Ask most people what their content marketing strategy is, and after you cut through the jargon, it boils down to something roughly translated as: “More eyeballs. Please. Any eyeballs.”
This is not a new impulse. The quest for attention is as old as commerce itself. And it does matter, ask anyone trying to build a business with an email list of 34 subscribers, 8 of whom share their DNA.
You need enough of an audience to generate meaningful feedback when you test an idea or launch an offer. That part is real.
But here’s the emotional truth: traffic without connection is just noise. There’s no shortage of publishers with massive audiences and microscopic businesses, standing on the side of the information highway with their thumbs out, wondering why the cars keep whizzing past.
The game isn’t attention. The game is relationship. And relationship happens in the messy, unglamorous middle, the part most formulas skip over.
Why the Old Formulas Fall Short
Classic copywriting formulas are useful tools. The granddaddy of them all, AIDA, breaks persuasion into four steps:
Attention, Interest, Desire, Action
P-A-S takes a different angle:
Problem, Agitate, Solve
These formulas work. They’ve sold billions of dollars of products. But in a content marketing environment, where you’re building relationships over time, not closing a sale in a single page, they have a critical blind spot.
They dramatically underestimate what happens in the middle.
Attention strategies are fun to study. Potent headlines, killer hooks, irresistible opening lines, that’s the sexy stuff. Action is exciting too, the close, the call to action, the moment of conversion.
But the middle? The long, patient work of building trust, demonstrating value, addressing objections, and earning the right to ask for something? That part is where businesses are actually built or broken.
The middle looks like actual work. Because it is.
The Middle Is Where You Live
In content marketing, the “middle” is where you cultivate the relationship, the sustained, generous, valuable presence that makes someone want to hear from you.
That means:
- Educational content that helps people do things they want to do, not thinly disguised sales pitches, but genuinely useful material
- Identity content that shows who you are and what you believe, so readers can decide if you’re their kind of person
- Low-risk entry points, free or inexpensive ways for people to test the waters and experience what you offer
The middle is also where you address the Friction Points, the rough patches on the path between “I just discovered you” and “I’m ready to buy.” These sound like:
- “It seems expensive.”
- “It seems complicated.”
- “It probably only works for other people.”
- “I don’t know where to start.”
- “It’ll take too long to see results.”
Smart content directly addresses these objections. Not by arguing with them, but by telling stories of real people who wrestled with the same concerns and came through the other side. By offering clear explanations and demonstrations. By making the path feel navigable instead of daunting.
A Modern Formula: ECUBED
If I were to build a persuasion framework for how content actually works today, not in a single sales letter, but across the ongoing relationship that content marketing requires, it would look like this:
Empathize. Know who you’re speaking with. What they care about, what they fear, what they know, what they don’t. Not demographics. A person.
Connect. Instead of chasing fleeting attention, spark a moment of genuine connection, usually by speaking to a problem they care about from a position of shared values.
Be Useful. Create content your audience finds genuinely valuable. Solve real problems. Pick the low-hanging fruit. Make their lives observably better just for having found you.
Speak to Beliefs. Identify the assumptions, convictions, or mindset shifts your audience needs to make progress, and address them directly.
Engage. Make offers. Start with low-risk, accessible entry points. Then ask for bigger commitments as trust deepens. Measure how people respond and iterate.
Deliver. Over time, sustain the relationship by continuing to provide value. Grow alongside your audience. Make the long-term commitment that most publishers won’t.
ECUBED, because if you’re going to invent a framework, it should at least be pronounceable.
The sequence isn’t rigid. You’ll cycle through these components repeatedly as your relationship with your audience deepens. But the principle holds: empathy before attention, connection before conversion, usefulness as the throughline.
The old formulas weren’t wrong. They were just incomplete. They described the skeleton of persuasion without the muscle and blood and heartbeat that make it actually move.
ECUBED isn’t about abandoning the classics. It’s about filling in the middle, the part where actual human relationships are built, one useful, honest, generous piece of content at a time.
So look at your content plan for the next month. Where’s the empathy? Where’s the usefulness? Where are you addressing the Friction Points? If the answer is “mostly I’m just trying to get attention”, you’ve found your next project.
Build the middle. The rest follows.