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Part 3

The Content Tilt

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

MARK TWAIN

There is so much of the same content out there in the world. To succeed with Content Inc., you need to step out of the pack. Let’s do this!

Chapter 5

Understanding the Power of the “Tilt”

When a trout rises to a fly, it does not swim as much as tilt its fins and jet skyward.

JOSEPH MONNINGER

In the movie The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne, Reeves’s character (Neo) is tested to see whether he is “The One.” While Neo is outside in the waiting area, a young protégé is holding up spoon after spoon, bending each one. As Neo sits beside the protégé, the young boy tells Neo that he has to look at the spoon in a different way … that the spoon actually does not exist at all.

Soon after, Neo was able to tilt his head to the side and slowly bend the spoon.

TELLING A DIFFERENT STORY

Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal (along with Tesla founder Elon Musk) and Facebook’s first outside investor, believes that most businesses copy other businesses and thus fail. In his book Zero to One, Thiel tells businesses that they should “figure out something that nobody else is doing and look to create a monopoly in some area that’s been underdeveloped. Find a problem nobody else is solving.” Sadly, most companies are creating content and telling stories that are no different from anything else out there.

Just type “SEO e-book” into Google, and you’ll get over 20 million results. There are a lot of businesses talking about the same things in the same way. Jay Baer believes that most businesses simply never go through the process of finding a content niche that they can own. In an interview with Jay, he tackles this concept: It’s like, “Hey I like knitting, and I’m going to start a knitting blog.” Really! There are 27 other knitting blogs. Why would anybody read yours? What is different? What is unique? What is interesting? Why would anyone stop reading the knitting blog that they’ve been reading for the last three years and read yours ever? And if you can’t articulate that, you need to go back to the drawing board. And most people I find who haven’t been doing this for a while just don’t go through that competitive calculus, and it’s dangerous.

There are hundreds of blogs on chili peppers that tell stories about the “heat” of the peppers. Claus Pilgaard found a way to tell a story that was radically different from that of his content competition … his messaging was around the “taste” of the peppers. Claus’s content tilt made all the difference.

CONTENT TILTING

If Content Inc is going to work for you, your content must be different. It must fill a content hole that is not being filled by someone else. As Peter Thiel suggests, we must find a problem area that no one else is solving and exploit that area with content.

This is called “content tilting.”

The word tilt has two primary definitions. The first is to cause to lean, incline, slope, or slant. If we tilt a glass or a table, we get to look at it from a different perspective. Neo, in The Matrix, tilted his head and saw the spoon differently and gained knowledge because of it.

The second definition of tilt is to aim or thrust, as you would tilt a lance in a joust. With this tilt, we look at the content niche in such a way that creates the opportunity for us to attack, and lead, and ultimately own the category.

While identifying the sweet spot is critical to the Content Inc. process, it’s the content tilt that will separate you from everyone else in your market area. Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping, calls this “the hook”—a simple twist on a familiar theme designed to entrap or ensnare your audience. Without “tilting” your content just enough to truly have a different story to tell, your content will fade into the rest of the clutter and be forgotten.

CASE STUDY: ANN REARDON

Sydney, Australia’s Ann Reardon is the “baking queen of YouTube.”

In 2011, after giving birth to her third son, Ann was looking for something to do during her night feedings, so she launched a recipe site called How to Cook That. “I wrote a recipe post every week and made some videos to complement the website. The videos were too big to upload to my website so I uploaded them to YouTube and started embedding them onto my site.” Before starting a family, Ann was a qualified food scientist and dietitian (her skill area). At the same time, she had a passion for teaching and working with children, so she changed careers and began working with youth in a poorer area of Western Australia.

“I absolutely loved it and have so many great memories,” shares Ann. “But our budget was extremely tight so it was during this time that I taught myself to edit videos for the youth ministry, as well as self-catering for lots of events. Over time some of the young adults asked if I could teach them how to cook. A group would come over and we’d all bake and have a great time in my kitchen.” You may be thinking that recipe blogs and “how-to” baking on YouTube are nothing new, and you’d be right. What separates Ann is her content tilt.

Ann focuses her recipes and baking on seemingly impossible creations, such as desserts with five pounds of Snickers bars and a cake that, when sliced open, is a perfect replica of an Instagram logo.

“Many people start a YouTube channel and try to copy what has already been done but the horse has already bolted,” Ann explains. “For every single breath you take, there is 8 hours of new video footage uploaded to YouTube, so I have to give viewers a good reason to come back and watch my channel.” In January 2012, Ann saw her 100th subscriber on YouTube and was thrilled. Exactly three years later, Ann has amassed more than 1 million subscribers and receives (believe it or not) more than 3,000 comments per week. In an average month, she’ll see over 16 million views of her videos.

Along with the substantial revenues from her cut of YouTube advertising royalties, she has launched an app called “Surprise Cakes” and another app for photo sharing; and as well, she has a number of sponsored content opportunities with brands such as electrical appliance company Breville and kitchenware company World Kitchen.

Yes, Ann found her sweet spot, the combination of her knowledge of food and her passion for teaching, but it was her content tilt of seemingly impossible food creations that has made all the difference (Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1 Ann Reardon’s content tilt of “impossible food creations” is what separates her content from the thousands of other baking blogs.

