CEO of VaynerMedia and five-time New York Times bestselling author Gary Vaynerchuck (Gary Vee) is renowned for his content marketing hacks. In a keynote speech from June 2019, he had a few things to say about content strategy. It’s worth listening to, especially if you’re a content manager or you’re involved in content strategy at any level.
This post highlights some of the key points made in the talk by Gary Vee. Marketing in 2020 is a different beast than it was 10 years ago, and he explains why creating a higher volume of content based on strategy is critical for a company’s success.
1. Communication Is Everything
“Communication basically dictates everything we do…the thing that has the control is the communication.”
When it comes to communicating with consumers, we’re in the middle of a technological revolution. Even brands that have the “best” products and services need to use the right digital tools and platforms to communicate effectively.
However, it’s not just about getting seen online. What matters is the execution of your communication, the relevancy of your content, and how you interact with consumers. Businesses have to constantly update their communication strategies by tracking the performance of their content, and those that don’t will fall behind.
2. A Common Content Strategy Mistake
“Over the next decade or two, you will see companies start to realize that an editor-in-chief will sit at the highest level…having a publishing DNA is imperative.”
Unfortunately for many companies, their business results do not match the high standards of the product or service they offer. The biggest mistake: they’re being too much of a “sales organization” and not a “marketing brand organization.” They are too focused on producing “quality” content and less concerned about how every piece of content is performing in terms of influencing the decision-maker, or the consumer, or the end-user. Knowing how to affect these decision-makers and knowing where to reach them is key.
3. Focus on the End Consumer
“Ultimately, executives of companies—unfortunately—are not consumer-centric.”
Gary Vaynerchuck believes the problem with many big businesses is that they think they’re entitled to the business. They worry about which conferences they can attend, or which awards they can win, instead of focusing primarily on the end consumer. When you only focus on the end-user, it gives you the greatest leverage to spread your ideas and build brand awareness. All the other things are just a distraction.
4. Analyze Each Platform
“Do the people creating your content know that adjectives in your copy change in the difference of 37,000 people seeing it versus 2.9 million seeing it?”
If you want content to succeed on any channel, you need to understand how the channel’s algorithm works. It’s not just engagement and shares that affect content rankings; it’s also about the words you use.
For example, according to a BuzzSumo report, headlines on LinkedIn with the words habits, mistakes, successful, and leader received more shares on average. Top-performing content also contained phrases such as the future of and X ways to. In contrast, on Facebook, the top-performing headline phrases include will make you and this is why.
There’s no simple formula; you need to research headlines that resonate within your industry. Find out which adjectives, nouns, and phrases appear in the highest-performing content on each channel. And constantly analyze your own content. Which of your headlines get the most views? Learn and then adapt.
Related Reading: Keyword Optimization: How to Target the Right Search Terms
5. Focus on the Present and the Future
“The next decade is going to be an enormous game of volume of output, and whichever companies figure that out first and can execute it will disproportionately pick up market share.”
It’s irrelevant what you’ve done in the past. It doesn’t matter if your last piece of content didn’t achieve the results you wanted. What matters is your next piece of content. Because that piece of content could be the one that blows away the competition. Through quantity, you’ll find the quality. The more content you deliver to your audience, the more feedback you’ll get, which will inform your content strategy going forward.
Gary Vee Marketing in 2020: Q&A Session
In his June 2019 talk, Gary Vaynerchuck was asked two important questions about content strategy:
What budget mistakes can the marketing department avoid?
In his response, Gary Vee explained that many businesses are wasting a lot of money on marketing strategies that are no longer effective in today’s digital environment.
“This company will spend more money building a booth at some conference than it will spend on working media dollars properly deployed on LinkedIn.”
Why spend thousands of dollars to attend a conference when you can spend the same amount on content production that will have a much greater impact on brand awareness, credibility, and customer loyalty?
Inevitably, it’s at the top level of a company that these budget decisions are made. You need to persuade these people about the value of content and the importance of content volume.
How do you ensure that you stay relevant to your followers?
“Once you make that commitment to content volume, the only thing you can do is pull through.”
When you commit to a higher content volume, you’ll suddenly find that every piece of content becomes more focused. Every location, job title, and organization can be targeted with each new piece of content.
For example, instead of trying to reach 10,000 people on one channel with one piece of content, create 10 different pieces of content for 10 channels, each focused on reaching a specific group of 1,000 people. You still reach 10,000 people, but each group is more likely to listen. You create more content, but every piece of content is more focused.
“The problem is that we’re not putting out content that is valuable to the person on the other side.”
Inevitably, when you start to increase your content volume, more people will start talking about you—and that’s when you have to grab their attention. But you have to focus on value as well as volume.
It’s not about the initial quality of the content; it’s your content ideas that matter, as does the value of your content to the end-user. You’ll get feedback on every piece of content and can then shape your future content strategies based on this ongoing feedback.
Seven Things You Can Do Now to Increase Content Volume
1. Focus on a wider range of topics. Think about every group of people you can target.
2. Don’t worry if some content fails—keep creating content and listen to feedback.
3. Use more of your team members—or hire more people—for content production.
4. Establish a content marketing workflow with all team members.
5. Repurpose content.
6. Take advantage of powerful content creation and publishing tools.
7. Work with Constant Content to add more writers to your team.
Content Strategy in 2020: Frequency and Repetition Work
People aren’t sitting around waiting for you to hit “publish.” You have to find your audience by ramping up your content volume. Fortunately, the internet, combined with technological advances, has changed the way companies can communicate with the end-user. The beauty of digital marketing is that it allows marketers to deliver different content to different audiences across different platforms.
This new online landscape means that content frequency and repetition work. It’s not just about the quality—quality content is subjective. Today, the more content you produce, the more opportunities you have to connect with people on a deeper level, which is what this video encapsulates.
At Constant Content, we know that consistently delivering valuable content can be difficult and costly without the right framework in place. This is why we’ve developed a system to support marketers that want to ramp up their content output.
We’re here to support companies and marketers that want to produce a higher volume of content. With a large database of hardworking freelance writers around the globe, we can support larger volumes of content without sacrificing quality.