Every Marketer that screams “Content” is an asshole.

You hear it all the time: “Create content”. Everybody reads / watches / consumes content. Creating content will create engagement, nurture visitors, and develop your brand.

As someone building a marcom agency, we have pushed it as a service to clients a ton of times. Hell, as marketers, we hear it from our fellow marketers… Reinforcing the idea that more content is the way to go.

Don’t get me wrong – content is important.

But.

It’s the machine that distributes content that’s more important.

Let me put things in context:

Most of the famous marketers and agencies use high-end analytics, tracking, and smart distribution systems to create “Customer Journeys”.

Ughhhh. More lingo…

Customer Journeys are the digital/physical touchpoints a customer experiences from Brand Discovery till Sale. (I hope that helped, otherwise say hey and I’ll explain it).

When they design customer journeys, there’s a purpose for each piece of content. Discover. Connect. Educate. Nurture. Sell. Upsell.

Pair various content pieces in a sequence, factor in timing & individualized audience engagement rates (using business intelligence & consumption analytics), and scale distribution through various platforms & mediums.

Create several of these sequences and you’ve got a customer journey.

Group a series of customer journeys together – once again, triggering them using business intelligence & consumption/engagement analytics, and now you have a machine that can handle an entire stage of a traditional sales funnel.

Repeat the whole cycle several times over and you have you’ll have developed a fully automated, digital sales funnel. At this point, ROI is measured through the number of people that go through the funnel.

You’ll want to keep content from going “stale”. So you start switching out content in various sequences – *in the process creating more content.*

You’ll want to nurture audiences that went through various journeys but still didn’t convert… *Create targeted, highly specific content.*

You’ll want to promote new products or offerings… *Create new customer journeys, using sequences, which use content.*

*Content becomes individualized lego pieces that when put together create a giant matrix style machine.*

In this model, the value of each piece of Content compounds as another piece gets added.

No wonder all the social media famous marketers yell “Create Content.” It works for them. And when it doesn’t work for the rest of us watching them… We think we did something wrong.

The other issue is most businesses don’t think at this scale.

We create a piece of content because we feel it’ll add value to our audience… And hope that if we can maintain interested readers… they’ll convert into Buyers.

*So the next time a marketer says create content for SEO, Social Media, or XYZ – ask them what their Customer Journey or Sequence is. And, if they look clueless. RUN!*

If you’re a marketer and you understood everything I said, pat yourself on the back.

If you have invested heavily into Content / Inbound Marketing… and have no idea what I just said, REACH OUT TO ME!

The rest of you… What didya think?

Afterthoughts after writing this article

For the purpose of explaining a point – I oversimplified a TON of concepts:

• Paid Distribution & Engagement is never simple. It’s a science all on it’s own.
• Content isn’t just written word in article form; it’s presentations, podcasts, videos, images, etc.
• Don’t forget different online channels consume content differently. All journeys created need to be cognizant of this and have sequence offsets / transfers in place.
• Consumption / Engagement analytics falls under GDPR. 9 times out of 10, most providers have conditionals / opt-in tools to help enforce GDPR. Look for it.