Our origins

Not content with content marketing

It all started with a rant about content marketing – the industry we worked in. Or a series of rants. And they all went something like this.

Content marketing is a bloated $50 billion industry that’s eating itself. More, and less-skilled, creators serve up more, and less-nutritious, content – like the eBook factories churning out 1500-word google searches dressed up as ‘thought leadership’.

In short, content marketing’s been choking on its own effluent for years now.

Doug Kessler called it back in 2013 in Crap: the single biggest threat to content marketing. Now, the shite massively outweighs the good stuff and people have put up their defences to keep the crap out.

We moved from rant to depressing introspection.

Looking in the mirror

We don’t know our audience well enough.

We don’t know what stage of the journey they’re on.

We all use different metrics to track what ‘good’ looks like.

We use multiple platforms to figure it out.

We try to understand content with tools designed to do other things.

We hypothesise over numbers.

We trust the ‘gut’ more than the data

We take ages doing it.

We don’t know the why behind success or failure.

Going too far

Rant. Depressing introspection. Then there was a metaphor about euthanising content marketing that went a little too far. So, you won’t see that. Finally, there was something positive – a plan to sit content marketing on one of those massive Acme-style sticks of dynamite and blow the crap out of it.

Just one question. A big question. How do we do it?

Rockee is our answer to that question.

Rockee was born

So, there was a piece missing in the content-performance jigsaw – there was no real way for the people reading content to tell the people making content what they thought of it. So, we built (are building) Rockee. It’s the first B2B audience-feedback platform. It tells you what people think of your content. No more guessing through analytics. No waiting for SEO uplift. No spurious social or media metrics. With Rockee, you can learn what works best 10x quicker than before and, better yet, use that insight to make awesome content.

Saving the world from shit content 

So, it’s early days for Rockee. And we’ve set ourselves a huge goal. But, we know good content marketers want better. So, we’re here to help them embrace feedback. To strive for awesome. And to save the world from shit content.