Most of the new-business advice I read still assumes the buyer wants to be sold to. Cold calls, a deck, a follow-up email that pretends the deck was tailored. It rarely works on me when I’m the one being pitched, so I’ve never quite understood why we expect it to work the other way round.
The thing I keep coming back to is that the people who might hire you are already reading. They read to solve a problem they have this week; a manager trying to work out why their traffic dropped, a marketing director who has been told to “do something about mobile”. If you have already written the piece that answers that question plainly, you turn up at exactly the moment they are paying attention.
I won’t pretend there’s a formula here. There are firms who treat content as a lead magnet and gate everything behind a form, and I understand the temptation; you want to know who is reading. My own view is that the gate costs you more than it earns. The person who fills in a form to grab a PDF is often the one least ready to buy. The one who reads three of your posts over a month, mentions you to a colleague, and emails out of the blue is worth ten of them.
A few things I believe about this, for what they’re worth:
- Write for the person doing the job, not the person signing the cheque. The junior who does the actual work is usually the one who recommends you.
- Answer the boring questions. The high-level “future of marketing” pieces get shared; the “how do I fix this specific thing” pieces get you hired.
- Publish on your own site first. I’ve watched too many good pieces disappear onto someone else’s platform where you can’t measure anything and can’t be found again six months later.
None of this is fast, and that’s the part people struggle with. You write for six months and hear nothing, then three enquiries arrive in a fortnight and everyone decides content marketing has “suddenly started working”. It didn’t suddenly do anything; you simply couldn’t see it accumulating.
The measurement problem is real and I haven’t solved it. Last-click will tell you the enquiry came from a Google search for your company name, which tells you nothing about the year of reading that made someone search for your name in the first place. I’ve started keeping a plain note of where enquiries say they first heard of us, in their own words, because the analytics won’t give it to me.
That’s roughly where my thinking is at the moment.
