What Are We All Afraid Of?
A look into what marketers fear
We don’t talk enough about fear.
In business – and in marketing especially – no one is “afraid” of anything. We’re “frustrated in our ability to execute” or we’re “concerned for changing market conditions.”
We speak in the detached patois of the insider; but we’re not “afraid” of anything. That’s a such a … pedestrian emotion.
And, anyway, why would we be afraid? MarTech marketing is always telling us how great we are.
We’re “Rockstar CMOs” or “Change Agents” or “LeadGen Ninjas” or whatever our last LinkedIn blurb read. We call ourselves this because that’s what we’re told by … ironically … the marketing of companies who want us to spend our money with them.
(You’d think people who worked in marketing would be less susceptible to marketing. You’d be wrong.)
But inescapably, underneath the posturing, we’re all afraid of something.
In 2014, Harvard Business Review asked 114 CEOs what they were afraid of. I expected to hear things about “disruptive technology” or “market displacement” – things they didn’t cause but could only react to, heroically, even in defeat. One pictures them, back against the wall, valiantly swinging their swords against the advancing hordes, standing courageously between their org chart and the abyss.
But, refreshingly, the number one fear was: “being found incompetent.”
That was followed by “underachievement” and “feeling vulnerable.”
Someone finally told the truth. CEOs, even.
I think fear is even more deeply seated in marketing because the field is, by nature, all about the appearance of value and fit. I’m trying to avoid using the word “pretension” here, but let’s be honest – marketing is about creating a mood, a feeling, a brand. In few worlds is being afraid of something a good look, and in marketing we tend to turn our campaigns back on ourselves. We want to embody what we espouse, so we buy into our own press releases.
And this is where it gets personal –
Marketing is often viewed as “art,” at some level. Accounting or operations is so easily separable from us as people – we can keep it at arm’s length, because it’s just numbers or processes. But marketing requires … interpretation, emotion, and subjective judgments about beauty and the human condition. There’s vulnerability in the exercise of that.
In the aptly titled Art and Fear, David Barnes and Ted Orland says this:
The chasm widens even further when your work isn’t going well, when happy accidents aren’t happening, or hunches aren’t paying off. If you buy into the premise that art can be made only by people who are extraordinary, such down periods only serve to confirm that you aren’t.
Screwing up finance might mean you don’t understand numbers. Screwing up marketing implies you don’t understand humans.
Compounding this is that our failures are inherently public. Marketing is meant to be seen, so if we fall flat on our faces, it’s not in some backroom accounting process or private warehouse operation or intranet implementation. No, if marketing goes sideways, everyone sees it. You can hide an internal process that doesn’t work, but crappy marketing campaigns are everyone’s business.
And there are just so many moving parts in the average MarTech suite. The “right” answer seems to be just around the corner.
TK Rader did a brilliant (if satirical) write-up on LinkedIn about how a bad CMO can keep their job for way too long, just because it’s so easy to get caught up and camouflaged by the constant eddy of technologies, stacks, suites, and methodologies in the marketing space.
Month 1: Tell the CEO that the MarTech stack is broken … Month 3: Marketo implementation is going well. It should come together any moment now. … But wait. Nothing is converting. I know WHY. Our BRAND is totally off. The website and the look and feel needs a re-design and our messaging needs a reboot. … Bounce rates up? It wasn’t our ICP traffic anyway so don’t worry. … Ok. Sure. We’ll do this. But listen, I really think we need to re-think how we capture demand and take a PLG approach. … Month 15: It’s not my fault. The Product just can’t support the PLG motion.
This is likely why CMO tenure is the lowest in the C-Suite. You can find a lot of statistics about this, so I’m hesitant to cite just one, but the average tenure of a CMO is about three years, and for a CMO in technology it’s even lower than that – less than two years, according to some studies.
So, we posture. We pretend. We swallow our fears as if none of that mattered.
But we all know there are things that keep us awake at night. There are things lurking out there past the light of the campfire that threaten to carry us off into the darkness.
What are those things?
Here are some ideas:
“Our content underperforms. It’s so repetitive. It seems like we haven’t had an original thought in a long time.”
“Our metrics are probably wrong. I’m not tracking the right things. I know how many people visited the website, but not what they did, what they liked, or how any of this even matters. What even is a ‘customer journey’?”
“Our content process is poorly architected. Campaigns take way too long to get started, and small changes turn into big messes.”
“We aren’t using the tools we paid for, and my boss is eventually going to notice. I promised that buying Tool X would make things better, but I can’t show that we’ve even been able to integrate it.”
Do any of those sound familiar?
They certainly sound familiar to me, and I’m not even in marketing, technically.
