Your Post-Mega-Layoffs Content Marketing Strategy

You invested tremendous sums to portray yourself as a digital transformer, focused on empowering people, revolutionizing business, securing the future.  Then your board lays off a tenth of your staff.  That didn’t help.

Cover image of the midway point of the demolition of the Burroughs Wellcome Building in Durham, North Carolina — at one time an architectural landmark, deemed too expensive to renovate — from a drone cam video by Heliflyer7 on YouTube.

There’s no way to spin this positively.  If you’re one of the 350 or so tech organizations worldwide, according to Layoffs.fyi, that have laid off a total of some 78,500 people since last December 1, then your audience’s opinion of you today is most likely net-negative.

Your firm did this while the signals emanating from the global economy are not all pointing in concert toward doom and disaster.  In fact, they’re all over the map.  The state of the US economy has recently been described by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as rebounding, if not yet booming.  US Gross Domestic Product for the fourth quarter of 2022 came in at an annualized rate of 2.9 percent, suggesting the “downturn” thus far has measured only three-tenths of a point.  Meanwhile, the global think tank, The Conference Board projects the annual US’ unemployment rate to have risen by at least a point by Q4 2023.

Amid this environment of self-asserted uncertainty, your company chose an immediate course change that equates with something one would do while it’s panicking.  Someone like Lehman Bros. or Daimler Chrysler or Sears.

Congratulations, your brand strategy has just been shot all to hell.  Smart people — specifically, the folks you court to be your customers, clients, and partners — will come to the conclusion that you realized you were doing, or about to do, something very big, very wrong.

Iceberg

Maybe yours isn’t the firm whose warehouse workers are marching in front of fulfillment centers claiming you time their bathroom breaks with a stopwatch.  Yet audiences are not going to see you all that much differently now.  Like it or not, your company has just cast its lot with those whom social media influencers, cable news moderators, and both elected and would-be legislators live to demonize.

A “social contagion” is to blame for the tech layoffs wave, asserts Prof. Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.  The author of Dying for a Paycheck, Pfeffer follows commercial enterprises quite closely, and concludes that corporate boards are spooked too easily.  When one firm acts as though the apocalypse has hit (for Twitter, it pretty much did) it triggers the panic wave.  Like schoolchildren terrified by having noticed someone else in the classroom appears terrified, other companies in your industry (at least 349 of them, at last count) react, even if the terror isn’t quite justified.

“The logic driving this — which doesn’t sound like very sensible logic because it’s not,” Pfeffer told his colleagues, “is, people say, ‘Everybody else is doing it.  Why aren’t we?’”

Go back and look at the content and literature your company published probably as recently as last month.  There you’ll find testaments to the power of digital transformation, of the disruptive influences of your services and the people behind them.  It probably mentions scaling, or scale, or scales.  The right technology, it argues, enables smooth scaling.  And there they are: your firm’s “thought leaders” (nice to see them when they were employed) who espoused the seven or eight or nine keys to clinching competitive advantage and keeping it.  Likely, there’s a mention or two of laser-focusing on customer satisfaction, customer security, customer experience, probably typeset over a stock image of an industrial laser.  But foremost, there’s the assertion that yours is a team, a family, a band of inseparable siblings whose sole motivation comes from the customer’s success and satisfaction.

You could try to cut the irony with a knife, but you can’t because it’s too hard.  Suppose you’d just learned about some other company that kicked hundreds or thousands of its own workers out the revolving door of its gleaming skyscraper headquarters.  Now think of all the landing pages, white papers, and TED talks that company produced as recently as last November, painting itself as the model organization for digital transformation.  Measure how skeptical you’ve just become, using whatever metrics you prefer.

Now realize that your customer now has the same skepticism about your company.  Your own wonderful cornucopia of content has just become so much ballast.

Inferno

In terms of organic content strategy, your brand is now associated with, and linked directly to, a negative event.  Its semantic epicenter is at the root of today’s global social upheaval.  Folks Googling your name will be treated to layoffs news in the first page of search results.  Not even Google itself is immune, as indicated above by this snapshot of Google search results for just plain “Google” on the evening of January 25, 2023.

Notice at lower right, that headline from The Hill — a publication that ostensibly covers Congress:  “Google lays off in-house massage therapists.”  This is SEO strategy at work: “Google” and “job cuts” being the strong link, “massage therapists” as the breakout link.  Who the hell cares about two or three massage therapists (with all due respect to those therapists) when over ten thousand other employees now find themselves jobless?  Google’s PageRank algorithms do.  How would a negative story such as laying off massage therapists have ranked in Google search results (SERP), had there not been a massive negative event preceding it?  Big negatives pave footpaths for all the little negatives.

