A new year feels full of possibility and promise. There is something soul-cleansing about a fresh calendar, a blank strategy doc, an editorial calendar that is unbesmirched by overdue tasks.
Once upon a time, in Q1 of a new year, my marketing team had set an overarching theme but needed a flagship content asset — a big one. I woke up in the middle of the night with a full-on eureka moment: a comic book. I had a plot line that was perfect for our audience and the theme. We could set ourselves apart as the industry underdogs, and we could make our users look like literal superheroes.
My CMO loved it, but we needed some budget. She took it up the chain… and the executives hated it. They wanted to elevate our brand to be more “serious” and more like our competitors, believing (bless their hearts) that would put us in the consideration set more often. Proposal denied. Back to white papers, please.
This edition of CONTENTIOUS is about content differentiation.. and how it actually starts much further back than the moments of genius you have in the shower. In order for content to truly stand out, you have to get certain ducks in a row. And most of the time, they’re not even your ducks.
💡 Antipattern: thinking it’s about you
Your big content goals for 2025 probably depend on your content being really good, really different, and really meaningful to your target audience.
If you’re like me a few years back, you probably start thinking that differentiation starts with you coming up with the chef’s-kiss perfect idea. But it doesn’t.
The “perfect idea” is only perfect if it has internal support, and you only get internal support by drawing a very clear line from content strategy to business strategy. I saw the way our leaders wanted to head as a brand, didn’t care for it, and kept on with the narrative I believed would resonate with customers. Leadership didn’t like it, and guess who won? (Hint: not me.)
What a masterclass in how to make a new year feel like the old one all over again. 😂
What I really wanted was a seat at the table to help guide the direction we were heading. And while I wasn’t invited to the table at that company, I could have handled things very differently… even if that meant gaining information that would have helped me realize sooner I’d be better off elsewhere.
Want to prove your impact, gain executive buy-in, and get content the respect it deserves at work? Check out my course:
💡 Big idea: but if you don’t own it, who will?
Differentiation doesn’t actually start with your good idea. What it does start with is executive buy-in for risk.
Because here’s the thing about differentiation: it’s different.
It’s uncharted territory, with no roadmap or dataset to guide your decision making. It’s pure, unadulterated Marketer Gut.™️
And if there is no appetite for doing things that haven’t been done before, or trying things that might not work, there is no amount of creativity that will close that gap.
This is why I laugh at the LinkedIn gurus who castigate content marketers about creating boring content. Where do they think that comes from? We are creative by nature. We are innately attuned to the needs of others, we want our work to have value and meaning, we want it to create good business results. No content marketer wakes up and says “I can’t wait to create more bland crap today that no one will read!”
Show me a piece of boring B2B content, and I’ll find a marketing team choked out by bureaucracy, fear, and a deep lack of executive curiosity about the people they’re hoping to reach.
The real tragedy too is that when White Paper #25 doesn’t perform well, that’s content’s fault. Wow, content writer. Your judgment here is poor. Good thing we didn’t let you do that expensive research project you wanted — imagine how THAT would have panned out.
So what do you do here? If you really want to meet those content goals this year, it’s time for some dialogue.
💪 Actionable tip: have The Talk.
Not THAT talk, but you might prefer it to the one you’re about to have. 😂
This talk is part education for them, and part information-gathering for you, and it’s offered in the spirit of alignment.
Here’s what I would do:
Invite your executive team (including marketing leadership, if that’s not you) to a meeting. Include the people from whom you believe your initiatives and proposals might get the most resistance, as well as your champions. Title the meeting “2025 content and business alignment” or something that shows you are serious.
Explain why you’re all here. What is the context? I like to start from a place of obvious agreement and then tease out where the points of divergence might be. “I think we all agree that content is a critical function to communicate our value to prospects. However due to [content marketing stats and industry shifts like AI], it’s getting much harder for content to stand out, and we are seeing data that [the old way] is no longer effective. We need to adopt a differentiated approach, and as differentiation requires a fair amount of doing things that haven’t been done before, I’d like to be very aligned on our collective appetite for experimentation.”
Show you’ve done your homework. Show examples of things you’d like to try, and ask them where they have concerns. See if you can address where their fear is coming from… Is it that they want guaranteed return on marketing? Is it that they are worried about brand reputation? If needed, work with your marketing leaders ahead of time to come up with ways you can address those objections, ideally with data, if helpful.
Problem solve. Come at the discussion as “company vs. problem” rather than “marketing vs. executives.” This means explaining why the problem is important, soliciting a plan for moving forward, and identifying where the guardrails and boundaries are. What would be a way to experiment with differentiation in a way that feels safe and low-risk for executives? If the experiment succeeds, what might that mean in terms of changes moving forward?
You have a plan! OR, IYKYK. Best case scenario, you have what you need to make some educated bets. But say you walk out and nothing has budged. They want you to stay in your lane, and your lane is clearly the “word factory” department. Then that’s a data point: if the gap can’t be closed, you’re going to start to need to figure out what’s next for you. I wrote about that once too:
#10: I love you more
A recent LinkedIn conversation I had (the magic happens in the DMs) really captured the zeitgeist of content marketing in 2024.
Yours in contention,
Lauren