the content mint newsletter

There is only one place on the internet where you have complete control of your content acoustics.

A place free from external noise.

A place where all communication comes directly from you.

A place that you can dress up or dress down to suit the tone and mood of your brand.

That place, is your website.

You control your website, not the tech giants.

Your website is your kingdom.

That’s why it’s called your domain.

“This is a very long letter, simply because I did not have the time to write a shorter one.”
— Blaise Pascal

If you spend the time up-front to clarify your messaging, then you reduce the potential wasted time spent on it by the audience.

I recently listened to the fascinating This is Propaganda podcast mini-series by the marketing agency (and self-proclaimed propagandists), BRINK.

The thesis of the podcast is that most, if not all, of our modern marketing tactics have direct origins in propaganda techniques developed during the first World War.

In the words of the show:

“People don’t buy your product, they buy the “why” behind your product. But it doesn’t matter how much thought leadership you bury it under, the goal is still to shift the beliefs and behaviors of individuals. It’s still propaganda.“

By the end of the show, I started wondering what isn’t propaganda (the last episode is titled “Everything is Propaganda, Even You”, so you can guess what conclusion they come to).

Here’s my two cents:

1. Propaganda is the propagation of a particular point of view. It always has a “right” answer implied, no matter how well hidden it may be.

2. Propaganda ceases to be propaganda when there is a real and acceptable possibility of disagreement or opportunity for mutual influence through dialogue.

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So . . . what do you think?

Is your marketing propaganda?

Is this propaganda?

AI content marketing is here. And it all sounds the same.

But the real problem is, it also sounds the same as all the humans who have been filling the internet with high-volume, low-value SEO fodder for years.

How many times have you read a variation on:

12 questions to ask before hiring a *insert-your-industry-here* company

(and why we meet all the requirements)

You (or anyone else) could write that article for your business right now in the blink of AI.

So, can we do better?

I think so.

In my opinion, the best way to not sound like AI is to:

1. start from a place that AI can’t (i.e. your personal lived experiences and applied knowledge)

and from there . . .

2. make unexpected, complex, or abstract connections between concepts which provide genuine insights to other humans (but which probably won’t make much sense to robots)

But whatever your strategy ends up being, go make something that is not in danger of people asking themselves: “did AI write this?”

Consider that one day you discover a painting you’ve never seen before but which you decide is a masterpiece.

The content of the artwork may have been what initially caught your attention, but the context in which you found it will play a big role in how you respond to it.

If you first discovered the painting online, your first instinct might be to look up the artist, his background, his other paintings, artists he was inspired by, etc.

This will give you more knowledge about the painting.

But if you discovered the painting in a museum on a quiet day, your first reaction might be to stop and examine the painting itself in further detail for what could be quite a long time of concentrated attention.

This will give you a better appreciation of the painting.

Then again, if you discovered the painting in an art class, you may have associated it so much with the community of people who discovered and discussed it with you that you feel like it has become nostalgic and part of your identity in some way.

This will give you a stronger connection to the painting.

The painting is the same in each scenario, but the subsequent reaction, impact, and perceived value gained is quite different.

So, what reaction is encouraged by the environment in which you present your content?

The last way that your content can continue to provide value to your customers after a sale, is to simply start the process over again.

This means going back to the guided discovery phase and discovering something new, or finding solutions to new challenges they are facing.

What I like about this idea is that it involves focusing on the meta-value of the content you create for the guided discovery phase. If you want past customers to be able to discover something new, you need to be one step ahead of them, and creating content is one way to explore new opportunities to provide value and demonstrate it to customers.

Put another way, past and present customers should get the sense through your latest content that you and your offerings are regularly evolving and leveling up. They should feel (rightly) that any new purchase will be more valuable than any past purchase, and ultimately they should be excited to participate.

Support content may not be applicable to every business situation, but for those in which it is, it can play an interesting and multi-faceted role.

On a very basic level, providing content which gives support or training to supplement your offering after a purchase can be a very useful way to automate and standardize repetitive information transfer. This can reduce the in-person support toll on you or your team, as long as it is something which can actually be automated and doesn’t require personal nuance.

But the real magic of support content is that it leads a double life . . .

A sale is never exclusively an emotional or an intellectual decision, it is a messy combination of both at a particular time in a particular circumstance.

We might think of the emotion and intellect as two ends of a scale, constantly fluctuating. The buyer usually doesn’t think too much about this scale during the buying process, but oftentimes once a sale has been made he or she will suddenly remember it when they are trying to justify the purchase to themselves (or potentially to someone else).

If at this point they see that one or the other side has had an outsized influence, they will work to retroactively balance the scale by either trying to gather more logical facts on the one hand, or to reinforce the abundance of facts that they already have with an emotional gut-check on the other hand.

Even if ​your personal method of communication​ favors either the side of emotional hype or that of intellectual nerdiness, it can be useful to have a healthy dose of each in your media because, chances are, if the customer is second guessing the decision to buy from you, it’s your content—not you directly—that they’re going to turn to when looking for extra weight to add on either side of the reassurance scale.

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P.S. I don’t think the scales have to be perfectly balanced (and since everyone’s value judgements are subjective, it is probably an impossible goal anyway). Mainly you want the customer to have at least something on each side of the scale that they are able to point to so that ultimately they can say: “Yeah, this purchase feels good and it makes sense.”

P.P.S. To read more about the symbiotic relationship of emotion and reason in our lives, check out Jonathan Haidt’s book ​The Happiness Hypothesis​ where he lays out his now well-known metaphor of the elephant and the rider.

The job of your content isn’t quite finished even once a sale has been completed.

There are at least three possible goals for content which may be consumed after a sale:

1. reassurance of the purchasing decision
2. support
3. restarting the sales cycle

Most likely there will be quite a lot of overlap between the content you create for the guided discovery phase and the post-purchase phase, the only difference will be when the customer comes across the content.

That being said, keeping in mind the multiple roles and goals that any one piece of content may be serving will help us as we consider the most worthwhile way to approach the creating of that content in the first place.

We’ll look at each of these three post-purchase goals a little closer in the next few days.

When it comes to making an actual investment decision, your content plays a very crucial, yet perhaps unexpected role: absence.

Whatever it is that you actually offer, it cannot be found in the content you provide. The ultimate goal of your content is to trace the outlines of this gap and indicate how it might be filled. (And yes, I think this is true even if content is your offering. Maybe we’ll work that out another time.)

However, the starker the contrast is between the description or depiction of the offering itself (via your content) and the understanding of the actual absence, the stronger the desire will be to take action or make an investment to fill the gap.

So, in what ways does your content point beyond itself to an unrealized need?