Businesses have never created more content.

Posts on LinkedIn, blog articles, videos, emails, podcasts, case studies, newsletters, webinars, and AI-generated articles.

Now that artificial intelligence is able to generate another 1,000 words while you’re still making your cup of tea, the amount produced is very unlikely to decrease in the near future.

But there’s a problem.

The fact is that having more content doesn’t always result in better marketing.

For business owners and managing directors the key question is not “How can we produce more content?”

It’s: “Are we creating something our customers actually want?”

The businesses that are succeeding through the use of content aren’t always the ones producing the largest amount of content. These are the ones who understand their customers best.

Content Marketing Should Start With the Customer

A rather simple error is to base your content strategy on your business.

• What do we want to share?
• Which services would we like to sell?
• What declarations would we like to make?

There is nothing in principle wrong with any of those questions, but that is not where effective content marketing starts.

Start with the customer.

• What is their objective?
• What’s frustrating them?
• What questions are they putting?
• What must they grasp in order to feel at ease in making a decision?
• What could stop them from selecting you?

Excellent content is found at the point where what your business knows meets what your customers want to know.

It is at this point that content begins to have commercial value.

Being Useful Is a Marketing Strategy

There is a tendency to believe that the purpose of marketing is to persuade people.

Sometimes it does.

One of the most effective things that your marketing can achieve is providing help.

• Answer a difficult question.
• Explain a complicated subject.
• Challenge a common misconception.
• Share something you’ve learned.
• Help someone steer clear of a costly mistake.
• Provide an informed opinion.

If you keep on doing it, an interesting thing will start to occur.

People start remembering you.

As time goes on, being familiar with something turns into credibility and that credibility may then become trust.

Once somebody actually needs the service that you offer, you cease to be an unknown business attempting to draw their attention. They have already been learning from you, whether you are the company or a individual.

Stop Creating Content for the Algorithm

SEO matters.

AEO matters.

GEO matters.

But your customers matter a great deal.

Search engines and AI platforms are just different ways of linking people with information.

Instead of focusing solely on keywords, rankings or the most recent supposed algorithmic trick, it is better to aim at providing the best possible answer to the customer’s question.

What this involves is showing true expertise and a good deal of experience.

If someone had spent 20 years working on a specific business problem, they should discuss the lessons they have acquired.

If customers repeatedly make the same mistake, explain it.

If there’s something your industry frequently gets wrong, challenge it.

That’s difficult for competitors to replicate because the content is rooted in your experience rather than something anybody could generate from the same prompt.

Your Sales Team Is Sitting on a Content Goldmine

Struggling to think of what to write about?

Speak to the people who are speaking to customers.

Find out from your sales team what questions come up in almost every conversation.

Find out from customer service what customers commonly misunderstand.

Look through recent enquiries.

Before the sale, look at the objections that have been raised.

Ask your current customers what they regret not knowing before making their purchase.

You could produce all the useful content you’ll need for the next six months simply from those conversations.

That is also the reason why marketing should not work by itself.

The knowledge needed to produce good marketing is already present in most businesses.

The difficulty lies in putting it all together.

Content Needs a Commercial Purpose

To be helpful doesn’t mean that you have to publish randomly.

All content should in the end serve the broader marketing and business strategy.

It might be a good idea to build up your expertise in a new market.

You could be moving the business.

You might be introducing a new service.

Maybe your aim is to draw in bigger customers, or it’s possible that you’re attempting to cut down on your reliance on paid advertising. You ought to base the subject matter on those objectives.

A hundred unrelated articles might bring in visitors.

A number of articles that have been carefully selected to answer the questions your potential customers ask themselves right before making a purchase could be of much greater value.

Traffic isn’t the objective. Business growth is.

Don’t Confuse Distribution With Strategy

The job isn’t even halfway done if good content isn’t created.

It will still be necessary for people to find it.

The article might end up as a permanent feature on your website, but aspects of the same way of thinking could also be conveyed via LinkedIn, email, sales discussions, presentations, podcasts or other channels.

A single good idea can frequently be turned into a number of useful marketing points.

It doesn’t mean that you should copy and paste the same text everywhere.

Different channels lead to different expectations.

A detailed article on a website could instead take the form of a brief comment on LinkedIn, a sales email, a conversation on a podcast, or a response to a common question.

