Just Enough Education to Perform

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello, yes you, rock star.

Let’s get one thing out of the way early “Just Enough Education to Perform” is not a song title, as is the editorial policy for this newsletter; it’s the title of a Stereophonics album from 2001. But it does mean I can write about education without lazily reaching back to the 70’s for some Pink Floyd.

This week, that thought on education comes from a source we quote fairly regularly on Rockstar CMO, our chum Kerry Cunnigham of 6Sense, who observes in this article - “Buyers Are Not Blank Slates” - that in our content marketing, we should rethink our personas’ need for education.

Unless you are tipping your category upside down or are genuinely bringing something new to the market that requires a new category and therefore an explanation, you may not need to do as much education about the problem you solve or the need for the category as the content marketing playbooks suggest.

As Kerry points out, these playbooks were written by folks like HubSpot, who, back in the day, had to educate us on this crazy little new thing called “Inbound marketing” in order for their category-disrupting CRM approach to resonate with buyers. Or Salesforce, when they championed SaaS, which seems hard to believe needed to be championed, but, yes kids, once upon a time, companies OWNED software.

It reminded me of my short flirt with the world of industry analysts, as, when I was an analyst I was surprised by how much of the briefing the vendor would take explaining the category and the problem it solves (yep, heard that 5 times this week, and yeah, analyst, my job to know this shit) and how long it took them to get to what was different about them.

Now, I am not dismissing the need for education in content marketing; in fact, I think 6Sense is a great example of this, educating us about the B2B buyer through their generously shared research.

We need to recognise that this may not be the buyer's first rodeo, build this into our persona development, and create content that responds to their needs, which may not include education on the category but is more likely to focus on mitigating and managing the risk of making a decision (or the FOFU).

The buyer does not necessarily want to become an expert on the market, they just want to solve their problem.

They, as the album title says, want “just enough education to perform”.

Please check out the links below, and have a great week.

Cheers!

Ian

Some stuff from me and my marketing chums….

Picked this from the album... Have a Nice Day!