The Beat: Serve Chilled

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. Delighted you are here! I’m Ian Truscott, and I intend to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from the Rockstar CMO community, the latest discussions from the podcast and our street knowledge blog.

This week’s newsletter is inspired by the coronation of our new King yesterday, which slightly surprises me. But, a phrase I kept hearing, that our new King Charles first used when being welcomed to the coronation by a page boy, (OK, “Child of His Majesty's Chapel Royal”) who basically asked, “What are you doing here?” the king replied:

“I come not to be served but to serve”

And today, on my walk I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts - The Marketing Book Podcast, and this week the host, Douglas Burdett was chatting to Joe Pulizzi, about the new edition of his book: Epic Content Marketing.

They covered all the bases of what Joe, and also regular guest on my Rockstar CMO podcast, Robert Rose talk about as the foundations for content marketing.

I know that many of you will be familiar with these concepts. If you allow me to summarise wildly, they are to understand the needs of your audience, niche to the point of usefulness, be consistent and be generous with the good stuff and stop pitching yourself and your products.

Or, as maybe a royal script writer might say, “come not to be served but to serve”.

Yes.. maybe “serving our audience” or “providing value”, is right up there with “empathy” as being overused to the point of vacuousness as marketing buzzwords, but how many marketers are actually doing this?

It’s a leap from the hamster wheel of flogging our gear. And, of course, content marketing is not a short-term fix for the pipeline, but a longer-term play, so we need to focus on the short-term stuff too. I am currently preparing a webinar on content marketing, and I have Mark Ritson's perspective from a few years ago that it’s all bollocks on a loop in my head and his quote that it has “distracted marketers from their real job of communicating with customers and selling stuff”.

I won’t dive into the argument for content marketing here, but, in my view, the real job of marketing is to be useful, to help the buyer solve their problem, to find the products and services to help them. And, preferably, trust us to do that and buy from us. With content.

And, as it happens, I find myself thinking about goals right now for what I am doing with Rockstar CMO and my day job as a CMO.

So, can I be so bold as to ask; if you are a marketer or content creator do you have a goal to serve?

And the tune that makes this week’s subject line, is from Groove Armada, from the Vertigo album in 1999. It’ll make for a chilled start to your week - link at the bottom.

Latest Podcast Episode

Street Knowledge

Some of the good stuff…..

One last question - how can I serve you with the podcast, blog and this newsletter? Is there a topic we should be covering? Please get in touch.

Thanks for getting this far! Have a great week.

Cheers,

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer | Rockstar CMO

Get your Monday Morning Marketing Mojo

A chilled start to the week…

The promo image used on the web page was partially created using A.I. through NightCafe Creator