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After reading today's Content Marketing Institute newsletter that included a note from founder Joe Pulizzi, I just had to share parts of it with you... mostly because it had a poignant effect on me. It is in part a testimonial about the book, Shoe Dog, by Nike founder Phil Knight. Pulizzi writes: Knight held many sales jobs before founding Nike, though he was pretty horrible at the majority of them – until he started selling shoes. Here’s how he explains it: “I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.” This paragraph hit me profoundly, as it is relevant to the content marketing journey taken by so many enterprises. Sometimes the right audience is targeted; sometimes the right content niche is chosen; sometimes the right platform is selected. But even when the patience and consistency are there, too, sometimes those initiatives still fail. When they do fail, it’s often because the content leaders really don't believe in them. They don’t believe in the content; they aren’t passionate about what they are creating... they don’t truly believe that the content will help their audience get better jobs and live better lives. Wow! We help most of our clients with content marketing, and try our best to practice what we preach. This note from Pulizzi, and the excerpt from Knight's book, help me to realize how critically important it is for everyone in our client's organization (and ours) to be totally sold out to their mission, specifically as it relates to the content we're producing. Fortunately for us at 30dps, we are a marketing agency that is passionate about inbound marketing, content marketing, marketing automation, Hubspot, custom website design, custom online tool development, and all things related to creating an amazing inbound customer experience. But I fear that, at least sometimes, we may be creating content for ourselves and our clients that does not adequately demonstrate the passion that we and our clients feel about our/their businesses—we need to ensure that we fix that! We are so committed to producing quality content on a reliable schedule that we likely, at times anyway, lapse into a mechanical process of development that doesn't accurately represent a true belief in what we're doing. The good news is that we DO believe in our clients' missions too... we just sometimes get so tied up "producing" that we forget how important it is to find and reflect the passion with which our businesses are started and operated. With newfound commitment, we gratefully take on the shared responsibility of producing amazing content (for ourselves and our clients), and do so with a renewed commitment to dig deep to reflect the passion and commitment that drives successful businesses. If you are struggling to find that passion, we'd love to work with you to find it, and help reflect it in your content as you embark upon the all-important mission of building something special that your customers want to be a part of.
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