Why Sticking With Content Creation — Over The Long Term — Is Essential To Its Success
For businesses and brands, content creation can follow a predictable cycle that leads to quick disappointment. Preparing for it can help you stick with the process.
I’ve discussed before — on this Medium account and elsewhere — about how important it is to adopt a long term mindset when you’re starting out with creating content and leveraging inbound marketing.
For one, I’ve made the point that mindset is one of the most overlooked aspects necessary to succeed in content marketing and (for most its ultimate goal) inbound lead generation.
I’ve also likened content marketing to investing. This is my go-to mental imagery — so feel free to borrow it for your brain!
If we reason that content marketing is an activity that’s going to pay long term dividends but not necessarily yield much return over the short term then — although I don’t have a degree in investing — I reckon that this is a pretty solid analogy.
For content creators — especially personal brands and businesses who are in it for concrete and clear reasons — the initial phase of moving from having an idea to set up a blog to actually getting going with it can involve moving across familiar territory.
The good news is that once you understand what’s happening in the background it can be easier to do what you need to in order to give it the best possible chance of actually succeeding.
Mapping The Gartner Hype Cycle Onto The Content Creator’s Typical Mental Rollercoaster
Gartner — the market research and advisory firm — is famous for having created what it calls the hype cycle that attempts to describe the probable reaction of a market to any major technological disruption.
The hype cycle has been criticized for not being based on evidence. It’s given me enough amusement over the years that I’m willing to brush that inconvenient fact aside.
As a long-time observer of tech trends, my experience (albeit anecdotal) also provides it with enough validation that it validates the trajectory it sets out — at least for me.
Because, yup, it kinda describes how things typically roll in tech.
Somebody comes up with a disruption that promises to change the way things are done in a market or segment thereof. Companies start pouring dollars into conferences, an echo-chambering bubble is formed, and everybody gets way too excited for their own good because that’s sort of how echo chambers work. Then the market realizes that they’ve grossly overinflated an idea that does have merit but its potential is circumscribed by all sorts of inconvenient and boring details like accessory technologies that still need to be developed, regulations that need to be passed, etc.
Finally the real innovation happens. When nobody — or rather less people — are looking. And oddly enough it’s in this relatively quiet corner of the trajectory that the real value is engineered and brought out to society. Long after the cleaning crews have scooped up the confetti from the conference centers.
So if I were to attempt to map the typical mental journey that a business content marketer goes through and plot it from the moment the “big idea” hits to when it’s executed (published) and beyond that, then I reckon it would look a lot like this:
Here are its constituent elements described:
The Valley Of Great Ideation
One day — while filling out a spreadsheet — Mr or Ms. Marketer comes up with a great idea for “content.”
Let’s put aside for a moment my typical grievances with the term “content.” Or let’s not.
Personally, I think it would be better if we talked about coming up with creative ideas and then mapping them onto the format (or formats) that we thought might resonate best with our target audiences.
Content by itself means nothing. The back of a cereal box contains content. What text isn’t content (or audio, or video)? Your audiences don’t care for content because the way the term is currently used is hopelessly over-generalized. If you’re doing content marketing, they care for messaging that sets out how you might resolve their pain points and appreciably improve their life in some other way. You gotta be more specific.
But whatever. Content has already become sadly entrenched and this is probably how the marketing manager in this sketchy would actually think about the brainspark moment. So content it is. We have a great idea. But we need to get from here to action.
We haven’t really done anything yet so we’re kinda in a valley here, at least from a productivity standpoint. But we have great plans for how to change all that and we’re sure it’s going to change the course of our business (lives?) once our prospects land on this thing.
The Upward-Rising Ascension Of Content Creation
Now, of course, we need to actually get this content out to the world.
The mechanics here aren’t really pertinent to the broader message that I’m trying to communicate so let’s quickly gloss over them.
Agencies may need to be drafted in. You can totally hire somebody like me which is totally not why I wrote this but nevertheless if I’m writing all this “content” then I guess I better start doing a better job at plugging myself.
Anyway.
You’re now on the upward rising ascension of doing.
