Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Modern Marketing Mastery: Insights on Content Strategy with Robert Rose

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 365

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Unlock the secrets to mastering digital marketing in my latest episode featuring an interview with the legendary Robert Rose. Robert is the guru on all things content marketing, but our conversation did not stop there. In this episode, Robert shares his journey from the dot-com boom to becoming the CMO of a startup, leveraging content to outshine industry giants and co-founding the Content Marketing Institute with Joe Pulizzi. We also touched upon how the latest advancements in AI, including ChatGPT 4.0 and Claude AI, are revolutionizing content strategies and what these mean for businesses. We dissect Google's latest algorithm changes and explain why long-form content and a data-driven approach remain vital to staying ahead in the SEO race.

We'll explore how the landscape of content marketing has evolved, why personal branding is crucial for small businesses, and the innovative integration of AI in marketing strategies. Robert emphasizes the need for a clear content process before adopting AI, illustrating through real-world examples like the legendary weather predictions of A Plus Roofing. We'll also discuss how content marketing now focuses on holding attention and creating meaningful customer relationships, using unique stories and value propositions to differentiate in saturated niches.

Stay tuned as we unravel the secrets to a successful content marketing framework and share practical tips on aligning your strategy with the customer journey. Plus, hear about Robert's book "Content Marketing Strategy" and his insights on the rising role of content entrepreneurs.

Let's dive in and master modern marketing together!

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Speaker 1:

Are you ready to transform your content strategy and truly engage your audience? Join me as I delve into the art of modern marketing with the legendary content marketing expert or I should say content marketing guru Robert Rose. Discover how to personify your brand, the practical integration of AI into content and the essential steps to create a content marketing strategy that both captivates and converts. Plus, learn why focusing on rarely given answers can set you apart in a truly noisy world. We've got all this, and more so. Stay tuned to this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer, marketing, marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tick-tocking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, Because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital-first marketing. One episode at a time.

Speaker 1:

This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neil Schafer. Hey everybody, neil Schafer here. Welcome to episode number 365 of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. How the heck have you been? It has been a little while. I was in Mexico City speaking, had a fantastic experience speaking there and introducing a lot of content from my upcoming book, which I am going to talk about in a bit. But it has been a great start to the summer so far and looking forward to serving you a little bit more frequently, as I have a lot of amazing interviews lined up over the next two to three months.

Speaker 1:

So, before we get to today's interview with Robert, I just want to go over some of the news that I am following, or news that I have been experiencing, I should say, in my own business and that of my clients. So I think, if we look at the landscape of digital marketing, clearly AI is still this theme, and we see that ChatGPT has come out with 4.0 alpha or 4.00. I forget the official way that they term it. So obviously we continue to see advances in AI. I have actually, for the first time, became a customer of ChatGPT. Up until now, I mentioned all these different AI tools that I use, that I still use, but for a general AI tool. Once I did a $20 a month trial, I realized that I was able to have a little bit more control into both the input and the output, versus using an app that had preset recipes or already had their defined way of doing things. So if you're happy with your AI tool, there's no need to change, but I felt the need just in terms of flexibility, and I'm really happy with ChatGPT 4. And I am on the 4.0 or whatever it is called library. I will say, though, that most recently, I've become very interested in cloudai, and I am looking to experiment with cloudai, potentially use both of them, or even move over to cloudai, as I've heard that the responses it gives is more conversational. Plus for my reading of the terms and conditions, I can actually upload my upcoming book there, and it will give me lots of different advice based on my own content of my book, and it will never use that as part of their large learning model, where, according to my understanding of OpenAI's terms and conditions, they might use any content that I upload in their large learning model. So these are things that as businesses and as users, as professionals, we all need to worry about and I urge you, if you want to take that next step of not just asking questions but actually uploading content, that you make sure that you have all the terms and conditions read and you understand the potential risks as well as benefits, advantages, disadvantages. That's what this all comes down to right.

Speaker 1:

When we talk about AI, so obviously AI is still center. You know, google obviously recently announced Google Gemini and all the different ways it's going to integrate with all the different Google products. That's pretty exciting. But when we talk about Google, I think we need to talk about, obviously, the recent changes in search and I've yet to get a response from one of my SEO guru friends, but I basically said hey, are the recent changes from October of last year to March of this year, the introduction of generative AI search, but there were a lot of other anti-spam and just a lot of different changes. I just asked him point blank is this the most disruptive change to SEO ever? And while I've yet to get a response, I think I already know the answer.

Speaker 1:

Ran Fishkin from SparkToro, formerly of Moz, also reported of this leak of Google documents, but it's pretty clear that, similar to how social media algorithms have become pay-to-play for business. It almost seems that SEO has become either you're a big brand and big brands or Reddit Quora seem to get preference, or it's going to be a really, really hard battle. So I am still very fond of SEO. I still evangelize it. It's still one of the major sections of my upcoming book, and getting visibility in search engines is obviously one major strategy. But there's other value above and beyond that.

Speaker 1:

At the end of the day, if you want to be creating email newsletters, if you want to be creating lead magnets, if you want to be creating social media content, you need a library of content, and that is really the purpose of what I feel is the purpose of blogging, and getting search engine visibility is one benefit of that, but there are other benefits, especially when you look at repurposing content, and in fact, with AI, we have new ways of repurposing that textual content in other textual content and other ideas. So the need for long form content is still there. Seo is still important, but in terms of how we get discovered, well, we need to look at our data and start being even more data-driven. There are still opportunities in SEO. It's not like my traffic has gotten to zero, but I definitely see bigger brands that seem to be getting higher search engine rankings, pumping out two, three, four blog posts a day, and I would as well search engine rankings pumping out two, three, four blog posts a day, and I would as well because it seems they're naturally ranking higher than people with less brand recognition. So obviously part of SEO is and I have a dedicated chapter on my upcoming book on this is back links, is getting known, getting people to talk about you, link to you. So brand recognition is still important, it's important everywhere and it seems like that is going forward with SEO. It seems to be one conclusion that some SEO experts have been talking about that it does become a critical thing. So if you want to improve your SEO, improve your brand recognition and where can you do that? I mean social media obviously is one great place to do that. Other than that, in social media specifically, we have the TikTok ban. Don't know what's going to happen. I continue to go full speed ahead on TikTok, starting to develop more short form videos which you'll see me start releasing, not just on TikTok but everywhere on social media. I have also, because I've seen a decline in traffic from X.