The idea remains consistent.

The delivery changes.

You Don’t Need to Be Everywhere

It is especially important for small and rapidly expanding businesses.

You will always have more marketing channels than the time, personnel, or funds you have available to manage them properly.

The attempt to be significant in all places generally leads to an average standard in all places.

Rather, consider the places where your customers actually spend their time.

For a specialist B2B service that you’re selling to managing directors, it wouldn’t be the top priority to produce three useful TikTok videos each morning.

Similarly, if your customers don’t make much use of LinkedIn, sticking to posting there five days a week just because someone has told you that you ‘need a personal brand’ is probably not really a sound strategy.

Select channels since it is the ones that your customers use, not because marketers are currently discussing them.

Measure What Matters

A danger associated with digital marketing is that nearly anything results in a figure.

• Views.
• Likes.
• Followers.
• Impressions.
• Clicks.
• Shares.
• Engagement rates.

This can create the comforting impression that everything is measurable, but measurable doesn’t automatically mean meaningful.

A LinkedIn post that attracts 20,000 impressions could result in nothing at all commercially.

An article which is read by 80 people might result in two good enquiries.

Which performed better?

For business owners and managing directors content measurement should in the end be linked to commercial results.

• Is an increasing number of the appropriate people coming to know you?
• Are enquiries improving?
• Is it the case that potential customers are better informed before they talk to the salespeople?
• Is the number of sales conversations increasing?
• Is your reputation strengthening?
• Are customers staying longer?
• Are people recommending you?

The questions tell you a great deal more than a dashboard loaded with vanity metrics.

Content Marketing Is a Feedback Loop

A content strategy must not be put together in January, stored away in a folder and then found again just before Christmas.

Listen.

Create.

Publish.

Measure.

Learn.

Adjust.

Then repeat.

For certain subjects the response will be stronger than might be expected.

Others will go completely without leaving any trace.

That’s fine.

Marketing becomes more effective when companies are curious enough to learn from what actually happens rather than simply sticking to the original plan.

Your customers are always giving hints and good marketers pay attention to them.

AI Makes Human Expertise More Valuable, Not Less

AI has fundamentally changed content production.

It can help research ideas, organise thinking, improve drafts, repurpose material and accelerate repetitive tasks. That’s useful, but when everyone has access to similar technology, simply producing content is no longer much of a competitive advantage.

Having something worth saying matters.

Your experience matters.

Your customer conversations matter.

Your opinions matter.

Your mistakes matter.

The way you understand your industry is important.

AI can be used to convey those things. It shouldn’t manufacture them.

The easier it becomes to produce general content, the easier it will be to identify true expertise, and this will, in turn, make it more valuable.

Better Content Requires Better Marketing Leadership

For most businesses that are expanding, the issue is not a shortage of content.

It shows a lack of strategic direction.

Various people are making various things. Agencies are working independently. The sales department has a single set of priorities. Marketing has another. It is not entirely clear to Leadership what return it will be getting.

It is here that strategic marketing leadership becomes important.

The content must link together your expertise, the needs of your customers, your brand positioning, your sales goals, and your overall business strategy.

Once the circumstances are in line, content ceases to be something that you’re creating just because “we really should post something this week.”

It turns into a business asset.

How Makin Marketing Can Help

At Makin Marketing I work directly with business owners and managing directors in order that their marketing may have greater clarity and a stronger commercial focus.

Acting as a Fractional CMO and as a strategic marketing consultant, I will be able to help you to understand your customers on a deeper level, improve your positioning, create a practical content strategy, ensure that marketing is aligned with sales, and enable you to make better decisions regarding where your time and budget should be allocated.

It could include SEO, AEO, GEO, thought leadership, content, brand development or marketing systems.

What comes second are the tactics.

Strategy comes first.

Good marketing is not about making more products.

It’s a matter of identifying what is important and then doing more of that.

Key Takeaways

Technology will continue changing.

Platforms will arise and then disappear.

Search behaviour will evolve.

AI will become a great deal more capable.

But one principle is unlikely to disappear:

What people focus on consists of things that are relevant to them.

• Understand your customers.
• Answer their questions.
• Share your expertise.
• Be useful.
• Measure what matters.
• And keep learning.

It sounds remarkably simple.

That is probably the reason why marketing has taken several decades to make it more complicated.