At CRUXY&CO we meet lots of people who are obsessed with short-term tactics & vanity metrics. They think that the world of content marketing is a new discipline – an unknown for which they must hire a millennial & throw out the old rule book.
I am delving into this topic with the amazing team at Raconteur soon and it got me thinking about #futurecontent.
Why is everyone losing sight of the fundamental building blocks of growth strategy?
The phrase “lipstick on a pig” certainly springs to mind. The terms “content marketing”, “thought leadership” & “white paper” do not even seem to mean anything anymore (she says, posting an article…).
What I am really intrigued by are the dark roots of business strategy, and how they weave into marketing.
These are the same as they have always been. Surely a sharp understanding of these things is what should dictate our future – not simply an obsession with the latest way to blast our message to the market.
The real roots of everything are not the channels we deploy but the reason we deploy them:
Not the thought-leader we want to become but the person with whom we want to engage, nor the article we want to post but the insight around which it should gravitate.
So what are the questions that have not changed in the face of so much…hmm… change:
- What is the insight about the market we should use to transform the business?
- Why should, & do, the audience care?
- Who are we really targeting? How do we avoid the tendency for vanity metrics & the quest to be all things to all people?
- What are the hopes, fears & dreams of our audience?
- What will it take to engage them in a way they don’t believe is possible?
I’ll be delving deeper into this at Raconteur’s upcoming event on Back to the Future of Content Marketing. Prepare for punch & provocation…oh & a good dose of the past to learn from for our future.
