The Beat: School of Rock

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a 3xCMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. In this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from our community, our podcast and our street knowledge blog.

Hello!

Hope you’ve had a great week!

The topic of educational content marketing has bubbled to the surface this week here, as you may know, if you listen to the podcast or look at our street knowledge blog.

I wrote a slightly ranty post about vendors treating their audience like bloody idiots, and Jeff and I dived into the topic on the podcast as we applied our 5 f’in’ fundamentals to how we might create an educational content marketing campaign.

It’s a good strategy to consider engaging the 95% of folks who are future buyers and not in the market today with generous content that educates them. Maybe preparing them to be future buyers, or maybe influencers or folks that will share, you know, the “I’m not in the market right now, but this company seem to know their stuff”.

And, of course, a point we’ve made a few times here is that content marketing is about being useful and getting educated on a topic might be at the top of the list of things to be done for some of your audience.

I often share the story that for years, I thought of Hubspot as a source of marketing education first and a product second; I got so deep into their content back in the day. It was years after that when I’d shimmied my way far enough up the greasy pole to influence anyone to buy their product.

Why is it that all of those crypto bros from 2022 are now experts on AI? Because, there is a need in the market for education, and, as the Dutch Christian humanist, Catholic theologian, educationalist, satirist, and philosopher Erasmus said in the 1500s, “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”.

No, before researching for this, I did not know where that quote came from, but apparently, it’s from the Latin “in regione caecorum rex est luscus” which seems relevant to share as we are on the topic of education.

I’m crafting another article on this topic, and one of the key things I want to explore is how we measure this, the goal differs slightly from our sales funnel; we want to teach the world to sing, right?

If you are a regular reader, you know I pick song titles for subject lines, so “Teach the Word to Sing” could have been a contender, but could you imagine having that earworm in your head today? So, “School of Rock” it is!

And, like my Tuesday 2¢ musing on counting “professionals helped”, how would we measure the success of an education campaign? It’s different from our sales funnel, it’s a measure of engagement in that big bucket of the 95% that are not engaging with you.

There are definitely metrics we can craft, and I’ll dig into those in this future post, but the more important thing is the goal. If we think about education as a B2B marketing goal, we should be purposeful in how we do that and measure it.

That’s my little teaser on a much bigger topic; please look at the links below if you’d like to dig in. And, as ever, if you have some thoughts, would love to hear them.

Cheers!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

I am still trying to get the Threads habit, and I would love to connect with you there - https://www.threads.net/@iantruscott

Street Knowledge

The good stuff from Rockstar CMO, our community and other stuff I’ve liked:

Around the interwebs…

From Rockstar CMO..

A must listen…

Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working

YES! School of Rock - a classic movie and I could have shared a bunch of clips, but if you wanna be the teachers pet…