The Easy Mode Framework, Part 2: Purpose

[Music] Hello there, dear listeners. Welcome back to Cheat Codes. Oh, it's not Easy Mode anymore. Cheat Codes. Cheat Codes by Easy Mode. Yes, hello there. Okay, so last time, well right now, this is the second part of the Easy Mode framework. Last time, just a quick recap, we talked about idea-driven content, which is the three types of good content. And we got a lot of questions based on that. And just so you guys know, there's not really a lot you can do with that information. Right? That's why it's the mindset part. There are no, it's not like, yeah, I got it, but like, where do I go now? Exactly. Where do you go now? And so we're going to show you where you go now with that information and Todd, you want to take it away, my man? Yeah, man, let's do this. Okay, so as Obed just said, in the last episode, we talked about establishing a mindset for creating good content, which is the first part of our Easy Mode framework. So if you haven't listened to that yet, it's kind of a prerequisite for everything else. So if for some reason you're just popping in now, I'd recommend going back and listening to that one first. Now, in that episode, we talked about three types of good content to answer the question, what is good content? Those three types are built on a foundation of insightful substance. But insightful is kind of subjective without a purpose, right? And in order to know if your content is truly insightful, you need to understand what you're trying to achieve with that content. So this became abundantly clear to me over the course of the last year. I did several hundred one on one calls with fellow content marketers that I found through LinkedIn. And I found that 99% of the teens out there had no idea what the purpose of their content is. And I learned this because one of the first questions that I asked to all of the people I talked to was, what's the purpose of the content you're currently creating or the content that you want to create? And literally right off the bat, the immediate reaction was deer and headlights. But the reason for the question, at least not initially, was to create that got your moment. The reason for the question was because if I didn't, if I don't know what you're trying to achieve with your content, how am I possibly going to give you advice on how to achieve whatever that goal is? There has to be something that we're striving to if we're going to create a successful content strategy. So after that initial shock of not knowing how to answer the question, people would give me one of two responses every single time. The first response was, you can probably guess this. I'm just throw it out there. What do you think the first response is? If I ask you, what's the purpose? And you probably know because we've talked about this. But what do you say? If I say, what's the purpose of your content? And I said 99% of the people give me the same answer. What do you think that answer is going to be? I want to increase bread awareness. Yes. Number one response. I would say this is like 80% of them that I got was, I want to increase bread awareness. And I'm going to say these are just random ballpark guest numbers. But I'm going to say like the other 19% is, I want to drive more inbound demo requests to my website. Now let's pause there for a moment and think about those two answers. Increase brand awareness and I want more demo requests on my website. Because I am confident that most of the people listening to this episode would have given me that same exact answer. But the problem with those two answers is that neither one of them are like an actual purpose. Their side effects of having content that executes on a very specific purpose. Yeah. And that, that's my friend, is where part two of the EasyWork framework comes into play. Which is what we are going to dive deep on today. We call part two of the EasyMode framework the content journey. And we call it a content journey because unlike the three types of idea-driven content that we went over in part one of this framework, the content journey is very much a progression system. It's mapping your content's purpose to the stage at which your, your at in your business is growth. However, as you move through this three part system, that does not mean that you stop creating the first as you move through to the third. Being able to iterate and advance each stage further in its messaging as you progress through this is going to be key to its success. So before we get into the detail of this content journey, I want to discuss what I see most companies doing. And I want to do this because if you're listening to this right now, if this is you, this part of the framework is really going to hit home and give some guidance on how to shift your content's purpose to be way more effective than it currently is. So most companies produce random acts of marketing. They have a product and they have a pain point that they think that that product solves for. And maybe it does solve for that. The strategy or lack thereof becomes creating little random pieces of content that links that pain point to the potential customer. And now most people listening right now are saying like, yeah, okay, what's wrong with that? I'm linking the pain point to the customer. My product is that bridge. What's wrong with that is that unless this product that you are selling is truly something new, which is rare, the content that you create nine times out of ten is going to be the exact same content that your competitor is making. It doesn't stand out and it doesn't achieve the goal that you want it to achieve, which as stated by most is either inbound demo requests or brand awareness. And it's all because it lacks purpose. So let's dive in to the three stages of the content journey to define what your content purpose should be. Stage one is your top down strategic narrative. Without a strategic narrative, the rest of your content will never reach its maximum potential. And like we mentioned a moment ago, every stage has a very specific purpose. The purpose of your top down content is to drive change among the strategic decision makers in the target market. So companies that fail to create this type of content will always fall into that trap of being a me to business. So this is a, this is a, this is a true purpose that you can craft a strategy behind in order to achieve your goals, whereas drive demos or build brand awareness is a side effect of having a strategic narrative, creating good content around it, and then getting that out into the market. Okay, so this is, this is only the first step. But for, for most companies that get to this part and that get this part right, this is also where a lot of them stop, right? There's still a big problem if all you have is a strategic narrative, right? Like, let's pretend that you have, you've created that aha moment in the minds of your decision makers. Okay, they, they adopt your point of view. And now they want to implement it. Consuming this top down content, it's not going to teach anybody how to do that, right? It leaves this, this massive gap that makes managers have to try and hack