#3: I Can See for Miles
How being the X-ray glasses makes you invaluable
Topical fun/sad fact: my best-performing LinkedIn post of all time started off with a shout-out to hot dog water. If you’re in the U.S. celebrating this week, may you be close to a grill. 🌭
Today we’re thinking about what you see as a content marketer, and how your vision can change everything.
💪 Actionable Tip: Create a Killer Content Brief
Most of the problems in life and in content marketing come from miscommunication.
What I see in my vision for a piece is not always what everyone else sees. And the more that I leave this up to chance (or to a five-minute conversation or a hastily fired-off email to a content writer), the less likely the content piece is going to hit the mark.
I’ve learned that a content brief makes the success criteria of the piece clear up front to everyone involved: me, the writer, any other stakeholders, and ultimately, my audience.
Here’s what mine include:
Context. Think of this like the 5 Ws of journalism. A content brief should essentially paint a picture of the entire writing situation:
Target audience (Who)
Purpose (Why)
Main message/angle (What)
Journey stage/appropriate product mentions for that stage (When/Where)
Specs. If the context is the 5 Ws in a content brief, the specs are the “how.” What are the objective requirements for the piece? What does it need to include to achieve the desired outcomes?
Deadline and word count
Keywords (if any)
External sources and internal links
Call to action
Graphic needs
Outline. I don’t set my outlines in stone (many times I expect them to evolve after any interviews the writer will have with SMEs). Still, some general sense of what big points the piece should hit is a way to help the writer see the direction I see.
I’ve been writing content briefs for years and it’s still the best hack I have. Doing an extra 30 minutes of work ahead of time saves me literally hours of revisions, and every time I try to skip this part, I regret it almost immediately.
🚫 Anti-Pattern: Thinking Correlation = Causation
I’m a big proponent of tracking content’s influence on pipeline and revenue. In my last few roles I’ve built a dashboard that shows this (and that’s a big part of what I teach in my course on proving content’s value).
Mark Stouse and Dale Harrison are my current LinkedIn faves, and they point out that marketers and even CMOs confuse correlation and causation. If a prospect sees a piece of content and then later becomes a customer, the piece of content or the ad click or whatever touch the marketer desires is considered the “cause” of the conversion, or at least a contributing factor. Almost all attribution models assume this.
But categorizing and quantifying human behavior is complicated — “people are people-y,” as a coworker told me this week — and there is always nuance.
In reality, it’s much more complex. Who knows if your content had an effect or not? Maybe the person who downloaded the white paper was going to become a customer anyway. Stouse and Harrison argue that actually proving causality requires a lot of math (in the form of regression analysis and predictive AI).
It’s good for content marketers to be thinking about this, even though attribution isn’t often in our purview. It affects us as we try to prove our worth and negotiate for more budget.
My two cents? Start tracking the relationship between content and pipeline, if you’re not already. Once you’re able to do that, moving into more advanced analytics down the road will be easier as you already have the data hygiene in place to do it correctly.
💡Aha Moment: Find the Thing that Needs Doing
Getting my company’s target audience (engineering leaders) to engage in any way is marketing on Hard Mode. These folks hate marketing. They will block your emails, they will not fill out a form to download your guide, and they do not care about your “10 Ways to Do X” blog post.
Personalization? Creepy. Cookies? You could offer to send them LITERAL HOMEMADE COOKIES and they’d tell you to f— right off, please and thank you.
So I’m spending my Q3 supporting our product team in building our product documentation out into a robust resource. Why? Because I’ve noticed that when a VP of Engineering visits our site, they’re going to skip all the marketing content and head straight for the docs. I saw that it needed doing and I proposed that we do it to my executive team with data, making the case that it’s important for customers but also potentially the most important content that our prospects want and need.
Content touches so much that it’s nearly always possible to find a [if not THE] thing that needs to be done. It starts with paying attention.
What do you see at your company? Is there a broken process somewhere that is keeping content from being as effective as it should be? Is there an untapped opportunity for content to create business value? If you can find it and make a case for it, you have a better chance of being seen as the strategic powerhouse that you are.
P.S. If you are struggling to prove content’s value at work, I want to help.
When I was a content manager earlier in my career, I had to learn a lot the hard way. The “hard way” included getting laid off in 2020 when I had the same problem, and then learning how to do it right through hundreds of hours of trial and error:
👉 building a dashboard to show content’s pipeline impact
👉 figuring out how to create internal content champions
👉 pitching content plans to executives
👉 talking at length with content leaders to learn how they did it
Then I spent another few hundred hours to capture that work in a course so you don’t have to spend all the time I did building the plane as you’re crashing it into the mountain flying it.
With Bending the Spoon, you get:
🥄 Lifetime access to the course, including all future additions, bonuses, and updates
🥄 5 modules with 20+ lessons plus a resource list
🥄 7 actionable guides, templates, and worksheets to put theory into practice
🥄 Insights from eight content leaders (soon to be nine!) on how they tackle our industry’s trickiest problems
Start here: