Playing the Metagame of Marketing
Your next big breakthrough won’t come from copying other people’s best work or doing more of the same.
I lived an hour away from the first reported case of COVID in the US, and overnight, everything changed.
It was March 2020, and at Corporate Visions, where I lead content, we were watching the dominoes start to fall. The company had historically relied on in-person sales training and messaging workshops—the kind that suddenly wouldn't be happening for...well, no one knew how long.
While competitors scrambled to figure out what to do, we launched two virtual sales training toolkits by April. And then proceeded to have two of our best years ever while the rest of the sales training industry slowly figured it out.
Was it chance? Partly. But we'd been experimenting with virtual training modalities and researching their effectiveness long before COVID hit. We had products ready to go.
Of course, no one predicted COVID, but we'd been paying attention to subtle patterns—increasing travel restrictions at companies, growing environmental concerns around business travel, and rising acceptance of video conferencing. These signals weren't obvious, until they suddenly were.
So when the world changed, we adapted while others panicked. And it made all the difference.
That's the marketing metagame in action—and it's the difference between companies that merely survive sudden changes and those that capitalize on them.
The Meta-What?
The "metagame" concept comes from competitive gaming.
It's not the explicit rules of the game, but the game within the game—the underlying and ever-evolving layer of strategies and counter-strategies that emerge as developers make balance changes and players discover (and exploit) what works best.
If you know someone who obsesses over competitive games like League of Legends or Hearthstone, you've seen this dynamic at work. It's why certain characters and strategies become popular, then fall out of favor, then return again.
The rules don’t change. The context changes.
Here’s where it gets interesting: The vast majority of players are stuck in middle ranks. Sometimes it’s a skill issue, as the kids say, but most of the time the difference between most players and the top 1% is the ability to read the meta and quickly adapt.
Marketing strategy works in much the same way. Most teams are busy mastering today's best practices: optimizing their ABM strategy, fine-tuning their SEO, A/B testing landing pages.
Nothing wrong with that. Table stakes matter. But while they’re working so hard to solidify their stance, the ground keeps shifting beneath their feet.
Now Comes the Hard Part
The best marketing leaders I know connect dots between seemingly unrelated shifts in technology, buyer behavior, economic conditions, and competitive moves. They sense the vibrations in the market before others feel the tremors.
With me so far? Good.
Now, understanding the meta is critical. But it’s not the hardest part. The tough part is convincing everyone else to change direction before the new reality becomes obvious.
I've been in those meetings. You're essentially saying, "I know our current approach has worked well for us, but we need to invest in something completely different."
Try that with your CFO sometime. Not easy.
This is the central challenge that separates good marketing leaders from the top 1%. You not only need to understand and adapt to the meta, but you also need a compelling strategic narrative that brings others along.
At Corporate Visions, we had research to back our virtual approach, which made convincing buyers easier. We'd been running experiments that validated our hypotheses. But I've been on the other side too—missing opportunities because I couldn't get buy-in fast enough or because we were too focused on doing more of what had worked in the past.
Your next big breakthrough won’t come from copying other people’s best work or doing more of the same. You only gain an edge by seeing the underlying patterns and finding new ways to win before it all congeals into conventional wisdom.
Because by the time it's obvious, you've already lost the advantage.
Worth Noting
AI Prediction > Production – AI is fundamentally changing how we approach personalization. While everyone's focused on using AI to create more content faster, the real players are using it to anticipate what specific buyers need and deliver hyper-relevant content at the right time.
More Is Not Better – There’s a sea change from simply producing "more" content to producing deeply original, visually compelling, or uniquely positioned work. Creative thinking is a key differentiator, but it demands that leaders foster a culture where breakthrough ideas can flourish.
Ecosystems Over Funnels – The sales funnel is on life support, and it's taking our attribution models with it. I'm watching CMOs wrestle with the reality that their buyers touch 20+ pieces of content across multiple channels before making a decision. The teams gaining ground are the ones who've stopped obsessing over which content "caused" the conversion and instead build an ecosystem of value that meets buyers at any entry point.
Try This
Try running an "Attribution Stress Test" to uncover which touchpoints in your buyer’s journey are doing the heavy lifting.
Pick two recent successful deals and try and map every interaction the buyer had with your marketing content—ads, emails, e-books, events, etc.
Bring the data to your team and have them debate this question: "If we removed this touchpoint, would we still have closed the deal?"
Identify which moments consistently drive action and allocate more resources to them. Cut or rethink channels that aren’t pulling their weight.
This won’t solve all attribution debates, but it sharpens your focus on what drives results in a messy, non-linear buyer journey.
Napkin Notes
"Crafting a story that tricks people into making short-term decisions they regret in the long run is the worst kind of marketing sin." Love this quote from Seth Godin.
Tim Metz wrote an excellent content attribution guide for Animalz. This is one to bookmark.
Lauren Lang says that “when demand gen leaders run marketing departments, they often treat content as a lead-generation campaign filler rather than a strategic cornerstone.” Discuss.