This week’s scoop comes from episode two of Pipeline by Dave Gerhardt. Dave had a chat with Ross Simmonds, the Founder and CEO at Foundation, the top notch marketing agency for content and strategy.
Simmonds argues that the narrative around content marketing has shifted in recent years:
“One of the biggest misconceptions in marketing is that content is the only thing that matters. We’ve been preaching about creating more and more content. And the world has listened. Organisations are pumping out content, hiring journalists, putting out YouTube videos, podcasts, articles, but they are losing sight of the fact that, just because you have a few blog posts, doesn’t mean the job is done. That’s where the job actually begins. You have to get that content to people by distributing it on various platforms.”
“Here’s what you need to know about content distribution: you create a piece once and distribute forever. Opportunities to take an asset that is good and spread it are literally endless. All it requires is a little bit of hard work and a whole bunch of creativity, the commitment of adding value to the people on the other end.”
Simmonds recommends scaling back on content: “If you can’t distribute all your assets, you should scale back with the amount of content you are creating. At the beginning, identify the intent of every piece of content. Every asset should have a goal. Is it meant to rank on Google? Meant to generate tractions amongst our target audience on social media? Elevate corporate culture or attract good talent? It’s like a stock portfolio in many ways. The businesses that you invest in, are going to be rooted in your own objectives. Somebody who is 65 is not going to have the same investment portfolio as somebody who is 22. The same thinking needs to be applied when you are an up and coming startup vs an industry leader.”
Simmonds takes us through the steps of a smart distribution engine: “You just pressed 'publish' on a great piece of content. On day one, you’re going to share it on Twitter, write a Twitter thread to support that asset. That last tweet – you’ll take a screenshot and you’re going to link to it on LinkedIn and share a link in the comments to that same article. Then you are going to email every single person you mentioned in that article. You are going to share it on your internal Slack channel to get your team to support it. In that message, you are going to link to the tweet, LinkedIn and Facebook posts. Ideally, people on your team are going to amplify it all within the first 30 minutes of this piece going live. Moreover, within the next 30 minutes, you are going to send a DM to your best clients and besties on the internet and ask them to reshare it on social as well. Later, you can potentially put up a quick video on LinkedIn promoting the same piece. The next day you are reaching out to newsletters, looking for nice Slack communities, Reddit threads, Facebook groups, as well as keeping an eye on the original post and whether or not there is a conversion happening. In addition to all of this, you are going to reshare it on Twitter because the people who were online in the morning are not the same who are on Twitter at night.”