236 | Your Content Strategy Expired 2 Years Ago (The 5-Year Lifecycle)

Your content strategy might have expired two years ago and nobody told you until today. I'm Kev Michael and this is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you get more leads and close them faster. A client of mine was recently frustrated because she followed my advice to the letter and it wasn't working, but here's the thing. She got that advice from a podcast episode that I published three years ago. I was right when I gave the advice, but since then the landscape moved and the strategy expired. Now I've been growing businesses by growing podcasts for eight years, which is long enough to watch multiple cycles of this works turn into this doesn't work anymore. So today I'm going to wake you up to the changing tides so that you can always be on top of the content strategy that brings the most results with the least amount of effort. By the end of this episode you're going to understand the hidden life cycle that determines whether your content strategy works or fails and I'm going to give you a framework so that you're never running a playbook that expired two years ago. Let's do it. All right, so a couple weeks ago I was on a Q&A call with members of the Grow the Show Academy and a member of the Academy brought up an old episode of mine about solo podcast episodes from three years ago. What I said in that episode of my podcast is that you the business owner should publish solo audio only episodes of your podcast. So she started doing that and she didn't really see the results that I was promising and she was confused and a little frustrated. She said you said solo episodes drive more sales. I've been doing them. What's wrong? And I had to say you're right. I did say that three years ago. What was true three years ago is that podcast listeners on audio apps were tired of the same 45 minute guest interview format. Solo episodes then were kind of novel. People were excited to open up their podcast app and here's someone cut to the chase for 20 minutes and give real value with no interview fluff. It felt fresh. Solo episodes drove deeper engagement. They drove more trust and yes, they drove more sales. But since then two major shifts have happened. First, the word spread. I'm partially at fault for that because thousands of podcasters listen to this podcast to get advice. So way more creators started doing solo episodes and listeners got saturated with them. Now they've heard the same solo format a thousand times now. It's not novel anymore. The second thing that changed is AI chatbots. People don't need to listen to you talk for 30 minutes to get information anymore. They ask a chatbot that already knows them intimately and gives them a personalized answer instantly. So that informational solo episode has really lost a lot of its pull in only the last three years. So I told this client actually I think you should lean into guest interviews now and focus on YouTube. She was shocked. Here's why I said that. And remember, this is true right now at the time of this recording. YouTube rewards watch time and it's way easier for someone to consume 60 minutes of a conversation than 60 minutes of one person talking, right? So podcast interviews are performing really well on YouTube right now. YouTube is making its way onto TVs. So more people put a podcast on their TV and then do something in their house while the podcast keeps playing. YouTube loves that. More people now consume podcasts on YouTube than any other app. And last fall YouTube introduced collabs, which means your guest just accepts the link and your episode with them shows up to all their subscribers. That's a massive benefit to us and I don't think that benefits going away anytime soon. So that's why I recommended to her do guest episodes on YouTube now. And here's the other thing about YouTube. You see on YouTube, people have watched solo videos kind of like the one I'm recording right now for 20 years. This is not novel on YouTube. But podcast style interviews on YouTube, that is still relatively new. It's kind of a fresh format on this 20 year old platform. So what's true is that in only three years, the exact same content format, solo episodes, went from this is absolutely the move to this has kind of lost some of his edge in only three years. Not because it was bad advice, but because the landscape moved. And that's what you need to understand about how this content thing works. So this isn't just about solo versus guest podcast episodes. This is a deeper principle that governs all of content and marketing. I actually learned this from Rich Sheffrin at a conference a couple years ago. He taught me that marketing tactics have a roughly five year life cycle. So take any given content strategy or marketing strategy. Let's say for example, let's talk about TikTok in 2020. That's the example we're going to use today. So think about year one. In year one, almost nobody is doing this new strategy. The few who are doing it get unbelievable returns. And it feels like a gold rush. So if you think about TikTok in 2020, think about the girls who are posting dancing videos in like 2019 and then blew up to become like a plus list celebrities. TikTok really hasn't produced that type of ascendance since like 2020. And that's because in year one of any attention to strategy, so few people are doing the thing that you get unbelievable returns for little effort. As time goes on in this five year life cycle, the amount of effort that is required to do it well goes up and the amount of results go down. So in years two and three, think 2022, 2023 for TikTok, more people catch on. And it still works, but the returns really shrink. It takes more work to get the same amount of views. And that's because there's more competition. More people have entered the fold. And also, audience start getting used to that format and getting marketed to in that same way. And so they start to tune it out. Once