I’m the guy people in marketing talk to about their problems and their fears. I’m the guy people ask to come in and help them with those problems.
Sometimes they’re honest about them. Often, they’re not. A lot of times, I have to read between the lines.
But I always ask myself: “What is this person afraid of?”
In the next few weeks, we’re going to throw off the shackles of pretension and get really honest about what worries us and what we can do about any of it. There are solutions, but a lot of them are disguised under layers of posturing and assumption that you know exactly what your problems are and can find the corresponding solution to any of them.
So, let’s turn the lights on.
Theme 1: “Our content is not very good”
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.)
I have a couple ideas here.
Solution 1.1: Better ideation and collaboration on content with a CMP
I’ll always believe that content gets better with transparency. Great content teams that I’ve worked with have a wide funnel at the top. There’s maximum visibility into their process – they “open the box” so everyone can look inside.
Great content doesn’t just come from a vaunted few. Lots of people inside your organization have one half off a great idea. The trick is to find the other half and put them together.
And this might sound weird coming from a guy so closely associated with CMS, but your CMS is not the place that this happens. A CMS is a publishing platform, not really a collaboration or ideation platform.
Years ago, I wrote a blog post called The First 85%, which posited that most of the “work” that goes into content happens outside your CMS. When someone actually logs into the CMS to create an artifact (the material form that the content takes), this is way, way into the process.
There are platforms designed specifically for that first 85% – the category is called “Content Marketing Platforms.”
(Honestly, I’ve never loved that label or acronym, because I think they have value far beyond just marketing. They’re more “Content Collaboration Platforms” or “Content Creation Platforms,” but then the acronym gets problematic…)
CMPs are based around the idea that content and its artifact are two different things. We tend to look at a web page and says, “that’s content.” But it’s not. That’s actually an artifact – a web page. The content is the message, the idea, the persuasion, all the effort and input that went into it. At artifact is just the media it got wrapped in.
In perfect world, we move to “multi-artifact” or “multi-channel” content. The same content turned into multiple artifacts and pushed into multiple channels reinforces the difference.
CMPs are about content. They assist with all the things you need to come up with better ideas and work through the sometimes-messy process that results in great content that affects people.
Intake: providing the ability for anyone in the organization to contribute ideas
Campaign management: figuring out how to group content into thematic campaigns
Large-scale content scheduling and editorial calendaring: – coordinating all the content efforts of entire organization for maximum efficient and effectiveness
Drafting content: actually putting fingers to keys and creating words or video or audio
Commenting and discussion: providing feedback and editorial review
Work process management: defining and tracking the steps that move content through editorial and publication processes
The “word du jour” in Martech is “content supply chain.” The goal is for your organization to strip the “heroics” out of content creation. No content process should require champions. No one should do battle. There should be no surprises.
Content creation should be – dare I say it – boring. In a good way. You want predictability. Reliability. And this is what a CDP seeks to provide.
(I maintain it should be boring like a trip to the dentist is boring. If your trip to the dentist is anything other than “boring,” that’s never good.)
Whenever I contemplate the idea of content being boring, I think back to a documentary called Saturday Night, which chronicles the weeklong development of an episode of Saturday Night Live. Contrary to the popular image of freewheeling insanity, the process of delivering an episode of SNL is incredibly precise and predictable. After watching that, I came to understand that creativity has to exist with process. It can run wild, but within guardrails that ensures that everything gets done.
This is what CDPs provide. They give you the framework to abstract the process of developing content to an enforceable platform, and let your staff concentrate and creating the best content they can.
Too much content either never gets started because it doesn’t get captured and developed, or derails because there isn’t a framework in place to shepherd it to publication.
Solution 1.2: Content accountability with micro-events and experimentation
I was in Helsinki once when a woman came up to me after a talk and asked, “How can I get my content creators to care about their content?”
She was stating an inconvenient truth out loud – a lot of times, people just create the content and publish it. Whether or not it actually does anything is not really their problem. They just throw it over the wall and hope for the best
One of the problems here is simple attribution – we generally don’t identify or track conversions as well as we should, so how would we know if our content was “effective”? In many cases, we can’t even define what “effective” even means.
A lot of content creators know this. I don’t want to say they hide behind it, but they simply know that their accountability ends with publication. They just have to get content out the door and are less concerned with what happens after that.
This is what my Finnish friend was struggling with. Her editors created a bunch of content, but after they hit publish, they didn’t have any skin in the game.
One of the solutions here is to include your tracking down to the “micro-event” or “micro-action” level. So, you don’t just track cart checkouts, but you break tracking down into smaller actions. If we accept that a conversion funnel includes lots of smaller events leading up to the moment where someone provides demonstrable value, you can start tracking those events.
