Adtech marketing strategy boils down to three questions…

Press releases are a very misunderstood form of marketing content. They often have no clear audience or purpose, fail to convey exactly what the news they’re releasing is.

I don’t think there’s an exact formula for creating effective social content. And my three most-viewed LinkedIn posts from the past 12 months reflect that — they are all very different.

I often talk to adtech CEOs about how to start marketing programs from scratch or rethink an existing marketing department.

They’re infamous. Descending on your LinkedIn inbox and email like a swarm of dastardly hornets, the lead gen vendors greet you with impersonal and lofty promises.

I went on Marketecture last week to talk with co-hosts Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi about adtech marketing. I outlined three mistakes I think most adtech companies make with marketing…

Adtech influencers exist and have tremendous power to drive business outcomes by solving the distribution problem for their companies.

As an adtech marketing agency owner, my main competitor is inaction: prospects hire no one as opposed to hiring another agency.

In my experience, most adtech companies fall into one of two camps when it comes to marketing…

MrBeast has used 235 million YouTube subscribers to build a $50M chocolate brand.

An adtech influencer can use 23,500 followers to build a $50M software brand.

Or a roughly $200 million brand.

Adtech marketing is easier and harder than most think.

It’s easier because the channel mix — content, events, and PR — is well known. Determining the channels that work in this business — which is all about building credibility and then relationships to drive high-consideration, high-value sales — isn’t rocket science.

Content is something you do. A box to check off the list of marketing tactics. That’s why it’s so easy for businesses to see the shiny new toy that is AI and immediately think that content can be automated.

The incremental, tactical approach to marketing doesn't account for the nonlinear impact of a relatively expensive step in the marketing process: strategy.

Many marketing agencies aspire to provide and even claim to offer a world-class service. But taking that term seriously points us in a different direction.

There is no reason B2B brands can’t aspire to what Rev represents: narrative differentiation, proactive and inventive editorial planning, and world-class content (you know, the kind that involves hiring Grey Lady journalists). But so few do. Instead, B2B brands stay small in their thinking — and the results speak for themselves.

The value of marketing services does not directly correlate to the calculable ROI on those services. And this is true for content marketing as well.

The good news is that creating a content marketing strategy doesn’t need to be a baroque affair with 10 MBA-caliber slide decks and a 10,000-word strategy doc that no one on your team will read. It can be done in a month of interviews and crystallized in a document as short as 2,000 words.

If you’re thinking about launching a content marketing strategy from scratch or transforming your haphazard approach to content into a more strategic one, you’ll need to think through four principles: who your customers are, where the intersection lies between your expertise and your customers’ needs, how you can reach them, and why you’re creating content in the first place.

Since ChatGPT exploded in popularity, my conversations with non-content marketing colleagues focus on one topic: generative AI. My clients, adtech and martech leaders and marketers, are also wondering how they should be using this technology and what it spells for the future of content marketing.

As an editor and then a content marketing agency owner, I’ve been in adtech and martech for seven years. And our space has the same problems that plague so much of B2B content marketing.