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Transcript: Episode 4 of Brandcasting with Relationary Marketing

Episode Title: Use Content Design to Connect with Your Target Audience with Emily Siner

Emily Siner: I mean, I think this goes back to the idea of what is your show’s reason for existing in the world? What hole does it fill that doesn’t already exist? So rather than just throwing something up because you have an idea, thinking about where it fits into the context of this entire podcasting landscape.

Clark Buckner: That’s the voice of Emily Siner. She’s the news director of Nashville Public Radio WPLN. Over six years ago, Emily launched Nashville Public Radio’s first podcast, Movers and Thinkers. And now, they have an award winning fleet of shows. She joins us to talk about content design, including identifying the true purpose for your podcast and the importance of knowing your show’s goals and the target audience. Additionally, she shares her tips for deciding the right length and release schedule for your episodes. 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.

Emily Siner: I’m the news director of Nashville Public Radio WPLN and I am the host of a podcast called Movers and Thinkers, and I’m also one of the editors on the many different podcasts that we have at the station.

Clark Buckner: You have a whole podcast fleet.

Emily: We do. Yes, we’re very excited about that.

Clark: Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining us here in our studio. We are just huge fans of you. I’ve said this before when you’ve spoken at the Nashville Podcasters Meetup and I mean every bit of it. You are truly, I believe, a hometown hero when it comes to audio, when it comes to podcasts, and we’re just super thrilled to have you on our show.

Emily: Thanks Clark. That always makes me feel good when you say that.

Clark: It’s a real thing and you really are. You did a Nashville TEDx talk in the past kind of right when podcasting was starting to get noticed in a new way. You’ve been really innovative on how you’ve incorporated audio podcasting with WPLN with this NPR affiliate to ultimately drive your goals forward, and those include things like creating better relationship with your listeners, trying to build that buy-in. So at Relationary we’re always talking about how content design of a show, of any podcast, there needs to be goals. And so we want to really unpack those items with you. We want to talk a little about designing shows and how all of the thought process goes into being intentional. So what better guests than you talk about content design because you have several shows on the fleet. What’s the fleet up to today?

Emily: We’re at six or seven. We have seven shows, but one is on hiatus so I guess six active shows.

Clark: Wow. So we’re talking about content design. And so when you approach a show, when you’re creating a show from scratch, just first thing that comes to your mind, why is it important to establish a target audience before you actually create the podcast?

Emily: I think it gives a structure to your show. Having that kind of target listener in mind helps you figure out how deep are you going to go into explaining things, how obvious is it. Most of our shows are targeted to a more general audience because we’re kind of getting the typical radio listener who is interested in a lot of things, but wants to learn more about something. And so that means that we are going to assume that the listener doesn’t really know when we start talking about something really specific and we’re going to give more detailed explanation. And that’s something that you wouldn’t do if you’re creating a video game podcast and your audience is video game listeners. You don’t have to explain what Madden is, but we would in our shows. So that’s important and also thinking about how you market it. So where are those audience members seeing content and finding content? Are they a very Reddit based kind of audience versus one that’s using Facebook? I don’t know. I think it’s super important. I would love to hear your insights too, Clark.

Clark: So I think it’s certainly helpful and I’ve heard this strategy from radio people, just creating that, I guess, persona or giving this person a name, who is she, or how old is he, or you give them a name, maybe even find a picture that looks like them in your mind and think about… Yeah, just like you’re saying. Some things that might be more obvious you don’t need to explain that, but you’re always speaking to that person. I think that’s part of the power of audio podcasts. Different than video, different than blogging. It’s so much more of an intimate experience. So I would hope our listener right now, I’m not saying listeners… Typically someone who is listening to a podcast, they’re alone, maybe they’re commuting, maybe they’re doing chores. They’re just sitting in the room with us. It’s me, you and our guest. So that guest, I have an idea of who they are. So that’s kind of one of the ways I think we’re thinking about it.

Emily: Can I ask, do you have the target audience member for this show?

Clark: I’m put on the spot here. So it’s less about the creative of just let’s do a podcast as a hobby. It’s more of how do we use podcasting in content marketing, so these are folks we’re trying to reach. These are the people who are in marketing. Maybe they’re at an agency and they have clients now who are asking them, “Hey, we want to get into podcasting,” but they don’t have maybe the in-house team, or the right gear, or the right expertise to do this and this is a resource for them. Also, people who are trying to take a forward step into the different vehicles. They’ve heard about podcasting, but we’re trying to help them think about how do you use this to drive your goals forward.