it together the best that they can. And, you know, what you need, what you need to do now is you need to train the market on how to implement that that strategic narrative that you've just created. So that's where stage two of this content journey comes into place. Stage two is what we call middle out implementation. Very fancy. So your top down content, it's continuing to run, right? You need to teach that next level down in the organization how to implement it and, and measure that success. If you don't, you're, you're going to leave the market vulnerable to try and figure it out on their own. And then you're going to fail. They're going to blame the narrative is ineffective when really it wasn't the strategies fault. It was the way that those people understood the strategy and tried to execute it on their own. It's, it's, it's also really important to note that the same way that your top down strategic narrative. So the organization is the audience. So somebody in the C suite or an executive. So should each one of these other stages. The, the creator of this content needs to be able to really understand the, the ins and outs of the role and the pain points of their specific intended audience. That level of understanding, right? They're, they're never going to be able to deeply answer those questions that come from the audience. And once you get to this implementation stage, this middle out stage that we're talking about of the content journey. These questions are going to get really, really tactical. It's the, if the internal voice of your content within your organization is not currently executing on what they're talking about. It quickly becomes irrelevant because, you know, the people out there doing it pass you by because they. The market will move past them. So for companies that have successfully marketed their strategic narrative and taught people how to implement it. Almost nobody has moved on to stage three of our, of our content journey. I'm going to keep bringing this up because I know that people are going to view this. They're going to, they're going to mix like try to mix this with what we went over an episode one, but it's, it's really important to understand that. In this content journey, this is a progression system. And this progression system does not happen overnight, right? It's not like we're talking about, you know, your top down content is going to be month one. You're, your middle out it's going to be month two like no this, these things take, you know, months and months to implement. So because it doesn't happen overnight, as you move through stage one and stage two, it's very likely that other companies are going to move into this market if they weren't already there. And, and stopping at this stage, this middle out implementation is where most, I'm going to almost every company that I know of falls into, right? Like we've seen it a million times. The company creates the category. They teach the market on how to implement the strategy that original company gets lazy and some new company comes in and steals the market from that original creator. Like I think the perfect example of that is ADM like terminus did all the work to get started six senses is now the dominant player in that category, right? We've also seen the flip side of that where the company creates the category, the market accepts that category and it grows. And then new companies raise money, they enter the market and they struggle to compete due to being seen as like this me to competitor that's entered the market and the category leader just continues to grow and grow and grow. In either one of these situations, the way that I see it, there's only two ways to win the first way to win is by niching down. But you know, for most companies that aren't the leader, but maybe they're like two through five, like niching down is a step backwards, right? And then we're talking about like the 12th, you know, competitor in a category. So again, it's kind of a step backwards. So what, what else can you do to win the other option is where this stage three comes in. And that is what we were calling stage three of this content journey is what we are calling bottom up evangelism. This is where as I see it, the creator economy meets B2B. It's where our narrative of, you know, B2B doesn't have to be boring is really going to shine through. Like this content, this content that we're creating in bottom up evangelism, it takes your strategic top down narrative that we that we built, you know, first, and it adds storytelling and entertainment value. And the reason it does that is because the goal of this content is to target end users of your product and literally evangelize the living shit out of them like like where our goal is to create die hard fans from the people using it and to create, you know, want to be users from the people that, you know, have to use the competitor. So most companies, when they create content, they focus on two groups, they focus on the leaders who make decisions and the ones who are dishing out the cash by the product where nobody focuses is the people that will actually be using the product once it's implemented, right. Like this is this is everybody views this is like, okay, like these people have no, no authority, like we need to focus on on the people above them. And this is the huge mistake that most people make because again, we put, we put absolutely no weight on these, on these individuals ability to affect buying decisions. But like think about this for a second, in reality, these people have a massive impact, you know, they're maybe they're not the person in the, you know, once the sales process has started. You know, they're not, they're not hopping into a demo maybe, but like think about it in the in the entire, think about it from your entire demand creation process like this end user is by far from a numbers perspective, the biggest group inside the organization. And just like the, you know, the people that we talk about above them, like these are the people that are sharing content in their internal slack groups with their managers. But the difference is these people are not sharing the thought leadership type content that is being targeted at managers and executives, you know. These are the people that are that are sharing, you know, corporate pro videos or sales feed videos, entertaining content because it resonates so deeply and that's the kind of stuff that goes viral internally at the organization. Brand awareness is the side effect that we mentioned in the beginning of this episode right that 99% of the people said was there was their contents purpose. And we stated that that's not an actual purpose. What they really meant was that they wanted their, their future users of their product to evangelize it for them internally months before a buying process ever started. So that the people that the decision makers in that organization were fully aware of that product. And the majority of this group, you know, they're not, they're not getting let's let's face it. They're not getting evangelized by blogs or ebooks or newsletters, you know, even even thought leadership podcasts, maybe