Revenue Diaries Entry 7

I did a decent job as a father this weekend. This is more of a pat on the back with a lesson to start this edition. Because parenting is hard, let’s celebrate the wins! 

My oldest had a basketball game Saturday morning, and to say he was excited is an understatement. He lives and breathes competition. It doesn’t matter the sport, it just happened to be basketball this weekend. 

He was running at 100% from the very beginning of the game. He hustled. He was all over the court. He was playing scrappy. 

His team led the entire game and was ahead by a single point in the last two minutes. 

It was fun to watch. 

They were playing full-court press, and throwing themselves at the ball. I was proud. 

But with just 25 seconds left, the other team hit a floater to go up by one. Caden was beside himself, trying not to break down completely but not holding back tears. 

I feel guilty typing this, but I thought he would give up and sit on the bench for a moment. 

But to my guilt-ridden surprise, he swallowed the grief, wiped his face, and returned to the game.

No Hoosier moment. They lost by one point.

After the high-fives and "good games," I pulled him aside. I wanted him to sit with what he was feeling, to understand that it’s okay to feel the pain.

Because here’s what mattered: he gave it everything he had. He didn’t give up. He left it all on the court. And that’s something worth recognizing, no matter the outcome.

It’s easy to focus on the win or loss in such moments, but there’s so much more to learn. Hard work and learning to process emotions are skills that will carry him through life beyond the First Baptist basketball court. As a parent, seeing him learn those lessons in front of me felt like the biggest win of all.

❤️ Kyle

On the Four Types of Content Marketing

Next week, I’m excited to launch my playbook on building a solid content marketing strategy. It’s based on years of experience leading and creating campaigns that have driven and influenced over $750 million in pipeline over the past decade.

Before the playbook, I wanted to revisit the four types of content marketing and thought leadership foundational to any brand strategy. 

It’s 2024. Goldfish attention spans are certainly pushing the stakes higher. Exceptional content marketing must not only stand out but also be dynamic, personalized, and creative. 

 2024 content marketing needs to achieve the following (and probably more): 

• Be pitchable: Journalists, writers, and influencers should want to cite your content.

• Be valuable: Audiences should willingly trade something (even just an email) for your insights. Ask the question: Would you pay for this?

• Be shareable: People should want to share your content. It should be a conversation piece in community discussions. 

• Be actionable: Your internal team should use it in their pitches, decks, and conversations. They should be seen as the experts!

• Be impactful: It should directly correlate with pipeline and revenue. 

It’s a tall order but completely doable if you focus on five types of content: Peer, Product, Experience, and Community.

Peer-based Content Marketing

Let’s start with one of the most common forms of thought leadership on the market today: Peer-based research. 

The people who buy and use your product know a lot that can help others. And frankly, they want to know what their peers are doing related to your use cases. At ExactTarget, we pioneered the idea of the “State of Marketing” report by surveying our customers, and Salesforce still uses it today as a big part of their content strategy. 

What to do tomorrow:

1. Define a set of use cases or pain points that are most relevant to your customers.

2. Develop 4 to 5 questions for each, using multiple-choice options.

3. Use tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to create an easy-to-use survey.

4. Reach out to your customers via email and offer an incentive—perhaps a $25 gift card, or even better, a $25 donation to DonorsChoose.org upon survey completion.

5. Partner with influencers and experts to increase the trust and reach of your content.

6. Leverage AI tools to quickly uncover patterns in large datasets.

7. Make your content accessible and engaging, such as through concise LinkedIn slideshows or Twitter threads.

This doesn’t have to take the form of research or surveys. You could also spin up a Zoom call, interview a dozen customers or their peers, and publish the content. 

Again, people care what their peers are doing. The more your content marketing connects to your audience's thoughts and feelings, the more they’ll care when you publish.

Product-based Content Marketing

Peer-based content marketing gets you the qualitative research needed to generate content, but what about the quantitative? Well, that’s where product-based content marketing comes into play—content built on benchmarking or product usage data. 

Your product creates useful information that could show people you're an expert and help future customers (even current customers). For example, when I was at ExactTarget, Silverpop used to share reports about email trends like open rates; now, it’s commonplace.

What to do tomorrow:

1. Collect anonymous data from your product to uncover interesting patterns and comparisons.

2. Analyze the data for useful insights. You can also leverage AI tools to help make sense of it all.

3. Add real-time tips and insights into your product, so users get value as they interact with it based on benchmark data.

4. Create interactive tools that allow companies to compare themselves to others (we’ll dive deeper into this later).

For example, we publish benchmark data from the Jellyfish app based on the usage of thousands of engineering teams. A DevOps tool could create a report called “The State of Build Pipelines” using data from lots of users. If you do this right, your content can become something your entire category depends on. 

