When we launched Rise, we promised to share not only analyses and frameworks, but also lessons we’ve learned from our mistakes.
Today we’ll honor that last part.
We suspect some of you may be in the same boat we’ve been in.
Of mice and men, and forgetting
We started the year with grand ambitions. We repositioned our agency to be a strategic partner to clients and aimed to grow our reputation for design services. We planned to grow along the same trajectory we experienced in 2023. We envisioned new business arms.
But as an old poem goes, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
This year has been utterly different from last.
B2B buyers are more uncertain. Sales take weeks longer to close. Search has become fragmented — generative AI platforms are competing with Google — and ads and AI results are taking up more space at the top of search engine results pages. Social media platforms don’t want people clicking on your links.
All this has shaken our confidence, but also motivated us to be more ambitious. So we doubled down on strategies, frameworks, production processes, internal learning, growing our writing team, and exploring new service offerings.
But I wonder if, as we evolved, we’ve sometimes forgotten the basic elements of good content marketing.
We’re probably in the same boat
We’re not alone in this angst; the B2B content marketers we talk to have similar observations. They sound overwhelmed.
To see whether this experience reflects a broader trend, I downloaded all the studies I could find about the B2B buying journey in Southeast Asia or Asia Pacific in 2024.
Here are some standout stats:
It’s tempting to fight complexity with complexity. To face unprecedented times with unprecedented measures. But consider this: after an earthquake, engineers check buildings for signs of weakness in the foundation and structure. And sometimes even strong structures need to be reinforced.
That’s the lesson we learned this week, the painful way.
Reinforce your foundations as you grow — and even if you think they’re strong
There are days (fortunately rare) when negative feedback weighs on me because I know I’ve let my client down. It’s been that week for a few of us in our team.
Overemphasizing big-picture, strategic messaging led to sacrificing detail and depth. Too much focus on meeting technical and SEO requirements led to overlooking the basics of stylistic techniques.
This reminded me of an editing checklist I built in the early days of With Content. This was a non-negotiable step in the editing process for me back in the day. (Feel free to make a copy and use it yourself!)
If you check it out, you’ll see it’s a lot of items to tick. But this rigor was part of how we established the culture of content excellence we’ve become known for. The mindset that informed this checklist also governed our feedback, mentoring, and peer-review sessions.
We’ve since expanded our content excellence standards to cover brief requirements, outline templates, and persona documents. We ponder how to edit as writers vs as marketers, and debate the use of AI. We’ve recruited people with the skills to write about difficult, technical topics.
This week’s setbacks reminded me why this checklist was non-negotiable. And it’s a good reminder to make sure our foundation continues to stand strong even as we grow and evolve.
Here are some ways to reinforce your foundations, whether you’re on solid ground or are experiencing a shakeup in your industry:
- Review and, if necessary, update your persona docs. You or someone else probably wrote them years ago. You need up-to-date knowledge of your target customers.
- Say the same message in different ways. No one reads every post on your blog and views every asset on your social media. So you need to share your value proposition through different angles and stories, again and again. Besides, repetition builds memory.
- Get to know your product better — and make sure external partners know it, too. Spend time using your product. Arrange a learning session between your product expert and your marketing agency to help them grasp how your product solves your customers’ problems.
- Understand common objections against your product. Get your sales team to share the common questions and objections they face, and create content that addresses them.
- Audit your blog. Choose which entries you need to update, merge, or delete.
- Do more of what works. Examine the content assets or campaigns that drove high-quality leads. Identify the elements you can replicate.
- Assess your strategy’s relevance. Let go of the notion that strategy is fixed. If you’re facing entirely different challenges now compared to when you created your content marketing strategy, consider adapting it to your present situation.
- Create a responsible AI manifesto that aligns with your core content values. AI adoption seems inevitable. Build AI usage guidelines into your foundation to mitigate the unpredictable impact of this technology. After all, what you do today is your best defense against future surprises.
Let’s raise the bar of content marketing in Southeast Asia
We hope you enjoy Rise and find this newsletter helpful. (Read our past editions here.)
And if you do, why not share it with a friend?
Thanks for reading!
⛵
Katrina