you get to year five, the amount of effort it takes to get results goes up and the amount of results that you get goes down. So it feels like it's so much more work and you're getting less out of it. That's where TikTok is at right now. You don't really hear people saying you got to get on TikTok anymore, right? And that's because the inherent bonus of just doing the new marketing tactic goes away. Everybody's using it. It still works, but it's harder. It's more expensive. And it doesn't feel like a gold rush anymore. It feels like a necessary evil almost. And at this point, there's something new that people are buzzing about. That same cycle applies to content formats, to platforms, and even something as small as thumbnail styles. So let's talk about YouTube thumbnails for a minute, because it's a great example of this. If you think about a thumbnail, think about the really busy, Mr. Beast style thumbnails that worked for a couple of years ago until everybody started copying them. You know, these are those thumbnails that had like crazy, almost AI generated caricature faces. And it was really busy with tons of stuff in it and explosions and stuff. Then everybody started using those thumbnails and it all started to blend in. At that point, minimalist thumbnails with really bold texts started to stand out. So if you look around at a lot of the podcasts that are doing well today, like Modern Wisdom by Chris Williamson, like the Mel Robbins show, these thumbnails are pretty basic with huge text. Now that's getting copied. And what seems to be the cutting edge right now at the time of this recording is you're seeing accounts like Harmosi and Gary Ve posting thumbnails with literally no text. It's just a photo because think about what happens when you go on YouTube. Bam, you are shown 12 thumbnails and immediately your eyes are drawn to one of them. Your eyes are going to be drawn to the one that's interesting to you, but also that looks most different than the other 11. So even if we zoom all the way into thumbnail strategy, this idea is at play where the strategy that works is dependent on what everyone else is doing. So the point is this, when you're choosing your content strategy, whether it's whether to do long form, short form, whether to do a podcast, solo episodes, guest episodes, what to make your thumbnails look like anything. You have to ask two questions. Number one, what is everybody else currently doing? That's what's going to help you know what will make you stand out versus what will make you blend in. The second thing is what is the consumer currently tired of? What format or approach to content feels stale to them right now versus what feels new and fresh? And the simplest way to answer both of those questions is to observe yourself. What are you consuming? Have you ever thought about that? How has the content that you consume on a daily and weekly basis changed? Do you still listen to the same podcast episodes that you did two years ago? Are you consuming podcasts on different platforms on different devices? Do you use a different app now than you used to? What about short form? Are you watching the same videos? Are you watching the same platform? Because here's the thing. Whatever has changed for you and the way that you consume content has probably changed for your audience too. The number one thing that you can do to become really good at content strategy is to become really self-aware. Understand what you are consuming right now, what seems boring, what grabs your attention, what you like, and model that in the content that you make. You see content in audience, it's a river, it's not a lake. The fish are always moving around, right? It's always constantly different fish in different water. And if you're going to play this game, if you're going to do content, somebody either you or someone on your team is going to have to keep up with not only where the current is now, but where the current is going. It's a full time job. So here's what I want you to do. Take 15 minutes this week and audit your own content consumption. What are you watching? What are you listening to and on what platforms? What's changed in the last year or two? Write it down. And then ask yourself, does the content that I'm making reflect the content that I'm consuming or is my content strategy now just copying, pasting what was working three years ago? If there's a gap, that's why your stuff isn't working as well as you want it to do. Now, I know I just told you to do a bunch of stuff. So to make this easier for you, I actually created a content consumption audit. It's a quick document that you can print out or put it on an iPad or something and it'll walk you through auditing your own content consumption for the last week and then comparing that to your content production. How different are those things? Are there any insights from the way that you consume content that you can make reflect in the content that you make for your business? Because here's the other golden nugget that's going to really help here. If you adjust your content strategy to more reflect the content that you're consuming, you're going to be better at it. It's going to be easier for you. Why? Because whatever content you're currently consuming is the content that you are most fluent in because you see it every day and you know what's good. But if you're creating content that's not the same as the content that you consume, then you have no idea what's good or what's bad because you are not a consumer of that content. It's like, who do you think is going to be a better sushi chef? The guy who loves sushi so much that he eats it every day for dinner or the guy that's allergic to fish? Who's going to make better sushi? Right? Alright, that's going to do it for this one. My name is Kev Michael. Don't forget to grab the content consumption audit guide that I mentioned. The link is in the description. This is Grow the Show and I'll see you in the next one.