Your Content Strategy Might Be Outdated | Ep. 2617

All right, so we're going to talk about the difference between old content marketing and new content marketing. So I'm going to share my screen over here. So there's a nice graphic that we have from Amanda that works at SparkToro. I don't want to butcher her last name, but she's got a— she's a great Twitter follow as well. But Amanda Nativdad, we'll just go with that. And so classic content marketing versus modern content marketing. For old content marketing or classic, however you want to call it, it's on the left side over here. So it says classic content marketing is informed by keyword research. Your key distribution channel is SEO. Your strategic goal is keyword and search traffic rank, and then you're looking for traffic. Content goal, you're trying to satisfy a search query. Challenges, you're beholden to search algorithms. And then value is you're more objective than subjective, right? So that's classic or old content marketing. Now, new content marketing, Modern content marketing is informed by audience research. So your key distribution channels, social media, your strategic goals are affinity, audience growth, sales, et cetera. And then your goal is to satisfy the audience's needs. Your challenge is you're beholden to audience and social media algorithms. And your value is it's more subjective than objective. And so we've said this a lot on this podcast before, that if we're to start from scratch today, we would not start with SEO. we would actually start with social where there are strong, there's strong organic reach potential.

But you can't ignore the classic method. If you look at that table, there was a classic method or in the new modern method. And I don't think that the modern method is better or the classic method is better. They both are still very effective. I don't see the classic method going anywhere, going away anytime soon. I think the classic content marketing and the modern is what's effective. And in business, what you end up seeing is like a lot of people will be like, oh, partner sales, that's an old way to do business. I know a lot of companies personally, like even in SaaS, I have friends that generate over $100 million of new sales a year, not total ARR, new sales a year just from partner sales. Like some of these older channels that people take for granted and aren't sexy anymore, They still work. Maybe they don't work as well as they used to, but they still work. Even social media, it doesn't work as well as it used to 3, 4, or 5 years ago, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't leverage social media marketing or SEO or have your content only work for SEO or only work for social media. Leverage each channel to its fullest as long as you can. Remember, something is better than nothing. And that's where I think a lot of people get wrong in their marketing. And this is where I think a lot of big corporations get it right. Big corporations don't look at it as like, man, SEO is dead, or, oh, social media algorithms don't work as well organically. Big corporations look at, we have this big number or target to hit, what are all the channels we can leverage to hit it? And go and figure out a strategy, come up with a game plan, and go leverage every single channel that can make us hit these KPIs as long as we can do it in an economical or profitable way. And I think that's the right approach that a lot of startups and mid-sized businesses get wrong. They look at it like, oh, this is dead. I'm going to focus on this instead. When you really want to scale and get bigger, you got to just accept the channels for what they are and leverage them to the full extent. And if you're not omnipresent and omnichannel, you're just not going to do as well in the long run.

Look, if you want to win in marketing, it doesn't matter if it's an old channel or a new channel. What matters is, It works, and if it works, then that's great. And what matters? Well, how do you find a channel that works? Simple marketing one on one. Where is your audience actually hanging out in the first place? Do your research up front, and then go market to them. Have good messaging. Have good creative. Have an amazing offer. It's the same marketing stuff we've been talking about for close to seven years, probably over seven years now on this podcast, right? And so, SEO isn't dead. We just said in the last episode, it's like, oh my god, it's dying. It's like. Maybe SEO in its current form is dying a slow death, but it's going to evolve. It's going to become a new SEO, right? And so I think right now what's hot is yes, social is hot, but don't ignore the other stuff. A lot of people that like to talk about how social is amazing usually, well, this is interesting, Neil, because a lot of our founder friends that talk to us, a lot of them see SEO as this kind of magical dark art or whatever.

Okay.

And it's like, it's really not that bad. But then we have another set of friends who really understand SEO. SEO, and those are the ones that just keep reaping the rewards because it's the gift that keeps on giving even today.

Yeah. You know, it's, you got to look at all the channels, you got to learn them and get good at them. And yes, a lot of them may seem, you know, this mythical creature like a unicorn, but they're not. You can learn them and you can get good at them. You just got to be patient and put in the time and the effort. On a random side note, You know, funny enough, on SparkToro, Rand had a good blog post that came out recently on, I think his last chapter—

Spark Social, which we're going to talk about.

Yeah.

Oh, you're talking about, oh, you're talking about his book. Okay, go ahead, go ahead.

Well, no, the last chapter, and he ended up breaking down what happened at Moz, which is probably worth checking out. And he ended up breaking down at SparkToro, funny enough, I didn't know this, he raised money from investors and they were able to pay back all their investors, so. Good for them.

Yeah. And he wrote a great book called Lost and Founder as well. So feel free to check that one out. The last thing I'll call out here is those of you that can see the screen is, so there's this nice graphic here and it's a Venn diagram. So on the top circle, it says your unique POV. And then the bottom left circle says your audience's needs. And then the bottom right says high volume keywords. And so basically, if you can find the intersection of all of these, where you have a unique point of view and and you understand your audience's needs and it has, there's intent or there's volume, sorry, behind whatever the person's looking for, that's where you're going to find the sweet spot with your content marketing. Now, if you want really good content marketing nowadays, just have unique point of view and understand your audience's needs and then just keep posting a lot. We're talking not even once a day. If you can afford to do it, maybe twice a day or more on these channels. That's what we've seen. We've seen this creator, Matt Gray. He's a mutual friend of ours. He's continued to rise through the ranks on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram just by posting twice or more per day. And he's got his unique point of view because he talks about systems and processes and all that. So that is it for today.

Please don't forget to— Oh, wait, one quick thing. Eric just mentioned systems and processes. I was at an event yesterday and it's so funny. In marketing, it's not a lot of mythical stuff. It really comes down to standard business operations. It's about systems and processes. And once you find something that works, figure out what are the exact steps that people need to take to replicate that and create that playbook and have your team just rinse and repeat and continually adjust the playbook and the systems and processes as algorithms adjust. But that's how you scale marketing and make it work for what other channels there may be or whatever algorithm updates there may be. And if you don't have the systems and processes down, sure, you can make money, but it's really hard to scale.

Actually, I have one more thing to add here. So this Venn diagram over here, think about how we're doing this YouTube video or this podcast right now. So it is our unique points of view. It's 2 people, right? We're trying to understand our audience's needs and we're also trying to cover certain keywords or interests as well. And we're publishing. We think YouTube's the best way for discoverability on podcasts. And so that's why we're publishing this to YouTube. And that's— this is our new way of doing content marketing, but it also is kind of the old way too because YouTube is also SEO as well. So that's kind of the meta lesson here. So again, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and you can check out the next video to get better at marketing over here somewhere, and we'll see you tomorrow.