It’s not going to be fun to write today’s newsletter, but I promised I’d keep it real with you guys for as long as I kept this up.

There’s been more bad news with Content Army this week.

We lost one long-term client (12 months) and another asked for a retainer reduction.

To say the business is struggling would be an understatement. It’s been dealing with headwinds that I’m not even sure are solvable at this moment in time, which I’ll explain below.

Despite this, I am, of course, going to continue with it 🙂

And I’ll document the reasons why below as well.

But first, before we get into what these problems are with this service, I think it’s important we spend a moment to understand the context as to how this business became a sought-after thing.
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2024 ONWARDS: YEAR OF THE PERSONAL BRAND

“Personal branding” has been riding a wave in recent years.

The benefits are fairly well established at this point, so I won’t spend too much time going over them again.

However, I think it’s critical to explain at this point why personal branding has been on the rise, especially as it pertains to B2B, and the problems that ensue as a result of misaligned expectations.

People are investing in personal branding not necessarily because they want to, but because they don’t know where else to turn.

Content marketing on LinkedIn & X has grown in popularity as CEOs and founders are reluctantly shifting away from channels that are dying like cold outbound.

They can’t hit their quotas anymore on those channels, and they see the likes of Adam Robinson and Chris Walker crushing LinkedIn and think that’s the right move to make.

And this is the root of the problem: the likes of Adam & Chris have invested a massive amount of time and energy into making this work, not to mention the fact that both have unique points of views and are interesting characters in their own rights.

Adam himself said it took 18 months to gain traction on LinkedIn before he was able to truly quantify business impact. That’s a massive leap of faith and patience that quite frankly, most founders would still consider absurd.

But the leverage you’re able to create once you do arrive is unparalleled, and it’s the ultimate amplification of all sales and marketing channels.

Unfortunately, most people will never get there, and that’s why Content Army is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

We’re delivering a great service, but it takes two to tango and we’re only as good as the people we work with and we need extreme patience, faith and commitment to have any opportunity of reaching close to those levels.

Let’s dive a little deeper into what the problems are with delivering this type of service.

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1: It takes time to see the results

Any marketing activity has a time lag, but none more so that I’m aware of than content marketing.

Unlike outbound sales which is designed to capture intent that’s already present, content’s role is typically to bring awareness.

You can’t replace a channel designed to capture intent (outbound) with one that’s designed to create awareness and compare results directly - it’s a recipe for disappointment.

And if you’re aware of the 95:5 rule, you’ll know that the majority of content we create is not going to make a direct impact today, but rather give us preferential consideration when buyers are in the market.

Most content takes at least two quarters to start showing measurable impact, but we’re seeing clients start to churn sometimes between 4-6 months as they struggle to justify the investment and fall back into short-term thinking.

But that’s the problem: people are impatient and want fast ROI. Content is not the channel for this; paid ads and outbound are.

This has been endlessly frustrating during sales calls, as there is just no way to project the impact content will have on your business in the short or even long-term. But customers want guarantees (which I understand), that we can’t honestly give it to them.

“Trust me, I believe it will work out” is a very difficult angle to take in persuading prospects. They want concrete numbers, and I can’t guarantee that.
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2: Measuring the impact

At Content Army, we report on impressions and engagement across the channels we serve, but that’s the extent of our reporting.

We can’t go deeper than this as we don’t have access to our clients’ sales data, nor do we even want to get involved in their CRM and pipeline process. That’s well beyond the remit of our expertise and would crush our profitability.

That’s another problem, however, when delivering what is ultimately, still perceived as a marketing service: people want to see results beyond surface-level metrics, and we can only advise them to implement self-attribition via demo bookings and post-purchase surveys.

You can of course, set up clear measurement for content marketing by integrating this activity into your internal CRM and then monitoring cause and effect and correlations, but again, we just aren’t able to provide that service at this moment in time (we do for our own business, but it’s complicated).

As such, we rely on clients to tell us about their results, and most just don’t understand how to track them correctly.

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3: It takes more than just content to succeed

On LinkedIn & X, it’s not enough to just create content, especially when you’re starting out.

You need to network aggressively by connecting with others and commenting on their posts to build a following.

We’re excellent at helping people with the creation process, but we don’t do the other 2 (even though we advise on it).

We may need to rethink this, but it’s a tricky problem to solve. No founder should start doing AI-bot comments, as they look pathetic, and we can’t possibly start commenting on their behalf and believe we can replace their unique point of view on things.

As such, we need our clients to come to the party, but most are already time-strapped and we’ve seen many simply ignore us when we recommend connecting with certain individuals or commenting on their posts.

Tough one to solve and holds people back from achieving best results.

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4: This doesn’t come naturally to most people

This is less of a problem than the others, but it still matters.

We’re working with a lot of technical founders. They’re amazingly intelligent people, but for many of them, being the outwardly extroverted creator doesn’t come naturally to them.

The harsh truth is that for the biggest creators, however, it does. They’re charismatic showmen, and they embrace the stage.

