Too Much Marketing Doesn’t Demand Results
More than 90% of B2B marketers use content marketing…
…but 58% of them rate it as ineffective. As in, little to no results.
Imagine it this way. What if 90% of auto manufacturers decided to use a new production method, but only 4-out-of-10 were able to get results. Would it make sense to keep doing the same thing?
Obviously not. So, why do we do this with marketing?
Marketing exists to produce results. What else is there?
The question is, is the problem with content marketing itself? Or is it somewhere else?
I vote the latter.
How To Demand (And Get) Results From Your Marketing
The problem with lackluster marketing isn’t first our tactics or process.
Marketing results don’t start with publishing content more consistently. They aren’t simply a matter of engaging your social media audience better.
Sure, those things help. But they’re not the primary pursuit of marketers.
When marketing focuses on tactics and process first, you’re simply left playing a continual game of catch up. So, let’s change the game for you.
Marketers must focus on big-picture results over the nuts-and-bolts of tactics and process.
This is because your tactics will necessarily change and evolve.This is especially true if you follow The 10x Marketing Formula.
You will be launching minimum viable projects (MVPs), running with lean methodologies, and learning from your failure.
Fundamentally, your tactics and processes serve your goals to achieve results. This means any marketing strategy that starts by focusing on them first is doomed before you start.
Instead, results depend on a focus on…well…results!
Achieving your growth goals will determine which tactics you keep and which you ditch. So, rather than focusing on activity, marketers must focus on growth.
Changing Your Marketing Culture To Focus On Results
This change requires a culture shift that centers around two questions:
- What results are you seeking?
- What results are you producing?
Once this shift happens, you can start to build up steam and momentum.
A great case for how this works is finding your competition-free content niche. At its core, it works by focusing on results first, then determining the tactics that will help you achieve them.
We followed this process at CoSchedule, and found our primary way of generating enough demand to achieve growth. And I’m not just talking about keeping the lights on and the bills paid…
…I mean genuine bottom-line growth directly attributable to going all in on competition-free content.
What Happened When We Found Our Competition-Free Content Niche
When we started, our sole focus was generating traffic. In turn, this would allow us to build a large, loyal audience and achieve revenue directly from our content marketing.
Here’s an excerpt from my upcoming book, The 10x Marketing Formula, that details how we first found our competition-free content niche:
When we began surveying our market competitors, we found lots of companies blogging. However, we immediately found a chink in their armor: their blog posts were following current industry best practices. They were working the same methods, mediums, and angles as everyone else.
Their posts were between 500- and 1,000-words long and included an image. Most of the time this image was a generic stock photo. Sometimes companies didn’t even realize they were using the exact photos as their competitors. Talk about a red ocean.
As we dug into their content and deconstructed it, we found another opportunity. Nearly all the blog posts and articles we found (even on major publications) were filled with the same tired advice. They neither told nor showed readers how to put the tactics into action. Instead, they threw out phrases like:
Make sure you work from a marketing plan approved by all project stakeholders. This will remove roadblocks for you down the road, thus increasing profitability and scope creep.
You know, the stuff you read that leaves you saying, “Gee, thanks for the same ‘expert advice’ everyone else is peddling.”
To us, it was apparent that our competition-free content niche would be:
Actionable and unique:
First, content that isn’t actionable is seldom beneficial. This is the stuff that tells what to do without ever showing how to do it. We knew actionable, how-to content would outshine anyone peddling fluffy advice. We also heavily invested into keyword and audience research to discover what unique questions our potential customer base was looking to solve.
This made it easy to identify topics we knew would:
1. Have a high-volume of search traffic,
2. Be unsolved by our competitors,
3. And ensure we stood out because we became the one-stop-shop for marketers with problems we were perfectly suited to solve (and, incidentally, so was our product!).
3–5x longer than average:
Second, our content was easily three- to five-times longer than our competition’s. Understand, though, length isn’t a magical formula for content success. Instead, longer content is nearly always requisite for actionability. You can easily dispense marketing advice in five-hundred words. Rarely can you provide advice and demonstrate, step-by-step, how to implement it. Length was never our goal; it was a by-product of content that solved problems for our customers while generating demand for our product.
Packed with free content upgrades:
Another element attendant to actionability were free content upgrades. We created these for every piece of content we published. They ranged from Excel-based worksheets to free software tools. And they always served the reader and facilitated implementation. This proved to be an incredible one-two punch, especially for building our email list. (More on exactly how to do that later.)
Include 5–6x more images:
Finally, we knew stock images added zero value. How does some guy in a gray suit scribbling nonsense on a whiteboard help a reader? It doesn’t. So, we hired a designer to completely own our visual content for blog posts. This meant we had custom infographics, charts, pull quotes, and more. And the best part was, we made them all insanely sharable. (In fact, one of our infographics was pinned on Pinterest over 100,000 times in just a few months.)
As a result, our content instantly took on a different flavor. Also important is we found that our team was really good at written content. Meaning we could hang in the competition-free space we’d identified, and do so quickly. We weren’t taking months to publish. Over the long haul, we’ve worked our asses off to do this better, and faster, than anyone else.
What Results Do You Want?
Cultivate a culture in your marketing team that’s obsessed with these two questions:
- What results do we want to achieve?
- What results are we currently producing?
Those answers will guide your tactics and processes. And long term, will unleash your team to produce 10x results faster than you thought possible.
If you’d like to go even further before the complete formula hits the shelves, sign up for our early access list.
Not only will you get the first chapter of the book free, but you can join the conversation in our private 10x Marketing LinkedIn Group.
I’m on a mission to help marketers get the most incredible results of their careers. And the 10x Marketing Formula will produce tenfold growth for anyone who puts it into practice.
So, start right now for free.
