Rules of the Dance

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a CMO, 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, topics from our podcast, and our street knowledge blog.

Hi there!

I think I’ve picked a bit of an obscure track title for this week’s subject line, it’s Mungo’s Hi-Fi and Rules of the Dance, which repeats the refrain “These are the rules and lessons” and if you are in marketing scrolling through your LinkedIn feed, this could summarise your experience as there are plenty of folks sharing the rules and lessons.

However, one such post by Andrew Fryrear, the CEO of Agile Sherpas, reminded me of a simple idea in a story about how her team, in her words, “shot down” one of her favorite content ideas.

I'm not sure if it’s a rule, but it's certainly something to think about as we hover over the publish button on our latest bit of content.

What’s the point?

Sometimes, that gets lost; it’s not just we have an idea that sounds great to us (like Andrea’s); we get carried away with impressing our peers and the industry goldfish bowl, or maybe we post because we said we would do this every Wednesday.

We still need to ask - what are we doing this for?

It being Wednesday is not a good enough excuse, although, I know, I know, the law of content marketing is that we need to be consistent, but isn’t it better not to do it than to knock out something half-arsed?

And this is what Andrea’s post reminded me of - putting yourselves in the shoes (or inbox or social media feed) of our audience:

As a TYPE OF PERSON

I would like SOME PIECE OF CONTENT

so I can ACCOMPLISH A GOAL.

One cautionary note: I think we can be a little bit relaxed about the audience’s goal. We don’t need to be too po-faced, thinking our audience is so disciplined and goal-oriented that it commands their every moment of content consumption.

We can be entertaining, distracting, or frivolous - but we need to know why we are doing it.

And yep, not because it’s Wednesday.

Back to the title - a rule for the dance?

Thanks for reading - and I hope you like the links below.

Cheers!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

Please say hello, reply to this email, and find me on LinkedIn or my personal website.

This week on the podcast…

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This week’s street knowledge

From the community, what caught my eye and a bit more from me…

Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working

I do like a bit of dub - maybe a chilled way to get your marketing mojo working.