Taking Your Online Marketing to The Good Place

If you come home after a long day of work on a Wednesday and flip on the TV, you might head over to NBC and find a trio of shows about Chicago’s first responders: Chicago Med, Chicago PD and Chicago Fire. In each case, the characters all find themselves dealing with all manner of life and death situations. This is instructive to your marketing.

Somehow, NBC has decided that the city of Chicago’s civil services departments should anchor a large portion of their primetime lineup. And look, none of these shows break any new ground – the characters are variations of tropes you’ve seen before, and the storylines don’t have much to say beyond the case of the week.

But if NBC has opted for predictability in those cases, what do we make of another of the network’s shows, The Good Place? It takes place in the afterlife with four characters who have been sent to the program’s version of “hell” trying to make their way to “heaven”. Guiding them on the journey is Ted Danson’s character Michael, an ethereal being who views the afterlife as a grand experiment and is fascinated by the human experience, and “Janet” an Alexa-type all-knowing entity in the form of a human.

The show is a rumination on philosophy, what constitutes being a “good” person versus being a “bad” person, and whether people have the capacity for change. And despite those heavy themes, it also happens to be gut-bustingly hilarious.

What does any of this have to do with your content marketing?

Well, first of all, you should be watching The Good Place. Set your DVRs or find it on a streaming service, folks. But the larger point is that in a television industry that can seemingly reward sameness and predictability, there is room for mold-breaking originality.

The same goes for your content marketing. Tactics like listicles, buzzwords and straight SEO copy have worked in the past, but here’s the problem: they’re almost uniformly bad for readers. And in recent years, Internet users have wised up and decided they want more from the websites they frequent.

Readers want to know that actual human beings are responsible for the content they’re consuming, and that it’s not a parade of bots trying to game Google’s algorithms. As such, it’s heralded a change in recent years forcing creators to produce content that people, not algorithms, want to read.

That means having people dedicated to telling your company’s story in an honest, compelling way. The numbers don’t lie: 90% of people between 22-36 seek authenticity from brands. People are seeking truth, and authenticity is the currency that carries it.

It’s why you see big legacy brands like Wendy’s going for a distinct, sassy voice on social media – when it lands, people love it. Their brand of sarcasm and humor lets users know the content they’re seeing hasn’t been focus-grouped to death. There are real people with real personalities allowed to express that, without layers of management approval watering them down before the tweets hit the web.

That’s where Flowerpot comes in. While we may not traffic in the gonzo, we are experts in content marketing. Our team knows how to position your brand so that potential customers form a connection. We aren’t trying to game the system, we just want to bring your message to the right audience at the right time with strong, engaging content writing, as well as video, visual design, photography, audio and podcasting.

At Flowerpot, we’re versatile and do our research to make sure we know the issues germane to your business. We work with companies doing everything from food and lifestyle brands to accounting software to real estate and home services to corporate coaching and more. In each case, we take the time to get to know our client, their business and their industry. We identify important trends and make sure your company’s content aligns with your industry’s best practices.

We understand that you may have reservations about trusting your brand’s public persona to outsiders, which is perfectly reasonable. But you took a huge chance in the first place by starting your own business, and at Flowerpot we can help you with an area that may not be your expertise.

To that end, we go back to The Good Place, and the wisdom of its heroine, Eleanor Shellstrop: “I know it sounds crazy. But if it weren’t crazy, they wouldn’t call it a leap of faith. They would call it a sit of doubting.

Don’t wallow in a sit of doubting, talk to Flowerpot about taking your online presence to The Good Place.