Speaker 1:

I've been playing a little bit around with threads and I also realized that using I don't know if you remember this, but a lot of these social media scheduling tools used to have, before Instagram, had a direct API. You would enter the content and photo in Instagram and then it would send you a notification. Then you open the notification, copy and paste and you post to the social network. So Social B, my preferred social media scheduling tool, has just started to offer what they call universal posting. So, whether it's threads or whether it's any other social network, the concept is the same you create the content in SocialBee and then it sends you a notification. So because of this, I've been able to publish daily on threads, and right now I'm recycling my most popular content from Twitter, which I think is the closest network, and just seeing how things go, and I look forward to reporting back to you on that. But if you haven't been on threads, I urge you to take another look, re-look at who you're following, and I've already had some pretty amazing conversations in terms of volume that I haven't had on Twitter, or, as we say, x, for some time. So those have been my things I've been looking at with social media recently. Obviously, instagram is playing around with unskippable ads. We'll see how that goes, but the world of social media continues and it's really about leaning more into video and having more and more of a data-driven strategy.

Speaker 1:

So those are sort of the news, the updates that I am looking at, and, just from a personal update, I know that every week I'm talking about the upcoming launch of my book, so I have decided that I am going to do a Kickstarter. I have sent out the advanced reading copy to a number of influential authors that I am honored to be friends with, so I've already gotten a number of quotes back from them. I can't wait to share those with you or I should say endorsements, quotes, blurbs, whatever you want to call them and once I finalize those over the next week or two, I will be able to finalize the back and front cover, as I do want to feature some of those quotes on that as well, as I want to feature those quotes at the beginning of the book, sort of this advanced praise for name of the book and at that point I will be launching the Kickstarter campaign where you can sign up to get notified. I will have a lot of early bird specials, so you're going to want to make sure that when I announce that it's available for a pre-launch or you know, enter your email address to know when it first launches. You'll want to make sure you sign up for that. I also have other plans, like launching a Facebook community where I share more information about digital threads, more videos, and I just gave you the name of the book there. But I've been talking a lot about it recently. So I hope to really offer you a lot of value, a lot of education and empower you in many different ways that this podcast alone cannot. So be on the lookout for that. Make sure you're signed up to my newsletter, neilschafercom slash newsletter. But either way, I will be announcing it on my podcast and I hope it is really really soon. I am already working with my graphic designer on the Kickstarter page, working with a copywriter on the copy and then, obviously, the quotes and blurbs still waiting for a number of people to hear back from them. But it is all coming together and obviously the content itself is all done. It's just a matter of the packaging and the launch and the strategy around that. All right, that's it for me.

Speaker 1:

I want to move on to the interview today. So today I interview Robert Rose and hopefully you know him, you've heard of him. He, along with Joe Polizzi, created Content Marketing Institute and we talk a lot about that history in this interview as well but also that content marketing has evolved so much that it's not content marketing anymore, it's modern marketing. And it's funny, over the years I've never met Robert in person, never had a chance to talk to him in person, so this was the first time, so that was very, very special to me, but it was a really, really great conversation about all things content marketing. You're in for a special treat. So, without further ado, here's my interview with Robert Rose.

Speaker 2:

You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, neil Schaefer here. Welcome to another edition of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Today we are going to go deep into content marketing. If there was a content marketing hall of fame, this guy would be right up there at the top of the list. Amazing that we both live in Southern California. We were just chatting before we started the recording and yet we've never had a chance to meet in person, although we know each other very well. But I'm really excited. I'm going to be learning together with you and really tapping into the brain of one of the foremost experts in content marketing. Everybody, welcome Robert Rose to the stage and to the podcast. Robert, thanks so much for joining.

Speaker 3:

Thank you so much for having me. As I told you before, I've been a huge fan for a long time, so this is quite the treat for me.

Speaker 1:

Oh, thank you, my friend. The treat is all mine, so I guess I always like to start with historical perspective, and I think we're going to get into that today, because content marketing is all you know. We can say it's evolved over time. I'm sure you'd agree. So let's begin with sort of the backstory, because when you started in content marketing, I'm assuming that the term just didn't exist, right? So I'd like to understand how you began this journey in content marketing.

Speaker 3:

Sure, it's a. It's a very simple story actually, because and it and Southern California plays a big role in it because I was, uh, you know, I found myself, after thecom boom and bust, joined up with a few friends as the CMO of a startup company, and so we did the classic two rounds of Silicon Valley funding and the whole thing. And we were a startup and we were an enterprise software startup. So we were competing with the likes in those days Many of these don't have products in this industry anymore but Oracle and Microsoft and Hewlett Packard before it became HP and all of the giants. And I knew that we were never going to win on brand. We were never going to win on we were 12 people in picnic tables, right? So how do we? How do we win?

Speaker 3:

And so I started leveraging my background as a media person, as a content person because I came from the entertainment business and basically said, look, I'm just going to go all in on this, you know, trying to be a mile deeper. So if we were ever invited to the RFP table or to the client's table, we would be a mile deeper in subject matter expertise than any of them would. So that's, that was the strategy right. And so I hired journalists, I hired writers, I hired designers as my marketing team, and my theory was I could teach them the marketing stuff, like I could teach them search engine marketing, I could teach them SEO, I could teach him direct marketing, but I couldn't teach him to be great communicators. And so we built a little media company and that was my bet, and it worked and it paid off.

