Promote Your Content Like Musicians Promote Their Music!

Welcome to my first marketing rant. Today we are talking about content creation and promotion, that is how you get content in front of the right audience to get your message through.

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Way too often I see content people investing way too little time promoting they great content that they work hard to produce. I estimate that the ration between the time people invest in creating the content v.s. the time they invest in promoting it is probably 80-20 argue . I am arguing that it should be 20-80 and unfortunately the 20% is not shorter. The overall time investment should be much higher

I think content people should think of B2b content like a musician thinks about a new album When a musician creates a new album, say it takes 2-6 months (well, if you are the Beatles, 30 days as we saw in the recent Let It Be documentary )

Then the real work begins with the album promotion. First they hit the late night shows and radio stations with dozens and dozens of interviews and short performances. Then they hit the road and play smaller venues to figure out what songs work best, while at the same time developing fans for the new songs, they start playing and singing the new songs to their friends. An audience starts developing. And note that in most cases, people don't like a new song the first time they hear it, it takes repetition.

After that, they hit the arenas, and if they are successful, stadiums.???By the time they are done, they have a fine tuned live show and millions of fans that sing their new songs and a bunch of smaller bands covering them for years to come. They do a jazz version, a version with a rapper, a remix and so on.

So, if you are a content creator such a product marketing manager, when you are create a new piece of content, say the first meeting deck, after you have a good draft, your late nigh shows are the leading salespeople and system engineers in the field. You share the pitch with them, get their feedback, ask them to try it, also you may want to run it by some analysts and they too spend a lot of time with customers.

Then you take it to customers in 101 scenarios, those are your small clubs shows, you see their reaction, you tune the message, incorporate the feedback. At this point you are ready to hit bigger audiences, the equivalent to arenas, that is?your regional sales meetings, your sales kick offs, and the press if applicable.

Finally you can take it to all your customers through your field and partners or directly for example at your user conference. Now everybody internally and externally is on board and sing the same songs. Your message is getting through.

And then something magical happens: people in the field start covering your song and often make it better. They customize it, build a version for a vertical (that is, your jazz version), some will introduce a great technical demo in the middle to make it real (that is your rapped version) and so on.

Bingo. Success. The process will take months. I have driven my fair shares of new first meeting deck, that is a new r updated message for the company I worked for both a product manager and as a marketeers. It always was a big endeavor. For example, at MobileIron around 2012-2013 when we transitioned from Mobile Device Management to Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), I followed the process above including personally certifying 80 sales reps and we successfully repositioned the company in a new bigger market.

I and my team are in the middle of it as we help propel VMware into the third leg of our illustrious history to become the leader of the Multi-Cloud Services market. This time the scale is enormous and it takes tremendous amount of energy, air cover from the executive team and a long term view.

Here is where promoting a new music album and a company messaging is different. A successful songs may last forever, but in high tech we have to create new songs as our engineering team innovates. In B2B if you are lucky and successful, some of your original milestones albums will have long legs and will provide the backdrop for new songs. For VMware, it was virtualization first with ESX, then the private cloud with our Software Defined Data Center, now Multi-Cloud with our Cross-Cloud Services.

If you find yourself changing genre often, then you either had the wrong message to begin with or in many cases you did not spend enough time promoting it to the right audiences to make it stick

So, in summary, think about content development as a musician and spend WAY more time getting the content in front of the right audience, whether it is a new presentation or a piece of demand generation material.