The Beatles Once Performed for 18 People – Don’t Sweat It When Your Content Marketing Blueprints Take Time to Make You World Famous
Marketing pros don't tell you it takes time for content marketing to work to bilk you. They say it because it's (usually) true. A few thoughts on getting started with content marketing.
It’s easy to forget that every music superstar – from The Beatles to Taylor Swift – started with an audience of none.
Kevin Bacon has had a hugely successful career. I continue to think of him as “Chip” from Animal House (“Remain calm. All will be well.).
Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected 30 or so times before being picked up and published.
Your current favorite content creator on Substack and/or Medium and/or LinkedIn? Yep, they also started with an audience of none.
And, yes, The Beatles did play before an audience of 18.
I’ve spent most of my professional life since 2010 in and around marketing, particularly content marketing. I’ve started from scratch a few times (in some ways, I’m starting over again now). It’s terrifying and then exhilarating to see an audience grow – view by view, comment by comment, and lead by lead.
Content marketing can feel like walking to school uphill both ways, in the snow, with no shoes on; especially when you start.
It’s different.
It’s tough.
It takes a different mentality and time for the results to show (for B2B buyers, it could take 2 years and 20 plus content “touches” before someone buys – it’s a long game). Even if you are already marketing your business and have a website, when you decide to invest in content marketing, it’s a reset.
But, like The Beatles, if you hone your craft and keep getting the word out, you’ll continue to grow.
Will you become a global phenomenon? Probably not.
Will you generate leads and sales for yourself or your company? Oh, yes. And almost certainly more than 18 of each!
Everyone Starts at Zero – Even The Beatles
Before The Beatles became THE BEATLES, they had to grind their way in small clubs all over England and in Germany.
Bored last week, I clicked on one of those ubiquitous “Wonderful Pictures of Whatever” links. Clicking along and the photo above caught my eye for no real reason – that’s a boring sock hop, I thought. The caption grabbed me by the throat, “The Night the Beatles Played for a Crowd of 18.”
Well, Lady Madonna, still my gently weeping guitar as it walks the long and winding road before I submerge, holding your hand because I wanna, in my yellow submarine.
18 people?!!??!!
Well come together and hit me on the head with Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.
Everyone begins at the beginning.
Before Beatlemania, the Beatles regularly played small clubs, like The Cavern Club in Liverpool – capacity of 300 or so. There is a list of Beatles concerts on Wikipedia. Seeing the larger venues kick in in 1964 after two-plus years of steady grinding at smaller clubs in the UK and West Germany is an interesting glimpse into the growth of the band’s popularity – from The Cavern Club to Royal Albert Hall to Shea Stadium in the U.S. (the largest grossing outdoor concert at the time).
So your website traffic is more Cavern Club than Royal Albert Hall.
That’s OK. You’ve got nowhere to go but up.
Content Marketing and Blogging – Get YOUR Crowd Over 18 Folks!
I worked on a dozen or so copier dealer/managed service provider sites (and read more). Most were horrible.
Many had been around for years, none were adding business value (some had blogs that were just Fivrr-produced crap).
[Momentary digression: Web visits is one of the most useless stats around UNLESS you don’t have any. Then it becomes important to increase Web visits (that’s people looking at your website and every visit is an opportunity to say “yes” to what you offer) until there is enough traffic to begin tracking conversions, time on site, purchase path, and all of the other statistics that help identify the best way to lead someone to making a purchase. Basically, before you can sell something, you have to have people in your store and your website is your digital storefront. I digress; this is a post for another day.]
The goal of content marketing is to turn visitors into leads and leads into sales through quality content, a defined buyers journey, nurturing, etc.
But the first step is to get more than 18 people in your crowd.
That’s why blogging is so powerful. Regularly publishing quality information (I’m using blogs here, but that could be video, photo, art, etc.) that helps your audience is still one of the most effective ways to create a bond with your customers.
Let me share two personal stories of starting at zero and near zero.
Story 1: Copier Dealer Blogs
Who would read about copiers?
More folks than you would think. Copy machines remain useful office productivity devices, even a path to digitizing documents.
Every copier dealership website I worked on started with 80%-ish of all traffic going to a single page – the meter page. (The meter page has each customer’s count for pages printed, copied, and/or scanned; most office copiers are leased and the fee is based on page volume. Office managers generally checked around payment time to ensure they weren’t going to get dinged for overages.)
Within a year, we would at least double website traffic, with all of the new traffic going to the blogs and landing pages for content assets we created.
We did this with basic content marketing strategies – what were customers asking salesmen (almost all men) and service techs and turning that into blog content. We created an asset to capture names, an email nurture campaign, and blogged at least weekly (and shared via social). We delivered qualified leads to every client we worked for.
How well does it work? The blog post I wrote on removing black lines for copiers for our first client is second in Google. I rewrote that for another client (and they’ve tweaked it since); that one is number one. The first one was written in 2015 (My Copies Have Black Lines – How Do I Fix It? ). The second, Lines on Copies and Scans? It’s Time to Clean the Slit Glass, in 2018.
Blog content, like a catchy tune, can have longevity when it answers a question.
Story 2: Growing a Community from Day 1
I know what it’s like to start a site from scratch, push the button, and see the big, fat zero in Google Analytics. (Also the excitement of seeing the first two visitors and then realizing it was two co-workers next to me looking at the new site.) I helped to develop and grow a community site for a professional organization from zero to generating more traffic than the AIIM site itself.
We got that Web traffic primarily through blogging (read about getting started with blogging here).
While I didn’t call it inbound or content marketing at the time, that’s what we were doing. Our goal was to bring together a community of information professionals by supplying them with useful information.
By becoming a useful, trusted resource we were able to add calls to action to our membership, training courses, and a variety of online and in-person events (and we created blog posts and other content from the training materials and events as well).
Without the blogs, none of it would have worked. I recruited a cast of 30 to 40 experts across enterprise content management topics and let them do their thing. The result was improved traffic to the website, the ability to let more people know we existed, and the ability to cross-sell. After we became HubSpot users for the blog and marketing automation, we were able to track sales back to specific pieces of content. This same process worked for those copier dealers (or any industry).
If you have an established business with customers who love you, you also have similar advantages to what I had with the AIIM Community:
We had an existing website and a well-established professional membership (we knew we’d get some traction, we just didn’t realize how much). YOU have customers who like you and are loyal. And you have an existing website to launch an inbound strategy from (even if it might need effort to make it an effective website).
We had the luxury of many experts willing to share their knowledge with an audience of their peers. YOU have tremendous knowledge and expertise in your sales team, your service technicians and customer support staff, and leadership. You know your industry and what your customers are interested in.
We were “sorta” doing content marketing. YOU have the advantage of maturing inbound methods. Inbound marketing has become more structured, effective, and supported by research. One example, HubSpot’s Inbound conference grew from 2,500 attendees in 2012 to 10,000 plus in 2015 (2023 had 12,000 attendees). If you’ve ever run an event, you know how explosive that growth is.
You also have the advantage of being able to tap into those of us who’ve learned (and keep learning) from mistakes and successes.
Just Do It
Nike does have that right – just go.
The first step is the hardest. Paul and John started by strumming out those first chords.
It’s time for you to start pecking out those first blog posts.
Before you know it, 18 can become 8,091 – the attendance at the Beatles’ first U.S. concert at the Coliseum in Washington, D.C.
Keep playing those small gigs and writing those blogs and a few years from now you – and your company – could be a superstar.
Aldershot photo from Mashable.
Coliseum photo from The Washington Coliseum and the Beatles Get a Second Act.