Becoming a Content Brand, Part 1: Craft
I’ve never used Ahrefs.
I’ve never paid for Buffer.
It took me about 5 years before I became a paying customer of Wistia.
I’ve never used InVision. (I’m not even a designer.)
Sparktoro. Drift. Gong. Not a dime.
But here’s the weird thing—I go to bat and recommend these brands all the time. That’s how much I’ve enjoyed and gotten value out of the content these brands have created over the years.
I’ve followed them (for years!) and recommend them purely on their content alone. I’m a brand evangelist without ever having been a customer or user.
That’s a Content Brand.
You know them. The brands you’ve been following for years but have never spent a dime on.
But, if/when the time comes, or, when someone asks for a recommendation, they’re the first ones to cross your mind.
That’s a Content Brand.
Content Brands are brands that create content so good that they inspire brand loyalty even from those who may never buy from them.
In a world of transactional content (click this link, visit this page, download this ebook), Content Brands are the ones that get ahead…
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The idea here isn’t that these brands don’t create content that drives sales. They (obviously) do.
It’s about the approach and philosophy for doing so. Whereas most brands carry out a transactional content strategy (what is this content doing for us right now?, how many clicks did it get?, how many leads did it generate?), these brands play the long game. They flip the script.
“What’s the content doing for them (our audience) right now?”
They invest in quality and entertainment value. They focus on craft.
They create content so good that it creates fans that extend way beyond people with the intent to buy right now. As a result, they create massive leverage in building a following that may buy now, later, or maybe even not at all.
Earlier I said that I became a Wistia customer about 5 years ago. I’ve been following and admiring their content for far longer than that. I’ve gotten to know Chris Savage (Wistia’s co-founder and CEO) over the years, and I reached out to him over the weekend specifically for this newsletter.
When I asked him about their approach to content, he talked about how creating content beyond only those with the intent to buy right now was deliberate, even if they didn’t know it at the time.
“We figured that if you had two options for content––a fun way and a boring way––the fun one would always win. It doesn’t matter what industry we’re in or what our product does, we’re all human beings trying to get a job done, and if we can be a moment of brightness during your workday that inspires or helps you do something better, then the fun option will probably win.
Over time I realized that what we were really doing was building a brand and an audience in advance of people needing to be customers. Ultimately, we didn’t need to time the moment that people needed to find a video marketing platform because they would already know and have a connection to us.”
They didn’t need to time the moment. (I love that.) The content serves the audience, not the other way around.
A few days later, I reached out to Patrick Campbell, another friend of mine, whose content with ProfitWell I’ve long admired.
He said something very similar to Chris.
“I don’t want to have to force myself in front of you constantly in an expensive way.”
The inbound strategy is very hit-oriented. You spend $10k to create the content, put together an ebook, and then some of them hit, some of them don’t, and then that resource diminishes in effectiveness over time.
Instead of that inbound strategy, Campbell describes the way he’s approached content as the media strategy.
“While the costs come out to be roughly the same, instead of dumping that money into ebooks or SEO, you’re investing in shows (or “nerd-tainment, as he calls it) that help to build an audience that you can go to at any time for demand purposes.
You’re basically building that audience through a variety of shows and content that air at different times during the week and which provide more touch points for people to engage with you. Multiple shows increases touchpoints.”
Basically, Campbell said he wasn’t interested in doing what every other brand is doing––investing a ton of money in the top of the funnel in the hopes of reaching people at the exact right moment.
Instead, he was more interested in building content assets and IP that would help give ProfitWell the biggest leverage of all––an audience of fans they could go to at any time.
Both of these companies are thriving. ProfitWell was recently acquired by Paddle for $200M.
Wistia spent $17M to buy out their investors 4 years ago and has done nothing but grow since. According to GetLatka, Wistia’s estimated revenue in 2021 was >$60M.
Both companies also grew (and continue to grow) primarily through content. But, they do so unconventionally.
What can we learn from all of this?
I’ve been geeking out on brands like this for a long time and there are 3 common themes I keep coming back to that I think tie them all together. Things we can all learn from. Their attention to the following is what I think separates them from every other brand creating content:
Craft: Content Brands over-index on the details of creation rather than the tactics that surround promotion.