A typical client usually scrambles their way through their first recording session with us. By sessions 2, 3 and 4, they’re really starting to hit their stride and feel more comfortable. This has been one of the most satisfying parts of running this service, as the coaching element has improved their ability to articulate the problems they solve for their ICP and led to them developing new skills.

Despite this, however, we’ve also seen some clients just start and quit because “this doesn’t feel natural to them”, and I understand that.

I still believe everybody should be investing in content. But sometimes people try it and decide it’s not for them, which leads me onto…
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5: It requires discipline (most aren’t truly committed)

Very few people take content seriously enough to see the process through to the end.

They often work with us because they want to dip their toes in the water, but when they see what’s truly involved to make this a success, they quit.

This has been the most challenging part of running this service overall.

When selling email marketing services for Magnet Monster, it’s renowned as a mandatory, proven marketing strategy to drive incremental revenue and profits for D2C brands.

Content marketing for B2B doesn’t come with the same guaranteed. There’s more faith involved, training, and it’s often done at the expense of more “proven” marketing channels, which even though they are dying by the day, people still resort to type with and go back to rather than pursue something new.

I don’t know the way to solve this problem.

I can’t “force” people to start taking content marketing seriously. They either do or they don’t want to. The opportunity for tremendous leverage is there but it’s on them to take the investment seriously and commit to the process.

Unfortunately, content is still viewed as a nice-to-have, not essential part of the marketing mix.

It seems as though many people are just not truly ready for this type of business activity just yet, but I believe more will see the light as they come to realise that this is one of the last remaining moats against commoditisation of services and software in an era of AI.

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REVISITING MY GTM STRATEGY

With all of the above in mind, I’ve had to admit to myself that we’ll need to be content with two facts with Content Army, at least for the timebeing:
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• It’s going to have low to moderate LTV for each client
• It will require a high lead velocity to make it a viable business model

I have the inverse of this at Magnet Monster: high LTV, low lead requirements to generate a decent profit. The differences between the two businesses could not be greater at this moment in time.

But Content Army benefits from one massive advantage that most agency services simply don’t have the benefit of: it’s relatively low touchpoint, especially when compared to DTC marketing.

Once the question frameworks have been created and the recording is done, there’s not a huge amount of back-and-forth each day between the client and us.

It enables us to deliver a highly profitable, seamless service.

We’ve filled in a lot of the gaps with advice, prompts to comment, ideation, etc, but even then, it’s still nice to run a service that feels organised, structured and focused, which could not be farther away from how eCommerce operates.

In order to make this work, I’m going to have to embark on a slightly different method for attracting clients than Magnet Monster, especially given how my content is currently focused on attracting DTC brands and most of my time is focused around sales & marketing for that business.

There are two primary ways we’re going to relaunch this business to see if it can grow this year.

1: Paid advertising on LinkedIn

We’ve been getting good results so far this year from paid ads for Magnet Monster, so we will now start to shift some of the budget across to Content Army to see if that too can work.

We’re going to lock down on our ICP: eComm SaaS founders, specifically in the Shopify space, which we already know extremely well.

We have no choice but to go down the paid route to amplify content now as all of our other marketing collateral is focused on email marketing, so this is the most effective way to get exposure for this service.

It’s time to put my money where my mouth is on this one.

2: Community

We already have a group of 25 founders in B2B in a Shared Slack channel. We’re going to open this up to the public, alongside my ex-business partner Blake Imperl, and get as many marketing leaders in our space in there as possible to help them with content.

We’re going to put on a host of workshops and online events to help teach these people, and the hope is that we’ll start picking up traction through being great connectors in the space.

This is something I’m really excited about as I’ve never experimented with it but I see great potential in.

If you’re the guy that opens up doors for others and people come to for advice, that brings you a tremendous amount of opportunity and goodwill. That’s my hope, anyway!

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WHY CONTINUE WITH THIS?

Once again, I cannot shake this question off.

If this was my sole venture, I would have made a pragmatic decision at this point to probably stop based on all of the factors I’ve learnt above.

However, I’m fortunate enough to be able to continue to experiment with this business with minimum risk.

We’re just about breaking even on our overheads at the moment, and as long as we don’t accrue any significant costs, we can continue to run this and bleed resources from Magnet Monster whilst we believe there is upside potential to the business.

At some point, I’ll have to consider the emotional drain this business is causing me, but it’s honestly not keeping me up at night right now, fortunately.

And that’s possibly a lesson I need to reflect on: do I want this badly enough to make it a success? Am I on cruise control, not giving this business the energy it requires?

These are good questions for another day. For the timebeing, for better or worse, I’m hoping that the leverage I have in my position at Magnet Monster and the success of that business will eventually lead to Content Army gaining traction.

But as with all things in life that aren’t progressing, eventually, you have to stop and ask yourself the hard questions.

I’m confident and resolute right now that we’ll find a way through, but time is running out to justify this venture.

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