John Bonini’s Post

Now that the site is live, I can talk about this logo that Stephanie Lauderback made. I wanted something fun. I wanted something unique. I wanted something that felt hand made. Most importantly, I wanted something that represents what a Content Brand is about. The top half of the exclamation point is a bookmark to signify the resonance your audience should feel with your content. They should want to bookmark it, favorite it, etc., and want to spend more time with you/your content going forward. The little sketches in the text shadows signify hand drawings/markings to represent the importance of making something that's your own in a time where that will be increasingly more important and effective. The font itself is meant to conjure up memories of consumer packaging/logos back when it was more fun. Think 50s-70s. The colors, well, I just like those. I love it. I hope you do, too 🙂

Content Brands is live 🎉 10 months ago I left my full-time role to launch my own consulting business. I didn’t really have a name for it or anything or even a dedicated website. That wasn’t important to me at the time. My first priority was filling out my client roster and continuing to refine my service product. The website would come later with the benefit of clarity. I gained that clarity in the form of (almost) one year of discovery calls and more than a dozen productive client engagements. Today, I officially launch Content Brands, my consulting program for helping teams turn their expertise into a content engine that builds awareness, trust, and an audience that cares every time you publish. I first wrote about the concept of a Content Brand in my newsletter more than a year ago. It resonated immediately. Subscribers responded more to that edition of the newsletter more than any other email I’ve written before or since. Friends of mine sent me texts saying, “You’re onto something. This will be huge.” After a year of talking with prospects and working with clients, they were right. Most of the folks I’ve talked to and worked with in B2B are essentially communicating the same challenge… Undifferentiated content. People couldn’t tell your content apart from any of your competitors. Or, even from AI. If you ripped the label off of your content, no one would ever know it was you. Your strategy is really just “publishing more stuff.” (Actual quote from a prospect turned client.) You’re mostly following the same playbook that everyone else has since 2012, hoping the right people find you. It’s not working like it used to. You’re focused on volume and have little time to get more out of what you already have. You’ve taken a more transactional approach to content, and as a result, have very little community around your brand to help market for you. This results in a lot of people who do not care about the content they create, and a lot of content that people do not care about. When people don’t care, they also won’t remember you. If they don’t remember you, there’s no chance you will earn their business. Publishing more undifferentiated content won’t solve the problem. It’ll actually make it worse. With your current “strategy”, you and/or your team will continue to be swamped publishing more content that drives low engagement and questionable lead quality. Content Brands solves this problem by switching the game up. It’s a program I've built that's broken out into 4 phases aimed at helping teams establish their core editorial narrative, build unique content IP (podcast, newsletter, social presence, etc.) to further that narrative, and implement the processes for repurposing and distributing that content in all the channels they care about. I've included a link to the (new) one page website (more content to come in the coming days/weeks) for those looking to be the first/next Content Brand in their space.

contentbrands dot co More on this tomorrow 🙂

Probably a hot take –– the majority of AI results I’ve seen from Google offer an infinitely better experience than most of the over-optimized content that follows them in search results. It’s quick. It’s to the point. It carries no agenda other than answering my question. Quickly. This should say something, yeah? It’s purely transactional which serves the purpose when I want to learn something and move on. Our challenge, as content creators, is to shift from transactional to relational in our content. Tell us about how you think. Tell us about why you think this way. Tell us about the experiences and observations that have led you here. Tell us about how you, your team, and your thinking are different. This is the type of content people are spending more time with. Not in theory. Not in the future. *Right now*. This is why newsletters, podcasts, etc., seem to be in vogue. It’s not because they’re more optimal platforms…in fact, they’re much harder to grow and gain traction with. It’s because they allow for deeper connection with the audience. 

Share the process. Not just the final result. The rebrand. That new podcast episode. Your newly launched newsletter. The research report. A new blog post. As marketers, we have a tendency to create content around and promote the result. “Here’s this new thing! Check it out.” But, what I’ve seen resonate more and more is content around the process for building, launching, and creating that new thing. What’s the insight that led to the change? What challenges did you run into? (That your audience might anticipate, too?) What did you learn along the way? This is what people relate to. This is what inspires and motivates change in your audience. Announcing the thing is here today, gone tomorrow. Everyone is announcing things, too. Yours will just be another in a long line of announcements this week. But, talking about the factors that led to that thing is both inspiring and memorable.

Content is a team sport. Sharing first-person insights, experiences, observations, and points of view is critical for cutting through the deluge of undifferentiated content right now. But marketing can’t do this alone. The founder has to participate. The leadership team needs to participate. The customer facing teams need to participate. Heck, the audience needs to participate. (And it’s your job to facilitate that.) You can’t outsource thought leadership—whether that’s to an external writer or an AI tool. Most will try, which makes your participation that much more of a differentiator.

You know what kills content programs? The wrong expectations and the wrong motivations. I talked to 🇺🇦 Eddie Shleyner a few weeks ago for Louder Than Words. He has almost 70k email subscribers. More than 100k LinkedIn followers. Not to mention, a profitable business. But it wasn't a business at first. Years ago, when Eddie committed to learning copywriting to advance his professional career, he started writing articles to prove to himself he could apply what he was learning. He didn't publish any of them. They were just a tool for him. It wasn't until a few years later that he was talked into sharing them with the world. His expectations were essentially zero. His motivations were to create great work...for himself. That, in part, has made all the difference.

What people say is so different than what they react to and how they react to it. The latter is so much more telling. This is why product teams ship code and measure/track user behavior. Marketing teams should treat content the same way. Leverage social media and email as testing grounds for specific topics, concepts, and angles. (Rather than leveraging these channels as link dumps for more undifferentiated content.) Pay attention to the signal you receive. Use that to further refine your approach to longer form content (blog posts, podcast discussions, future newsletters, etc.) Treat content like a product. (Because it is.) This is one way to differentiate.

The most valuable asset any marketing team can have is a person who genuinely cares about the quality of the output. They’ll think audience first. They’ll challenge others to refine and adjust their work. They’ll question the purpose and approach behind certain initiatives. They’ll translate ideas from execs in a way that’s unique and authentic. They’ll “protect” the audience from crappy, undifferentiated content. If you have someone like this on your team, you have an unfair advantage.

Too many marketing teams view their podcast as an organic play. They’re approaching audio similar to the way everyone approached blogging (many still do) in 2012––publish it, optimize it, hope the right people find it. It’s the wrong move. Treat your podcast like a premium asset––i.e. a research report. Use the stories, insights, data, quotes, etc., gathered in each episode as context and color in all of the content you create across your blog, social, and email. This way, all of your content leads with actual stories from humans in the trenches doing the work. It’s honest content in a time where most other content is manufactured and low on nutrition. That’s where the ROI of podcasting is. Not in the number of downloads but in how it influences all of the other content you create.