bullets: changing minds.

What prospects need to believe

“Changing minds” is actually something of a misnomer here. It can be important, but often it is less a case of moving a target from one position to another, but more getting them to care about the things that you would like them to care about, and that would make your product or service a natural choice. 

Either way, when it comes to the content you create, that starts with asking the question:

“What do I need a prospect to believe before they buy my product or service?”

Answering this question provides structure to your content marketing efforts. Indeed it adds structure to all your marketing efforts. It is also likely to turn up all sorts of interesting and previously unexplored areas for improvement across the business. 

If it helps, I usually suggest a framework for this activity which is used to categorise these beliefs:

• Things a prospect needs to believe about the world. So for my business, it might be something like “marketing is an essential element in business growth and it is right for start-ups to invest in marketing sooner rather than later”. This isn’t an absolutely perfect mapping, but you can often think of these as inspiration for ‘top of funnel’ content.

• Things a prospect needs to believe about the category. Which for me might include “Fractional CMOs represent a smart way to bring on board high-level expertise without committing to permanent headcount and full-salary”. Similarly to above, these are often appropriate top or middle of funnel content prompts.

• Things a prospect needs to believe about your own product or service. So again, that might be “Tom will roll up his sleeves and actually build my go-to-market engine, not just spout hot air”. These could be seen as potential topics for bottom of funnel content.

In fact, I would encourage any business to build a spreadsheet with three tabs and continually build and manage these lists. And for once, I don’t mind if the list gets long, as long as a sense of relative importance is maintained. 

Let me explain what I mean by that last point. I’ve written before about consistency of messaging, and resisting the temptation to move on to new things because you assume that your core message has already been received and understood. The examples I used were Volvo and Ryanair. Almost everything both those companies do in public is built around safety and price respectively.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t tell other stories. Your business has to tell multiple stories, and indeed constantly needs to evaluate, for the wider world and the individual prospect, which story is most salient right now. The spreadsheet is your list of stories, and it does three main things for you as a business. In no particular order, it:

• Ensures the business understands the challenges around sales and marketing: what we are actually trying to tell people. 

• Gives you ideas for new content, because every belief you need to instill is a prompt to create something to do that job.

• Keeps the content you create meaningful and purposeful, because you understand precisely what it is trying to do, and thus know what you need to communicate and what the next step you are trying to prompt looks like.

I believe a spreadsheet of beliefs is incredibly powerful. It provides the structure that both content ideation and clear messaging require. With such a spreadsheet in hand you have a set of questions to be answered, a set of conversations that need (or may need) to take place, and a plan of action. 

The limits of the list

Be clear, however, on what it is not. It cannot be seen as a list in isolation. It requires careful consideration and management, and needs to be adapted to market and product developments. It also does not and cannot make those individual calls about what a prospect needs to see right now. Managed correctly, however, it can ensure that when the time comes, you have what you need to hand.

Two final points worth making. Firstly, this process is entirely divorced from the tactical delivery of content. Whether you use a long-form blog post or a Tiktok video is a different conversation: the medium and the message are not the same and one does not dictate the other. Indeed some beliefs that relate to the product are never going to be appropriate for anything more than sales training and enablement.

Second, and most importantly, this is one of those activities in which you must be as self-critical as possible, and some of the beliefs you list may imply criticism of the company or product. With the best will in the world, many founders find this difficult. That isn’t surprising, sometimes it feels like asking a new parent for reasons why somebody wouldn’t like their baby. But it is important to be honest.

For this reason I would propose three rules:

• Create the spreadsheet and share it. Do things in writing. Do not sit in a room together and ‘brainstorm’ things: that is an environment that makes it hard for people to be negative (or even construed as negative) about the company.

• Work from data rather than opinion to the greatest extent possible. You have sales calls or conversations and notes in a CRM. It has never been easier to pull data from these and identify common themes. Don’t eliminate opinion entirely: prospects often do not or cannot articulate objections. But look at the data first.

• Insist that anything added to the spreadsheet is given a fair hearing. Don’t allow anything to be dismissed as ‘not important’ or ‘self evident’. Likely as not anything on there is there for a reason (even more so if it is backed by data).

What you end up with won’t do the whole job of content marketing for you. But it will help set you off on the right track.