Welcome to Contentment

Hey good folks and happy Wednesday! 

I hope you are deep in the weeds building AI into your content marketing operations and supply chain. From where I sit, AI is best used as infrastructure to a system. It can help speed us up. It can help improve quality (seriously!). But the fundamentals of content marketing are still the same. 

So, this week, a look back at the 3 types of content you need in your content marketing strategy, and how your context mix shifts depending on your company’s goals. 

In other words, this week, we’re looking back at some fundamentals.

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You can’t fulfill every ask. You can’t focus on every good tactic. Even in the age of AI, content marketing requires hedging your bets, and then shifting your strategy based on what’s working and/or your company needs. 

Here are three types of content your brand needs to produce:

• Thought leadership content: This includes product launch content, event content, POV or opinion content from executives or partners, proprietary research content (which can often be used as campaign content, too), etc. The goal of this content is primarily to drive impressions, traffic, and earn press. Rarely is pipeline a concern, though it never hurts. In the case of proprietary research that is also used as campaign content, lead gen is important, too. 
• Campaign content: This is content created to drive pipeline. It starts by piquing the interest of your prospects, and driving leads. But it's important those leads are high-quality, or else your pipeline numbers won’t be pretty. Assets in this type of content are typically gated––ebooks, research, webinars, interactive content like quizzes or calculators, etc. Campaign content also typically includes sales enablement material to make sure your sales team (and partner team) can effectively follow-up on the leads (i.e. the whole point). 
• Performance content: This is content created to rank on Google or in LLMs. This is typically part of a larger web strategy to support the site's information architecture. But it's not enough for this content to drive traffic. It also needs to convert. 

Depending on the size and maturity of your company, as well as your specific strategy, you’ll focus on some of these more than others. Let’s look at this handy little chart to help think through your mix based on your company needs. 

You’ll see that each type of content is used no matter what the company needs. It’s just the content mix that changes. 

Here’s a real-world example on how that mix changes based on company needs and size, based on my own experience: 

• When I worked at early-stage startups, my breakdown was: 50% thought leadership content, 25% performance content, 25% campaign content. That’s because thought leadership content earned us the most traffic the fastest, built network effects, and helped tell our narrative to a market who was just hearing about us. While that was in motion, we were building an SEO moat, and working to convert leads into pipeline with regular, but less frequent, campaigns. 
• At larger companies, you might spend 50% of your time on performance content––especially if you have the resources to maintain the scale needed to win––and then 25% on both campaign content and thought leadership. In many cases, you can begin to combine these types of content with proprietary research to earn press mentions via thought leadership and pipeline through a gated asset. 

In all cases, the name of the game is repurposing. No asset should be created and distributed only once, or used only once. And, you should always be willing to shift your content mix as needs change.

The goal isn’t to do it all. It’s to do what is necessary to move the needle. 

Content needs to both drive traffic and drive pipeline. Few assets can do both of those things. And no asset can both drive traffic and drive pipeline all on its own. 

Content marketing is ecosystem building. It is world building. And every piece should play an important role in how that ecosystem works. 

A NOTE ON THIS ADVICE

You do you! 

One content marketer’s best practices aren’t always right for another one, though I do try to distill out the main concepts and core practices I believe everyone can benefit from. That said, you must use good judgment when deciding whether to take advice given from folks on the internet. I am an expert, and this advice comes from my direct experience, but I am not smarter than you, and I have nothing to gain or lose because of what you do.

THINGS KEEPING ME CONTENT

• What I’m watching: The wife and I have been enjoying the cooler summer nights and smaller mosquito population in the backyard. It's been a good substitute for TV nights for the last week or so.
• What I’m wearing: Nothing interesting right now. I’m biding my time for cooler weather (next week!) when I can break out some fall-like clothes. 
• What I’m eating: We had a little family cookout for Labor Day in which my brother told us it was “A little tradition of his to eat steak on Labor Day.” So, we ate steak! When we asked how this tradition came to be he said, “Any day off feels like a good day to have a tradition of eating steak.” So, there you have it. 

Thank you so much for reading. Let me know what you think by replying to this email.

Very excited to be here with y’all.

Tracey

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