Achieving your most audacious goals doesn’t happen by accident. Explore the Authority Journey and what it takes to influence, lead, and succeed.
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NOTES:
Why do you create content? Traffic? Product announcement? Subscriptions?
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: a marketing campaign by Montgomery Ward in 1939.
- Copywriter Robert L. May: poem for a coloring book in 1939.
- 2.4 million free copies of the story were given out that year.
- 3.6 million by 1946 — when Montgomery Ward signed over the rights to May.
Content marketing was popularized in 2010. But it’s nothing new. Marketers have been writing poems, books, reports, magazines, magalogs, articles, posters, and more for the last century at least.
Great content marketing isn’t about:
- Your blog
- Your funnels
- Or SEO
It’s about authority.
It’s about attracting your best customers… building trust through thought leadership… giving your audience a framework for understanding how to buy products like yours.
Content is simply the packaging of your messaging.
It’s telling people what’s important, what they need to know, how to interpret the trends, etc.
Content for content’s sake vs. Mark Schaefer’s Content Shock. I saw a trend, but Mark led out with it.
You can do that with any format. You can do it through any channel. You can use different strategies with it (SEO, funnels, messaging bots, or channel marketing).
But content is simply marketing, sales, customer success. It’s the MESSAGE you craft for your customers, to make them smarter consumers, to help them succeed, to level up their thinking, so they feel confident.
The OUTCOME is traffic, trust, and sales. But those aren’t reasons we do content. When we do content, either as a brand or as individuals, we’re doing it to build authority.
Content for content’s sake — that’s what happens when you forget this.
- We’ve been treating like a hack.
- Wastes people’s time
- No real value: echo chamber
To succeed, content must:
- Be strategic
- Give value.
- Serve your audience
- Exist for a reason