like an entertaining podcast or something like that. But like the typical things that that we think of in these these, you know, top down and middle out content, that's not what's working on this group of people. This is the group that that like they, they crave those creative concepts that we talk about. This is the group that like they want that type three content that we outlined in the first part of this framework. So companies underestimate like I don't think anybody's going to, going to deny this here that that companies drastically underestimate the power of like creators and B2B because like let's face it. And then they're, they're few and far between. And when I say creators like people have people have called me out on this when I've when I've created like tick tocks and linked in post on this and stuff. And it's like they say like what are you talking about like we already have creators and in B2B. I'm not talking about I'm not talking about like your typical podcast. I'm not talking about content writers like when I say creator, I don't mean they're creating content. That's not that's not how I'm defining creator. So like let's not confuse the two right. So like companies don't value the power that like a when I say creator think about like you know, YouTubers influencers like we don't we don't value that in B2B. And these people that are that are already in B2B and they are creators like these are the people that they don't get excited by jumping into like numbers and reporting which in most cases it causes them to get stuck where they're at in an organization. But you know they're they're also the ones that have this this massive untapped potential for impacting the growth of your business like when you especially when you're in these these crowded markets where the products are like so incredibly commoditized like this is where this group of people have this this massive ability to impact growth. And smart companies. They're going to build teams around this this type of role I talked about this in the tic talk the other way the other day like the same way that we've built teams around the SDR role like you're going to you're going to have a small team of dedicated creators on your marketing team and you're going to have call it a creator manager call it a director of creators like whatever you want to call it. That's going to be the role that that manages these creators and the same way that an SDR manager's job is to listen to SDR calls and give them feedback on you know how to level up and you know book more meetings whatever the creator manager will they'll collaborate with these creators they'll give them feedback on you know how to make their content better. And they're going to train them on how to better evangelize their end users because these are the people that have been creating for a long time they've they've you know figured out what works what doesn't what's cringy what's not like what resonates like they've they've mastered this this craft so. Don't be the this is this is kind of like a message for for. Leadership I guess if if anybody's listening to this podcast from like a leadership perspective. You don't want to be the company that that misses that boat because like you need to realize right now that one the creator economy is coming to be to be like I don't think anybody's denying that at this point. And and you know you you need to start evangelizing now because right now nobody else is doing it so you have this massive potential to be the first company in your category that's doing this. And that my friends is how you assign purpose to your contents strategy. And before before before you you chime in here sir just as a final reminder as I I previously stated I was going to say this several times throughout this episode. This is a progression system people. You move from you move from top down to middle out to bottom up but at no point as you progress through those should you stop doing the one before it you need to you need to advance the one before it as you move down. So that's my spiel sir. Thank you sir so if if you're listening to this you have to look at your stage of growth right if you're super early stage and you don't have anything going for you then what he's trying to say is don't just jump to the evangelizing and users part as great as that sounds like you need to first establish that top down narrative right once you get that established. It's a good consistent engine it's running you're not running into hiccups you have zero issues keeping it going and putting it out there then you can start establishing that middle out tactical implementation. You get that going that's established that goes on for a while it's doing well now you have both things running in parallel in tandem without messing up. Now you can start focusing on the bottom up evangelizing and users part and just to serve as a quick recap the first part of this framework was mindset right a lot of people came to us and they were like hey you know that was awesome that was great but like what do we create and so that's exactly what I'm trying to say like it was the mindset part as in we all talk about make good content but no one really. Know what that means now we do we created like this classification system for it so we know now that okay good content it can be broken up into three types type one type two type three cool now that we have that information we can now move forward but before we get to creation before we get to strategy. We want it to go over purpose right so now we know what the purposes of our content are still. There's still more parts to this right this is still not the part where if you if you're listening that you stop listening and you have all this information now and you're excited and you go back to your content strategy and you want to revamp it just just just keep hearing us out right because next we're going to move to the strategy part and the way that we see strategy. It's essentially the prerequisites of ideation because where we see teams get stuck on ideation is not that they're unable to come up with good ideas it's because they don't have the prerequisites of it down of ideation down so we've broken up strategy into two different parts one is the five prerequisites that you have to understand and then the second part of strategy is a process that we're going to do. A process that we've created called a realm of relevancy which is a way that you map out your strategic narrative to inform content topics and so we'll be diving into that episode next it'll be part three of the easy mode framework strategy and yeah I think you guys are going to love it. I just want to throw this out there yes I am I am on the team prerequisite I notice you say how safe we requisite free requisite yeah pre requisite huh I think I kind of say both this is like niche niche yeah I say niche I say niche too but you say speaking you know speaking of pre-requit I can't say the word now I don't know exactly I used that before okay and the speaking of pre-requisites all right guys thanks for later. All right guys thanks for listening see you later. All right thanks and bye. [MUSIC]