Don’t just track who clicks a video link from your home page. Track who plays it. Who gets to 10%. 50% 100% percent.
Don’t just track page views, track scroll depth. How far “down” a piece of content does the visitor progress? (I like this so much better than time-on-page. Scrolling implies they’re doing something, and didn’t just switch windows or go to the bathroom.)
Once you’ve drilled down this level, you can more accurately track that wildly over-used word: “engagement.” And because you can track this more granularly, that means you can bring experimentation to bear.
Experimentation is what it sounds like: trying different things, with a structured tracking system to definitively define which option works better.
Consider:
Don’t just write one headline for that article. Write five, each taking a different angle or in a different format or tone. Then find out which one gets clicked on more often.
Fiddle with design elements on the page. Try different images that completely change the tone and focus of the article.
Break the content down into different lengths. Find which one gets people to the Call to Action more consistently. Clearly, more people are likely to get to the end of shorter content, but how serious are they? Fewer people will stick with longer content, but they might be naturally more qualified leads.
Believe me when I said that you don’t know the answer to any of this. You don’t – you might have theories or suspicions, but you don’t know. The only people who know are the people who are consuming your content, and experimentation fundamentally becomes a way to ask them.
I would never be so bold as to say that you’ll ever be able to absolutely predict with your customers want and what will resonate with them, but experimentation and micro-analytics gets you closer to refining that prediction over time.
Solution 1.3: Content desire with CDP journey analytics
There’s a great scene in Friends where the gang is having a trivia contest to see who knows each other better (remember: the winner gets Monica and Rachel’s apartment).
Ross: Rachel claims this is her favorite movie…
Chandler: Dangerous Liaisons
Ross: Correct. Her actual favorite movie is…
Joey: Weekend at Bernie’s!
I love this, because it reveals a truth: we are what we consume. Humans have a process of “content association” and “content disassociation.” We love to be associated with Dangerous Liaisons because that makes us look erudite. We might not be so open about Weekend at Bernies, because that less of the image we’re going for.
No matter what people say they want, what they are is what they consume. There’s a lot of content out there, and there’s no better way to figure out someone likes than to follow them around and, well, keep track.
You might think this is analytics, but it’s not – analytics is about tracking content consumption is aggregate. Analytics tells you that 1,000 people read your blog post.
But customer data is something different – customer data tells you that this person read four blog posts, a product page, and downloaded a white paper. You might not even know who “this person” is, but they left a behavior trail in their wake.
Analytics is channel-centric, and cross-identity. Customer data is identity-centric, and cross-channel.
Let me say that again: analytics is about a channel, in aggregate. Customer data is about… Bob. Or Mary. Or whoever.
Every trail tells a story. Content recommendation platforms can use that story to predict the content someone will consume next, specifically what content is most likely to lead that journey to a conversion.
You see, if you watch enough journeys, you start to recognize patterns. Then you can consider Identity X and find patterns of (1) people consuming the same type of content, and (2) people who arrive at a positive outcome (a conversion). Combine those two things and you can pretty accurately figure out what Identity X should see next.
Knowing this, it becomes much clearer what content in your system is most effective. Additionally, you can “load level” your content by figuring out if you have more content of a particular topic that your visitors want, or less content. This helps drive better decisions about what content to create.
Again, this isn’t just about consumption. This is about consumption as part of a larger process. Just because someone consumes something doesn’t mean anything by itself. Hell, you can get people to consume anything with clickbait-ish titles.
But if they consume something, and then go on to convert or provide value, then that gives you a key piece of data. Now you have some understanding of the path that your customers go on, and you can develop content to meet that need, instead of just piling on more and more content that performs well in isolation.
This speaks to a larger, healthy perspective shift – moving from content to journey. Very few customers consume a single piece of content, then convert. Rather, everyone is on a journey through your content domain. They move from content to content, experience to experience. The key is not concentrating on specific “islands of consumption,” but rather to understand the transitions between them. Why does Content X lead to Content Y, and is that the path someone takes before they become a conversion?
It’s a study in what’s called “positive deviancy.” Instead of trying to figure out what’s wrong with your content, figure out what’s right. Use tooling to examine those journeys that worked, then extract the commonalities from those and capitalize on them.
We can do all the focus groups we want, and we’ll never learn exactly what makes our customers tick. I’m not saying you shouldn’t talk to your customers, but they’re probably going to tell you about Dangerous Liaisons, rather than Weekend at Bernie’s. We don’t want to know what customer say they want; rather, we want to examine the successful journey they actually embark on.