Speaker 3:

And then ultimately, as I was sort of out there on the speaking circuit, sort of talking about, you know, hyping up my company and all that stuff, I heard about this guy, joe Pulizzi, who was basically giving the same talk as me and got his book which was at that point, was called Get Content, get Customers and read his book and he sort of had been talking about this thing called content marketing.

Speaker 3:

I promptly went out and registered the domain. Much to my dismay, I registered under my company's name instead of me Bad move. And then basically met him, stalked him at a conference and basically said hey, listen, I'm doing the same thing you're doing. And he said, hey, well, I'm starting this thing. I'm gonna call it the Content Marketing Institute if you wanna join up. And it was perfect timing for me because I was kind of tired of pushing the startup rock up the hill and it was time for me to move on anyway, and so I ended up hanging up my own shingle and sort of going out and consulting companies on doing this content marketing thing, wrote a couple of books, with Joe as the chief strategy officer of Content Marketing Institute, and over the course of six years, really, from 2010 to about 2016, we just, you know, we grew that thing and started evangelizing.

Speaker 1:

Amazing, amazing that you find kindred spirits. I always wonder how, when I see companies with like two co-founders, how did they go to high school together, go to college together? In your case, it sounds really serendipitous and really based on, as I would expect, no less based on the content itself of what you two were talking about.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we were using the same examples In those days. It like you know, southwest airlines and Red Bull and you know all these sort of classic companies that were using content to drive their, their brand value and and uh, you know this was. I remember this is 2010, 2009,. When everybody's putting money under the mattress cause we all thought the world was going to come to an end and it was. It was just a crazy, crazy time and yeah no-transcript. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy at that point.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I still remember Blog World and yeah, I mean we could go back. Yeah, of course, yeah, those are classic, so I'm curious around. The same time, I'm just putting my history cap back on. I remember a book called was it called? Inbound Marketing? I'm trying to remember the official name of the book. Yeah, it was Inbound.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm always curious about because some people are still confused, or is it the same? Or where did you see the growth of HubSpot and the term inbound marketing in parallel with what you and Joe were doing with?

Speaker 3:

content marketing. Yeah, it was a little. So there was two primary differences, right, where and look hats off to HubSpot they were. I mean, in the most meta way, inbound marketing is one of the best examples of content marketing that has ever existed. But the processes themselves are different. You know, inbound marketing and again, this is huge kudos to HubSpot and the and and Dharmesh and Halligan and and and all the guys that that sort of originated, that which were the idea there is is really marketing automation. Right, it was.

Speaker 3:

It was all about search and it was all about being found, and once you were found, then it was basically moving people into a funnel to market to them in a way that would make them feel good about what they were doing and and basically talking about, you know, evangelizing a particular process or you know, in this case, you know really marketing automation more than anything else. And then it ultimately became about CRM and as they sort of grew their product. So inbound was always about be found, right, so it was very search focused. It was always about be found and then do something once you were found, creating content as the mechanism of being found. And so there's an overlap there in the Venn diagram for sure.

Speaker 3:

But content marketing was always about something separate.

Speaker 3:

It was about creating content that was valuable, full stop, like independent of whether it was good for SEO or whether it was good because it could really approach the entirety of the customer journey right.

Speaker 3:

It was a great loyalty program, for example, and in fact most of the early examples were loyalty programs, not top of the funnel, sort of you know lead generation programs, and that was the difference.

Speaker 3:

And then the second sort of fundamental difference was and this was sort of the you know we as Content Marketing Institute started looking at content marketing more as operating like a media company, operating, you know, like you know, and sort of looking at your marketing like an owned, a real focus on owned media, like building that blog, building that resource center, building that webinar program, building that email newsletter and Inbound became much more around the idea of building a really sort of wonderful lead generation funnel that would be optimized just at that sort of lead gen, demand gen part of the organization. And you know we were frenemies for a little while. You know where we were like yeah, you're talking about it in the wrong way, and they would be like no, you're talking about it in the wrong way, and so it was fun, for you know that 2012, 2013 timeframe, but there is a bit of a difference.

Speaker 1:

That makes a lot of sense. I mean, there's so many different directions we can go through the conversation and one is you know, with HubSpot going their way, it's almost like inbound marketing becomes this more B2B, lead gen focus, whereas content marketing equally applies to B2B and B2C, based on that evergreen concept. And I'm wondering you know you can go that direction or another direction, but just since then, obviously we've had more than a decade. How has you seen content marketing evolve? For those that read your early books and they haven't seen any blog posts or anything about content marketing in the last decade, what would you say are sort of like the hallmark differences or ways it has evolved into what we see today? Differences or ways it has evolved into what we see today.

Speaker 3:

You know, I think the biggest one is and this is something that I talk about now and this is, you know, because it has become more let's call it pointed or more focused, after you know, in post-pandemic world, which is in the noise that you're trying to pierce right. So there's it's no shock to anyone small businesses, solopreneurs, content creators, you know, we're all creating content in some manner, and so it's a noisy, noisy, noisy world and in a world where social media and the algorithms are all focused in on not getting great organic reach with your, you know, with your particular audiences, and that evolution and what's going on broadly with social media and what's going on with paid media and how ineffective in many ways it is inefficient, probably a better word. So it comes down to how do you start to create differentiation and competitive advantage. And it was Don Schultz actually we had the fantastic honor of getting to know Don a little bit before he passed away and he's considered the father of integrated marketing. And one of the things that he said is that in today's world, with technology, with the internet, with the web, everybody can copy what you do and everybody does copy what you do. So it you know, when you come out with some great ad campaign or you come out with some cool, creative you know on, you know that's going to work. On social media, it is 10 minutes before somebody is copying you and copying the way that you do things, and the same with your product, the same with all.

