Forming an Edge

How much to spend on your own marketing; fading VC returns; the knife’s edge; “AI marketing”; how SMBs buy; modern content marketing.

Author

Bubo
October 25, 2023

This week: how much to spend on your own marketing; fading VC returns; the knife’s edge; “AI marketing”; how SMBs buy; modern content marketing.

💡 Professional services firms should spend about 4% of revenue on marketing activities, with the biggest expense being time rather than money.

🤯 Activities like PR and social media often don't provide enough return for the investment.

🧱 Professional services firms should focus their limited marketing time and budget on just a few high-impact activities like SEM/SEO, writing their own content, and lead nurturing.

💡 Venture capital changed how companies are valued by shifting focus from tangible assets to growth potential, enabling the Silicon Valley tech boom.

🤯 This valuation based on speculative future success is highly subjective, and competitive advantages that fueled growth are fading.

🧱 With the digital revolution reaching maturity, companies must prove value in new ways as VC recedes, like more human leadership and intellectual capital.

💡 A knife's sharpness is determined by the molecular structure and geometry of the steel, not just the edge angle.

🤯 The most meaningful measure of a knife's sharpness is whether it produces good food, not precise cuts.

🧱 Knives are unfinished until sharpened, inviting users to shape them and change their world through this private act.

This one’s a real cherry: “Before you establish an AI marketing agency, you should grasp the foundations of AI marketing itself.” You don’t say! 🤯 “AI marketing” isn’t really a thing. If you think of AI as shorthand for “Augmented Indies”, you’ll see it as empowering automation rather than a business model. That’s a useful way to think about things.

(What about the way SMBs buy your services? Is there opportunity to innovate there?)

💡 Spending only 33% of time on core business practices, SMBs lose too much time on admin; technology should be easy, accessible and affordable.

🤯 Fragmentation and clutter amongst software, services and experts makes it hard for SMBs to implement technology seamlessly.

🧱 You can become a trusted expert by understanding clients' problems, taking it slow, leveraging AI, and providing an all-inclusive business platform.

💡 Modern Content Marketing: Your New Growth Flywheel

💡 Modern content marketing focuses on understanding your audience's needs and distributing content through social media rather than just trying to rank for keywords.

🤯 Successful modern content marketing requires regularly researching your audience and developing content that aligns with your brand's core values and point of view.

🧱 You can make the biggest impact by taking an audience-first, zero-click approach to ideation, engagement and distribution.