The Odd Struggle with Start-Ups and Content

Jay Acunzo, director of platform at NextView Ventures, a Boston-area early-stage venture capital company, works with a number of technology start-ups on the concept of content marketing. Oddly enough, while most tech start-ups want to create the best product in the world for their niche, they don’t believe the same about their content.

In an interview, Jay notes:

I say [to start-ups], do you think that your product, either now or in the future, is going to be the best solution to solving whatever problem you’ve identified in the market? Because that’s really why tech founders start companies; they see a problem and they want to solve it better than what is in existence. So 100% of these founders say unequivocally yes, we’re going to have a better product than our competitors.

So then I say, why is it true for your product but not your content? And for me it always comes back to mentality and skill set. They don’t think about content in the way that [marketers] think about it. They think about it as a random collection of best practices that just get recycled. “So we’ve got to blog a lot … well everyone else is blogging so why should we blog?” It’s not about that. It’s about can you solve the problem in a way that is unique? Your product does that, but your content should do that. Everybody is talking about theoretically how to do marketing and you’re like “This is really hard; I’m going to build a product that is going to make marketing really, really simple and almost like plug and play.” That’s great! You’re confident your product can do that, so if you’re going to create content, don’t just blog; do [something different].

They [start-ups] are so confident that they can do something different that no one has ever seen before with their product, and there is a lot of noise. A lot of people have done what they’re doing before, but they’re like no, I don’t care; I’m going to do better. Yet when they come to the content, they’re like no, I can’t be different. I think it’s mentality and skill set that is causing them to say that.

… I think you just have to think much harder about choosing your niche and on what angle on the problem you’re taking with your product … that has to come through with your content. And guess what, if you’re content reflects the product and it’s still not innovative enough, chances are that your product wasn’t going to stick anyways, so you might want to revisit the actual thesis for the business. I’m always blown away by that. All these entrepreneurs are so confident that we can solve this problem better than anybody else with our product, and it should articulate that through the content too and they just don’t think that way.

SETTING THE “BEST OF BREED” GOAL

Those who succeed were—at one point or another in their lives—willing to put themselves in situations that were uncomfortable, whereas the unsuccessful seek comfort from all their decisions.

GRANT CARDONE, THE 10X RULE

Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour, now the number two sports apparel company in the world (behind Nike), states that if you don’t have the business goal of being number one in your market, you’ll never make it. When talking about his own organization, he says that every employee at Under Armour knows that the mission is to be the clear leader, no questions asked.

The same goes for your Content Inc. goals. Your ultimate objectives—those big hairy audacious goals (as named by Jim Collins of Good to Great fame) you worked on in Chapter 1—should make you cringe at least a little bit.

I completely disagree with marketing experts and consultants who say it’s not necessary to be the leading information provider for your industry. I’m calling bull on that.

Yes, it is a bit audacious to go out on a limb and clearly state that your content should be an irreplaceable resource for your readers (and customers) … that you are indeed driving where the market is going from an information standpoint (like a media company). That said, be audacious!

If you are not striving to be the go-to resource for your industry niche, you are settling for the comfortable, whatever that means to you in goal-setting terms.

Simply put, you won’t be successful with the Content Inc. approach if you settle.

WHAT IF YOUR CONTENT WERE GONE?

Let’s say someone rounded up all your content and placed it in a box, like it never existed. Would anyone miss it? Would you leave a gap in the marketplace?

If the answer to this is no, then we’ve got a problem, Houston.

We want customers and prospects needing … no, longing for our content. It becomes part of their lives … their jobs.

Today, it’s harder and harder to buy attention. You have to earn it. Earn it today, tomorrow, and five years from now by delivering the most impactful information your customers could ever ask for. Set the uncomfortable goals that will take your business to the next level.

Look at the goals you set in Chapter 1. If you are completely comfortable with them, you are settling for good enough. But good enough won’t win the battle for customer attention. Be great!

FINDING YOUR CONTENT MARKETING HEDGEHOG

Let’s go back to Jim Collins again and his fantastic book Good to Great. If you know anything about the book, you know about the hedgehog.

The hedgehog, in business, is that thing your business can be the best at … that combines your unique talents and passion into something you can make money doing.

In expanding on this topic for Content Inc., I believe we need to look at the hedgehog in four ways:

1. What we cover. In your niche, maybe you produce the best research, or the best how-to information, or the best investigative journalism.

2. How we cover it. This is channel specific. You possibly have a winning video series like Game Theory from Matthew Patrick or How to Cook That from Ann Reardon or an amazing podcast like EntrepreneurOnFire from John Lee Dumas.

3. Why we cover it. This is your higher purpose. To be a truly effective content marketer, you have to be creating and distributing content for the betterment of your reader-customer. Once you find that, then you can introduce a product. The matching of your customers’ informational or entertainment needs and what you sell is the Content Inc. jackpot.

4. Whom we cover it for. Are there groups of people that are not getting the information they need to do their jobs better or live their lives to the fullest extent? Your hedgehog might be covering a piece of information for that niche group and then doing it better than anyone else.

CONTENT INC. INSIGHTS

The sweet spot is not enough. In order for our Content Inc. model to succeed, we need to tilt our content in such a way that separates us from the competition.

The majority of content developed every day is just like everything else out there. It does nothing for the reader or the producer. It doesn’t matter the frequency of delivery or the channel you deliver the content through; if the content doesn’t tell a different story, it will most likely be ignored.