Experience-based Content Marketing

Experience-based content marketing aims to capture the mindshare of your customers, customer’s customer.

Let me give you an example (an oldie but a goodie). 

In 2014, I was part of the team that developed ExactTarget’s content marketing strategy. We had already launched a highly successful thought-leadership campaign called Subscribers, Fans, and Followers, one of the first pieces of content to include consumer survey responses.

It wasn’t a benchmark report for our customers (see product and peer). It was survey data from our customer’s customer. 

We took it one step further, and we made it experiential. 

In 2013, we created another thought-leadership piece called Retail Touchpoints Exposed, which analyzed the customer journey across the top 50 retail brands we were targeting. Our team spent months shopping in their stores, subscribing to emails, and tracking engagement. We asked questions like:

• Did they capture email or mobile information in-store?

• Did they personalize the digital experience based on the in-store interaction if they collected email?

You get the idea. The best part? After 90 days of tracking these brands, we developed a scorecard for each one and ranked them against their competitors. This scorecard became perfect material for sales reps to use when contacting targeted accounts.

Experience-based research is powerful because it captures the mindshare of your customer’s customers, giving you a unique view in the market (and different from your competitors). 

Community-based Content Marketing

Guess what? Buyers trust peers and communities more than your brand. Community-generated content can tap into this trust, promoting the voices of your customers, partners, and influencers. 

However, I’m not talking about starting another community. We don’t have time for that. But we can tap into the existing communities, including your customers. 

Here are some examples: 

• Case Studies and Testimonials: No-brainer. Highlight stories directly from your customers. Pair these with metrics that quantify their success using your product. If you don’t have metrics, find some. Metrics are the lifeblood of any case study. 

• Customer-Generated Blogs or Videos: Invite customers to share their expertise, such as how they use your product to solve their pain. This could be a podcast or feature them on your YouTube channel or blog.

• Community Spotlights: Make your customers the hero. Share stories of how your customers are using the product. Have a “User of the Month” section to highlight someone helpful or creative. You could also recognize a large group of individuals, like when we recognized 35 Women and Non-binary Engineering Leaders to Watch. We want to celebrate our customers but also make them feel valued. 

Community-generated content strengthens engagement and enhances trust by showing prospects how real people use and benefit from your product. It transforms your content into a conversation, not just a “screaming from the rooftops” campaign.

As we head into 2024, it’s clear that content marketing has to change and improve. People’s attention is harder to catch, so we must create interesting, helpful, and customer-centric content. By focusing on content based on experience, community, peers, and your product, you can make magic that gets noticed and grows the business. 

I can’t wait to share my playbook with you next week. 

On Self-Correcting Mechanisms

There is a reason I lean more towards science than religion in framing my worldview and values.

Self-correcting mechanisms. 

Over the past month, I’ve been listening to Yuval Harari’s book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. In it, he examines how information networks have evolved and shaped human thought throughout history.

Harari argues that for a society to thrive, it needs a way to spot and correct mistakes over time, or, in other words, incorporate self-correcting mechanisms. 

Self-correcting mechanisms allow for the recognition and correction of errors. They build resilient systems.

He compares groups like the Catholic Church, which historically resisted self-correction, to the scientific community, where peer review actively drives improvement. Politically, Harari views democracy as good at self-correcting through free elections and a free press. However, dictatorships don’t have these tools, eventually leading to collapse. 

Self-correcting mechanisms are also very, very important to how you perform and lead marketing teams. Integrating self-correcting principles into your team and strategy can help you adjust faster and continue to grow. 

So, we’ve established that self-correcting mechanisms are a good thing for marketing and society. Let’s look at a few examples and how it works for marketing, using ideas from Nexus: 

• Adjusting to Change: Like the systems in Nexus that adapt to new situations, marketing plans must be flexible. For example, if the market’s opinions or the economy change, you will want to change your messaging to stay relevant.

• Learning from Feedback: Self-correcting mechanisms rely on feedback loops. Use analytics tools, customer surveys, or social listening to identify what's working and what isn’t. This data will help you make adjustments, like improving ad targeting, refining content, or shifting your ICP. 

• Staying Strong Under Pressure: A good marketing plan or system doesn’t fall apart if something goes wrong, such as a campaign that doesn't work or a competitor doing something big. Instead, it uses what it learns to change direction and recover quickly.

• Growing Over Time: By continuously learning and improving, self-correcting marketing teams improve, find new ideas, and stay successful over time.

When you use self-correcting mechanisms in marketing, your plans don’t fall apart when things get tough. Instead, they change, get better, and succeed. These tools help everything grow (not just your campaigns), but also you and your team.

In the end, the ability to learn, correct mistakes, and improve is what makes some teams and communities stronger, while others remain stagnant.

Oh and you should read Nexus before your competitors.