Create a “Content Playground”

I'm a big fan of this article from Ashley Faust over at Atlassian. Create a content playground that's fun for buyers and lucrative for you. So obviously, right from the beginning, we have a strong concept idea of a content playground. And I know that it's a strong concept because I have been thinking about this framing ever since I read this, probably last year. And that framing, that concept, is built on an article which fundamentally challenges convention.

The core narrative here is that the traditional marketing funnel, the way we think about people progressing in a linear way through marketing stages, doesn't make sense. People go back and forth, round about, up and down, wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. And actually, the funnel is not a useful conception. A playground is a far better and more practical framework. That's a good argument, built on a truism, something that our industry generally believes to be true and doesn't think too hard about.

Right from the beginning, it's interesting, it challenges our assumptions, it's a good concept. I also like how intensely credible Ashley comes off in her writing. Right from the beginning, the very opening paragraph is a first-person experience. It's her talking about something that happened to her. And through doing that, she is saying, "I have lived this, I am part of the world that you are part of, I understand the challenges you go through every day, and therefore my advice on this subject matter is credible." As a result, she's been very, very good at doing that. And she reinforces that later on by talking about how Atlassian does something. So not only is she talking about her own personal experience, but she's bringing her company into it as well. That's another good flex because she's obviously associated and knows this intimate company very well. She can speak on their behalf. It also proves her credibility in this area.

And she's also done the classic thought leadership thing of introducing a framework. So once again, we're not just solving a single discrete problem. She's basically addressing that problem and saying the way to solve that is by thinking about this from a completely different, completely lateral perspective. Here is a different way of thinking about this that will equip you with the skills and insight you need to solve this problem and others in the future. So she introduces this idea of the conceptual level, the strategic level, and the tactical level as a way of replacing the old funnel stages. That's good and that's useful. And then she makes it even more useful by showing how that framework can be used in practice at a real-world company.

Because one of the dangers of thought leadership is that we write things that are a little bit too complicated, a little bit intellectual, a little bit academic, and things that maybe fall apart when you actually try to implement them in reality. We want to cultivate a little bit of the whole, you know, ivory tower vibe, but we also have to have practical advice and show how the ivory tower ideas translate into useful real-world stuff. And Ashley has done that very well.

In terms of things I would maybe look to improve, there are two things that jump out at me from this article. It feels quite marketing-y, and that I think is just a constraint of where it's published. You know, this is the CXL blog. It is a company blog designed for marketers. They are conversion optimization experts, so all the pop-ups and links and banners you'd expect are present.

The thing that maybe we could have controlled a bit more in the writing and editorial side of things are the images used. Stock images, images taken from other blogs. This is from Luckless Digital. As well as feeling kind of ill-thought-out, slightly insincere, slightly marketing-y, they also give away your authority. You are basically delegating away your genius and saying, "Hey, my idea is good, but it's not quite as good as this idea, this framework that somebody else had." And that may sound like a slightly pedantic thing, but I think wherever possible, we want to be presenting ourselves and our network as the originator of these ideas. So personally, I probably would have sketched out a quick ugly version of this funnel that we can use and attribute to ourselves instead of linking out to another generic marketing blog that we probably don't have any association with, we probably wouldn't vouch for their ideas. And yeah, some of these stock images in here just, you know, it's not Instagram, man, it's a thought leadership blog post.

And the other last thing as well, it is very long, which I know is the mandate for CXL, that's fine. But the narrative peters out right about here. I read this, I was interested, I was hooked, and I lost interest right about here because it feels like we just deviated from the core point we were making, which is the playground that is the big idea. So I'd maybe break this out into two articles or consider condensing the distribution framework into the earlier section so it was just part and parcel of how Atlassian applies the framework. Because we've kind of devolved into an almost tutorial style, how-to, which I think is not quite in the spirit of what was a really interesting, novel, and contrarian idea from the get-go.

Yeah, it certainly works in this context. I've remembered it ever since, lots of good information in here. A big fan of Ashley's work on this topic.