Great start…
Thank you to those of you early birds who donated to my 100-Hole Marathon. As of this typing I’m at $870, so a little over $1500 to go. The event is May 12th and all proceeds go to children who need speech therapy. You can donate here.
Groundhog Day
Pam and I have been in Key West for 12 days now. From a weather perspective, it’s literally been the same day every day … mostly sunny with a high of 80 and a low of 70. I could not imagine a more perfect scenario.
We’ve been doing all the things in Old Town (the touristy section of Key West) as well as getting to the beach and watching nearly every sunset. They are remarkable. Each one is just a bit different than the last. The one pictured above I graded a 10 from the pier at Mallory Square. I absolutely love that so many people come out together as a group to watch nature do its thing.
I’ve learned there is such a thing as island time. No one seems to be in a hurry and there is a calling to enjoy the moment. I’m doing my best to lean into that.
Even though the article below is about business planning, I’m starting to enjoy NOT having a plan with our Key West adventures. Many times we’ve just set out on what Pam calls “look abouts” and we get lost. In almost every case, we’ve found something interesting. Last week we watched a large school of fish do a figure eight. Two days ago we found a parrot sanctuary. Yesterday we ended up watching a carnival cruise ship navigate their way into port.
My point is that planning is critical, but putting yourself in situations for serendipity to occur may be just as important.
Creating Less Business Stuff
In my last newsletter I talked about how the more stuff you own, the more that stuff distracts you from life. Soaking in the warm Florida sun has me pondering this even more. How possible is it for me to downsize my life? What difficult decisions await? How necessary is it? Will this more uncomplicated life relieve my anxiety in any way?
I’m not sure the correct path, but I do think it’s okay to rethink the traditional method of owning a home for the majority of our lives.
And I can’t stop thinking about George Carlin and his infamous bit about stuff. If you haven’t seen it, please make the time.
The basic gist is this: humans live their lives accumulating more and more stuff to put in more and more places. If we go somewhere new, we immediately need to get more stuff to fill that open spot. In Carlin’s words, “A house is where we put our stuff while we go out and get more stuff.”
Your company probably behaves the same way. How did we get here?
Corporate Stuff
When the web came along, we had to take all our product and service stuff and fill all the pockets of our website. The thought was, the more stuff we can put on the web, the more chance we have to sell the stuff we have. So when customers are looking for stuff, they know that we have the stuff they need. Then we can add even more stuff on our website so we can sell even more stuff.
More Places to Put Our Stuff
And then it happened. All of a sudden, there were more places to put our corporate stuff. Blogs were created, and we started to blog about our awesome stuff.
YouTube was created, and we created movies about our stuff.
Facebook was created, and we created fan pages about our stuff, hoping that people would comment on our stuff, and even share our stuff with other people who hopefully wanted to buy our stuff.
And then we created Instragrams and Pinterests of our stuff, we added TikToks of our stuff, and then we’d tweet that stuff out to see if anyone wanted to buy our stuff.
But we quickly realized that our stuff wasn’t that interesting to customers, and most of the time customers didn’t want our stuff and didn’t feel like sharing our stuff with others who actually may want to buy our stuff.
Enter content stuff.
Content Stuff
With customers not checking our stuff out on our website, and completely ignoring the stuff we talk about on our blogs and other social media, and then Google not ranking our stuff in their search engine, we found a better way: content stuff. Or better said, stuff that our customers find interesting or valuable.
This worked great. Customers started actually paying attention to our content stuff. Some even started to share our content stuff. Page views shot up and social shares increased from more people looking at our content stuff.
It worked so well that we were able to get more marketing budget to create more stuff, and hired more people to create more content stuff about customer stuff.
But the dream soon ended, because even though people were loving our content stuff, it wasn’t helping us sell our corporate stuff. Our senior marketers questioned why were creating all this content stuff if we weren’t selling more corporate stuff. From this point on, we couldn’t create any more content stuff until we started show that we could sell more of our corporate stuff.
Enter Strategy
Content without strategy is just stuff. There are two reasons why most companies are wasting their time creating all this stuff: 1) creating corporate stuff that doesn’t resonate with customer stuff means little to no activity, and 2) creating content stuff without a real strategy creates activity with no end result that won’t help the company sell corporate stuff (just ask your marketing leader the purpose behind your Facebook page).
According to CMI research, nine in 10 companies budget for and create content stuff. At the same time, the clear majority of those companies have no documented strategy for why they are creating all that content stuff.
For our marketing to work, we need to link the corporate stuff with the customer stuff through the content stuff.
In other words, we have to ask why we are creating the content stuff. Is it driving sales, increasing savings in some way or helping create better customers in some way (I call this sunshine)? How are we going to measure it? And what’s our hypothesis on how long this will take?
We need to really ask questions about our customers. What are their pain points? What keeps them up at night? How can we solve these problems every day, week, month, year by giving them amazing content stuff that will help them and at the same time help our business?
The intersection of your expertise as a brand and what your customers’ needs are becomes the central point of all the content stuff you create.
*****
So, where do you start with all this?
It might mean you stop producing stuff on multiple social channels and focus on one or two where you can truly deliver value. It might mean stopping a video product or a podcast to excel at an amazing enewsletter. Every company is different, and you won’t know until you start asking the simple questions like:
What is the purpose of this content?
What happens from the content? How do we measure it? Can we tie anything back to creating new customers or keeping our current customers happier?
I’ve found through my two decades in marketing that, generally, less is more and more focused is better than scattered.
Good luck with all your stuff.