Relationary Marketing

Transcript: Episode 3 of Brandcasting with Relationary Marketing

Episode Title: Craft a Long Game Strategy to Curate Your Content with Joe Pulizzi

Joe Pulizzi: I love content marketing because I think it’s the purest form of communication. You just give value to your customers, give, give, give over and over again. And then when they start telling you what they want to buy, you offer them things to buy.

Clark Buckner: That’s Joe Pulizzi. He’s a public speaker, best-selling author, and founder of the Content Marketing Institute. If there’s anyone we could call an expert on content marketing, it’s Joe. In fact, he’s been called “the content marketing godfather.” It’s why we wanted to bring him onto our show to talk through his formula for an effective content marketing strategy, including what is it, what does it look like for your business, and what does podcasting have to do with it? Joe will answer those questions and talk about his own success with implementing content marketing strategies.

Clark Buckner: Welcome to Brandcasting with Relationary Marketing, the show all about how to build a professional branded podcast that delivers on your business’s goals. I’m your host Clark Buckner, partner and co-founder here at Relationary. We’re a turnkey podcast production agency for B2B content marketing. We help brands and agencies create engaging content to establish thought leadership, nurture key relationships, and promote events. For a recap and transcript of this episode and to download our free five-step guide to building a branded podcast, head on over to relationarymarketing.com/podcast. Now, let’s jump in.

Joe Pulizzi: I am the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, as well as the Orange Effect Foundation, and I am super excited to be here today.

Clark: Joe, thank you so much. There’s so many things we could talk with you about. You really are attributed to being, I’ve heard many people say “the godfather of content marketing.” You really were among the first to truly pioneer this phrase and this concept. And it all really boils down to what I’ve heard you say before, you cannot extract value until you give value. So you’ve bundled that up. You’ve created an entire movement around it. Our agency, Relationary, we read through Content Inc. in our early days as we were kind of finding what our sweet spot was and how we wanted to more or less go to market and do what we do with podcasting. So we’re so happy you took some time to talk with us. We’re going to be talking about content marketing, but also want to hear kind of you and your updates and what you’re doing present, and then get a little bit of a future perspective on what you think the future looks like with content marketing.

Joe: Well, first of all, you’re too kind. I don’t know if any of what you just said is true, but I’ll take it.

Clark: It’s true.

Joe: I’m honored to be here so it’ll be fun. And of course, I’ll talk content marketing. I’ve been talking content marketing for 20 years now. It’s hard to believe I’ve been in this business for two decades.

Clark: Wow. So let’s rewind it back two decades ago. Can you just paint a picture of the beginnings? Take us back to the beginnings of content marketing and then we’ll kind of take a few steps from there to present and then to future.

Joe: It’s so weird going back. I mean, if you go back, I graduated from Penn State. I had a Master’s of Arts in Communication in 1997. I fumbled around and landed at Penton Media and that changed my life. Penton, for those of you that don’t know, a large business-to-business media company, was bought out recently by Informa. And they did magazines and newsletters and events in all sorts of weird business areas like HVAC and machine design and those types of things. And I got into Penton custom media, the department, as an account manager. Penton did content marketing projects for large B2B companies. They did newsletters, they did print magazines, and they didn’t do advertising like most of what Penton did. They actually created custom content. And when I found this out, I was like, this is amazing. This is going to be it and ended up taking over that department a couple of years later.

Joe: And by 2005, 2006, as Google was doing their thing with search engines and you had Facebook coming on the scene and Twitter in ’07 and all that type of stuff. I’m like, wow, companies are going to have to create more content. They’re going to have to tell their story and learn how to do it because the audience can go direct. This is going to change everything. And of course, it took a little bit longer than that, but really believed that, ended up leaving Penton in 2007, launched what ultimately became Content Marketing Institute, launched Content Marketing World in 2011. The rest is history. It took off and here we are today. I love content marketing because I think it’s the purest form of communication. You just give value to your customers, give, give, give over and over again and then when they start telling you what they want to buy, you offer them things to buy. It’s pretty simple. Well, it’s just hard to do for a lot of people because it’s so different than what we’ve been doing over the past 50 years.

Clark: What have we been doing in the past 50 years?

