I read this announcement with pleasure about Hubspot’s recent investment from Google Ventures, Sequoia and Salesforce. Congratulations to them.
The last point from Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan is critical for not just business owners, but content marketers.
It Is A Go Big Or Go Home World We Live In – I learned in b-school that the natural state of most industries is an oligopoly where there a number of players with smaller than 50% of the market. Since the internet, we believe we have moved into a winner-take-all world where the market leader in a new industry gets 80%+ of the market cap in their industry, like Google (search), Salesforce (CRM), Groupon (group buying), VMWare (virtualization), etc. We believe we have a head start in an important new industry, so we are hitting the gas to try be that winner who takes all.
This is EXACTLY the way you have to think about your content marketing creation or distribution.
In your market niches, you must be THE expert in your category. The content expert gets the best search engine placement, the most number of links, the largest amount of social media sharing, the most invites for speaking events and (here it comes) the most business from that content.
If you are not the leader, the gap will widen unless you do something about it right now.
As I was contemplating Brian’s last thought, I scribbled down some ramblings of my own.
Visualize the Lead. Most brands feel they either can’t for whatever reason or don’t have the right to be THE quality source for information in their market. If you believe this, get over it quickly. The move into content marketing is happening fast in every market around the world. Those that move fast and hard will win. And by the way, budget is no excuse anymore. I’ve seen companies with very little budget do amazing things from a content marketing perspective.
Resource Everywhere. To be the content leader, you’ll need to heavily leverage both internal and external resources (like my friends at Openview Venture Partners). I don’t believe we have a choice anymore…outsource, insource…the answer is…YES.
Move Faster. Think you are moving fast? It’s not enough. There is only one speed, and that’s faster.
What’s Your Content Competition? Be friends in social media, but in content creation, be better…be the best. Know who you are competing against (both traditional media and your actual competitors). Make sure someone on your team reads every word they write and watches every video they shoot.
Invest in Content R&D. Every quarter, you should be testing out a new content product as part of your buying cycle. Treat your content investment just like you would invest in an actual new product launch.
It’s very hard to realize the magnitude of what’s going on around us right now. It’s just like playing a baseball game…while on the field, we tend not to notice the people in the stands, those ordering food, the chaos or the normalcy. That’s where you are at this very moment. We are seeing the greatest marketing transformation of our time right now. Yes, you know it’s changing and that it’s significant, but you have no idea how truly momentous this is.
Champion your content marketing effort now. Be the best. Move faster. Dominate. Win!
Do or do not. There is no try.
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