Minimum Effort, Maximum Efficiency: A Closer Look At Content Minimalism | B2Breakout 🚀

In the last newsletter, I talked about the idea of content minimalism - turning your B2B content marketing into an efficiency machine designed to survive and thrive in a recession type economy. This article is a continuation of that one, so if you haven’t read that one, go check it out and come back!

We are still on the hunt for more exciting B2B businesses or marketing champions who would be happy to talk about their approach to B2B. If you know someone who may be interested in having their work or business highlighted, please let me know by responding to this email.

Now let’s get down and dirty with Content Efficiency.

Let’s Talk About The Moment The Penny Dropped.

When I first got started with marketing for my consultancy business, I listened to a lot of podcasts telling me what to do and how to do it.

Like, seriously. A LOT of podcasts.

I’d drive, listening to the logic of what they were saying and nodding, making a plan in my head based on the points they were making.

They would invite guests who’d speak about what they had done and how it worked for them.

And they had to be right - they were the leaders in their fields, after all. It obviously worked.

In this case, it was the head of SEO from a major agency.

They explained a concept, how it worked, how they deployed content around clusters.

While I listened, I was working out timelines to repeat this same process for myself.

Then a question was asked:

So how many articles did you need to write for this to work?

“1000 within a year”, was the response. “We had a team of 15 people dedicated to it!”

WHAT?!

That’s more than 3 ARTICLES PER DAY.

The host asked my next question as if they read my mind:

What was your budget?

“A million.”

FFS.

Then it dawned on me.

Most of these people giving advice on marketing are working with large budgets, with little risk.

Their advice was irrelevant to 97% of small businesses like mine.

So whilst their advice was GOOD, it was BAD advice for my context.

Right Advice, Wrong Context

Most advice is really well intentioned.

And don’t get me wrong, it’s usually completely solid in the right context.

But it quickly becomes useless - or even harmful - when applied in a different context.

This is especially true when you are comparing large businesses to small businesses.

This was a bitter pill for me to swallow.

Because it meant that most of the advice I was listening to was probably incorrect for my business.

And because that advice is everywhere, it’s easy to listen to and follow.

And everything could work, maybe (although they aren’t left facing the consequences if it doesn’t).

But here’s the thing:

If you are a small B2B service based business -

You are the product.

You are the marketing.

You are also the service.

Your time is therefore the most important factor in everything.

Applying the logic of the bigger businesses assumes you have time. Which you don’t.

It assumes you have unlimited resources. Which you don’t

It also assumes you have unlimited capacity to get things wrong. Which you don’t.

Once you come to terms with these facts, then you turn to efficiency being the key factor for most businesses.

How can I get as much output as possible with as little input as possible?

When you start from this point you get a very different outcome.

The Minimalist Marketing Approach

Step 1: set the rules.

You have to start by setting some ground rules and boundaries. Those might look like:

• I only want to invest 2 days per month max on my marketing

• I want the time resource costs to my business to be 5 days marketing per month (all in).

Obviously, you can play around with this based on your size and what is working for you.

But the basic rule is:

Your time should be kept to a minimum.

If you have a team running marketing - their time should be too.

The point is to strip back to what you need, rather than fall into the trap of doing things just because you can.

Remember - the business owner’s time is worth 10x of everyone else’s time!

Step 2: Break down your activities according to time, effort, cost and effectiveness.

Put together a spreadsheet breaking down your costs, resources and time.

Be honest, too - add everything.

Step 3: Conduct an audit on the breakdown to work out these points:

From there you can work out:

• Your priorities

• What is working

• Overspend

• Underspend

• Your resources

This exact process helped me to reduce:

• My time spend on marketing by 70%

• Money spent on tools and software by 80%

• Staff requirements by 70%

That is a big change, to say the least.

A Shift In Mindset

Once you start working from this perspective, your mindset should change from what you think you need to do to what you actually need to do.

It also gives you a baseline for future decisions, as if everything is relative to this baseline your processes will remain efficient.

There are going to be some hard decisions in the process of doing this.

But from one small business to another, I promise it will help you to achieve more in the long run.

If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve built a marketing efficiency calculator - which is designed to help businesses navigate what they are doing and how they can start to apply a content minimalism approach to your business.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

Until next time,

Murray

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It can be a long process to get this all in place, but I’d love to hear if these insights work for you. Reply to this email with your thoughts or any questions you might have. Always happy to chat.