Timing your marketing and content

Read Time: 5 minutes

Great marketing and content at the wrong time will flop. Mediocre or bad marketing and content at the right time can do very well.

I noticed something important this year: timing is becoming a bigger factor in the success of marketing and content than almost anything else.

What do I mean by timing?

Aligning to either predictable/repeatable events/seasons OR aligning to a trend or wave in your market.

Large brands and businesses can create their own timing, but for smaller and medium-sized businesses, the secret is drafting behind the bigger ones.

Changing algorithms

Why has this seemed to become more important this year?

Because all media, especially social media, has moved to attention-based algorithms. In other words, showing people what they want to see, to try to keep them on-network as long as possible.

Followers, subscribers, etc. don’t factor in nearly as much as they did before. All of the algorithms have switched to trying to predict which content (regardless of the creator) will keep people’s attention.

That is GREAT news for all of us, IF we learn how to take advantage of it.

Finding the “zeitgeist”

Have you heard the term “zeitgeist”? I generally knew what it meant but looked up the definition:

“the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time”

In any given period of time, say 2 – 3 years, there is a general zeitgeist. As you drill down into shorter periods, waves come and go, and then you get down into time frames of a few weeks or days, where trends come and go.

Take the topic of AI. That’s been a big part of the zeitgeist in business and the general public for a couple of years now (don’t worry we’ll cover non-tech examples as well).

Within AI we’ve had waves like ChatGPT launch and growth, new models, competitors, new startups.

Within that we have trends come and go like AI-generated images, now AI-generated videos, and so on.

Here’s the KEY point: when something is in the zeitgeist or trending, there is DEMAND for content and services related to that topic. Usually much more demand than supply.

Supply and demand

I noticed this when some of my videos and content about AI got 1000x more views than (IMHO) equally valuable content about other topics.

Why? Because there was insatiable demand for content about AI at that time and fewer folks talking about it.

To land this point I use a gold mining analogy. Whenever and wherever a new vein of gold is discovered, it attracts people and companies to mine it until the vein runs dry, then they move to the next one.

The earliest folks to the new vein mine the easiest and most profitable gold.

Content and marketing has become EXACTLY the same.

What a lot of us (myself included up until now) do with our content strategy is we create content about what we think people SHOULD read or do instead of creating content that they are actively looking for, THEN relating it back to what we’d like them to do.

In other words, a lot of us are mining in random locations and saying “there SHOULD be gold here” vs. going to where the gold already is (the zeitgeist, waves, and trends in our niche)

This does NOT mean you have to talk about only trending things. But it DOES mean that if you can find a way to shape your content and marketing into areas that are in the zeitgeist or trending you will get a big boost.

Here are a few quick examples, first one of mine then some clients.

Be the NEWS in your niche

One thing you can do regardless of your niche is to be a news source within your niche. This ensures you are always talking about something timely or relevant.

Following this thought, last week I launched an entirely new content channel and strategy. As you may know, a big part of my business is our agency and done-for-you services. Many of those are built on the HighLevel platform as we’re an agency partner of theirs.

Every year they have a big conference in Dallas where they announce hundreds of new features and capabilities.

Using the thought process above:

1. HighLevel has been in the zeitgeist in online business for a few years now.
2. They are also heavily engaged in the AI wave.
3. Over the course of the few weeks surrounding the conference there would be a “vein of gold” with high demand for content around all the new features.

Even better, HighLevel releases new features weekly, so there is always “news” and trends within that world.

So I grabbed a pickaxe and decided build GHL NEWS, a brand new email newsletter and site where I’ll be in “reporter mode” creating content and analysis around all things HighLevel and the surrounding ecosystem.

I use AI to grab all the news and summarize it and add links, then I add an editorial at the top with my analysis and what it means for folks in the ecosystem.

Why? Because there is DEMAND for such content and it is an area highly aligned with my ideal customers.

Anything “new” is a reason for people to stop the scroll and tune in for a minute. When they do, if I also offer value by relating the news to their goals or needs, then folks will see me as an expert in the topic space and want to work with me.

By launching this around their conference, I hit the exact time when interest level would be high. In other words, I was the first to that new vein of gold.

Over last week we got thousands of organic views to the new site (I made some posts in various HighLevel groups and channels where people were asking where to find all the new updates) then we also layered in some ads. We got hundreds of opt ins to this very niche newsletter in just a few days and it has ramped up since.

Now imagine if I had launched that on some other random week of the year? It would not have had as much momentum.

Worse, imagine if I had just started creating random content? There would not have been demand.

I would have been mining where there is no gold.

Trend Following

Now you may or may not want to become the “news” in your niche, but you can definitely try to find and leverage trends.

With one of my content engine clients in the financial space, we did this. Last year there were some tax changes in the UK where essentially you could get “free” money from the government if you did certain things by Dec 31 with your retirement planning.

There was a specific deadline when it needed to be completed.

So we planned a YouTube video and content around that topic.

There was alignment of a trend with a specific deadline and that content did very well.

Imagine if instead he had just published a video about “tax planning” – boring…

Look at the alignments again: toward end of year in the financial space taxes and planning are in the zeitgeist. Within that was a specific set of things in his target market in the UK. Then similar to my conference example, there was very specific date/deadline to key in on.

The result was an outlier success for that video. Not at all because the content was any different than his typical videos, but because of the alignment of supply (content) to demand (interest) turbocharged by a deadline.

We’re starting to shift a lot of our content planning across clients over to this model by first looking for the zeitgeist, waves, and trends in their given niches THEN layering in their content pillars/expertise to latch on to those trends and publish content into the demand.

For the same client, in financial markets there is always “news” so we can look for things like certain investments where there is demand for content like crypto or gold, or changes to policies, etc. None of that means he has to be pro-crypto or anti-crypto it just means if that’s what people want content about, he would form whatever his opinion is and publish into the demand.

Being first to the vein

Remember, the earlier you are to the vein of gold, the easier the gold you get.

A good metric for your content and marketing is how quickly can you react and pivot to a new wave or trend?

The faster you can, the earlier you’ll be to the next vein.

Take Action

1. For your content and marketing, identify the 1 – 3 year zeitgeist in your niche
2. Identify 3 – 5 waves or major areas of interest in your niche each year
3. On a monthly or even weekly basis try to identify news or trends where there is demand (the signals are what is showing up in your feeds and what influencers in your niche are talking about)
4. Pick areas with alignment across all three time scales and focus your content on those areas with your unique take or expertise
5. Then if you want a team to help you plan, create, edit, and publish content at scale, take a look at our Content Engine service where we help do all of that!