Joe: Interrupting people, basically. And by the way, it worked very well. I mean, if you go back to the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, if you wanted to get your name out, you advertised and you found people that had an audience and you said, okay, I’m going to interrupt those people with “here buy my product.” And then as we got in later and later, you move into the ’90s and 2000s and today, you realize that “well, shoot, I could create the content. I could build my own audience.” And that’s where this whole content marketing revolution started to take place. And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with advertising. I mean, I think that people that have podcasts like you do should advertise on different networks to try to get more audience, but that’s the difference. And so I don’t want to go advertise to sell a product right now. What I want to do is advertise to build an audience, to get and keep subscribers so that I can build an asset, and then I can sell whatever I want.

Joe: And it’s tough. I mean, if you go back, I mean, when I took marketing classes in the ’90s, and even if you read most marketing books today, there’s not a lot of talk about building this consistent value over time or really creating a publishing model as the new marketing. Not a lot of talk about that. And even though we like to tell about how awesome content marketing is, the truth is it’s still a very small part of what’s spent in marketing today. So we’ve got a long way to go.

Clark: It’s a great landscape of where we’ve come from and where we’re at today. And it sounds like we still have a way to go and maybe we’ll uncover more of that soon. I like how you started to kind of share some quick tips and you have some formulas really on how do you approach content marketing. So could you share with us maybe one of these formulas? I mean, I think of the Content Inc. model, but I know you’ve got tons of different formulas. Which one you think fits best here as we kind of paint a picture really of not only what content marketing is, but how do you approach it in an appropriate way?

Joe: Well, I’m going to let you in on a little secret here. If you look at any one of the five books that I’ve written or co-written, it’s all the same formula. We just tell it in different ways. So the Content Inc. formula that you talked about, thanks for shouting out that book, we wrote that in 2015, and just adjusted the model for entrepreneurs that have no money. In Killing Marketing with Robert Rose and I wrote in 2017, is in essence, the same model, it’s just positioned for enterprise brands that have a ton of money. There’s a couple ways that I would start to look at it and we can go through six steps or you can go through 20 steps, but it comes down to a couple of different things.

Joe: First of all, who is your audience, who you’re trying to target, and I want the smaller, the better. I don’t want a big audience. I want the smaller audience because there’s a better chance of you actually creating something that resonates with a smaller audience because you can get to know that audience better and really focus on what their pain points are, what keeps them up at night. So that’s where I want to start. Then you look at that small audience and you say, “Hmm, what can I offer that audience that hasn’t been offered before?” It might seem like a very simple question. The problem is nobody asks that question. We usually create the content we want to create. We usually tell the stories we want to tell, which is fine and we should look at that, but really what I want to do is say, okay, what is missing from that customer, that audience, that person’s life and how can we deliver it in a way that’s going to be easy for them to subscribe to, to get ahold of, to download, to read, whatever the case is.

Joe: And we call this “the content tilt.” How do you find an area of differentiation on the web that you actually have a chance to break through all this content clutter? The reason why we talk about this as if, I still do this, if you go into any size company and you look at the content they’re creating, let’s say they’re writing all kinds of blog posts or they’re creating podcasts or doing whatever, and you look at, okay, they’re targeting this audience. When you really look at it, they’re not creating anything different. There’s usually 10 other companies or individuals that are creating the same exact things. That’s not helpful. That’s not going to make an impact on somebody. So you have to find that content tilt, that area of differentiation.

Joe: Then whenever you take that next step, most people want to say, “Okay, great. I’ve got this idea. I’m going to start talking about this thing called ‘content marketing’,” which is what we did in 2007. So how do we start doing that? A lot of companies will say, “Oh, I’m going to do a podcast. We’re going to do some webinars. Let’s get on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And let’s just send that story out to everyone we can on every channel.” Well, that’s not the way you do it. What you do is you find one content type. Is it audio, textual, visual on one platform. Is it YouTube? Is it e-newsletter? Is it a podcast like we’re on now? And then maybe the most important one of this is, are you delivering that consistently over time? If you say, “Joe, I want to do this and I’m only going to do for six months. What can I expect?” I would say don’t expect much because it takes a long time to build a relationship with an audience through anything, but through content.

