As of today, there is nothing more difficult than building an interested, dedicated, and active audience.
As of today, there is nothing more important than building an interested, dedicated, and active audience.
If you are doing anything else, it might feel easier, more impactful, direct, but it is mostly a short term illusion. Get rid of that and start building.
As I have cleaned up the mess that was (still is) my personal inbox, I have grouped together few resources that are worth checking out if you are interested in any of the topics below.
Leadership
Seth Godin’s blog – Delivers daily, and rarely fails. It might be considered “marketing” by most, but I personally consume Seth’s content mainly to keep my practice and work on track.
David Cancel’s The One Thing – Delivers weekly, fairly short messages, loads of wisdom from a guy who has built three multi-million dollars companies and witnessed a good deal of B2B and Saas development in the past decade. Without losing sight on what is important.
Dave Stachowiak’s Coaching for Leaders – This is a weekly podcast, but by subscribing (for free) you are getting weekly episode notes full of great content. Always one of my first recommendations when it comes to a more modern approach to leadership.
Marketing Strategy
Forget the Funnel – Gia and Claire’s customer-led program is all you need to come up with a complete and growth-oriented marketing plan. For free, you still get weekly workshops and a resource library that is basically endless.
Sharebird – For different reasons, I consider Product Marketing has being the strategic foundation of modern marketing, and Sharebird puts together AMAs from Product Marketers of companies such as Salesforce, Adobe, Zuora, Hubspot, and more.
Content Marketing
Animalz – Their weekly newsletters are pretty much a lesson in how to do content marketing themselves. I crave for their “What we’re reading” section, and I recommend joining the Slack community to get feedback and insights on best practices, or just have a chat.
Velocity Partners – I wrote about how much I love Velocity’s messaging, and that is in itself a great reason to get their semi-regular newsletter. And if you want a second one, here is what they did when everyone in marketing was panicking about the covid situation back in April. Brilliant.
This is definitely more content than I can consume in a lifetime, and it is pretty much my final newsletter reading list.
What do you read?
There are three kinds of external help a marketing department can get.
There is the help that is valuable because it provides a competence that is missing. This is typical when you hire a freelancer, for example. Perhaps you have a small team, you lack some skills, you want something specific done that you cannot do yourself.
Then, there is the help that is valuable because it gets things done. Most agencies fall into this bucket. They do not really deliver mind-blowing results, they might or might not have specific competences, some might actually argue they could have gotten pretty much the same outcome by doing the job internally. But the truth is, the team simply does not have enough bandwidth, or it is not well organised, or its skills are not well mapped.
Finally, there is the help that is valuable because it delivers quality. It might be a freelancer, it might be an agency. But in this case, they are at the edge of their field, they are doing things that not many others know, they are reinventing a particular tactic or the way it is approached. Things might get difficult, because the counterpart is somebody with convictions, ideas, opinions, and they might not be willing to simply do what pleases the head of marketing. They repay these difficulties with an outstanding job.
Now, the fact is that often we approach external help in marketing with unrealistic expectations. And so, when we hire for competence, we do not want to do the project management work that is necessary. When we hire for project management, we are unprepared in feeding the right information at the right time because we do not have them. When we hire for quality, we are not ready to change our assumptions and beliefs, and potentially redefine strategy and tactics altogether.
Who are you hiring to help you out? Are you aware of what that means?
Would you rather buy services from:
It is a matter of specificity, of course.
There is no difference between product 1, 2, 3, and 4. What changes is the level to which the company providing the service demonstrates to know what you are dealing with day after day.
Moving from option 1 to option 4 requires more data, more research, more effort. And to motivate the investment, just survey some of the websites of your competitors and alternatives: how many belong in every category? A fairly common situation is: 80% use option 1; 15% use option 2; 4% use option 3; 1% use option 4.
So, does being specific pay?
Things that will make people stop listening and move their attention elsewhere.
Raising your voice.
Interrupting.
Antagonizing.
Being self-important.
Imposing your own topic.
Using more than three items in a list.
Not making pauses.
Technical jargon.
Not letting the other speak.
Getting distracted.
No form of personalization.
It does not matter if your idea is the best in the world, if you do any of the above you stand no chance to make an impact. Thinking about how many organisations out there have at least five of these dealbreakers in their communication on a regular basis.
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