I met Chris Walker, CEO of Refine Labs, through this LinkedIn post. I liked his take on long form content (surprise!) and asked him to join me on the podcast.
He advocates an audience first approach to content – content that addresses customer concerns even when they aren’t related to your product. That same type of content can be used to educate the sales team on what’s important in the customer’s world. This is nothing new in content marketing but many companies are missing this opportunity.
I think people use quality as an excuse not to do things that they don’t want to do anyway… I think that there is a minimum point of entry threshold that you need to cross and after that, there’s diminishing returns up to the highest production value you could find, if that makes sense… And so companies need to make a strategic choice. And so if you are the billion dollar brand, how much are you willing to invest to get this done? And the answer for most companies would be, “Not enough, so we’re not going to do it.”
We both agree that for any new marketing initiative, there is a learning curve. But you have to start to get better. In my opinion, it’s another example of giving up a long term win for short term safety.
In terms of distribution, Refine Labs is relying heavily on ads in social media to promote their content. The advantage is the ability to be ultra-specific with your targeting.
Listen to the full episode to find out how Chris suggests you produce the content and what’s missing from most case studies.
Share this post