And just look at that photo of pensive, humbled Google CEO Sundar Pichai.  His face adorns a veritable tower of links to a plethora of follow-up stories, including a refreshed analysis of the US Dept. of Justice’s antitrust case against the company (lovely inclusion of “local news death spiral” in that headline), a Medium blog post linking Google to “personal ambition and poor leadership,” and a Gizmodo article with the headline, “Google is Screwed.”  You have to give Google credit for running an algorithm that’s the furthest thing from self-serving, even when the company could use it most.

If your firm is smaller than Google, then maybe you’re not facing the colossal cavalcade of crap at the same scale.  However, whatever negative impact the bad news will have, will be proportional with however highly Google scored your domain up to now.  In other words, if your domain published great content, and Google scored your domain highly, then bad news about you from (mostly) reputable outside sources will score just as high.  It’s a false equivalency generated by default, mainly by the fact that a domain’s authority score in PageRank is an unsigned, absolute value (neither positive nor negative).

“Your customer now has the same skepticism about your company.  Your own wonderful cornucopia of content has just become so much ballast.”

What’s more:  Your negative news, and the negative news cycle impacting Google and others, is the same news.  You’re now faced with an historic, negative news event that will weigh down the authority and effectiveness of your branded links and referrals for as long as there’s history in Google’s history cache.  Google loves negative headlines (e.g., “Google is Screwed”).  It builds its ranking system on traffic, and negative phrases (e.g., “personal ambition,” “death spiral,” “silent war against Google”) trigger absolute-value page views.  It’s this degree of impact that page ranking systems record, and then archive for an indefinite period of time.

In my work with a major website agency, I learned an extraordinary amount about what kinds of content influence the search results for ordinary Google users — right down to the placements of prepositions and pronouns.  I met some folks whose organizations were actively struggling to combat the negative influences on their brand from major news events dating back to the 1990s — before there was a Google — even when the outcomes of those events were complete exoneration.  As social media sites know all too well, just the phraseology of negative accusations (even false ones) and negative headlines (ditto) can influence human behavior, and human behavior impacts historical outcomes.  You could say, the Great Layoffs Cataclysm of ’23 is already one example in itself.

This is the class of problem I’ve actually been tasked with solving.

Buoyancy

Let’s leave the debates about whether your organization actually did the right thing to Twitter, where you can always count on a perfect 50/50 popular split for any argument with two sides.  Let’s consider instead what you do right now to build a new content strategy for your organization that presents an ideal image of a company that, at least from this moment forward, has its heads screwed on straight.

A re-creation of the war room set from the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” for the Stanley Kubrick traveling museum exhibit. Adapted from a photo by SunOfErat, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.

1.     Assemble your war room.

Too many organizations manage their websites like their break rooms.  Often the responsibility for a site’s upkeep is subdivided among departments, and doled out to rotating chains of individuals — Marty has dishes this week, Melinda has trash, and Owen has the blog.

Your blog is literally your public address system.  If you’ve never thought of it before as your publication, your broadcast, your channel, that attitude must change today.

Such a change is made more visible, and thus more powerful, by starting at the top.  Someone has to step up to be the responsible party, the editor-in-chief, the “content czar.”  As Prof. Pfeffer pointed out, boards of directors wait for signals from other companies’ boards of directors, before taking drastic action.  For some, it’s worth it to never be credited with success, if it means avoiding all blame.

In bad times and negative circumstances, organizations tend to suspend their online services and dial down their messaging, once again supported by evidence that everyone else appears to be doing the same thing.  More than once, I’ve heard this referred to as “applying the tourniquet.”  I call it, turning yourself off.  Boards of directors and executive suites tend to pay more attention (or any attention) to alternative courses of action that involve risk, if those courses are embodied in one person.

Find your singular content champion now.  You might be under a hiring freeze, but there’s a good chance your company already has such a person in-house.  You might even have several candidates (assuming they’re still employed) who have been fighting the good fight for years without ever being noticed.  Be careful, however, about portraying your plurality of champions as a team, even if they are a team.  Teams with a cause are often treated like mobs.  If it’s anything boards of directors fear, it’s groups of people coming together under a common cause to make decisions.

2.     Stop the “digital disruption” nonsense.

All the stuff you’ve published whose principal narrative is more metaphorical then factual or measurable, must go.  “Digital transformation” is now off the table.  The whole purpose of utopic metaphors in tech marketing has always been to convert customers to the state you prefer them to be, in order to fit your pre-constructed marketing funnels for them.  I’ve heard this referred to as “repaving the customer journey” — as though the road the customer set out for itself, were the wrong road to begin with.