Emily: I think that’s one of the things that we think about too. Along with audience, you have what are the goals for the show and is it to reach new audiences of people who, for us, are not the typical public radio listener? A lot of what we talk about with podcasts is reaching younger audiences who aren’t already listening to us, but there are also some shows. I’d say Curious Nashville maybe fits a little bit of both, but with Curious Nashville, we are targeting current listeners to ask us questions and give this kind of feedback loop. So we’re deepening the experience for current listeners. Hopefully we’re also reaching new listeners too, but I think you approach a show differently when you’re thinking about am I reaching new people who aren’t already aware of this brand versus are we making a more personal connection with people that we already know.

Clark: That’s a really good point. So some of the clients that we work with… Okay, it’s all about your goals and we’re talking about goals in just a moment, that’s the most important part of content design. But some of our clients, they’re creating podcasts because this gives their audience, their friends with the brand, their fans, whatever you want to call them, a way to deepen that connection. So super fans, so Jack Daniels is one of our clients. We love working with them and through an agency, DVL Seigenthaler, but they have something called Tennessee Squires and they just love Jack Daniels. To become a Squire, there’s some steps involved and not everyone’s a Squire so they’re really proud of that.

Clark: And so that’s some of the kinds of folks that we create that podcast for. The engagement is really great. They listen to it for a majority of the episode, which is also good. So every goal is different. Some podcasts have a totally different goal. Maybe that’s just to try to advance someone in the sales funnel or the content marketing funnel that’s created. So I think this is a great segue to talk about goals and success. What does success really mean? So I’ll be curious to hear what are your goals for doing podcasts.

Emily: I think our overall goal is to become more of a presence in our community and deepen the connection with people. So we already have this platform to share content over the radio, but it’s not necessarily super personal. And our podcasts are more personal either because we are talking into someone’s ear bud, like you said, or because it’s a live event and we’re getting to interact with people in real life. It just gives more outlets for that so I think overall that’s our goal. Within that, a big part of it is increasing our membership at the public radio station. So hopefully if people like what we’re doing, they’ll become members. And then it doesn’t even matter if they’re listening to the radio or to our podcasts, they’ll just feel connected to the station.

Emily: A secondary goal but one that I find super important as one of the podcast producers and a journalist at the station is having this outlet to do more creative long form storytelling because you’re really constrained in radio by the clock. We very rarely put anything on the radio that’s more than six minutes. So to have this outlet to do a 25 minute narrative story is huge and has definitely helped us just become more creative storytellers in general.

Clark: I love that. It’s so interesting because going into this, my thought was, “Oh, this is just another revenue stream. Create content, sell ad,” because we look at, I love everyone has for names for this stuff, but we call it the B2C approach where the B2B approach. The typical B2C approach, the business-to-consumer approach, is typically going to be build a show, make it huge, sell a bunch of ads, but the B2B approach is a bit different. It’s usually connected to a business goal and the success metric is less about quantity of downloads and it’s more about the quality or what are those people doing. So it’s so interesting to hear sure you’re able to sell ads on this, and that makes sense for your model and your nonprofit and all that, but creating that emotional connection, that deeper relationship and broadening your reach, I love hearing that.

Emily: Yeah, and I think being a nonprofit in the public radio model, the existing public radio model probably contributes to that where there are many different legs to getting revenue and direct advertising or what we call underwriting in public radio is one of them, but a huge part is also donations and donations come from a sense of community and presence and all these touchy, feely things that I think in commercial media are sometimes not seen as super important, but I’m really glad that they are in our space.

Clark: That’s a great point. So we’re going to kind of popcorn around because there’s just a lot to cover. So what are your opinions on length of shows?

Emily: Yeah, so I have two thoughts and they’re kind of conflicting. One is that I feel like the perfect episode length is 25 minutes. It should never go beyond an hour. If it’s an hour and I see… If someone recommends a podcast and I look at it and the episodes are an hour and 15 minutes, I will like audibly scoff. I’ll be like, “I’m not going to listen to that.” But then on the other hand, I have friends who clearly listen to that. If they recommend it to me or people who will listen to the extended interview with Krista Tippett that’s like an hour and a half long. I have listened to episodes that are that long when it’s something that I really care about. I’ve listened to the long form podcast interview with Terry Gross about interviewing, which was an hour and 15 minutes. And not only that, I listened to it twice because I loved it so much. So maybe I just don’t personally care about as many things as most people and more people are willing to listen to that. I don’t know.

Clark: Hey. we agree. Average commute time around 25 minutes one way. So how about frequency? How do you normally approach frequency?

Emily: So we have a few different approaches and it’s kind of like the more frequently you do it, the shorter the run is. So what that means is we might have a season, for example, The Promise, where we had season one and it took about a year to prep. Then we had all seven episodes coming out week after week and that was a season and then it was done and it’ll be done for the next two years because we’re going to have something coming out next year. So very high frequency, high intensity of narrative structure and reporting.

