You're thinking about content incorrectly

Welcome to another edition of PROse, the B2B marketer's no BS guide to growing an engaged audience.

Sorry about the late send. It’s been a hectic week (in a good way, though).

Either way, I’m excited to jump into this week’s topic on content.

Let’s do it 

Have you noticed the amount of documentaries being made lately?

It seems like every major streaming platform is dropping 1 or 2 new documentaries every couple of weeks.

Pre-pandemic, most people I know probably would’ve refused to sit and watch a documentary.

Now we’re all addicted to documentaries, across genres like true crime to sports.

(If you watched The Last Dance all the way through, please reply and tell me if you think MJ was a tyrant)

And, apparently, the numbers show that too.

In a conversation this week with Gary Vee, Ben Silverman (producer of The Office, among others) notes the meteoric rise in documentary viewership on Netflix.

Take a listen to 17:11-17:29.

If you don’t want to take a listen, here’s the gist of what he said:

Around the time Netflix first started getting into documentaries, 10% of 40m subscribers were watching them.

Then they hired a head of documentaries (this guy) and viewership exploded—with 220m subscribers, 80% of them are watching documentaries now.

That got my mind going:

Most B2B companies (at least the ones I talk to) are thinking about content in the wrong way.

There are marketing orgs that are not investing in producing good content because they think they need to be blasting daily memes or producing $30k YouTube videos every week.

So they opt to do what every other B2B company is doing—SEO-focused listicles, shallow webinars & ebooks, and the occasional social update celebrating their “202x Best Place to Work” award.

Their entire content program is centered around focusing on themselves or their product in hopes that they’ll convert someone in their audience into a sales lead.

Nevermind the orgs that aren’t prioritizing content at all.

But what both of these orgs don’t realize, or refuse to accept, is that the way that people educate themselves, discover new products/services, and make buying decisions is through content.

If that’s true, the modern marketer’s job is to sell the content. And allow the content to “sell” the product.

The content is the product.

Okay, so what’s the tie between the documentary boom and B2B content?

The lesson to be drawn here can be as direct as “make a documentary about your company’s story”.

You might think that personal content consumption habits are different from business content consumption habits, but they’re not.

We don’t magically switch into “‘business content’ mode” because we’re reading/watching something at work.

And, right now documentaries are in. Just take a look at all the documentaries coming out lately specifically about startups.

The lesson can also be as indirect as: it’s wholly possible to build an engaged audience and engage your existing audience without needing to do trendy dances, or make it 1.6 secs long because “sHort FoRm vIdEO”

Don’t think that you need to turn into a meme factory or create a massive TikTok account in order to build an effective content program.

Does entertaining your audience hurt? No. If you have the ability to make your audience laugh, do it!

If you don’t have that skill, don’t let it be a reason to not create content people can get lost in.

You need to be treating creating and distributing content in the same way Nike treats creating and distributing shoes.

It’s not a side mission. 

It’s not something that you do in service of your company/product/sales first, and customers second.

It is the mission. If your customers won’t get value out of something, don’t publish it no matter how enticing it is to try to game the system/algorithms.

You probably won’t build a program the size or style of Netflix, nor should you try to.

But maybe if you treat content as your product, you can see the type of audience growth and engagement for your work that Netflix is seeing for theirs.

That’s all I’ve got for you today.

Let me know: do you agree creating & distributing content should be themain mission for modern B2B marketing orgs?