I often find myself wondering just how easy the first dedicated marketer ever had it. Y’know what I mean? Marketing in Shakespeare’s day – the kind where you write something brilliant, put it on and boom. Sold out.

Now look, I’m no hater. As I’m sure you’ll come to see when you read this piece, I can’t hold a candle to our Bill. In fact, if you came here expecting MacBeth, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news…

But I’m sure you and I can agree he had it easier, right? No algorithms. No two-second hooks. No influencer strategy (well, maybe). No GTM approach. Nobody’s asking if the latest rendition of King Lear can be turned into 14 pieces of mid-funnel content before this Friday.

Obviously, this is all a bit of nonsense. He might’ve been bloody good at branding. But he did have one advantage: he was selling content.

You, as a B2B CMO, are using content to sell.

And that changes things.

We’re all consuming media so differently now. Increasingly, we don’t just consume the thing itself but rather we’re often found consuming someone’s consumption of an event.

For example, if I asked you to recount the last interview you watched, report you read or campaign you engaged with as a consumer, is it likely you engaged with those materials at the source? Or did you watch a breakdown of the interview, a three-point summary of the report on LinkedIn or someone’s reaction to a remixed, hyper-processed snippet of a campaign taken completely out of context to make you feel a certain kind of way?

Quite a harrowing thought isn’t it? It’s all gotten a bit too meta. We’re living in a world where the reaction to the thing can sometimes become more culturally relevant to us than the thing itself.

Here’s why that matters for the modern marketer.

It matters because that content standing between your brand and your customer who is in the decision-making process is increasingly becoming a part of the brand experience.

In fact, it’s acting like a bit of a legitimacy building tool for you. My colleague and our Head of PR, Maggie Morrissey, touches excellently on this in her piece on PR as a brand-building tool (read it when you’re done here). 

She explains how, in this new world of content-focused marketing, spreading your touchpoints across as many reputable people and places as possible is a key factor in building your brand presence in your industry.

What rings true for prospective buyers is that they still need to be able to discover you. They still need to understand exactly what it is you do and why you do it. They need a reason to believe you when you say it so that they can ultimately feel comfortable when they buy from you.

What’s changed is where all of this takes place.

Your customer might see your campaign at launch, then your CEO’s LinkedIn post that they totally wrote themselves, hear about you from a colleague who was served review content from an influencer, receive your direct-to-email campaign, then nothing for six months before that entire journey is reinforced by one more piece of content that encourages them to pick up the phone.

None of these things in isolation are the journey, but together they are. And you shouldn’t beat yourself up for not capturing them at any one step along the pathway because the likelihood is that you’re unable to track how long this buyer took to come to the fore. The key is to remember that these people are looking for your content; they do want it, and it helps them make their decisions. It’s your job to supply them with it, in a way that’s engaging and that can be picked up by anyone at any point in the journey and still make sense.

So, would Shakespeare have been any good at branding today?

Who knows? I’m not sure Romeo and Juliet is necessarily right for a B2B audience anyway.

But that’s good news.

Because it means you don’t need to write like Shakespeare to get ahead either.

But there is a game to play here. And I won’t sugarcoat it; it’s complex and long. There are targets to hit, and you can’t be afraid to test things in the right way to make sure your content is both relevant and engaging when your audience encounters it.

And that’s where I’d recommend delegating to someone who truly gets it. 

So, let’s talk.