Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.
Hello!
This week, I am inspired by a LinkedIn post by Jordie van Rijn, where he suggests the idea of “Surround Sound” marketing, which he defined as:
Surround sound marketing is 'showing up everywhere your buyer is looking’. So not just in your own channels.
And he fleshed out the channels we should look at and the benefits of doing so - definitely worth a read.
In the comments, a couple of us pointed out that this was what we, the less cool kids, call “omni-channel marketing”, but it was so refreshing to find someone giving a shit about this stuff and not banging on about AI, that, yeah, surround sound marketing - why not?
Jordie is right to bring this up now, as while we old content gunslingers have long championed the benefits of taking a holistic view of both the customers and the channels they are on (for example, in this 2013 post I wrote), today, with changes to the social media algorithms and the shifts in search, the challenge to get your voice heard or your brand to cut through, we need to be everywhere.
I just read a LinkedIn post by Jay Bear, author, speaker, and, according to his website, “The World's Most Inspirational Speaker on Customer Experience” (clearly untouched by imposter syndrome), and someone that I’ve followed for a decade or more (I have his original 2013 book “Youtility”), and he makes an observation about the content marketing commandment that we should not be building our content on rented land (basically social media) and that we need to:
“Atomize Your Awareness” and get what you know in more places, regardless of who owns those places.
I think I prefer Surround Sound rather than being Atomized (we’ve all seen it go wrong in the Star Trek transporter), but it’s the same idea.
We are not getting found on the channels we own, our websites, newsletters. podcasts (etc), we need to use rented land (social media, podcast appearances, guest blog posts) to gain credibility with generative AI, whatever the fuck is going on with Google search and the social algorithms to the point that hopefully someone gets interested enough to find our owned channels, then to trust that we will deliver consistently good content sufficient to subscribe, follow or tune in next week.
Which leads me to the song title that has given this email its subject line - Comfort in Sound by Feeder - for the chorus “Comfort in sound // It’s all around you now”.
Thanks for reading this far, hope you like the links I’ve shared below.
Cheers!
Ian
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Ian Truscott | Managing Partner | Velocity B
This week’s street knowledge
What caught my eye on the topic and a bit more from me…
