The Beat: Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

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.

Hi there,

On Fridays, we have a regular pizza and movie night in our house, a tradition we started when the kids were little, and now, they are not so little, and the film The Killer on Netflix came up in the roster (my wife is a Michael Fassbender fan).

No, I am not turning this newsletter into a film review, but the lead character played tracks from The Smiths throughout. So, if it’s cool enough for Fassbender, I can use one of their tracks for this newsletter edition's title - “Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before” - as I want to dip into the topic of creating opinion content and thought leadership.

We’ve got onto this topic on the podcast recently, starting from a conversation we had in episode 192, as we were discussing content marketing now that we live in a generative AI and synthetic content world.

I shared my opinion that as B2B marketers, we need to double down on the content that differentiates, the stories that only we can tell and no amount of crafty prompting can your competitors replicate.

Stuff like:

• Case studies or customer success stories are the obvious examples, as they are uniquely our story.

• Original research, especially the sort that uncovers or addresses our buyer’s needs or insight into the business challenge.

• Understanding our true brand voice and how we can tell and present the story as uniquely us.

This naturally leads us to thought leadership and opinion pieces that wrap up this client experience and insight and share it in a story told in our brand voice.

I wish I could find the LinkedIn post, but, I remember when this whole ChatGPT thing hit the feed, one of my connections was using the platform to test if their position, their “thought leadership” was really that different by asking ChatGPT to write something similar.

The key thing, and this is a good practice regardless of generative AI, is that our thought leadership is more of a mission than a campaign. True thought leadership is a position we take, that then feeds our campaigns.

It’s not a one-and-done thing, a one-off whitepaper, blog post or some newsjacking, buzzy thing to catch some fleeting zeitgeist or that we do because the CEO slapped a copy of an inflight magazine on our desk (or forwarded a competitor campaign or something they’d seen on LinkedIn).

It has to be authentic, something our whole organization can get behind, and that is a story we can tell and make relevant to the needs of all of our personas and ideal customers.

On the podcast, Jeff and I share some examples that we’ve experienced here, telling some tales.

The “thought” part of “thought leadership” is relatively easy; the execution, being bold and distinct, is the hard bit.

I am skating over the surface of this topic. Hopefully, you can get some more depth in the articles I link to below.

And yeah, as The Smiths said: Stop me if you think you've heard this one before.

If they’ve heard it before, have another go.

Cheers,

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

Now on Threads, be great to connect there, if you are on - https://www.threads.net/@iantruscott

Latest on the podcast

All my opinions are opinions I have heard…

Something a bit different: I have not shared a TikTok video here before, and I am not sure how well this will work, but this popped into my TikTok feed as I prepared this newsletter; it made me laugh as I wonder if, in B2B marketing, this is how we behave.

If the player doesn’t work - it’s comedian Ian Stone talking about opinions - here is the link: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGe8gB52G/

@ianstonecomedy

Too many opinions #opinion #standupcomedy #comedyclub

Street Knowledge

This week, a rummage around the record box for tunes that share the beat with this week’s theme.

Get your Monday Morning Marketing Mojo Working

Yes, I did name this issue after one song from The Smiths, but “Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before” isn't going to get anybody’s mojo working, Monday or not, so how about this - How Soon Is Now?

The copy is totally human the promo image used on the web page was partially created using A.I. through NightCafe Studio