Joe: So we’d like to say you got to give it about 12 to 18 months minimum just to see where you’re at to build that audience. But that’s how you would start. And you become the best at that content type, at that story you’re telling to that audience and you deliver. If you say you’re going to deliver consistently over time, if you say you’re going to deliver every week, you deliver every week at the same time and you don’t miss. Same with your e-newsletter. Same with your blog posts. Same time. Exactly. Just be. That’s your promise to your customers though, what you’re delivering and you do that. That’s the model we used at Content Marketing Institute. That’s the model that John Deere used, that they started The Furrow magazine in 1895 that they still use today selling out their monthly magazine. That’s what Aero Electronics does in the B2B space and they’ve done a great job with all their brands and being the number one resource for electronic designers. On and on and on, it doesn’t matter.

Joe: That’s what I love about content marketing. In essence, it’s such a simple model and it’s hard to do because first of all, it is so simple, and the second thing is it just takes time and a lot of people don’t have the patience to stick with it over time. And if we would have not had patience at Content Marketing Institute, and we would have said, “This blog is not working and we’re only going to give it 18 months,” we wouldn’t have worked. But we waited another year later and then things blew up. That’s how quickly things can happen. But a lot of people don’t have that patience.

Clark: It’s interesting when you talk about the 12 to 18 months timeline it usually takes. It’s funny because we’ve had some perspective, new clients who are interested in podcasting and they say, “How about we just try out three episodes and we’ll see how it does?”

Joe: Yep.

Clark: How often have you heard a similar ask?

Joe: All the time. Actually, I love hearing that when I used to sell. I used to basically sell content marketing projects, mostly print magazines, and somebody would come in and say, “I want to do a test run. Can we do two issues?” And I would say, “No. No, you can’t do two issues because they’re not going to be successful. You’re not making a commitment. This is not an ad you’re running here.” Even if it was an ad, I would tell them they have to do more than two. You are trying to change the behavior of a group of people. Do you really think touching them twice is going to make any difference at all? No.

Clark: No.

Joe: And I love, actually, I look at goal-setting and forming habits. If you believe it or not, there’s a study that happened in 2009 that says it takes an average of 66 days to form a habit. Let’s just say that’s true and somebody wants to change their behavior and you want to change somebody else’s behavior, you could say you have to deliver something to them 66 times. And I can attest to that because when Robert Rose and I did This Old Marketing Podcast, we did 211 episodes. And I would say that probably by the middle of year two, which would have been 80 or 90 is when it really started to take off. Now, a lot of people are going to be saying, come on, Joe, 80 episodes. But seriously, that was about a year and a half it takes.

Joe: I love the challenge of somebody saying, “Can I do something small?” And I would say, “Well, for what purpose? Do you want a sample? Do you need to get permission from your Chief Marketing Officer to do something like this or are you just not sure?” Because if it’s because you’re not sure, that’s marketing. Nobody’s sure. There is no sure thing in marketing. It’s like, okay, I’m going to buy this ad program that’s going to pay for this sponsorship, or I’m going to buy a Superbowl ad. You don’t know if that’s going to work. There’s no for sure on anything.

Joe: Now, what I like about content marketing more than advertising is that even though there we’re both not sure if they’re going to work, by at the end of my content marketing initiative, I probably built an audience of some kind, have a subscriber base that ultimately we can monetize or do something with. And you know what you’ve done, you built an asset. If you advertise, you have to generate some product sales at some point. With a content marketing initiative and a subscriber base, you have an asset forever if you keep that subscriber base active, and you can do all kinds of things with that. That’s what I love about the difference.

Clark: I like that and in a moment, I want to ask you about how do you measure success in content marketing. But before that, I want to give some context of how we’ve been approaching this. We’ll sometimes say podcasting doesn’t make money, but content marketing makes money, and podcasting can make for great content marketing. So as we think about content marketing as this larger umbrella, this engine that’s going for a long period of time, and podcasting can certainly play a role in that especially if it’s something you’re really dedicating time and energy just along with any other types of projects. So when you think about content marketing and measuring success, how do you encourage folks to think about measuring success, especially when timelines and budgets are on the line?