Speaker 3:

The one thing that they can't do is if you find a unique story, a unique value that you can tell, and the focus and goal of that is to establish a better relationship, a better relationship with prospective customers, existing customers, et cetera. It's like, as I always say, it's teaching customers how to be better customers, right? So, whether that's thought leadership, whether that's inspiration, whether that's education, it's that fantastic idea of how do I develop a more meaningful relationship with my audiences so that I'm differentiated and basically can pierce the noise and not just grab attention but actually hold attention over time. And that's the real difference from the early days, which was really wrapped up in the idea of being found on search, engaging on social and being focused in, on just joining in on the noise, to today, where it's being very focused and very pointed about the value that you're creating, so that once you get that attention to that customer, you're holding it so that you're always top of mind with a relationship with them, independent of where they are in their journey.

Speaker 1:

Always top of mind with a relationship with them, independent of where they are in their journey. So, based on that description and what is left when everybody is pumping out content, it's the differentiation right, and I know you've written about customer experience as well. I'm assuming that's another sort of differentiator, together with the content.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's the same right, Because that's marketing's job now, right, and when customer experience, you know, which has become sort of the du jour way of saying you know marketing in in in so many ways. You know it's. It's this idea that marketing's job got bigger right as digital became more democratized and content became more democratized and basically everybody from our competitor to the you know, I mean, in so many ways even big companies are competing with solopreneurs these days, right. So you've got, you know this is the Uber, right, competing with, you know that, all of these new disruptive sort of startups that can compete because they can create content or experiences that are differentiated from you know larger, you know more established competitors. And so marketing's job got bigger, right.

Speaker 3:

Marketing used to be back in the days, right, marketing was brand, put leads in the funnel and kind of go away right, and basically it was up to every other department after that sales, customer service and so on and so forth. But now marketing in so many ways is, you know, we're not only required to have an opinion and value at the demand generation and the brand level, but also sales enablement, also customer onboarding, customer loyalty, customer evangelism and all the way back around to, you know, selling again, and so our job got bigger. The entirety of the customer experience is now marketing's job, and so, you know, the demands on the team become more and more and more. Thus the demands of more content become more and more, and it's trying to figure out how to be judicious and really deliberative about that.

Speaker 1:

So, based on all of that, the listener, or the viewer in some cases, is probably thinking well, you know, how do I, how do I make sense of this? You know most companies if not 99, if not 100% of companies are creating content in some way. Whether they're doing content marketing or not is another story. But for those that are listening, how would you go about if you had a magic wand and say we are going to reset your content marketing and you need to begin with this type of a strategy and this type of a framework? Where would you begin to teach everybody what that content marketing strategy framework would look like?

Speaker 3:

I'll tell you one of the first things that I'll do with a company that wants to do this. I mean, first of all, that's really the first step is you kind of have to want to do it, right? I mean, it's not something that is, you know, it just magically happens. So once you commit to actually doing something, one of the first things I'll do is I'll draw basically the entirety of the customer's journey on a whiteboard and say where does it hurt the most? Like, what are you really struggling to do? And with many small businesses it's awareness, it's, you know, putting new business into the pipeline, you know. And it's but many, and I will tell you after working with so many small businesses, it's not about growth, it's more about loyalty, right, like how do I keep my customers coming back? And those kinds of things. So I usually say where does it hurt the most? Because that's the place where we can afford to really take a risk, to really focus on a disruption, because we've been focused there and it hasn't worked. So let's try something to establish a relationship with an audience, with our customers, and try and differentiate there so that we can improve that part of the experience. And so I'll give you a perfect example of this.

Speaker 3:

I work with a small consulting firm, and this small consulting firm they're 12 people. Their customers, their clients are all big hedge fund managers, big investment managers, chief investment officers. They buy low, sell high, crowd, and so you go, okay, and their problem was there. It's a what have you done for me lately? Business, right, so it's all about okay. Well, what research have you given me lately? What advice have you given me lately? You know, and and so loyalty was a big deal for them, right Cause it was like, yeah, I've subscribed for a year to your consulting service and it's not that much anymore, and you know I need to go on, right, so for them, getting that renewal was incredibly important. So what do they do? Well, your first idea might like well, they'll do a newsletter to their customers on how to buy low and sell high, or they'll do a you know a magazine on how to do economics better, or what's going on with the world and Brexit and all that kind of stuff. And it's like well, no, they can get that from Schwab, they can get that from BlackRock, they can get that from any of their other bigger competitors. What can they do that nobody else can do to establish a special kind of relationship with their customer and for them.

Speaker 3:

Honestly and it sounds weird but it totally worked was they launched a book club and a book club where their customers they would recommend and send their customers very cheap, right, send them a book, a monthly book. Everybody reads it. They set up a little LinkedIn group to have everybody go discuss the book. They set up a little video thing where they would review the book and it was a wonderful thing. And not books on investing, books on fiction and history and science fiction and all the kinds of things, because what they knew is their audience didn't have time to learn or know what to read. So getting this guidance from them was a wonderful value. And, by the way, 18 months later, it's the number two reason that their clients renew year after year is this silly little book club. That's a great idea of content marketing, working at the loyalty level in a small business and differentiating yourself, because BlackRock or Schwab none of them are doing that right. That's the differentiation.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing, and I guess I mean especially in post-pandemic times. But if content is and I'm sure you've said it, I've said it a lot of times is this currency of digital media, of digital marketing, it's something you must have and it is this commodity. It can be used in a lot of different ways. So it almost sounds like we need to evolve our thinking as marketers that it's not just about content for SEO, for lead gen, that inbound marketing, but it's content that can serve a lot of different purposes. And really, starting with that customer journey mapping and where are the pains right? It's almost like where do you want this to fit in your whole corporate strategy? Where can it help the most? And then find creative solutions to make impact there.

Speaker 1:

And I guess, based on that analogy and that's a really fresh analogy I've never or fresh way of thinking about, I've never thought about before or even heard before I suppose the way that you measure your success with content marketing, then is not about vanity likes or even leads generated. I'm assuming we need a new way of measuring now that really looks at that customer journey map again and what we're trying to achieve and, I guess, from a holistic perspective did we achieve it or not? I mean. Correct me if I'm wrong, but how do you go ahead?

