What's the best advice you gave this week?

FWD 117: Your long overdue marketing pivot to the personal

Today, Google, your friendly provider of everything you know of as the Internet, really cowboyed up its courage. After much moral handwringing, they removed their public pledge not to use AI to build weapons.

And you were worried about them scraping your email and Google docs to undermine your SEO strategy. Phew. They're only going to use it to automate the manufacture of the world-ending fire. I never expected Keanu Reeves to live long enough to be the real world Neo.

This bit of news got me thinking about advice. (Stay with me...)

After you fire your Google overlord

Most of you have been reading me long enough to start questioning the logic of letting Google determine your marketing strategy. You've read the full-length book amount of content I've written and are starting to realize, "Hey, these guys might not be on our side."

Now, as another call with another client this week proved, your content agency might not be so awake to what's going on, but that's a problem that's a little harder to solve.

Now that you are aware, freeing yourself from chasing the Google (or Facebook or LinkedIn or TikTok) algorithm's flippant whims turns out was the easy part.

What do you do after?

You've been trained to say what everyone else is saying, only more keyword coded for so long that the real work is something more tantalizing but terrifying: showing up as you are.

At least once a week someone asks me what kind of content is working now. I think I get asked this not because I'm a content marketing guru (I'm not) but because I produce a lot of content, and some of it is successful.

And my answer more often than not, is this:

Distribute your best advice.

• What's the best conversation you had with a client this week? Write about it.
• What's the best client experience your team produced this month? Podcast about it.
• What knowledge or service did you provide this month that changed the course of your customer's life? Make a video about it.

As a peril of my profession, I go to a lot of business websites and social media feeds, and the experience is nearly always the same: The same blogs on the same topics with the same generic advice with no connection to anyone actually having unique outcomes.

The Internet is pivoting to AI, in part, because businesses and content creators have spent the last ten years filling it full of copycat trash. So why not let the machines do it? (Psst, there are many reasons not to let the machines do it, but that's a different Edition.)

I'm not telling you anything you don't know. You know you should be building a portfolio of content rich with point-of-view, has a strong and recognizable voice, and couldn't ever be attributed to your competitors. I'm not the first person to tell you this. But you're not doing it.

I've spent a lot of the last year or so watching for why, and I think you will be interested in the answer...

Why hide behind the bland

Part of the introductory work we do with each client is surfacing and naming their awareness of their resistance to growth. Most founders/CEOs convince themselves that if not for them, the entire growth enterprise would collapse into itself, but the truth is, the executive suite is the primary reason why content operations fail and why brands underperform. Why marketing budgets would be better used to fuel roasted marshmallow parties.

Leaders have organized their ventures to keep the best insights from getting out, by making a series of tactical decisions that keep their organizations hidden, unrecognizable in a field of sameness. That's why I picked the topic as my second forum of 2025. (You should come.) Much of this is done subconsciously in patterns you might recognize:

1. Buffering best people: Leaders keep their best advisors, their winning sales people, and their life-saving client service people away from marketing because "they don't have time to be doing that stuff." Under the guise of protecting the rainmakers, what they are really doing is saving them from having to slow down once a month or less and actually understand and put into words what's working. A habit that would both transform your marketing and make your sales culture more repeatable.
2. False humility parade: "We just do what everyone else does. There's nothing to write about." This is just lazy thinking. Maybe no one on your team has the skills to interview, extract, and notice (my team has these skills if you need us) what is different about what you're doing, but you don't ACTUALLY believe that you offer no differentiated value. If that was true you'd close up shop to fulfill that "Integrity" corporate value etched into the conference room glass.
3. You forgot about trust: Most Founders and executives I've worked with have been to ten-too-many marketing conference sessions and have bought into a long-lost lie that you can build a magic funnel of leads on the internet and never actually build trust. The magic of clicks and keywords will tripwire your best and most lucrative clients into a magic bucket. This was barely ever true before and it's certainly not true now. To grow a trust business you have to show up in the world with trust-building things. Your ChatGPT generated white paper that people have to give their email for which then puts them in some aggressive marketing funnel is certainly not building trust. Trust is made by transparency, storytelling, specificity, and contact.

Recent data from Wynter shows that nearly everyone is less confident in their content strategy these days. Based on all of the above, I can't help but think the film Spanglish where Cloris Leachman says to her adult daughter played by Tea Leone, "Sometimes your low self-esteem is just good judgment."

Unhiding from Plain Sight

If you don't trust your prospect, they can never trust you. Trusting your prospect means showing up in the "free" marketing space (your website, your social feeds, your events, your newsletters) with the best you have to offer, slices of your best advice that you give your best clients. It means believing that by being great for free people will—in a reasonable amount of time—trust you to be great for money.

In next week's Live Forum, I'm going to lead you through the steps on how to systematize your growth engine for the four factors above:

• Transparency
• Storytelling
• Specificity, and
• Contact

Maybe you needed this little newsletter nudge to pick one of the four and get to work. Or maybe you need a system and a plan to reshape your growth operation to bring down the barriers to trust-made growth. Either way, we're here for you.

Make sure you're registered for the Hiding in Plain Sight Forum. I know it's going to be worth your time.

Forward, forward.