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Kathleen is incorporating what she learned about building a media business into the marketing strategies she uses for clean.io.
Kathleen describes herself as a content-first marketer. The first person she hired when she joined clean.io was a content manager. That person was a trained journalist whose skills were writing, knowing how to interview, knowing the right questions to ask, and turning what they learned into great content.
Two books that were an inspiration to Kathleen were Content Inc and Killing Marketing, written by Joe Pulizzi, and in both of them, he wrote about the content-first approach to marketing. That approach to Kathleen is about going faster.
Kathleen believes that today, great content lies at the heart of all marketing. Content needs to be looked at as a product and not as a channel. Content treated as a product drives massive audiences and super-loyal followings.
When content gets treated as a channel, it might get you to its website, but you will not go back there regularly. However, when the content is excellent and gets treated as a product, it drives habit so that content becomes part of your daily life. So you purchase a subscription, and you get it every day. In other words, when content is the product, the content is so good that people are willing to pay for it.
The best media companies, and the best non-media companies that think like media companies, are becoming super-successful by injecting more brands and more personality into their content. And they are hyper-focused on their ideal audience, so there is a higher purpose behind their content, and they invest fully in what they stand for.
A subscriber is a person who pays for access to content to derive value from it regularly. A member, however, has an emotional tie to what they decide to join. People become members because they believe in what that brand stands for, and they want to associate themselves with it.
Membership suffers from far lower churn. It drives a more intense level of loyalty and passion. People tend to become much more vocal brand advocates for the things they join or become members of, than the things to which they subscribe.
Good brands are building communities to reinforce their brand loyalty and customer longevity.
Kathleen would prefer to build a community on Slack rather than on Facebook because when you have your community on Slack, you own it. With Facebook, the rules could change.
For a community to be successful and take off, it needs to feel like the members own it, not the organization sponsoring it. It is best to create a community in a space where the members are already spending a lot of their time. You need to drive tremendous value in your community to get people to join it.
HubSpot started creating content and building an audience before their product was ready. That is a hallmark of the media company model. To keep on driving top of funnel awareness for their products, HubSpot has to build a new audience first and then introduce their product (which is content).
Kathleen sees a definite movement afoot, particularly in the tech and SaaS worlds, where the lines between product companies and media companies are starting to blur.
Start from where you are. Recognize that you need to improve the quality of your content and dedicate your resources to that. Then, increase the volume and think about the content products that you are going to put out.
Links and Resources:
Kathleen’s website
The Inbound Success Podcast
clean.io
Books mentioned:
Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork Dan Sullivanby
Content Inc Joe Pulizziby
Killing Marketing by Joe Pulizzi
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