Your objective now is to craft a narrative that your company can own.  Perhaps you wholeheartedly believe in the power of digital disruption.  The simple fact that this phrase and others like it are so ubiquitous, demonstrates just how unlikely it is for you to own a narrative crafted around them.  You cannot own a narrative that’s rooted in factors outside of your control, such as the technology market, the stock market, and the labor market.  You can own a narrative that’s about solving the problems and resolving the issues your customer faces.  You can only accomplish this by identifying and exposing each problem individually, then presenting to your audience in copious detail the solutions to those problems (as best you can under customers’ guidance).

You can’t accomplish this by embracing a fad or a phrase or a phenomenon, like “paradigm shifting” or “cultural synergy,” just because everyone else did so.  Remember what Prof. Pfeffer says about collective actions looking like contagions.  It’s the bandwagon approach that led you to where you find yourself now.  Value propositions that work online are original, unique, and demonstrable.  Surely you can create one.

3.     Heroize your customer.

The narrative you must adopt at this point actually is focused on the customer.  More often than not, customers portray their own situations not with roads but with roadblocks.  IT service providers have historically referred to what they offer as “solutions.”  This isn’t a bad word, although it typically refers to resolving the sales and marketing funnel, rather than clearing off genuine customer roadblocks.

In fact, how great you are as a company, or as a product or service, must become subordinate to the story of your customers and the roadblocks they will remove for themselves — with your help, certainly, but through their decisions, their tactics, and their actions.

This strategy inverts the typical center of a semantic association network, but with good reason.  A typical SEO strategy would have you place your brand at the center of this network, and then use content to make the necessary semantic attributions to your brand (e.g., “Cisco —> 5G SD-WAN”).  In turn, these attributions would enable semantic indexes to draw inferences from the reverse relationships (“5G SD-WAN —> Cisco”).  What you want to do instead is define the solution using terms and phrases (keywords) that are mainly or exclusively used by you, then associate your method with that solution, and finally bind your brand to that solution (“connectivity —> Cisco —> 5G SD-WAN”).

The narrative you present must be original and must be yours.  If you present it right, it will be yours alone.  It has to depict the removal of roadblocks — not a detour, not a divergence, not a sublimation or tolerance of their existence, but the destruction of all obfuscation.  It needs to show the customer at the place the customer has said the customer wants to be.  Don’t repave the road.  Plow it.

4.     Shrink your brand portfolio to one.

If yours is an organization with seventeen or so divisions, it’s time for the products and services of those divisions to coalesce behind a singular platform.  Don’t just bundle services together.  Bind them.  Let your customer perceive how the components of that platform truly interface with, and interact with, each other.  Of course, this requires deliberate architecture, both of the substance of the services and the content that describes them.  Bundling services together, even with the best price breaks, does not produce a platform.

There are tech organizations that purport to be in the SEO business, that continue to operate under the premise that a brand portfolio of dozens of brands in the same namespace, achieves the goals of saturation marketing — like a beverage producer with 28 flavors.  A search engine is not a mall or a grocery store or a retail warehouse.  It never was.  Get over this idea.

When customer sentiment around your brand is in negative territory, the more brands you maintain in your portfolio, the more the compounded weight of those brands together, scores against you.  If you couldn’t afford several hundred employees, then you certainly can’t afford to prop up several dozen cut-and-paste “dot-com” brands.  Find one brand that represents your products and services.  If you operate dozens of different services, then consolidate them under one platform and one brand.  It doesn’t have to be your corporate owner’s name, but it does have to be the one word or phrase that will serve as the axis around which all these services revolve.  Centralize.  Consolidate.  Coordinate.

Remember, if you truly do believe in SEO, then you must accept that SEO is about owning the semantic network of words and phrases that explain what you do.  Each of those concepts is a singular entity, or what my last employer would call a “node.”  When a network is comprised of multiple brands that, in the property graph of the semantic network, are all offshoots from those concepts, then all of those brands are in competition with one another for visibility, discoverability, and accessibility.  When you’re the proprietor of all those brands, you compete against yourself.

5.     Document everything publicly.

If your product or service requires documentation or written instructions, then compiling all of that material into a single PDF does you no good.  Straight, plain, exhaustive documentation of every feature, using an easily navigable index, provides your domain with a treasure trove of content with which search engines can build more accurate, more pertinent, more valuable contextual associations.

