The "Cattle vs. Pet" Content Strategy
I sell two types of content to my clients: cattle content and pet content.
Marketers often get this completely backwards. They treat every blog post like a precious pet that needs special attention, perfect formatting, and three rounds of approval. Meanwhile, their white papers—the actual closers—get rushed out the door with generic messaging.
You're petting the cattle and sending your pets to slaughter.
Pet content is special. You give it a home, worry when you haven't seen it, feed it special food. White papers, case studies, competitive analysis—that's pet content. It lives in your house and drinks clean water.
Cattle content? Your blogs and social posts. They're out in the field, eating grass, storing value. You don't cry when you lose one. You check the geotag occasionally to make sure they're still alive. But collectively? They're incredibly valuable.
The practice field nobody wants to admit they need
Your flagship sales assets—those case studies and playbooks we've been talking about—those are performance, not practice.
I've spent thousands of hours practicing guitar behind closed doors so I could perform for hundreds of hours in public. Cattle content is practice. Pet content is the stage.
You can't perform if you don't practice.
Blogs and social are where you learn to write, where you figure out how you speak as a brand, where you test ideas that might be terrible. Write a post about something you're noodling on. Try a hook you're not sure about. See what gets traction and see what dies.
The average lifespan of a tweet is 15 seconds. A LinkedIn post? Maybe 24 hours. If it stinks, nobody's going to remember. If it resonates, you take that idea and upgrade it to performance content.
Too many companies are so terrified of publishing imperfect content that they publish nothing at all.
Why "SEO is dead" is the dumbest take in marketing
Everyone's crying about AI killing SEO. Meanwhile, ChatGPT cites Reddit 40% of the time in its responses.
You know what that means? Your Reddit posts are becoming sales content. Your "throwaway" social posts are driving AI-powered discovery. The cattle are producing more milk than ever.
The companies saying SEO is dead are the same ones whose blogs haven't been updated since February 2022. Previous post? September 2021. You visit their site and instantly wonder if they're still in business.
Dead companies don't write blogs. Active companies don't stop.
The compound interest of showing up
Cattle content isn't low-value content. It accrues value slowly over months and years. Every blog post, every social thread, every LinkedIn update—it all stacks up incrementally.
Maybe each piece individually doesn't close a deal. But collectively? They shape perception. Keep your name in circulation. Build credibility. Create the conditions where someone thinks of you when they need what you offer.
You're not trying to go viral. You're trying to stay visible.
How to feed your pets with cattle
Just finished a 20-page white paper? Don't blast the entire thing on LinkedIn. Cut it up:
Blog article focusing on one argument from the paper
Another article zooming in on a specific data point
LinkedIn thread with a provocative question that drives downloads
Social posts teasing key insights without giving everything away
Your cattle content distributes the essence of your pet content without devaluing it.
Same goes for newsletters. They're cattle that tells you what your audience actually wants. What they click, what they skip, what gets replies—that's data you feed back into everything else.
Too many companies hesitate. "What if no one reads it? What if it's not perfect?"
Nobody will read most of it. It won't be perfect. That's the point. You're building volume, showing up, keeping your voice in circulation. When someone needs what you offer, they've seen you around enough to think of you.
The hierarchy of content that actually works
Here's the complete B2B content ecosystem that actually closes deals:
Pet Content (Performance):
Sales playbooks
White papers
Case studies
Ebooks
One-pagers
Product documentation
Competitive analysis
Cattle Content (Practice):
Blog posts
Social media
Newsletters
Reddit threads
LinkedIn updates
If you have all of this running, you're serious about B2B sales. If you don't, you're probably not that serious.
Stop overthinking, start publishing
You can't be serious about B2B sales without cattle content supporting your pet content. Blogs and social don't close deals directly, but they create the ecosystem where deals can happen.
They prove you're alive. They give you space to practice. They distribute your bigger ideas. They keep you in the conversation.
Disappear from blogs and social for six months, and you've told the market you're asleep. Nobody buys from companies that look dead.
Build the herd. Stay visible. Let the cattle graze while you perfect your pets.
Because at the end of the day, your perfectly crafted white paper means nothing if nobody knows you exist.
Need content that actually drives pipeline? Both the cattle and the pets? Let's build your herd. anthony@edifycontent.com