Speaker 1:

and measure this program now.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, you've just hit on the two most important things, which is number one, what you talked about with regard to being a business strategy, right.

Speaker 3:

So if you start to think about it and you start drilling into the real content marketing and owned media idea and building an audience and all those kinds of things, it starts to look very similar to a product marketing, right, and in many cases, one of the things that I'll tell a CEO or a business owner or something I'm saying listen, if your blog, if your website, if your email newsletter isn't as important as one of your products and services, then you're doing it wrong.

Speaker 3:

Right? You need to put that level of care and feeding into these programs to get what you're going to get out of it. So it absolutely looks like a business strategy at the end of the day that feeds into and creates a fly wheel effect on your marketing. And the second, what you really spoke to, which is absolutely the case, is okay. Now, once you have that content product, once you have that effort as a business strategy, it needs clear goals and objectives. One of the biggest traps we see companies fall into is they'll launch a blog and you go, okay, great, what's the goal of the journey is it actually solving for is the number one thing, and having that objective be truly understood by everybody in the business.

Speaker 1:

So if the book club is an example of content marketing in its own way, it's funny. One of things that podcasters talk about is well, let's ask AI what we should ask our guests' questions right? So here's a fun one, because when people think of content marketing and you know the AI says, for businesses with limited resources, what are your top tips for creating high quality, engaging content that resonates with the target audience? And what you're saying is that's part of content marketing, but that's not necessarily the most important part, based on where your company is, with your relationship with your customers, with differentiation in your industry and with your pain points that your company is currently facing. So when you're asked that question, how do you respond?

Speaker 3:

You know this is where I go off on a little bit of a rant about the whole. And look, marcus Sheridan and I are great friends. I love Marcus to death. But the whole answer your customer's questions and every question that your customer has on your blog and your FAQ and making sure that you're keyword rich and that those days are gone. You just know I mean that's just.

Speaker 3:

You might as well unless you're in such a niche area where those questions haven't been answered before, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that you're just adding more to the noise. And so the question you have to start to ask yourself is not what's the frequently asked question, but what's the rarely given answer? Right, what are your customers? What do they need? What do they want? What do they value that they're not getting and that they're not getting from our competitors? And that's the key.

Speaker 3:

So it's like, yes, I want things to be popular, yes, I want things to resonate, yes, I want them to align with what it is we do as a business, but at the same time, it's not just more information about what it is we do for a living, unless you have such a niche area that people really don't understand it. Now, and I totally will cop to that. There are some greenfield opportunities out there in some businesses and maybe AI is one of them, right when there just isn't enough information out there yet to really understand at the most basic levels. But for most businesses you're doing stuff that has been done for years and years and years and years and you're if you just go in and sort of say, oh, it's just going to be another listicle article about you know, marketing is a great example of this. Like, how many articles do we need to see about the top 10 ways to do social media Right? I mean, it's like that's just not going to differentiate you in today's world.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, amen. And I work with a lot of small businesses that are in industries where there aren't a lot of businesses. I think as marketers we just assume everyone is doing this but there's still industries, right, there's still products or niches where some have less content than others. So I wouldn't say that there is zero opportunity, and that's especially true in B2B. Yeah, yeah, but generally speaking, absolutely so, you know. Based on all that, I'm curious whenever you speak, I'm sure that you share certain success stories. The one you know, the book club, is one example. Can you give us another example you know of a smaller business that you think has done really well, whether you've worked with them or not, that you think has really mastered these concepts, put them to good use and found their own unique solution to differentiate and become a great company through this?

Speaker 3:

I've got one top of mind right now. I've never met this person. I don't know this person. I happen to be a fan of his content Awesome, and you'll appreciate this.

Speaker 3:

Being in Southern California, it's a Southern California example. So we have a little place that we go to up at the beach in Montecito, santa Barbara for, for those of you who aren't local, so it's the Santa Barbara area, which is, you know, I mean, let's just face it Santa Barbara one of the most beautiful places in the planet, indeed, and we we go up there and we we visit, and there is a roofing company up there and the roofing company is called A Plus Roofing, I think it's called. It's one of those like it's going to fall first in the phone book kind of thing. It's like A underscore 100, aaa roofing or something. And so there's a guy there. He's a legend. He's become now a legend. The business has been around for 35 years. It's a family business, less than 100 people, and what do they do? They fix roofs, right, they fix and put in roofs on your house.

Speaker 3:

But the guy is a legend Jack, the owner there, because he started a weather report. He started a weather and it's an email newsletter that you subscribe to and it's Jack's weather report, and then they have a whole section on their website. That's basically, you know, the the weather. The key is is that that content is is not just the weather, he adds his personality to it and the legend is and I've actually seen this, I've witnessed it, I've seen it with my own eyes he will predict to the minute when it's going to start raining somewhere. Like he'll say hey, by the way, you can hang out at the beach on Butterfly Beach till noon, but at 1.15, it's going to start raining, so you need to be done on the beach by then.

Speaker 3:

He has his whole weather report. He's been interviewed many times. He's got thousands of subscribers in the Santa Barbara area to his email newsletter. It's a whole section on their website now as, as he said, it's the best advertising they've ever done. He said because he's top of mind. When somebody's roof leaks, he's the one that's top of mind because and you can see immediately how the content aligns with what they're doing. And he just happens to be super passionate about weather and so he's a super fan when it comes to weather and he just shares that information with his audience. And I watched an interview with him where he said yeah, that's the best, it's the best advertising we've ever done.

Speaker 1:

That's fantastic and it goes back to a point you were making earlier that I wanted to throw out, because we have had Eli Schwartz on this podcast literally wrote the book called Product Led SEO of treating the content as its own product.