Joe: Well, the question you have to ask is why are you doing this? So if you’re talking to your client and they say, “How do I know this is going to work?” I would like to say, “Well, what’s your marketing goal for doing this?” You have an audience goal. I mean, hopefully, you do. You have an audience and you have something that you want to change in them, their thinking on something, or you want to be additive to their life in some way. So that’s what you build your content marketing mission statement. You have a goal for them. But if you have a marketing goal behind it, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to sell more widgets? Are you trying to create better customers that maybe are more loyal? Are you trying to create a better yield so that you create better customers by them buying more stuff than people that don’t listen to your podcast or read your newsletter? Are you trying to actually monetize it so you can actually make money off of your podcast because you can do all the things a media company does?

Joe: Once you build an audience, you can sell advertising and sponsorship, and you can have sponsors of your podcast, and you can sell subscriptions and products, and things that you never thought before that you would sell because you have an audience. So that leads you to all sorts of different revenue. But that’s what I would say. So if you say, “How do I measure success of content marketing?” I would say, “Okay, what’s your goal?” Say that you want to create more loyalty in your customers. It’s like, okay, great. Then that’s what we need to measure. So let’s start, right now and say where’s our loyalty at right now? What do these customers do? What do most of our regular customers do? And then what we want to do is measure what customers are doing that listened to the podcast, that read the newsletter.

Joe: I’ll give you an example. TD Ameritrade, big online brokerage now. They created a magazine years ago called Think Money Magazine. It’s a print magazine. They send it out quarterly and it goes to heavy traders that trade a lot of stocks and bonds and derivatives and all kinds of stuff. And it took them a while to get this data because it’s not easy to do this, but they did a benchmark and then they figured out, okay, let’s figure out what the readers of the magazine are doing. And they found out that those customers that read the magazine and engaged in the magazine on a regular basis, trade five times more than those that don’t. Now, this is unbelievable. I mean, these are the things that just don’t happen.

Joe: That means they’re delivering, and by the way, the magazine is fantastic, Think Money Magazine, and it just delivers such value. They’re not talking about Ameritrade products or services. They’re really talking about how you trade better, how you become a better person, better trader. They trade five times more, that’s on average. That’s what they’re seeing. That’s ROI that is off the charts, that you just can’t get. Well, why are they getting that? Because they’re delivering content that nobody else is delivering. And so they’re actually teaching them how to be better traders and by doing that, they’re going to trade more. So that’s just a very simple way to look at that. That’s just one thing that you could do. As you get more experienced and you start diversifying your product line and you move from one type of content product, let’s say a podcast to an e-newsletter, to a webinar program to an event, to a print magazine, to all these other things, then you could have 10, 12, 14 different ways to measure your content marketing.

Joe: And that’s basically what we did at Content Marketing Institute. It’s like, oh, chief content officer, that created better customers. Those are our best customers that actually went to Content Marketing World and spent more money. And then we monetize the newsletter, and the podcast directly, and we sold training products to this audience, and all types of other things. And that’s from six, seven years down the road. So that’s how you can expect to go from, oh, I’m starting one thing here, and then you diversified your product line, just like a media company does.

Clark: That’s really neat. And the process of asking why, what are your goals from the very beginning, and then returning to that. Staying focused on those goals is something that really resonates with me and our team because when we start, we have something called “the content design” and it’s really, it’s just like what you’re saying, why are you wanting to do this, what are your goals, the audience, all of that. And you talk about monetization and that is such a huge phrase. Anytime we host a meetup in Nashville with our national podcasters meetup, when you put the word monetization in there, people come out of the woodwork. Everyone wants to talk about monetization. And an interesting way to look at podcasting and through our lens, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, is how podcasting can be creating value that maybe isn’t necessarily money created from the podcast specifically.

Clark: So a couple examples, using it as a way to build the trust, build thought leadership, and staying focused on maybe a smaller audience. It’s so great to be reminded by that from you because we really are trying to create niche content for a select group of folks in an intimate form of podcasting. And we’ve seen that work really well. Even though the audience size may seem small, and on the surface, you see a small audience size, you might think, that’s not successful. Well, if you see how it’s being used as a vehicle to progress someone down the content marketing funnel or maybe down the sales funnel, that really comes back to why we named our company Relationary because of the relationship nurturing.

