Foundations: How Does It Come Together?

You’ve asked questions and performed research to hone in on the problems of your ICP, created content that meaningfully and specifically addresses those problems, and shared that content to both individuals and communities in order to build new relationships within that ICP.

That’s strategy, execution, and distribution - and absolutely worth celebrating.

However, there’s likely still valuable information from your research that didn’t relate to the specific topic you covered. Additionally, the individuals you shared your content with may have different perspectives or opinions regarding that topic, or may be experiencing different problems.

So, you go through the process again, and again, and again, and in doing so, you create a flywheel - a system where one action leads to another, which leads to another, and so on, eventually leading back to the initial action.

Your flywheel consists of three stages:

• People in your ICP give you insight into their problems.
• You create content addressing those problems.
• You share that content with new people within your ICP.

Even though you’re not doing anything different, the process becomes more efficient, and you’ll build momentum. With every additional piece of content you create, you’re further demonstrating your credibility to your ICP.

Create Resources - Not Lead Magnets

In many cases, resources like videos, slide decks and white papers are used as lead magnets: you give a company your email, and in exchange, you get the resource you want.

However, there’s no guarantee that the particular resource you’ve signed up to get will actually help you. At the same time, because of the hurdle to acquisition, what could be some of an organization’s best work won’t have the impact that it otherwise could.

As a concept, lead magnets are optimized for growth - and when you focus on the number, you lose sight of the individuals that make up that number. Instead of asking your audience to perform a transaction to gain access to these resources, make them freely available. In doing so, you’ll improve the quality of your email list (since those who just signed up for the resource will be omitted), your audience won’t regret signing up for something that didn’t help them, and your highest-quality work can freely spread.

While it does involve additional effort, creating value for your ICP outside of your regular content demonstrates that you want to help them as much as you can, and are invested in their success, even if that success means they don’t become a customer.

Consistency

The biggest challenge in implementing this process is being able to do so consistently. Marketing doesn’t happen once - regardless of the time and effort, one piece of content posted to one platform one time is unlikely to be significant. For example, tech writer Ed Zitron grew his newsletter from 349 subscribers to 50,000 in just over four years, but to do so, he wrote hundreds of thousands of words over more than 370 pieces of content.

According to a 2018 study by the faculty of the University of British Columbia, our brains are attracted to sedentary behaviours, and avoiding those behaviours requires more effort than following our usual routines or habits. Willpower is not enough; we’ll easily justify whatever it is we end up doing.

Instead, we should, as Oliver Burkeman writes in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, “embrace radical incrementalism.”

“The psychology professor Robert Boice spent his entire career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day.”

You can’t control when your audience finds out about you, or if they’re even in the market when they do. What you can control is the amount of effort you’re willing to put in. Putting aside several hours to work on content might seem like a good idea, but is it really something you’d want to do again and again - especially if you don’t enjoy it? On the other hand, if you dedicate just 15 minutes a day, you might not make as much progress in an individual session, but you will get much more done in the long-term.

Because there are no shortcuts, only trade-offs.