Great Content is Simpler Than You Think.

I have no appetite for bullshit.

It's in my blood, I suppose. I was one of those children that rolled my eyes at my parents' Santa Claus gift tags at a time when I should have been smart enough to keep believing in Big Red for fear of shutting down the intake of presents. Whenever I open a speech or a work story with that skeptical attitude, there is always at least one friend or family member that loudly interrupts with, "Why do you work in marketing, then?"

They're kind of right, aren't they? Aside from lawyers and 'Glenngary Glen Ross' era salespeople, is there any industry which inspires a collective shudder of distaste quite like marketing? To the general public, we're the ones responsible for interrupting their favorite TV shows every 5 - 7 minutes. We're the ones forcefully shoving Coke cans into the foreground of big budget movies. We're the ones gating content behind email subscriptions and calculating exactly how irritating a pop-in video ad can be before people start hammering the 'back' button on their internet browsers.

Marketing is swollen with bullshit. There are agencies out there that have been extremely successful through deception, misleading figures, meaningless buzzwords, and outright lies. Global corporations have entire floors devoted to teams of "managers" and "directors" who collect salaries while spending 40 hour weeks generating PowerPoint reports that will never be read by a human being.

Why do we make this so difficult? Why do we fill conversations about marketing with pointless abbreviations and buzzwords that require half of every conversation to be spent explaining what was just said? Is it to make our work look harder than it is? To look more valuable? More necessary?

Why not take a simpler approach?

My marketing philosophy is extremely straightforward. I believe in it deeply, and I've seen it work in nearly every use case. It's something I apply to the work I do for every client I work with, and several clients I don't work with because I can't keep my mouth shut. Here is the four step process:

1. Find out who your audience really is, and what their challenges are.
2. Create content that helps them solve those challenges. Make it easy to get and easy to understand. Don't make them pay for it.
3. Spend some money/time to promote that content out in every channel your audience frequents.
4. Listen to their feedback, and alter your approach as needed.

That's it. No buzzwords, no bullshit, no unnecessary metrics. Yes, there's a layer of more traditional marketing terminology that comes along with this approach. I'm going to ask you about business goals. I'm going to define personas and KPIs. I'm probably going to try to develop an accurate measure for ROI and attribution. What I avoid are phrases like "elevating our reach" and "achieving greater digital activation."

When I'm asked by non-conformist anti-corporate punk friends from college how I can sleep at night, I smile and tell them that I do my work with honesty, with transparency, and with care. I strive to help businesses learn how to help their customers, not how to sell to them. That's what the heart of marketing should be - we should be working to create happy consumers, and to teach brands why that's important.

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These comments reflect the opinions of Tim Howell alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of his employers, partners, peers, or family members. Opinions or advice in this blog should not be taken as direct recommendations or suggestions. Any statistics, information, or metrics provided are linked to referenced source material, and are not sourced from any current or past clients, customers, or related brands.