What content do you use in marketing your firm? And what content should go in which place?
Your company typically has seven layers of content marketing. In descending order of importance, they are:
- Reputation
- Website
- Email templates
- Social media
- Events
- Deck
- Virtual data room
At HOF Capital, we try to manage these layers to be MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive). When I was a strategy consultant, I used the concept of MECE to structure client problems into clean buckets of analysis. The idea of MECE is fundamental to how we run internal processes at our firm.
Specifically, the content for the seven layers are:
1. Reputation
Jeff Bezos said, “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” By definition, it’s unwritten, but critical.
2. Website
To the maximum extent possible, in our marketing materials and LinkedIn profiles, we ban adjectives. I really dislike seeing companies or individuals say that they are “prestigious,” “influential,” etc. Those are not normally quantitatively defensible, and belong in the reputation layer. Your marketing materials should show, not tell. Of course, we do try to demonstrate quantitatively the aspects of our story we…
