October 30, 2024
I’ve always felt like the Martech industry is more concerned with swimming pools than it is with what goes in them. We spend an inordinate time building magnificent holes in the ground yet often forget to fill them with water.
I keep trying to “back people up” to content – the stuff we’re supposed to be managing.
But we can back up further … human action. Because, in the end, this is what we’re trying to create: some form of human action, whether it be a “hard” conversion, like a checkout, or a softer conversion, like a changed opinion or a new perspective.
And this is where we often break down in Martech. So long as the architecture is in place, the content becomes sadly interchangeable. Or, at best, it becomes fatalistic –like, “We’ll just throw this out there and hope it works, and if it doesn’t, well… what’re gonna do? People like what they like.”
(And, while I’m not a Luddite by any measure, do you think Generative AI is going to make this better or worse?)
I’m not a content strategist, and I’m just going to assume you’ve engaged a good one. A good content strategist can help at the macro level – they can develop messaging strategies and architecture which are geared to getting your message across.
But let’s drill down further. How do you actually create better content? How do you create content that engages people? That delights people? That they share with other people, and return to more than once?
(I’m reminded of this 1994 long-form ad for MCI which I watch probably once a year and have shared with dozens of people over decades. Please, create content like this.)