Speaker 1:

Right, yeah, and I know we're not talking about SEO per se, but I think that that's a really fascinating way of looking at it and also the differentiation. But I think another thing that makes it really powerful, something that I am working in a discovery mode for a future book, is the role of personal branding with content, especially when we talk about that smaller business where the founder, the CEO, is front and center. Would you say that a lot of the successes you see? Obviously that the consulting company, investment consulting Book of the Month Club that might not have had that aspect to it, but would you see that personal branding of the founder or the face of the company? Do you see a lot of success with companies doing that? Or is that something you would normally recommend? Or it really depends on the pain points, the industry or what have you?

Speaker 3:

I've seen both work, but what I would say is that I think you've really hit it well, because it's not necessarily the founder or the, because I find many founders and many company owners quite honestly aren't interested in it right, they're not interested in developing it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, but it's someone, right. It's finding someone in the business, whether it's you, or whether you create a content brand that is made up of multiple people. It is personifying it to a point where, yes, you are looking at it like a product and at some level, there is a human-oriented component, right. So, at the most tactical level, right, if you're blogging and all your blogs are written by admin, you know, or the company name, it's probably worth revisiting, right, and so putting a human face and a human personified brand to it is really helpful, because it helps stand out, it helps put a human face to it. And boy is that especially important today in a world of AI is putting that human, wonderful human face to it and name to it, so that you feel like you're getting a connection and a relationship with someone, not something. But it doesn't have to be the owner or the business owner. In many cases, it is just because they're the ones that are most passionate, they're the ones that are most knowledgeable, they're the subject matter experts. The business is about them, really. But that's the business choice to make. If you don't want to do that, like my old startup company, you know, my CEO didn't want to blog, like didn't have time for it. He was like I don't want to do it, I'm not a writer, I don't feel like it.

Speaker 3:

And basically what I would do as the head of marketing was I would basically give his name out there. But the way I would get his content out there is I would go to him and say leave me a voice. You have a 25 minute or a 30 minute commute home every single day. Leave me a voicemail of what you're thinking Like. Just give me what's on top of your mind, just leave me a long ass voicemail. And he would do that.

Speaker 3:

And I would give that to a writer who would then shape it into one or multiple pieces, give it to him and say is this what you meant? And he'd say, yes, we put it into his voice and away we go. Right, so it can be done without your participation or without your necessarily having to get into all the stuff that you don't want to get into, because, look, entrepreneurs want to market, sort of like we want to pay taxes, right, it's the thing that we do with a glass of wine at the end of the evening. It's like cobbler's kids all the metaphors. But if you do it well and it can be the most fun thing that you do.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, amen, and I mean, obviously with the Adventist short form video. It depends on your industry, but it becomes even more challenging. I have a brother in the wine industry, actually in Santa Barbara County. He has a wine tasting room in Las Olivas and he struggles with this because he is the face of his winery, has a wine tasting room, very passionate about talking about wine, but yet there's a hurdle for him to show up with short form video where he knows what he has to do.

Speaker 1:

But I want to switch from the human to what you hinted at, which was the AI and I'm a big fan of your rose colored glasses and I know you've been talking about AI for a lot, as all of us have, over the last several months, and I think with, once again, with historical perspective, we now begin to settle down.

Speaker 1:

We now begin to settle down and when every tool on earth already has AI functionality, including Google, we begin to sort of okay, how do we begin to practically work this into what we're doing?

Speaker 1:

And one of the things that you had mentioned, you wanted to talk about was how to practically integrate AI into your content and marketing operations. So I want to sort of switch gears there into what your thoughts are and I know you probably have a lot of thoughts about AI and it's really interesting because Neil Patel is someone I don't know if you noticed recently really going on this sort of anti-AI I won't say anti-AI rage, but hey, human content is always going to rank better than AI content and let your stupid competitors, let AI run their content, be smart and be human. So I'll be curious to say and I also would agree with Neil and I'm assuming you would as well but how can marketers and small businesses and entrepreneurs listening have some practicality beyond sort of the buzz? How do they begin to really make sense into working this into all their operations on a daily basis?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, big question, and I think the I mean, look, we have to preface everything that we're saying here with we don't know, we really don't know. Anybody who says they've got it all figured out is just lying. They just don't. They just things are changing way, way, way, way too fast for us to actually really have any firm grasp on how this is going to change. This new innovation is going to change us.

Speaker 3:

What I do know is that AI isn't a strategy. Ai is an innovation that looks for a strategy, and what I mean by that is that thinking about AI as a strategy is a little bit like saying, well, what's your telephone strategy? Like, what's your computing strategy? Right, and so the key is is that your content strategy, whatever it is you want to do in content and marketing, you have to have a strategy on which you will apply the AI technology. You have to have a strategy on which you will apply the AI technology, and incumbent in that is understanding what your content is like, what your content process is. That's the human. That's really what Neil is, you know, sort of raging against is that if you don't know the story that you want to tell, or you don't know how to tell it, or you don't know what the process is for how you get content out to the public. You don't have a clear, documented, understood process for what you're doing with content. Applying AI doesn't matter, right, it won't help, it won't hurt. It'll just be another element of thrash that you add to your already burgeoning plate of thrashy things. And so you have to first. We call it getting ready to get ready, right? So getting ready to get ready for AI is understanding your human-driven content strategy first.

Speaker 3:

What do you want to do? What is your idea? What is your unique take on the world? What is your belief about the world that you want to share? What is that content product you want to launch? What is the direction? Basically, what is the strategy? Now we can go okay.

Speaker 3:

How does AI play into that? Does it help me create derivative content a little faster? Does it help me rewrite some of the content that I have in a quicker way? Does it help me create a chatbot that creates an interface to my help documentation? There are all kinds of things that AI can be applied to to integrate into our processes, but the key is that we have the processes for them to integrate into, and so that's the first step and then we can start to look at okay, now how does the innovation of AI actually apply across there? And it becomes a lot easier question to answer other than just like well, I know I can use ChatGPT to create stuff and maybe it'll work. Like, maybe, maybe it will, maybe it will create a great SEO article for you, maybe it will create social posts automatically, but long-term is not going to provide any differentiation to you unless you have a content strategy that is differentiated.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, excellent advice. And it almost reminds me, and I talk about this it's you know, when social media just started. It's not a strategy, right, totally. How do you work it into everything else you're doing? And I think you know, similar to do you have a customer journey map? Do you understand the pain points in that map and where content fits in? It's the same thing. Well, yeah, ai can create content, but do you have you mentioned the strategy? I talk a lot about workflows. Do you have a workflow? Can?

