I find inspiration for what I do comes from interesting places. Creating compelling content about technology is surprisingly challenging. Over the years, what began as a passion to find the optimal merger of the art and science of technical product marketing turned into something much bigger than even I anticipated. The foundation of how we optimize our workflows at GTM Delta was born from experience I described as a comparison to how a French Brigade system works in a restaurant kitchen.
Today it struck me that the method and the content itself are actually both very much aligned to the experience of fine cuisine. My Mom was an amazing chef. She taught me early in life that creating a dish that pleases means that the ingredients, and the presentation, have to create an experience. I thought that was just advice from my Mom. Turns out that she was far more in tune with something that I would only recently understand in a way I can relate to you.
How Does a Michelin Star Chef Think?
Daniel Humm is a Swiss plant-based chef and owner of Eleven Madison Park, and I’ve been lucky enough to experience his cuisine. It’s not just the food itself that leaves a lasting memory. In the beautifully crafted Netflix series 7 Days Out They’ve been awarded 3 Michelin Stars, and it’s no wonder as you sit for the experience at their beautiful restaurant in the heart of New York City.
When prompted to describe how Daniel thinks about his creations as a Michelin Star awarded chef, you can see why he and his team have earned the kudos they have. Daniel’s approach to creating a dish is based on what he identifies as the four fundamentals:
- The dish has to be Delicious.
- The dish has to be Beautiful.
- Creativity. Every dish should add to the dialog of food today.
- Intention – it needs to make sense that this dish exists.
“Between the 4 fundamentals, they work against each other. Like creativity and deliciousness; they don’t go hand in hand but the both need to be there.” says Daniel, in what becomes this interesting dichotomy we all face in creating something for the world to consume. This jumped out at me as the challenge my team is solving with bringing products and companies to the market with GTM techniques and methods.
It’s about creating an experience, not just an artifact. But the artifact alone should be an experience unto itself.
We Spend Far Longer that Most in Our Content Kitchen
Our philosophy is that the merger of art and science play out beautifully in content creation. In order to find that optimal balance, we experiment with many tools, techniques, and measuring of the market to find where intent in creation meets results in execution.
Does the world really need another blog? Yes!! The question is, does the world need the specific blog you are about to publish? How do you make it so valuable and enjoyable to consume that it creates a real human connection. Each piece of content we create to share our stories should be designed to be a pleasure to write, and to read. To be a Michelin Star content creator you should follow the same 4 fundamentals of a Michelin Star dish.
Any time we create content for our clients, or ourselves, we use the same test. Does this piece of content matter, and did it add to the vocabulary and dialog of the tech ecosystem. There are many posts out that MAY APPEAR to be similar, but ours are designed from the ground up to be original and fantastic.
Delicious Content = Delighted Customers
Why do you need to create content? Your goal should be to become a guide and a storyteller to someone you hope to add to your list of delighted customers. We should aim to delight them from the first sentence, and to leave them at the end saying “these folks know what my problem is and I appreciate how they’ve told this story”. I refer to this as “nod reading” where as they are reading about how you define the problem that they find themselves consistently nodding along. Your reader should be invested in your story because it should be THEIR story.
You built your company because you fell in love with the problem. Now we need to get that message out to the world to show off the amazing capabilities you, your team, and your platform have to offer to the world.
A Multi-Course Content Experience
Your content needs to be a complete experience across the entire marketing and sales funnel. The optimal content and the ideal sharing of it makes up the total experience. Sales and Marketing are like Diet and Exercise. They need to go hand in hand.
We have built our systems and methods around understanding the goal of the reader, and how their intent maps to your sales and marketing lifecycle. This is part of the differentiation needed to stand out in a noisy world filled with confusing messaging and poorly targeted content. This is also a key differentiator with the voluminous amount of AI-generated content out there that is making it more challenging to get ranked well in search results.
The content diet plan is made up of tasty appetizers (quick videos, explainers, problem-focused blogs) that are tantalizing to your top of funnel prospects. Move down to the middle of the funnel and you find webinars, demo videos, whitepapers, and ebooks. Then the final stage at the bottom of the funnel will likely be more of your long-form content that is introcucing your solution story alongside the problem-centric content.
By approaching content as a total customer engagement experience, we are able to target personas and funnel position to optimize the way readers turn into customers. They will leave your site and rememember the experience. Then you have your brand and your story clearly in their mind the next time they search or share an idea related to the problem you solve. Pair this with a comprehensive retargeting and marketing campaign and you truly have what they love to call the Chef’s kiss. 🧑🏻🍳🤌🏻💖
The right content leaves a lasting taste memory, so let’s work together to make sure it’s a Michelin Star experience!