Tutorials add to your treasure trove.  Instructional articles and blog posts add more.  Several simultaneous channels that offer varying options for consuming your narrative, are collectively a good thing.  If your platform is complex enough, a more formal curriculum — especially one that incorporates videos and e-books — will give your domain the strongest possible contextual foundation.  Link your documentation with your tutorials and with your curricula, and you have a powerful semantic network that defines your service.  Now, when you produce marketing literature that invokes the terms and phrases introduced by your foundational copy, you’re defining your narrative with the sharpest tools at your disposal.

6.     Empower your support community.

If your product or service platform lacks a support network of dedicated users (and, where applicable, open source contributors), you’re in trouble.  You already know that a support community can produce good quality content, when they’re given reasonable incentives.  But now, they have just as great an interest in securing the platform they use and depend upon for their livelihood, as you have.

You need all the good will you can possibly attain.  You absolutely do not have to beg your users and contributors to support your platform, especially if you portray it for them as just as much their platform as yours.  Your content champion not only becomes your platform’s caretaker, but your community’s advocate.  Place your community on your brand’s tallest pedestal.  Let your domain be a showcase for what they’re capable of doing.  Let your customer see their faces and hear their voices.  Let everyone get a clearer picture of what success should actually look like.  Give your audience role models, rock stars, heroes.  Let them shine.

7.     Invert your marketing funnel.

With your content generation machine effectively reassembled and re-launched, you’re at the stage where you can utilize new content as the foundation for a fresh relationship with audiences and with customers.  Your objective is to regularize their interactions with your domain.  You can’t do this by leaving the state of your domain stagnate.  It’s in the act of treating your domain as a publication that you come to realize, you’re not in control of the customer relationship anymore.  The customer is.

It’s Google itself that suggested five years ago that its behavioral data proves the customer relationship is not really funnel-shaped.  Something more pyramid-shaped has been suggested as an alternative since the turn of the century.  In practice, marketers encounter more funnels than auto mechanics or weather forecasters.

Yet it’s not really the shape that matters here, except in this particular instance, to suggest a release of constraints upon the customer.  Currently, negative content locks the customer into a holding pattern of disillusionment.  Your content strategy should be a kind of deprogramming: systematic, deliberate, careful application of ideas, facts, and methods that unburden the customer, breaking the shackles that are freezing your relationship in place.  Undo the negatives, then start rebuilding the positives and reorienting the customer around the world as you would have it be.

The healthiest state for the customer to maintain, even while that customer is still considering investing in your platform, is engagement.  Note however, the ultimate state of affairs is no longer “conversion” (originally called “conviction”) where the customer’s behavior is transformed yet yours isn’t.  As I’ve advised clients before, engagement is the state of the customer’s involvement in its relationship with the organization.  Content is the medium of communication for that relationship.  Once that exchange of both content and ideas becomes collaborative, you’ve reached the new goal of true customer relationships where the customer is more in control than ever: partnership.

The inverse funnel I’m presenting here is an unwinding.  The task before you today is to rebuild a world for your customer where the association between your brand and “layoffs” (or your brand and any other catastrophic event) is less material and less pertinent than your commitment to a successful customer relationship outcome.  You can only do this by pumping out a stream of new content at a respectably fast clip.  If your organization does not evolve into a content machine now, then a different content machine will be the one that defines your narrative for you.

Rescue

Bad news gives your competitors, along with folks who didn’t even know you existed before the news was published, openings to define your identity and own your narrative.  You may dismiss bad news such as mass layoffs as stuff that happens to companies over the normal course of history.  Whether or not it’s officially normal to shoot your own public image in the face now, every time a catastrophe like this happens, your content strategy starts over.

So as long as you’re rebuilding your contextual foundation anyway, here’s your opportunity to avoid reconstructing the one you had — the one that failed you when the chips were down.  Build a new image for your company around the archetypes and concepts that your customers want — concepts that have a lot more to do with them, than with you.  Put people at the forefront of your new strategy — yours and your partners’.  Then the next time someone in a crystal tower somewhere rolls the dice, they come up snake-eyes, and ten thousand people’s livelihoods get assaulted. . . and every other crystal tower considers copycatting, your organization may be too busy reaping the benefits of the partnerships you’ve forged, to notice or to care.

Of course, that’s the optimistic view.  An old editor of mine should be pleased that I tried an optimistic closing paragraph.  Truth is, it’s becoming likelier by the month that you’ll have to use this inverse funnel method again and again.  Contagions, to paraphrase a bumper sticker, happen.  At least this way, you’ll be ready.

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Scott M. Fulton, III is the author of this document, and is solely responsible for his content.