Clark: She was embedded all year where she did the story.

Emily: Yeah. So obviously not something that’s sustainable more than a couple months out of the year.

Clark: It’s kind of bet because that’s a lot of time investment, resource investment.

Emily: Yeah. well, And then the thought is we put all this investment into it so we want it to be something that’s coming out every week that we can actively market during that entire time. I’m pretty sure when that came out, all of our podcasts were directing people to The Promise. So it sort of gives us this intense time to say this is The Promise’s two months. That helped us gain a lot of traction nationally too. So I think that worked well for that. With Versify, it comes out every two weeks and also has seasons so there is an end date, but it might there might be 14 episodes every two weeks and then the rest of the year is for episode prep. For something like Movies and Thinkers and Curious Nashville, we don’t necessarily have seasons, but they don’t come out as frequently. I think it’s really hard to do a consistent week after week show forever with no kind of end date season in mind.

Clark: Right. We certainly love having the season mindset because you give yourself permission to stop and you give a heads up to your audience. And also with Curious Nashville, it makes sense there’s going to be some infrequency, but the audience knows that, they expect that. If you only had one show, you want to stay as consistent as possible. But since we have this family, it works, but there’s a reason behind why you’re doing it.

Emily: The season model gives the audience a chance to catch up because if it really is coming out every week like a radio show like This American Life, it’s very easy, at least for me, to be like, “Well, I missed that week. I’ll listen to the next one.” But when people are recommending a show and you see there’s episodes one through eight and I’m going to start with episode one, I’m going to get through eight before the next season comes out.

Clark: Excellent. So we talked earlier about some shows are more narrative, you have the interview format. Any suggestions on how you’re approaching details like that? And also included in this is the structure of the episode. So we use something we like to call a “gold moment”. So for instance, on this podcast episode, we started off with a gold moment from you. Intro narration from me, boom, go to the full edited interview. So when you think about elements that make up the podcast episode, things that are really making it what it is, any thoughts you have around that?

Emily: Yeah. Also, this is fun. It’s sort of meta. I don’t know yet what the gold moment will be.

Clark: I don’t either.

Emily: But the listeners do.

Clark: It’s going to be great and it was great.

Emily: Yeah, we do the same thing. We don’t call it a gold moment. We call it a “billboard”.

Clark: I love how everyone calls it something different. I’ve heard people call it a “hero moment”. That’s cool.

Emily: I like the “gold moment”. I feel like that’s a good way to do it too. And we will often, even if it’s not a moment from the show, it might be a preview moment or it might be a standalone small story or a related thing. For Movers and Thinkers, I’ll pick out a question that kind of stands alone and that will be its own little segment at the beginning that’s maybe one to two minutes long. And then we have our show open, which is “from National Public Radio this is Movers and Thinkers.”

Clark: Of course. That’s so classic.

Emily: And I think the thing with that that’s nice is that you kind of get two chances to open. You have the very open and then you have your open after the show open, which is another way to hook the listener. I think the only other thing that we think about with where to put breaks is that we always have a space for a midroll even if we haven’t sold a midroll. So we have a natural middle ending point and then we have the end ending point.

Clark: So when you go into recording an episode, you know that’s going to be there.

Emily: Right. As we’re writing the script or as I’m kind of working through my interview I’ll mark here’s a good kind of mid ending point.

Clark: That’s lovely because we’ve had some people who’ve asked, “Hey, what are our options if we have a sponsor?” And we tell people what midrolls are challenging because unless you go into it like you do, intentionally, otherwise it’s going to be disruptive to just drop in a midroll.

Emily: We actually had to add midrolls to several of our podcasts once we started kind of actively looking for sponsors. I remember I had to go through all my previous episodes of Movers and Thinkers and figure out where the midroll was going to be and rerecord a little middle ending thing. I tried to do it in the voicing that I had at the time, which probably wasn’t as good.

Clark: I bet no one else noticed, but I see what you’re saying.

Emily: It’s hard to retrofit it.

Clark: Wow. Because there is something so special and intimate with that live show you do that… Yeah, once you’re in that moment, it’s really challenging to replicate.

Emily: Yeah. And I guess that kind of goes to a different thing about how we structure our episodes, which is that the structure of the live show is not necessarily how it’s going to end up in the episode. And so we can move things around. I necessarily think about that as much when I’m doing the live show because that’s a different space and there isn’t a natural middle breaking point. But then as I’m listening through, I can kind of pinpoint it.

Clark: I love it. Well, we’ve got a few minutes left with you. I know you’ve got to get back to the station and keep the good work going, but I want to ask you about in this content design process, one of the steps is to name the show. That’s important. Let’s talk about your experience with naming shows.