Conviction: Content Brands hold strong conviction in their unique approach to creating and publishing the content itself.
Continuity: Content Brands ensure continuity by having all content assets and IP revolve around a central theme/thesis/POV.
I’ll be going through each one over the next 3 newsletters, starting with Craft in today’s edition.
What are you doing, in like, an hour or so?
I'll be presenting as part of The Juice's webinar, "How to Run Laps Around Your Competition with Content Distribution."
I’ll be hanging with Brett McGrath of The Juice, Hiba Amin of Textbox, Nick Bennet of Alyce, and Meisha Bochicchio of Goldcast as we go deep on all things content distribution.
Specifically, I'll be getting into how link distribution *is not* content distribution and how brands should approach distributing learnings and insights instead.
Register here and I’ll see you in a bit.
Craft
Content Brands are often motivated by and obsessed with the craft of content creation rather than the tactics so often associated with it.
They obsess over premise. They lose sleep over production value. They feel like they need to get everything related to the experience right—the outline, the position, the featured image, the headline, etc. They listen through hundreds of tracks in search of the right intro music for a new show.
They obsess over things others might view as fluff. Or vanity.
They don’t obsess over keywords or click rates or backlinks. They aren’t dependent on any one channel.
Content IS the channel––it’s how they attract an audience, not a tactic for getting found.
In other words, they create the type of content people go searching for, not the kind you publish and hope gets found.
So, rather than obsessing over tactics and algorithms, they instead focus their time on the creative.
They do this in 2 ways by focusing on:
Uniqueness: Will this be unlike anything else our audience consumes?
It’s Wistia restoring an old station wagon as part of their interview series, Brandwagon.
It’s Patrick Campbell spending 9 hours(!) recording himself repeating the word “churn” 100,000 times.
Campbell referred to this as “nerd-tainment” in our conversation.
“I have to be somewhat entertaining around the thing that we’re doing,” said Campbell. “Our aim is to create things that people want to learn from but also are entertained by.”
Savage says Wistia grew into their approach through a series of wins over the years.
“We launched a team video that said nothing of our product but drove a bunch of sales,” said Savage. “We did a content survey and decided to make this video to try and convince people to fill it out. 75% of the people who watched the video, filled out the survey.”
“The power of brand is obvious.”
Utility: Will this be more helpful than anything else our audience consumes?
It’s SparkToro curating their most valuable learnings around audience research and sharing them via their newsletter twice a month.
This one might feel obvious. Like, isn’t every brand publishing a listicle “how to” trying to be helpful?
Maybe. But, it feels like utility with an agenda.
But, instead of making sweeping generalizations about ALL companies, here’s what I’ve noticed about Content Brands –– Utility is the starting point. It’s not part of a larger agenda aimed at helping them rank or generate backlinks or clicks.
The content is a product in and of itself and they treat it like one. They’re protective of it. They obsess over it.
And here’s the biggest differentiator I’ve observed: Content Brands seem to value utility even more than they do any transaction that could come of it.
They’re helpful because they want to be helpful. And, they trust that in doing so, will lead to good things. Maybe now. Maybe someday. Or, maybe never.
Rand Fishkin, cofounder at SparkToro, had this to say about this topic on the Metrics & Chill podcast recently.
“Amanda [Natividad] and I do this holiday gift guide every year,” said Fishkin. “It’s called The Best Damn Food & Drink Gift Guide. There is no connection to our product and really no reason for us to do it. We do it because we like food and drink gifts. We like to giving them to people. We like getting them from people. And, we thought the internet didn’t have great resources on this, so let’s create it ourselves.
And, we like celebrating indie producers of tasty foods and fun beverages. So, that’s it.”
Utility, or being helpful, doesn’t have a target audience. Everyone benefits from helpful content. And, while not everyone can or will be a customer, what better way to begin a relationship than from a place of being helpful?
And not just helpful, but over-indexing on helpful?
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That's all for this week. In 2 weeks, I'll be covering the next key differentiator of Content Brands –– their Conviction in their approach to creating and publishing the content itself.
I have a few really special guests lined up to lend their thoughts for that edition. Excited for you to read it.
Have a great rest of your day and week. And an (early) Happy Thanksgiving to all those who celebrate.
See you soon.
- John
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