Clark: So you started off this conversation with us talking about influencing people and how that’s changed over the years and it’s been such a lovely overview. So as we’re starting to wrap up, I definitely want to hear a little bit more on the present of just your life. I think folks are definitely going to be interested in what is happening in your life today, but then we want to close out after that by talking about where you think content marketing will go in the next few years. So before we get to that, what’s going on today in your life? I know there’s been some changes. You had a healthy exit from this. So what’s keeping you busy today.

Joe: I’m absolutely loving life. I’d always wanted to write a fiction novel. And I did. I finished the book in January of ’19 and it’s called The Will to Die. It’s in its fourth edit revision right now. We’re getting real close to being able to release this thing. So I’m hoping probably by the beginning of 2020 we’ll have published. But yeah, I’m looking to get out there. I’ve got a newsletter going out, joepulizzi.com/newsletter where I talk about random things in marketing.

Clark: The random newsletter.

Joe: Random newsletter. I just talk about what my thoughts are in marketing. Been thinking about getting back in the podcast game. And then-

Clark: A foundation.

Joe: Yeah. My wife and I started the Orange Effect Foundation in 2014. And basically, we provide grants to right now about 130 kids in 28 states for speech therapy services that they couldn’t afford and a lot of these kids are on the Autism spectrum. And so a lot of my free time is spent trying to raise money to get kids speech therapy so they can communicate and be as normal as they to be, whatever normal means.

Clark: Excellent. Well, this has been such a joy to get to talk to you and hear the past, the present, and now just a little touch on the future. So if you had to leave us with something, especially as it relates to what is coming down the future from the two decades you’ve seen in the past, what do you think the future holds for content marketing?

Joe: It’s so funny because even though we’ve been … Content marketing, by the way, is a very old discipline. Hundreds of years, Ben Franklin used to do content marketing, so this is not a new thing. The people that follow the model, that dedicate to it over the next five, 10 years will be successful. Those companies that want to be innovative, will be doing content marketing projects and delivering value outside of the products and services that they currently offer. And those that don’t will be advertising and they’re not going to be innovative, in my opinion. I think there’s a huge potential. I know you’ll love to hear this. I think the greatest potential right now is in audio.

Clark: Woo-hoo.

Joe: I know, it’s true. I’m not even saying that.

Clark: That’s awesome.

Joe: I just say that for you.

Clark: Hey, we believe it too.

Joe: It’s absolutely true. It’s the most intimate way to communicate. It’s the best way to connect with your audience and it’s the only medium right now that you can multitask. So you can run, you can work out, you could mow the lawn, and you can listen to podcasting. And I think there’s a huge potential there. And I believe in podcasting so much because when Robert and I started our podcast in 2013, everyone would come up to us after speeches or content marketing role and they’d say, “Joe, we love your book. Joe, we love your newsletter. Joe, we love your blogs. Joe, we love Content Marketing World.”

Joe: Once the podcast started, it all stopped. It all moved to, “Joe, we love the podcast,” and that became our very best audience. And anybody can do this, but as we just talked about, it just takes time and patience and finding a niche, focusing on being the best friend to that audience and not letting them down. And it just comes to basic human nature.

Clark: I love it.

Joe: Yeah. All the automation and all the AI and all that stuff is still going to happen, but it doesn’t affect the model. The model will continue to go on just as the way we talked about it.

Clark: Joe, thank you so much again, for taking the time. I really appreciate it and we’re looking forward to your new podcast.

Joe: Here we go. I hope to be back. I really enjoy it. So hopefully in the next couple of months, I’ll be back on the airwaves.

Clark: Thank you, sir.

Joe: Thank you.

Clark: Hey, thanks so much for listening to Brandcasting with Relationary Marketing. We’re a turnkey podcast production agency for content marketing and we’d love to hear from you. For a recap and transcript of this episode, and to download our free five-step guide to building a branded podcast, visit relationarymarketing.com/podcast. And if you enjoy this content, please follow, rate, and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time.

Clark: Brandcasting is a production of Relationary Marketing. This episode was produced by Darcy Mack and executive producers Clark Buckner, me, and Chuck Bryant with editing support from Dylan Carrow and music by Jess Grommet. Additional production support is provided by Anthony Luciani, AJ Meyers, Riley Wallace, and Jasmine Meriweather.