Speaker 3:

you map that out before AI.

Speaker 1:

And then, what are the pieces that AI is going to help you with? Like ideation, I'm sure there's certain areas where AI would help more or less, but is this a conversation you're having like on a daily basis, still with clients? Or what is sort of the state of the market that you see with how businesses are leveraging AI today?

Speaker 3:

It's messy and chaotic and, if I'm completely honest, it's a little frustrating, because what I'm finding is that there is sort of pressure from the top, whether you're a startup company and you're getting pressure from your board or your management team to sort of like figure out what your AI strategy is going to be, and so you know, I worked with one company that threw a chat bot on their site just so that they could say that they have AI going while they try and figure out what it's going to be. On the other side, you've got the agency world, you know, where the agencies are getting pressured by clients to use AI, but, of course, only if it provides me a huge discount on services. It's like that weird tension is there, and so what we've mostly been talking with clients about and this again, the words like workflow, words like governance, words like process smaller companies tend to go. That doesn't apply to me. I'm not big, but it does. It absolutely does.

Speaker 3:

You have to understand what it is you're doing.

Speaker 3:

Even if you're a team of one or two or three that sort of manage the entirety of marketing, you've got to have a process, a well understood set of processes, objectives, governance and workflow in order to make things work at scale. I mean, it's the kind of the it's kind of the heart of being a small business is you have to understand process better than almost the big companies, because you just don't have that many resources to throw at it. So that's what we've been talking a lot with small businesses about is like let's look at what you're doing, let's look at what you're actually doing and what you want to do and what's in your way. Let's build a process for that. And now you're ready to say, okay, is it going to be co-pilot in Microsoft? Is it going to be Gemini in workflow, you know, in Google workspaces? Is it going to be some application of ChatGPT? Is it going to be a custom tool that you build that will start to really make itself known as we understand where we want to apply it into the workflow, into the process.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, awesome advice, you know fast. Yeah, awesome advice. We're nearing the end here and very similar. I'll be reaching out to you shortly because I'm working on my next book and I have a title and I don't actually define the title until the conclusion. Nice, I like that Because I want people to understand.

Speaker 1:

It's not as simple as what you think, and I'm looking at the title that was proposed for this episode, which is content marketing is just modern marketing and we haven't touched on it, but I have a feeling that, as a way to wrap up everything we're talking about, this is just a great way to tee it up for you and to have you explain what you mean by that.

Speaker 3:

So what I mean by that is that you know so when. So it goes all the way back it's a great call back to the beginning of the show, where you know, when Joe and I were first starting this whole thing in 2010, 2011, 2012,. And we were fighting with Inbound and we're doing all the things and social media, and it was all sort of the early days, and one of the things that we said is, look, at some point content marketing is just going to fade back into the fabric of what we're doing with marketing, right, it just makes sense, right. It just makes sense that it becomes sort of a core practice. What I didn't expect and maybe, look, maybe I'm biased, right, and not maybe I'm biased, I'm biased, right. So there's definitely a bias I have here. But what I've observed is that modern marketing is really becoming what we thought of as content marketing, right. In other words, it's kind of the reverse. It's basically modern marketing is becoming what we created with content marketing.

Speaker 3:

You look at any marketing team these days what's their primary operation? What's their primary task? Almost inevitably, every marketing organization I don't care if you're a team of four or a team of a thousand almost exclusively it's a content production machine. It's ads, it's brochures, it's PowerPoints, it's content, it's digital pages, it's website pages, it's blog posts, it's thought leadership and basically it's how do we get our arms wrapped around? What modern marketing operations is these days, which is really just modern content operations? And so it's marketing department as media company, really more you know, and that includes everything from digital asset management to the way we manage our properties, to the way we manage our story, the way we scale the job skills we're looking for. It's really centered on content, and so, in so many ways, we see modern marketing becoming what we originally architected as sort of this weird little thing that people did off in the corner called content marketing, and now it's kind of what the entire business does.

Speaker 1:

So it's almost we could reframe it as think marketing, think content type of.

Speaker 3:

Yes, there you go, I like it. Is that the title?

Speaker 1:

No, no, it's not. It's not a content marketing book. I mean, obviously it's more of like a digital marketing playbook type of approach. But obviously you know AI content. That's all part of it.

Speaker 1:

Just on a final note, I'm really curious because you and Joe started out together and I was at Joe's first Creator Economy Expo. I'm not sure if you were there. Are you going to be at the Content Entrepreneur Expo in May? I will, yes, indeed, I'll be there as well, Looking forward to chatting them. But I'm just curious because obviously over time we tend to take different directions, different interpretations. Is Joe's, you know, and he talked about content entrepreneur on this podcast when he was creating the Creator Economy Expo. He really wanted to own that term. So I wasn't surprised, and I'm sure you know as well. He's been talking about that term for a while. Of course, how does content entrepreneur sort of fit into everything that we've been talking about? What is your take on it? And I know this is like Joe's thing, You're probably not part of it or I don't even know if you agree or not with that approach, but just curious as to what your take, how that fits into everything we've been talking about.

Speaker 3:

I think? Well, no, I do. I definitely do agree with it. You know, I think you know it's the one step more right. So so in 20 and what I mean by that is so 2017, he and I wrote a book together called killing marketing, and you know.

Speaker 3:

So, in my teaching, I have four sort of models more force for operational models for content. One of them is this profit. We call it content for profit, and this was a operating model that very few businesses by the way, big businesses are working from. Maybe the classic example of this is Red Bull. So Red Bull, red Bull Media House. They make money. They sell advertising. It's a revenue generate.

