My inverted content marketing
My marketing looks like this: blog every day about writing and books, regularly interact with writers on LinkedIn and Facebook, publish books on writing, speak at industry events. That perfectly fits the definition of content marketing.
My writing and editing business is doing great. But far less than 10% of it comes from leads generated by this content.
Am I doing content marketing wrong?
Inverted content marketing
By far, most of my business comes from word-of-mouth. A potential client contacts me and says something like, “Diane said I should talk to you.” In one case recently, a prospect told me, “I talked to two different people, and both said I should work with you.”
These are the best kind of leads. I don’t have to convince them I’m worth working with, I only have to explain what I do. About two times out of three, they become paying clients. Many consultants would kill for a two-out-of-three conversion rate.
Sometimes this pays off big-time. My current six-figure ghostwriting gig came directly from a word-of-mouth-recommendation from a former client.
Ten years after launching my freelance business, there are lots of nonfiction writers who know who I am. The ones I have worked with generally had a good experience and are happy to recommend me.
So with all this word-of-mouth working for me, why pursue visibility with daily blogging, public speaking, and so on?
My target is not really clients.
It’s the zeitgeist.
Every day I remind my readers of some simple facts:
- I am still here.
- I still think about authors and their problems nearly all the time.
- I am creative and up-to-date on solving authors’ problems. (That’s why I’m writing so much about topics like hybrid publishing and AI.)
- I help authors. It’s my purpose and defines who I am.
The interesting thing is what these posts do for me.
If you don’t know me and you stumble on my posts or my books, they might make a positive impression. You might even read them and say, “Hey, I should work with this guy.” And I might be right for you. That’s where the less-than-10% of my leads come from. (They don’t convert at a two-out-of-three rate, but a few do turn into clients.)
But if you already know me, every one of these posts reinforces the idea that I’m the right guy to help authors. That gets embedded in your brain. My branding become part of how you think of me: “Josh Bernoff helps authors.” Or more importantly, “Who helps authors? Josh does.”
Then, two days or a week or a month or years later, when a friend tell you, “I think I want to write a book but I need help,” you think of me. “Who helps authors? Josh does.”
So my target is mostly people who already know me, even the great majority of them who’ve never worked with me. And the job of my content marketing is to remind them what I do, just in case somebody asks them about it.
Content marketing generates leads. This generates branding in people’s brains that turns into recommendations. Loyalty creates interest which creates awareness. Funnel-y enough, it’s inverted.
Should you do this?
Probably not.
Take a look at how I do what I do.
I had to work on creating the same impression for a decade. Most people don’t want to work that long on the same thing.
I post every day. Most people don’t have the creative energy to do that.
I love writing blog posts. For most people, it’s a chore.
I don’t measure the impact in any disciplined way. For content marketers, that’s heresy.
I genuinely like helping authors for free. Most people need to be a lot more commercial than that.
My audience is very tightly networked. There are probably 5,000 people who would potentially work with me (“thought leader” type potential authors with ideas in media, marketing, or technology) and they mostly know each other.
The convergence of those trends mean this type of inverted content marketing works for me, and probably won’t work for you.
But hey. I like it, and it’s a fun way to spend this part of my career.