Escaping the content vortex
If social content is most of your marketing, this is for you
Those of you running challenger B2B businesses in the UK, SMEs turning over £2M or less, you have all my love and support. It’s really not easy right now.
You’ve recently been taxed by our government to the same degree as those much larger than you, but with greater impact on your bottom line. Investment in anything other than AI has dried up to a trickle. Your workforce have lots of personal challenges which impact their working day, and your profit, as the social contract between state and population becomes ever more threadbare.
But… we still have agency. Let us not learn helplessness. Let us not circle the plughole of despair. There will be winners as well as losers in all this. But we have to change, because we are operating in a somewhat rigged system, within which we have to be smart operators to survive and thrive.
Unlearning bad habits
As I have mentioned in previous articles, presentations, and rants at anyone who will listen, we have been duped by sellers of various kinds of marketing technology into some very bad habits.
Shame on them for doing so. Shame on us for letting them.
We’ve been sold the ‘bootstrap opportunity’ lie. The tools make it all so easy. Build your own website, make your own videos, post every day with your authentic personal story… and very little happens.
Not quite nothing. Nothing would wake us up pretty quickly. No, something appears to be happening. Likes, comments, follower numbers, little dopamine hits of hope every day. With those hits, come the encouragement.
Post more, post everyday, add a selfie, try this new way of posting, use an AI tool to turn this type of post into another type of post. Comment more, engage more, do another webinar….
It starts to sound like that Trainspotting “Choose Life” monologue, doesn’t it? Because that’s how you talk to addicts. That’s how gaslighting works. They just keep telling you to do a little bit more, with a little variation, and all will be ok…
Well it’s not going to be ok. And it’s time to wake up to that fact.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a solo founder trying to do this stuff yourself, or you’ve got a young, enthusiastic marketer on staff trying to do this for you, or a small agency working for you.
Everyone is trapped in the same organic content vortex, because if you want substantial growth the megaplatforms have to be paid to access it. And, without investment, “we don’t have that kind of money”. This is the refrain I hear every single day from SME directors. They’re in a quicksand they just can’t seem to free themselves from, with the overhanging branch that would save them always just out of reach.
Even major companies have changed their relationship with social media and scaled back investment. Here’s the deepdive on how and why that has happened. But social is a very different game if you already have an audience, versus if you are trying to grow one, especially in B2B.
Beginning the fightback
I won’t promise you instant fixes, I can promise you worthwhile building blocks you can use to start climbing somewhere valuable. I’m going to assume you have a product or service out there and some kind of initial traction. A few people, at least, have believed in you and purchased from you.
Step 1: Communicate for friends of friends
Warren Buffett said that he wrote his famous annual shareholder letter as though he was writing to his sister. It gave him focus and a reason to carefully choose his tone and language.
This focus is almost entirely absent in social media posting. We posit weird abstract thoughts from our own internal monologue and expect others to get what we mean. We give not a thought to whether our audience can clue in.
Try asking someone who bought from you to describe someone else they know who might also buy. Write, or design, or record for that person based on what you heard, not your own understanding.
You can’t run before you’ve learned to walk. Communicate successfully with friendly, like-minded people before you try to persuade those further from your worldview.
Step 2: Establish a reliable method of communication access
Social media platforms are the worst form of reliably accessing anyone and LinkedIn is the worst of the worst. Just ask around. Ask a few customers how often they see your posts.
Look at the industry and job title demographics associated with post impressions. I’d be willing to bet they don’t match your ideal customer most of time. Most of them will be peers and competitors wanting to keep tabs on you, or snoop on any good ideas they can pinch.
If someone is really interested in you, in your value, they will be prepared to grant you access to them in some form. Email is the obvious avenue, although it may be that some would prefer this via a central point, say Medium or Substack, than to manage many individual direct subscriptions through a platform like Mailchimp.
The clue is, think about it from their POV, not yours.
Even better, would they pay for access to your knowledge? How do you know until you try? If you’re producing valuable content, what’s to stop you trying a freemium route? Substack will let you try it (for text, image-based, or video) or Patreon opens up even more possibilities.
If we’re going to be creators, let’s be the best ones we can, for the people who give a shit. Rather than bad ones for the millions out there who don’t.
Step 3: Being distinctive in our communication
“Hey, that guy who posts a train selfie every day gets more likes than me. I should post a train selfie every day too.”
See where the algo-pleasing mindset gets you? A world of bland mush where you become just like everyone else. And yet we play along.
What would you create if you had to think harder about it? If the bar was a bit higher? If your internal monologue asked “If I post this, am I going to look smart or stupid, funny or cringey, valuable or cheap”?
This is all about the digital company we keep. Breathe in social slop all day and sloppy is what you will learn is acceptable. And that’s why you aren’t being compared favourably to anyone in the world outside. Social media platforms might be terrible, but not all creators are. Some are extraordinary craftspeople.
I know you may not have the time or skill to become a great creator yourself (and please be honest with yourself about that), but you are the ultimate guardian of your business’ brand and your brand is your representation. What matters, hear me clearly, is what your taste in content says about you. That’s the signal you send with every post, every comment, every like. Those of us who do see you, that is how we judge you.
Some people will love you no matter what, some will dislike you no matter what. Those are biases you cannot affect. Understand them, but don’t be swayed too far by either, everyone else can be persuaded in either direction.
Step 4: Escalate commitment, reject passivity
It’s 2025. “If you build it, they will come” stopped being true in digital terms more than a decade ago. Update that thought with “If you post it, they will respond”, an equally valid untruth. The sheer amount of unengaged content I see every day is ludicrous.
But what about the lurkers, Tom? They’re out there, we just don’t know they’re watching, but they are, everyone tells me they are….
We’re a bit old for fairytales aren’t we? Who told you that? Someone who sells personal brand storytelling services for a living, by any chance? Why do you think there are so many of those people on LinkedIn and they’re so fucking relentless? They know you want to believe it.
I know a desire for reciprocity exists in decent human beings. I know that if someone actually has any love for you, derives any joy from what you do, or generally thinks well of you in any way… then they will want to act on that feeling.
All you have to do is design an action for them and actually request that act. But most of the time we’re too scared to ask. YOU HAVE TO ASK.
And if that reciprocity doesn’t materialise, you walk away. You unfollow that person, you unsubscribe from them, you disconnect, you talk to someone else at the next networking meeting. Because otherwise they just become another meaningless number that fools you into thinking you’re getting somewhere.
None of this is actually very hard to do. It’s mostly in the mind. It’s empathy, it’s discipline, it’s ethics and above all it’s humanity. But as I said earlier, some bad old habits have to be kicked, and that’s the bit that’s not easy.
I know I’ve berated you a bit in this article. It was by design to shock you a little and stimulate your thinking. I want you to hear that it’s not your fault this happened. But you have got to take responsibility for your reputation and your brand, to get yourself out of this rut.
Maybe from this advice you can do it alone. If the scales have fallen from your eyes, brilliant. But you don’t have to do it alone, if you find it hard or you don’t know where to begin. There is a tribe of people who can keep you on a better path, if you surround yourself with them. You can start with me, I can introduce you to others. But I’ll want some commitment from you in return.
Fair deal, to escape the vortex? I’m ready to do that work, when you are.
Reach me via LinkedIn (I know, the irony, but it’s ok as a DM tool), or the Exodus 25 website.
Really enjoyed this one Tom - I even read it all! Now you know it's special.