Emily: Yeah, it’s really hard to come up with an idea that you feel like encapsulates everything and also you want to listen to yourself say every episode. It took me a while actually to get on board. Even though I came up with Movers and Thinkers and it was approved, I still didn’t really love it for a while. People kept saying, “Movers and Shakers,” and then I kind of realized that’s fine. That’s something I can use. So anyway, it takes a while to, I think, come up with a name. And we don’t have a great process for necessarily the inception side of it, but we do have a process for what to do after you come up with a new name, which is primarily to make sure that it doesn’t already exist, which sounds very obvious, but you can sometimes forget to do that or someone else might come up with a name shortly afterward that actually happened with Versify.

Emily: There was a poetry project that a publisher was working on, not podcast related, and they were using the name Versify and the station had to figure out with the publisher how we were going to divide up that trademark. Our classical show, Keeping Score, is still in existence but no longer is called Keeping Score. It’s now called Classically Speaking because after we came up with that name and started producing episodes, we realized there was another show that had already trademarked the name. And so if we wanted to market it in any kind of national way, it was going to run into issues so we had to change it. So it’s something that now we are more cognizant of doing on the front end, to be like just in case this goes big. And I would say for anyone producing a podcast, just in case your podcast is a huge success, make sure it’s something that can be sustainable that you won’t have to change the name of in the middle.

Clark: Well, one of the final things that I think any podcast needs to be able to do, whether it’s the B2C approach, the B2B approach, it’s give value. So as we’re starting to wrap up, any thoughts you had around any kind of podcast just giving value to the listener?

Emily: Yeah. I mean, I think this goes back to the idea of what is your show’s reason for existing in the world. What hole does it fill that doesn’t already exist? I think, for example, with Movers and Thinkers, I wanted to do an interview show, but there are also so many interview shows out there. So I wanted to think of a way to make that a little bit different, and part of that is just I try to have my own particular interview style, but it’s also having this live component, having sometimes a mix of three different guests. If you’re doing a show about a topic that you’re passionate about or working in, I think it’s probably a good idea to maybe survey some people in the field and see what they want to hear. What doesn’t exist yet already? If there’s a show out there that you really think you can do better, defining what you can do better about it to yourself is important. So rather than just throwing something up because you have an idea, thinking about where it fits into the context of this entire podcasting landscape.

Clark: I love it. What a great way to wrap up this whole dialogue around content design. I love it. So Emily, I want to ask you, what is your why? You started off at All Tech Considered in DC. Now, you’re the News Director here in Nashville at WPLN. Why do you do this, and especially why do you do this with audio?

Emily: I think audio is such a creative medium. I originally was a kind of a journalist in training in print and then early on in my career started working at NPR and started working with audio. It’s this really interesting transition that we see a lot of print journalists make where you have to start using audio and everything has to be listened to linearly. In text, you can kind of read around. You can’t do that in listening. You have to listen linearly. It constrains you a lot and so at first it feels like you can’t even tell a story and then you suddenly realize there’s so much more you can do with it like putting people into a scene and into a moment and hearing another human’s voice.

Emily: It’s so cool and such a cool way to show emotion and human connection. So that to me is why I do radio. I love that part of it. I love sharing stories. And on the new side, I love feeling like we’re providing this really important service to democracy by sharing information. And I think that storytelling in general does that by creating empathy between people, which is a super important thing, especially now.

Clark: This has been so much fun. So I want to close this out by basically what’s a way someone can connect with you, Emily, and your team at WPLN. Maybe that is they’re interested in sponsoring a podcast or maybe they also believe in this important mission. They want to become members. What’s a good way to learn more?

Emily: To sponsor a podcast you should contact our sponsorship team which is at sponsornashvillepublicradio.org. We have many opportunities for businesses or people who are interested in doing that. If you want to become a member, you go to wpln.org/give. There’s actually a little check box on the donation form now to show that you listen to podcasts so that we know that our podcasts are pushing people to become members, which is an important way to measure that.

Clark: That’s so cool. And the power of podcasts, especially if you’re interested in maybe growing your podcast, sponsoring other podcasts makes sense because if you’re trying to get in front of people who are already adopted the medium, who believe in the power of audio, who have it in their routines, your money can go a little further.

Emily: I agree. You should definitely sponsor our podcasts.

Clark: All right, Emily. Thank you. And what’s a good way for someone to connect with you, follow you on Twitter, all of that?

Emily: Follow me on Twitter @Sinersays. Siner is S-I-N-E-R like diner, but with an S. Siner says.

Clark: Siner says. Okay. Thank you so much.

Emily: Thank you, Clark. This is so much fun.

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 Brian with editing support from Dylan Carrow and music by Jess Grommet. Additional production support is provided by Anthony Lucianni, AJ Meyers, Riley Wallace, and Jasmine Meriweather.

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.