If your audience is doom-scrolling, is your content marketing helping or hindering?

And if your audience is saturated with existential dread, how can you deliver something steadying?

At the moment, the news feels like a slot machine designed by a sadist…and every pull reveals something worse. Perhaps that’s why, each morning, I reach for my phone and spend an hour absorbing catastrophe.

We humans simply cannot resist peering at the car accident.

Content marketing: The egg guy

There’s a guy in the Netherlands with an incubator. His name is Alwyn. He rescues discarded or endangered eggs – sometimes from the supermarket – and hand-rears the tiniest, cutest, hungriest little beasties you’ve ever seen.

He posts the videos on YouTube and I’m absolutely living for his content marketing at the moment, because the world outside is on fire. (I’m not even a bird person, as you may already know…)

Content marketing: Simply teach

Unfortunately, we have a weird tendency, when the world feels unstable, to mirror that instability in our content marketing – via urgency, inflated stakes and the rhetoric of crisis.

But people need relief. So I’m resisting grand gestures, performative empathy and geopolitical treatises… 

Instead, I’m trying to teach my clients what their brand’s voice actually sounds like, how to properly open a sales email, how to get their juniors to write like pros, where creative ideas come from, and how to un-install impostor syndrome. You know, the usual stuff.

Content marketing: Blow gently

When a newborn chick eveeeeeeentually emerges from its egg, the egg guy lifts it to his mouth and blows on it. It’s weird to watch – it looks like he’s about to eat it – but it helps to dry the baby bird’s feathers and regulate its body temperature.

When the macro environment is overwhelming, you can do something similar, by using your content marketing efforts to shrink your reader’s frame. Practicality may feel banal in the moment, but it’s actually merciful.

Slow people down, give them a sense of control and enable them to achieve visible progress. Small wins. Low-hanging fruit. And as for tone, keep it measured and unpanicked.

Content marketing: Don’t vanish

Many brands go quiet during volatile seasons. To be honest, I’m tempted to go quiet myself; to pause all my content marketing – posts, articles, columns and content – and just wait for stability. But my customers are still launching products, sending sales emails, onboarding juniors, needing creative ideas, wanting to up-skill their teams.

So I’m choosing to see reliable communication as a form of reassurance and I’m staying in the game.

Want a practical exercise? Review your last five pieces of content marketing and ask a bigger question than “Did this perform?” Ask: “Is this likely to have regulated or agitated?” If your answer is that you’re mostly adding to the noise, you may need to re-think your messaging.

Content marketing: One egg at a time

Alwyn, the man who cares for the eggs, focuses only on the egg in front of him. He’s tending what can still grow, while everything else is collapsing or combusting.

And I, for one, am going to stop narrating or even echoing the drama ‘out there’, and use content marketing to tend what can still grow: my clients’ intellectual confidence.

Like this? Now stop lurking and browse my training options. Consider booking me to speak. Or let’s chat about a consult or some killer copy.