It feels good at this part of the journey. Fancy people with cameras have shown up and they’re taking amazing looking photos. They’re all talk about platforms and how you’re going to distribute this “content.”
Mental images have started clouding your consciousness. You’re trying to focus on that graphic promoting this “content” in InDesign but you keep having unwanted fantasies about picking up some award for this outstanding campaign.
Then the big day arrives. The approvals have been secured. Your content is ready to go out the door. It’s time to hit that big bold publish button.
The Rapidly Plummeting Mental Sinkhole Of Non Immediate Validation (And Premature Celebrations)
You wake up groggy and hungover from that celebration party that you threw celebrating the release of your latest piece of “content.” The one you were so sure was going to light the industry on fire.
You log into your email. To Twitter. You check your YouTube stats.
And yup.
Nobody really cared.
You refresh every app on your device. You throw a pillow at the wall. You wait an hour and try to chill out. And yup. This time you’re sure. Basically nobody cared.
Your lead volume is minimal. Your engagement volumes fall way short of what you projected. Your latest piece of “content,” it seems, has been a dud. Too bad all the vendors at your party are still going to have to get paid.
The Long Trail Of Increasing Returns
The good news is that the story either gets better from this point forward or — at very least — it doesn’t get worse.
In the worst case scenario, your initial suspicions are confirmed.
You’ve produced content that doesn’t interest the industry.
But that’s okay.
You’ve iterated. You can bring that data back to the drawing board and have a think about what you could have done better for next time.
But you’d be irresponsible to go through that debriefing process until the market has had a decent chance to actually take a look at what you’ve had to say.
You can spend time dissecting the nuances of what you think major technology platforms are doing to their algorithms. Even though as an external party that’s often a dubiously worthwhile process.
Or you can remember that people are busy and have a lot of “stuff” going on and that at any given moment your “content” may have been fighting for distribution with 100s of other pieces.
The good news is that social media distribution isn’t your only pickup channel. Whatever way you dice the stats, that has a pretty short half life.
Thankfully you have a plan B. If you’ve created evergreen content then you’re also banking on the power of organic discoverability. That’s actually a more interesting hand to play because:
- If feeds into things like your reputation and technical SEO factors that all take a long time to develop. Thus, it builds upon itself. So rather than having a one time shot at success, you can play the increasing odds on a long term playing field.
- You’ve created “content” that might take a while to be digested by the industry. Things like the news cycle might affect it too. What you wrote may largely fall on deaf ears today but be wildly appreciated in a few months’ time when you’re not the only one talking about this. (And the advantage there: you might now be able to claim to have been the first).
Remember as well that:
- Initial and long term receptions to a piece of “content” can be markedly different and a “viral” initial reception that doesn’t actually bring in many qualified leads isn’t likely all that useful to your business.
- Republishing and refreshing older pieces of content can be powerful ways to bring them up to speed and update their contexts. Just because a piece is “old” doesn’t mean that it has to sit there. You can invest far less effort than what it took to produce the content in the first place and leverage it again.
Like driving for hours through undulating countryside, transversing the long road of potential increasing returns is an activity that may best be undertaken while also thinking about other things. Or listening to a good podcast.
Maintain, curate, and refresh (see above). But you can also let things operate in the background. I like to call organic discoverability on pieces of content that you’re not actively curating the most basic (and oldest) form of marketing automation. No integrations or fancy SaaS tools required.
Don’t Quit At The Sinkhole
It’s entirely up to you to what extent you or your business wishes to engage in content creation.
You can do a 80:20 outbound:inbound mix. Skip out on inbound marketing entirely. Or focus all your time and energy on creating assets that you hope are going to entice people to do business with you.
But whichever option you choose, it would probably be a mistake to skip out on the whole thing the moment you feel out those painful depths that constitute the Sinkhole Of Non-Immediate Validation.
In the terms through which businesses are accustomed to categorizing KPIs, content creation is a leading indicator. You need to engage in it before you see results.
Do what you want with your content marketing approach, but consider whether pulling the plug after the initial wave of non-euphoric validation might be the smart move over the long term.
