This post was published on April 11, 2025 but first sent to Rise newsletter subscribers on August 30, 2024. Get insights delivered fresh to your inbox once every two weeks. Subscribe to Rise now
Is there such a thing as uniqueness in content marketing?
I used to think not.
That’s because I had a binary view:
I thought uniqueness required the entirety of a content piece to be distinct, singular, one of a kind. Therefore, any content piece designed to rank for high-volume search terms could never be unique.
But experience has taught me otherwise. I now believe you don’t have to whip up something new to achieve uniqueness and differentiation. Just as the unexpected use of a single ingredient can transform a familiar dish, there’s one thing you can add to your content to elevate it above and beyond the competition — and make it difficult to copy.
That ‘thing’ is an earned secret.
The impact of an earned secret
You likely have “earned secrets” if “you did something in your past to solve a hard problem and learned something about the world that not a lot of other people know,” says Ben Horowitz, the venture capitalist who’s said to have coined the term.
One of my favorite examples of an earned secret revolves around customer service. A decade ago (and even up to now), the major narrative in B2C customer service circles was that delighting customers and exceeding their expectations would make them more loyal to your brand.
On the surface, it makes sense. Who would object to such an agreeable statement?
One group of consultants — a company named CEB — wasn’t so sure. And to test their hunch, they questioned 97,000 customers.
Few teams do research on such a massive scale. For their effort, the CEB researchers earned some valuable secrets. They learned that:
- Customers whose expectations are exceeded don’t become more loyal than those whose expectations are simply met.
- Customer service interactions tend to drive disloyalty, not loyalty.
- The best way to prevent disloyalty is to make sure customers exert as little effort as possible during customer service interactions.
CEB conducted their research in 2013 but their insights are still potent today (you can read their fascinating findings here). Thanks to their earned secrets, they were able to develop a defensible opinion about B2C customer service, challenge industry cliches and truisms, and develop a useful tool — the Customer Effort Score, which many companies still use.
If someone had asked a marketer at CEB to write content targeting high-volume keywords like “customer loyalty”, they would have been able to infuse their article with a unique perspective, thanks to their earned secrets.
If someone had asked them to make a playbook, their advice would have stood out by challenging conventions and providing an original metric.
Even if they made a simple social media post, it would still have contained an element of uniqueness and originality, because CEB had discovered something about the world that not a lot of other people knew.
How to discover your earned secrets
You don’t need to do something on such a large scale like CEB did.
If you’ve poured significant time and effort into a job or a hobby, chances are you’ve learned a thing or two that other people will find insightful. But it might not be obvious to you — maybe because you’ve never articulated it before or because the insights already feel quite intuitive to you.
The people you want to interview for content might feel the same way. In fact, one thing we hear from our clients is that their subject-matter experts sometimes object to being interviewed because “they think they have nothing to say” on a given topic.
Here are some tips to discover your earned secrets:
- Teach others. This will force you to reflect on your experiences and articulate the knowledge and insights you’ve gained over the years.
- Challenge truisms. Think of common sayings that everyone in your industry seems to embrace without thinking about it critically. Does your experience contradict popular wisdom?
- Solve a problem and live to tell the tale. Tackle an obstacle that you, your team, or your customers have been facing, and write about your thought process, hypothesis, the various solutions you tried, and the outcomes.
The people around you have a secret
Who in your company might have “earned secrets” you can use for content?
- The subject-matter expert who has learned cultural peculiarities about how your customers use your product
- The founder who discovered a widely shared pain point, a feasible and scalable solution, and an outcome many people are willing to pay for
- The customer service rep who has found out why customers are disappointed with your service even though you think you’ve delivered everything you promised
- The sales executive who has identified the ‘aha moment’ — that point in the customer journey when a prospect’s objections dissolve and are replaced with belief in your solution
By interviewing these people, you increase your chances of discovering “earned secrets” that are valuable to your audience.
Not sure how to get started? Try one of these 25 prompts to brainstorm thought leadership content and get your key opinion leaders (KOLs) talking.
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Thanks for reading!
Katrina
