Hey! How’s your week going? Matt here, from MessageUp.
I’m fortunate to be writing this week’s newsletter from the beautiful Ojai Valley Inn, in California, where my wife and I are spending a few days to celebrate our wedding anniversary. (In case you’re wondering, she’s on a work-related webinar right now, so I’m not being a bad husband and working while on vacay!)
If you’re in the USA, you’ll know that historically bad weather has impacted a wide swath of the country in recent days. Ojai is no exception. We’ve seen about 6 inches of rain fall in 2+ days, which is double the amount they typically receive in February and almost a third of the average annual total!
Combined with gusty winds, water is getting into all sorts of places where it doesn’t belong. Even though the resort is built on a hill, the drainage system isn’t designed to handle this amount of water. Tree branches are littered around, roads have become rivers, flights of steps are makeshift waterfalls, and breezeways between rooms are shallow lagoons. Significant clean up and repair will be required.
Although this pales in comparison to the catastrophe we witnessed in our home town of Houston in 2017 (Hurricane Harvey), when over 40 inches of rain fell in less than a week, it definitely isn’t how we expected our Ojai experience to unfold. Thankfully, we booked a room with a fireplace and brought plenty of books to read!
This is a reliability problem. Precipitation in California is unreliable. The state is still in the throes of a 5+ year drought, despite multiple “atmospheric river” events in recent months. And, in this case, sunshine in California is less reliable than we had believed.
Which brings me to the thought exercise I pursued earlier this week while writing my post for The Framework blog.
I love a good metaphor. My book editor knows this, having spent several weeks helping me untangle the spaghetti of mixed metaphors (there’s one now!) that threatened to confuse my readers. But I digress…
My goal was to write about a helpful metaphor for B2B content marketing. After a few false starts, I chose a river. There’s something majestic, powerful, and useful about rivers. They have played a fundamental role throughout human history. And I think a river makes a great metaphor for content marketing. To learn why, read The Six Defining Characteristics of the B2B Content Marketing River at messageup.com/framework. You will hopefully take away a useful metaphor explaining why cadence, consistency, and channels are vital elements of a successful content marketing strategy.
For more helpful reads, browse on down to What We’ve Been Reading to find summaries and links for articles on sharpening your B2B marketing experience, whether content marketing ROI can beat inflation, fixing content that B2B buyers hate, and mastering Google’s new EAT algorithm. That last piece, which adds a fourth letter to the EAT acronym, is an important read for anyone hoping to get their content found via organic search.
And finally, this week’s One Step actionable tip brings us back to the river metaphor. I’ve provided a guided thought exercise to help you assess the integrity of your content marketing process using the elements I elaborated in the blog post. Give it a try and let me know how well it works.
On that note, I want you to know how much I appreciate your feedback. Write to me at matt@messageup.com with comments and suggestions for future editions. I read all your messages and promise to reply unless you’re really mean, in which case I’ll probably just hit delete😆.
Have a great week. I’ll see you back here next Wednesday, hopefully dried out and ready to write more about content marketing!
Cheers,
~ Matt
o/b/o Team MessageUp
Get Ready to Read All About It!
My books—Content Marketing: Mission Critical, aimed at CEOs, and Content Marketing: Making the Magic Happen, for B2B marketing leaders—are almost ready for publication! I’ll provide regular updates in these newsletters but if you’d like to know when the books are ready for pre-order (and receive a special discount coupon), click below to join the wait list:
Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Mar 01, 2023 - The Six Defining Characteristics of the B2B Content Marketing River
Feb 22, 2023 - Five Things Smart CEOs Get Wrong About B2B Content Marketing
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that we hope you will enjoy and find valuable:
How to Sharpen Your B2B Marketing Experience Strategy
This short piece by Chris Wood at MarTech proposes a pyramid approach to delivering the right level of engagement to the right people in a target organization. This helps distribute marketing resources efficiently between one-to-may, one-to-few, and one-to-one engagement.
Can Content Marketing ROI Beat Inflation?
Content marketing is cost-effective and powerful—60% less expensive overall than other forms of marketing and generating three times the leads—which Matthew Lopes at Forbes Agency Council says positions it uniquely to beat inflation.
Buyers Hate B2B Content. Here's How to Fix It.
Christine Crandell, President of New Business Strategies, writing for CMS Wire, reports that 50% of vendor content is neither sought, read, nor valued by B2B buyers. As she notes, that's a lot of wasted money and time! In response, she offers helpful tips on becoming a trusted source of stage-specific content that buyers actually want to consume.
7 Tactics to Master Google’s New E-A-T for B2Bs
Google's search algorithm is a mysterious beast, with (at least) 200 heads. Recent updates have focused on measuring the quality of websites, under the acronym EAT: expertise, authority, and trust. As Shama Hyder explains in this LinkedIn article, you can now add "experience" to that list, and she shares 7 tips on improving your website's EEAT performance.
One Step…
Let’s take the river metaphor from this week’s blog post and run with it for a few minutes.
Here’s a six-question thought exercise to help you assess your B2B content marketing strategy and process, in search of ideas for improvement.
Headwaters: How much of your content can be tied back to your company’s purpose, mission, vision, and differentiation? Is it clear to a reader where your river originates? Does the content flow together naturally to become a coherent whole?
Banks: Does your content river have solid, easy-to-identify banks? Does any of your content spill outside those banks, potentially confusing your target audience or making it harder for them to know when and why to come back to your river for more?
Tributaries: Does your content marketing river incorporate compatible material flowing from other sources? (user generated content, guest posts, links, citations) Can a visitor easily navigate from one branch of your river to another? (internal and external links, topic index, navigation)
Flow: Is the flow of your content river predictable and strong? Does your company publish with a consistent cadence and quality, or does the flow oscillate between bursts and lulls? Has your river ever run dry or caused a flood?
Utility: Is your content river useful to your target audience? How easy is it for them to explore, leave, and come back for more? Are there any gaps in your content library that would interrupt their learning journey? Why would someone bookmark your content for future reference?
Transformation: What change is your content river creating in the environment in which you operate? Are you adding helpful context and interpretation? Are you bringing together a community around a common theme and vocabulary? Is your thought leadership reshaping your sector?
Some of these are big topics that could each prompt several hours of discussion. Take advantage of that reflection whenever you can but, for now, ask yourself which of these areas feels most uncomfortable or least developed and focus your improvement efforts there.
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