Random acts of marketing

We work with incredibly talented, bright, and extremely busy people. Understandably, marketing can feel like another thing that you have to do. A task that may not move the needle today and therefore it gets pushed repeatedly to the bottom of the list. Especially when you have projects to deliver, salaries to pay and xxx. Marketing and content is often something that is only thought about when the pipeline is quiet, rather than being a consistent investment alongside other work. 

1. You won’t build authority. Posting a flurry of content on LinkedIn when you’re quiet and going dark when you’re busy means you’re essentially treating your audience like a tap you can turn on and off. Audiences don’t work that way. One burst of activity may generate a spike in impressions but those impressions and that interest will quickly dissipate and people will move on if you are not consistent with your strategy. Impressions without continuity and exposure to your authentic voice or perspective does not compound into authority. 
2. You won’t train your audience to come back. Sporadic marketing reads, unconsciously, like a lack of conviction, even if the content itself is good. You can’t expect your audience to come to you and be checking for your latest insights if nine times out of ten, you’re saying nothing at all. Contrast that with someone who shows up every week with a point of view. That person is training their audience to expect things from them.
3. You aren’t approaching your audience from a place of value creation.  Good content strategy is centred around creating value for your ideal audience (this includes ideal clients but is slightly broader than just people that need your services right now). It should focus on problems they face and how they feel about the world. If you only market when the pipeline is quiet then you are marketing to fill a hole  and your content comes from a place of need, not a place of value creation. Audiences will sense that and it turns them off. More practically, content has a lag time. Conversion, especially in B2B service industries, can be weeks or months. Any positive impact will be seen later, potentially when you’re busy again – and the cycle repeats.
4. You’ll never see the compounding interest. Like any investment, marketing compounds. A company or person who has been publishing consistently for two years doesn’t just have a hefty content bank (which they can farm for more content), they also have an audience that has grown used to hearing from them and a reputation that precedes them in a room. When they do outreach before an event, their prospects already know a bit about who they are and are potentially warmer to a conversation.

All of this means that random acts of marketing never actually accumulate into anything useful or effective, because each burst of activity starts with the clock at zero. 

Let’s fix that

Fixing a random acts of marketing problem is fairly straightforward and doesn’t require anything fancy to get started. What you need first is a clear roadmap, a model that is understood by everyone in your team with shared responsibilities to drive accountability and action. We’d call that a content plan. Here are a few simple ways you can begin to address this issue:

1. Focus on one thing. Pay attention to one platform. It is tempting to throw everything at it when you are starting a new strategy, but what you need is a sustainable practice. Once you have enough eyeballs in your audience (which is probably more eyeballs than you think), you can then think about getting them onto an email list through lead magnets and delivering additional value. 
2. Create a schedule that works for you, even when you are running at max capacity.  At Make the Break we usually suggest clients look to post 2-3 times a week, to feed the hungry algorithm. That may sound like a herculean task for you (one client told me recently that their current schedule is more like once a quarter). You can start with once a week. Treat this as a non-negotiable deliverable for a project. 
3. Always be ahead of when you are posting. Part of what makes consistency hard is not having guardrails. Ringfence an hour or two a week for content creation and do two weeks at a time. Always be ahead of the game rather than reactive. 
4. Keep it simple. Long form articles are great, but they are also time consuming and it can feel very disheartening when something you have worked on for a while doesn’t get the traction you want. Content can take many shapes.  A short text LinkedIn post about something genuinely interesting and a team picture can work well. It doesn’t always have to be a thesis. Just put a solid brick in the wall. 
5. Do not outsource your content writing to AI. This is so unbelievably tempting for busy founders and leaders, but I beg you, please don’t do this. Use AI for research, to give you writing frameworks, to prompt you, but do the writing yourself. I implore this for two reasons:

Number one: the act of writing is an act of discovery and through it you will come to understand what you really think. That is what is most valuable to your prospective audience, your unique point of view. 

Number two: unless you are a good editor*, your content will read like it’s been written by AI. You may feel that is forgivable, but I guarantee you that your audience will be annoyed. This goes back to my earlier point that content creation and audience participation is an exchange. They expect you to put time in and for the content to be valuable, just like your expectation is for them to spend time engaging with you. 

I’d love to hear if you have found anything else that has helped you get out of the random acts of marketing rut – drop me a comment with your suggestions.

* If you are a good editor, you’ll likely spend as much time editing LLM written content as you would have done writing it.