Mind Readings: Advanced Questions

In this episode, let's talk about the advanced questions. At a recent event, I was at Content Marketing World, uh, Drew Davis did a great keynote talking about uh rarely answered questions on how we can create content for key stakeholders instead of commodity content that uh search engines would find. And that got me wondering what exactly are the advanced questions, anyway. There's two or three different models and frameworks for getting to things like advanced questions or to any advanced topic. Um the the the premise of Drew's talk was that the frequently asked questions are very often tactical questions that have a gazillion answers, right?

They're frequently asked questions. How do you do this? How do you do that? And if we think about the types of questions people will ask, how is a very common question? How do you do this thing, right?

How do you uh get more followers on Instagram or something along those lines? The second tier up, sort of uh uh slightly more advanced would be a what question. What is Instagram, right? What is the purpose of having followers and so on and so forth? And then the highest tier would be the why questions.

Why would you even do this thing? Why do you care about this thing? Uh in his talk, he mentions uh one of the rarely answered asked questions is why does content marketing take so long to work, right? There's plenty of questions on how long it takes to work, but very few um pieces of content on why it takes so long to work. So that how, what, why framework is very useful for trying to determine what those more advanced questions are.

At the higher levels, I mean, you know, Simon Sinek has been talking about this for a number of years, the whole start with why premise of asking really challenging questions about your brand. Why do you show up to work? Why does your company exist, and so on and so forth? These are questions that uh you're not going to Google an answer for, right? There's no and there's no way to Google what is my company about.

Uh that is something you have to answer. But that is absolutely something that a CEO or a CMO would be interested in. The second framework, which mirrors the how what why framework very closely, is Google's um hero hub help model. And they use this for content marketing specifically. They advise creators that there's uh uh there should be a large pyramid of um at the bottom of the pyramid, sort of help content.

How do you do things, right? How to make uh Bernays sauce. Then there's hub content, which is sort of monthly bigger uh pieces that you promote more, that you spend more money on, that are more they're less execution, more tactical. And then, of course, there's the hero pieces, the once a quarter big splash uh pieces of content that you roll out, uh big premieres, for example, on your YouTube channel. And this hero hub help model is their suggestion for making content that uh does well.

Now, the hero hub help model sort of goes against what Drew was talking about in the sense that Google advises you created a lot of help content, relatively you know, frequent uh hub content and then relatively infrequent help uh uh hero content because the hero content takes a lot longer to create. Uh it requires more investment of resources, more promotion, uh, and requires really having these big ideas on a fairly frequent basis, some kind of big idea or big concept. For folks who have written books or given conference talks, you know that big ideas are tough to create, right? Uh truly original, unique big ideas. They take a lot of effort.

Creating help content, uh tactical how-to content, that's easy. That's that's straightforward. Here's the difference between that the strategy that Drew presented and the strategy that that Google presents. Google is trying to get you traffic, right? They regardless of quality, they just want eyeballs on your content because of course that benefits them.

The more eyeballs that they have on YouTube, the more ads they can sell. But it does also jump start your community, right? Because if you can attract a lot of people who are very uh tactically minded, that can create um uh a community for you. Now, one of the things you have to do is if you're going to take that approach ahead, you have to approach it for a long period of time. Because if you want those people in your audience to be strategists and C-suite, you could be dealing with people you know in your audience for 10 to 15 years, right?

As they ascend the hierarchies in their organizations, they naturally become more senior over time and uh you're able to to take those relationships and work with them. But it takes 10 to 15 years, right? If you're trying to get results sooner rather than later, uh, you might be better off flipping that and going for as much hero content as you can afford, uh, targeted at the highest levels of a company. How else do you get advanced questions? Well, a big part is research.

Uh, there is no substitute for going out to your target audience, the people you really want to talk to, uh, and asking them what are the tough questions that you have? What are the questions that that you've not been able to find answers to? Uh, what are the challenges that are taking longer than you think? And this because your audience at those highest levels is not going to be huge, you're not going to be rolling out a massive survey. You're probably going to be bending someone's ear at a conference, right?

Um, maybe scheduling a one-on-one call if you can get onto somebody's calendar, um, things like that, looking at uh aggregating research done by other research firms that do have that level of access if you don't to put together what those questions are. That's challenging for a lot of organizations, right? And that's challenging for any kind of research because if you want to talk to the Fortune 50 CMOs, well, guess what? Everybody else does too, and it can be very tricky to get a hold of them. So you might have to look at people at level seniority, but maybe not at the biggest companies, with the understanding that a lot of the challenges that maybe someone in the Fortune 1000 is facing, probably at least some of them, there's some overlap with uh challenges of the Fortune 50, right?

Think about ROI in marketing. Uh we know what ROI is, you know, that's that's an easy question. It's earned minus spent divided by spent. It's a very common financial formula. We know less about you know what are the best ways to calculate ROI, and one of the challenging questions is why is ROI so difficult to compute?

Why is this seemingly simple formula so out of reach for a lot of people? Why do consulting firms get paid millions of dollars to get that answer? That would be uh that sort of hero level content, and you'd have to invest some time in it. Think about hero content like writing a book, right? When you write a book, this thing probably has a big idea in it of some kind, and it's gonna take you a long time, anywhere from six to eighteen months to crank this out.

So if you want a cadence of hero content, you're gonna need to have essentially four books in progress at any given time throughout the year to crank out one per quarter. That should help you calibrate the level of investment you need to create those advanced questions to create the the hero content that would answer those advanced questions. So that's some thinking about how we can extrapolate from that particular talk into something we can do, right? Your first step is going to be doing the research and then figuring out how you're going to create the content about those multiple big ideas at the same time. So that's today's mind readings.

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