What You Can Achieve By Creating Like a Media Company

One of the best words of advice I’ve received in my career is to focus on outcomes. All of the other stuff is just details.

I’m a firm believer in enjoying the journey, but not when it comes to business. It’s all about outputs. Therefore, let’s clearly outline what you can achieve by building a media function within your organization.

Primary Outcomes

Find & Build Your Audience

Producing content (especially in the early stages of a business, brand or product) is a great way to hone in on your target audience.

People who are attracted to your content will naturally gravitate towards it, helping you to fortify your messaging and build a highly lucrative audience. 

This will also provide signals to your product team and help you discover the biggest pain points your prospects have so you can build solutions for them.

Build Brand AFFINITY

What makes this audience so valuable is how you are building it — by making genuine connections.

Brand awareness and brand positioning are simply the ground floor of audience building. What you’re accomplishing here is something much more meaningful.

You’re building brand affinity — creating true fans of your organization by capturing the essence of the audience itself.

These individuals will share your content and company story, reference and refer you and buy your products, becoming true champions of your brand.

This will make your sales outreach a lot easier. More on this in the following section!

Generate Revenue

This leads us to the final and most important primary outcome - making money.

The number one way to maximize your revenue is by audience building through content. Maybe you aren’t making any money at all, maybe you’re highly profitable.

It doesn’t matter, if you’re not leveraging content to its fullest, you’re leaving incredible amounts of money on the table!

Depending on the size and scope of your business, this could be millions of dollars of enterprise value.

Secondary Outcomes

Get Exclusive Access

Whether it’s cold emailing, networking or running the org chart gambit, it’s a challenge getting in front of the right people.

Fortunately, great content is a magnet that organically attracts your audience to you and your products. 

This is a more natural and stronger way of building connections than through overly aggressive sales approaches.

And when your sales team is ready to reach out, it becomes a lot easier when the prospect is already familiar with your brand through your content. 

And great content doesn’t just give you access to people but also events and media! By running a media company you become a part of the press yourself.

This means exclusive invites and access such as press passes to the leading events in your industry. These alone can equate to a value of tens of thousands of dollars.

We all know content is the backbone of any successful event, so as you build your brand and content, event organizers will invite your team to be a part of the speaking agenda. 

Provide Signals

In my opinion, signals are an underutilized benefit of consistently publishing content.

While traditionally much of the attention is focused on last/first-touch attribution and lead generation, there are a lot of other telling events that happen around the content you publish.

Content acts as a flashlight shedding light on blindspots during the customer journey, providing additional insights. This is especially useful for longer sales cycles for products such as Enterprise Saas. 

By creating more touchpoints (ways for your audience to interact with your brand), you get a better and fuller perspective of your audience. 

Create Additional Revenue Streams

This one is entirely optional and dependent on the goals of your business. But, not to be forgotten, content is a product itself and can be directly monetized.

That’s right, you can take your marketing department — which has traditionally been a cost center — and turn it into a revenue-generating function! 

You can distill the knowledge inside your organization into digital products such as courses, papers, paid communities or teaching cohorts.

Your content platforms become valuable sources for ads and sponsored content as they grow.

We’ll cover this in-depth in a future newsletter.

Tertiary Outcomes

Attract & Retain Talent

Although your primary audience will be those who are interested in your core business, there are also benefits to be gained from secondary audiences. 

By building a media function you will expand the reach and depth of your brand, which will naturally attract not just sales prospects, but also employee prospects to your organization. Specifically, this can be a great way to attract top-level talent from within your industry. 

This also helps with employee retention by showcasing your company on an entirely different level and providing additional paths for career development through media. 

Attract Investors, Acquirers & Partners

Another important audience segment is those who want to work with your company - investors, buyers and partners. 

As with employee prospects, you extend your brand to reach others within your industry who could be interested in working with you, but from a partnership standpoint — product integration, joint customer prospecting, company acquisition, etc. 

Not to mention, having a media function directly increases the enterprise value of your company, making it all the more attractive to work with or buy.

The upside to building your own media platform is immense. Get started now!

If you’d like a sharable form of this content to educate someone in your network (your boss perhaps), download the infographic version.