You’ve probably seen the headlines: SEO is dead. Email marketing is dead. PPC is dead. But the truth is, the channels aren’t dead.
What’s dead is the idea of random acts of marketing, just publishing to stay visible without any real purpose.
AI has lowered the barrier to entry. With ChatGPT, Canva, and endless templates, anyone can publish. Which means the hard part isn’t creating content anymore. The hard part is creating content that matters.
Too many teams are still churning out blogs, webinars, and social posts just to stay active.
But activity ≠ outcomes.
If you don’t know what success looks like for each piece, you’re just making noise.
The Two Magic Questions
Five years ago, I started running all of my content through two simple filters. Today, they’re more important than ever:
What do they get? What does your audience walk away with?
Information?
A process?
Inspiration?
Confidence to solve their problem?
What do we want? What do we want to happen after they consume it?
Build trust?
Earn a demo?
Reduce churn?
Strengthen customer relationships?
If your content can’t clearly answer both, it’s not purposeful marketing. It’s just hoping that something sticks to the wall.
The Trap of One-Sided Content
All for the audience, none for you: The “Ultimate Guide” that gets shared widely but never ties back to your product.
All for you, none for the audience: The “We, we, we” press release that nobody cares about.
The sweet spot is both.
Like a case study: your audience learns how to solve a problem, and you earn credibility by showing how your product made it possible.
The Challenge
Look at your last five pieces of content. For each one, can you answer:
What did the audience get?
What did we want as a business?
If you can’t answer both, you’re not marketing. You’re just dreaming.
The era of random acts of marketing is over. The future belongs to purpose-driven publishing, content that creates value for your audience and moves your business forward.
So ask the two questions. Every time.