Speaker 3:

Now, they'll be the first to tell you that it doesn't profit, it's not a profitable business. It's a revenue generate. Now, they'll tell you that they'll be the first to tell you that it doesn't profit. It does not a profitable business, but that's a revenue generator. It's a marketing program that pays for itself, right?

Speaker 3:

Cleveland Clinic is the same way. With their blog and their content programs, they're all generating advertising revenue, sponsorship revenue. For Cleveland Clinic, it is profitable. They're, they're actually making a tidy big profit. They have 90 people now working in that division, wow and they also do website updates and marketing and stuff like that.

Speaker 3:

So when you start looking at it as a business, that's when you get into the content entrepreneur world, and what Joe is doing so successfully is really highlighting the fact that today's influencer, today's content maker wannabe, you know, sort of started off with the maker economy and then got into the creator economy, and so there is a segment of the creator economy that is devoted to those that want to become little media companies, a content entrepreneur, and so the concepts, the basic learning concepts, are roughly the same. They're the same as content marketing. It's just taking it one step further that you're actually going to make money doing this and so that, and that's what he's teaching these days. And that's kind of where we diverge, I guess. I'm focused on content as a marketing practice and the operations of modern marketing, and he's focused on it as becoming a little media company.

Speaker 1:

Got it and therefore that whole content entrepreneur. It's almost like content marketing for business growth, for content creators and entrepreneurs. Maybe a better way of framing the thing that's right.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean and and basically it ends up being, you know, I mean it ends up being sort of this, this idea of you know they're very, they're very big overlapping Venn diagrams, right, of the kinds of activities that you'll do in each bucket. But at some point, you know so, if you're a content entrepreneur, you start off by launching content products and trying to get an audience and building, then monetizing that audience and like any media company would. But at some point you have to sort of pull over and get into the marketing stuff. Right, how do you? You know, how are you thinking about? You know, marketing yourself and selling yourself and calls to action and all those kinds of things. And the same thing is marketing. You've got the calls to action, you've got the paid media strategy down, you know what you're doing. But now you need to jump over into the building an audience category.

Speaker 3:

So there's sort of a cross pollination, if you will, between businesses and what they're doing from a marketing perspective versus what they're doing from a product development perspective. And that's, you know. That's why I feel comfortable speaking there, because I'm going to be talking about marketing stuff. Right, I'm not going to be talking about building a content business. Plenty of people talking about that. I'll be talking about like hey, once you're ready to start marketing, can you creating a marketing plan for yourself? Here's what that looks like.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that that that was my thought as well, that it's almost like you know content marketing with diapers on. You know not to, but it's. You know what happens when everybody in your niche has a community, what happens to everybody in your niche has a book? It's going to come down to differentiation. It's going to come down to the marketing that we get, aren't we pretty much there?

Speaker 3:

Doesn't everybody have a podcast these days, neil, yeah, yeah, indeed indeed.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, this has been. I'm really glad we've covered sort of both ends of the spectrum on many different topics. I think this has been absolutely fantastic. You have written so many books, so at the end it's like, well, where can we send people listening? What's the latest book that you would recommend of all your books, based on what we talked about, that they go out and buy? I want to hand the microphone over to you to lead our listener to consume more of your content.

Speaker 3:

Well, you're very kind to offer that. Yes, I do have a new book out that came out in September of last year. It's called shocking Content Marketing Strategy how to Harness the Value of your Brand's Voice, and it's built for small companies as well as big companies. I tried to address both and that was sort of. The purpose of the book was to sort of really build a textbook, a sort of a how-to, a sort of much more of a. You know it's very geeky right. So if you're into a geeky read about you know processes and workflows and all those kinds of things, it's a good book for you.

Speaker 3:

If you're into like you know big, you know, get you all wound up and excited about case studies and stuff, it's probably I mean, there's a lot of case studies in there, but there's. It's not a get excited book, it's a like roll up your sleeves and get to work book and so that you can look at. I mean, if you want the website for that, it's contentmarketingstrategycom. So that was smart. And then, of course, I'm doing my fractional services these days as a fractional marketing guy, fractional marketing leader, and so if you're interested in any of that, you can also check that out at contentmarketingstrategycom or my sort of more fractional services sort of idea which is robertrosenet.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. And then, obviously, we'll see you at the Content Entrepreneur Expo. Well, I'm assuming you'll be at Content Marketing World. I see it's coming to San Diego, which is awesome, so make sure you check out those events. Come hear Robert speak. And Rob, this has been so awesome. Thank you so much for your time.

Speaker 3:

Oh, thank you for having me, Niel. It's always, like I said, super fan and I'm so honored to be on the show so honored to be on the show.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much, so I hope you enjoyed the interview as much as I did. Robert is really a great guy. After that, I actually did have a chance to meet him in person at the Content Entrepreneur Expo. Really, briefly, I'm hoping, if I'm able to speak at Content Marketing World in San Diego in September, that I will have a chance to meet him again and hopefully I'll see you there as well.

Speaker 1:

But I also want to remind you that this is a podcast, but whenever you hear an interview, there is a YouTube video of that interview and, in fact, if you were to subscribe my YouTube channel and watch the live streams or even the recorded video, that is how I am first releasing these interview episodes.

Speaker 1:

So make sure you go to youtubecom slash neilschafer if you want to consume in a video format or if you want to listen to this in audio while you're in YouTube. Because I know YouTube is a popular place for listening to podcasts, I am adding more and more episodes there. You will find a lot of old and new interviews there, some that you might have missed if you're a recent listener. So I hope you go over to youtubecom slash neilschafer, sign up and, yeah, feel free to join the live stream. Ask questions, try to make them as interactive as possible, and sometimes you'll hear podcast interviews where we do have a chance to answer questions when they are relevant and on topic. So I invite you to join us for any live stream and that is it for this episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast, until next week. This is your Digital Marketing Coach, neil Schafer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcastnealschaefercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at nealschaefercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neal has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.