2012-05-28

Robert Rose is one of those marketing professionals who really makes you think just a little bit differently. Robert and I met for the first time when we sat next to each other on the bus returning to the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel from the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame kickoff event at Content Marketing World 2011. His outgoing nature and infectious personality made us instant friends, and after seeing him present at the conference the next day, I knew his content was something special.

Robert will once again be presenting at Content Marketing World 2012 in Columbus, and I had the chance to catch up with him on Content Marketing 360 Radio Show. We pulled out a section of the book he co-authored with Joe Pulizzi, Managing Content Marketing: The Real-World Guide For Creating Passionate Subscribers To Your Brand, Developing Your Pillars of Content, to discuss on the show.

Here are some highlights:

Making our audience passionate about what we’re trying to do in the larger world is the really magical part of marketing

It’s not about features and benefits; it’s about engagement, entertainment, education

The key to business is to understand what business you are really in

What Hollywood can teach us when it comes to connecting with our audience

Learn Robert’s Ten Step Brand Journey

Hear real-world examples to showcase these ideas

There are several ways you can get the interview with Robert:

Subscribe to Next Stage Online Radio via iTunes. [Note: This feed includes additional topics beyond content marketing.]

Download the MP3 from Content Marketing 360′s Facebook page.

Read the transcript below.

Pamela: My guest today is Robert Rose. He is the founder — and you got to love this — calls himself the Chief Troublemaker at Big Blue Moose. I love the name that you have, Robert. It’s so much fun. Robert Rose is also the author of “Managing Content Marketing”, and I just want to give the subtitle as well: The real world guide for creating passionate subscribers to your brand. And you have got the lineage in marketing and storytelling. Robert, welcome to Content Marketing 360 Radio Show.

Robert: Thank you, Pamela. Thank you so much for having me.

Pamela: Oh, it’s going to be good. You’re a man after my own storytelling heart. Today, we’re gong to be talking around a topic. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you and I have a creative background that mirrors itself a little bit. We’ve got some of that writing in our background, creative energy, and what you talk about is something I really wanted to make sure our audience is connected with. So, we’re titling this right out of the chapter of your book, “Managing Content Marketing”, Developing Your Pillars of Content.

I know we’re going to have a great conversation, but before we dive into that, Robert, I want the audience if you’re listening today and you have not had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Robert Rose or seeing him present, how did you get involved in this wonderful world of content marketing? And when we talk about the storytelling elements today, can you connect some of those dots from your past and why it’s so important in the marketing process today to have that storytelling background?

Robert: Sure. Happy to do that. Well, for folks like you and I we’re sales rock stars, actors, actresses, writers. So, the perfect place for us to land is marketing, right? Especially on the web these days. I’ve been in Los Angeles for more than 20 years now. I came out to be a writer and was lucky enough to have a little bit of success in the early days and did some screen plays and some theater and some television out here. I was always very passionate about the creation of story and writing stories, and found myself getting into marketing early on and spent part of the early 2000s in various sizes of marketing organizations, from large companies to small companies, to consulting companies to advertising agencies.

It was right around the 2007 time frame when I met a guy name Joe Pulizzi, who you’re of course very familiar with. He and I always threatened to do something together so we started talking about writing a book, and really I was so passionate about content marketing and know Joe is as well, and we really wanted to write the “How To” — how does a content marketing process really get moving in an organization?

What I found over the years of working in marketing was that my storytelling background was such an advantage for me in creating engaging content. It was such a wonderful leverage point for me to get more than what I was getting from just purchased media. The ability to aggregate our own audience today, whether it’s through a blog, through social media channels, through video, through our own website, whatever the channel is, aggregating our own audience and making them passionate about what we’re trying to do in the larger world is the really magical part of marketing. It’s where we build that community that we then can facilitate and at some point to sort of belabor an old Peter Drucker quote, “Have them at some point discover that they need our product or service.”

That’s where content marketing has really gotten its legs over the last few years, and storytelling is such an integral part of that because that at the end of the day is what engages the audience. It’s not features. It’s not benefits. It’s not the ultimate persuasive content. It’s ultimately a content that engages, entertains, informs and ultimately brings a customer to understand that what they’re doing with your brand is something that they can be passionate about over the long haul.

Pamela: We as consumers, the interesting piece, too, Robert, is it’s profound yet it’s not, right? Stories have always been a selling point for really good marketing. Stories sell, stories are what connect us emotionally, and there is something about the state of the Internet that really has kind of forced businesses of all sizes to take a look at this a little differently. Which is why I wanted to have you on the show because you bring about the storytelling element in a very unique way. What I believe is very easy to understand and digest. Wouldn’t you agree we hear this, you’re business should be telling a story. Well, what the heck does that really mean?

Robert: Exactly. It’s an extraordinarily important point that you bring up because one of the things that often comes up is this idea that this new thing called content marketing, is hard or difficult and it’s not. It’s one of the things that I really stress in workshops that I give and talks that I give is that content marketing itself isn’t hard. The storytelling, we all tell stories, we all know how to tell stories, and we all know how to be engaging when we want to be. The hard part, the difficult part, is how do we operationalize that in the business that we’re in? How do we transform an organization into a storytelling organization?

One of the best examples of the reason why that is so important today, I often use the example of Professor Theodore Levitt, the old, very famous, Chicago marketing professor, Harvard Business Review writer, and he wrote a report for the Harvard Business Review, which many people don’t remember, many marketing professionals, especially these days are too young to remember a piece called, Marketing Myopia. In that piece he referenced something that everybody, of course, knows, which is this is the old famous what business are you really in business? The famous business where he takes the railroads to task for not understanding that they’re in the transportation business rather than the railroad business.

In that piece he also speaks to Hollywood where he recognizes that in the 1960s, Hollywood when they were going through their huge transformation from movies to television, didn’t realize they were in the entertainment business and rather than the movie business, and it was one of the reasons the big family and mogul owned studios ultimately met their demise.

That’s the really key piece of this is businesses understanding what business they’re really in. Apple isn’t in the computer business. It’s a lifestyle business. It is about how you live your life in a digital way. For businesses that are starting to understand why it’s important to tell a story, it is understanding what is the larger role that we have in the world and what are we trying to do that’s bigger than ourselves? How can we be a leader in facilitating that? Once you figure that out you’ve got you’re — and so closely tied with brand, but then you have your reason and the story that you’re trying to tell, which becomes everything else and it makes it so much more compelling and engaging.

Pamela: It connects to us emotionally now, right?

Robert: Exactly.

Pamela: Where we want, that’s where the sales really happen. Where the conversions really happen is when we’ve been touched. When the heart and that mind and that soul are connected to the dollar a little bit and, of course, who’s done it better than Hollywood in the past?

Robert: Exactly. It’s absolutely right. This is especially true with B2B marketers. They’ll often say to me in a workshop, “Well, we sell this boring product to a boring set of people, to a boring industry. How can we connect in an emotional way?” and then I’ll ask, “What is it you sell?” “Well, we sell this $500,000 thing that makes factories more efficient, etc., etc., or we’re a piece of software, something like that.” and I’ll say, “You know, if I’m a CFO or a CIO or a CEO and I’m about to write a check for $500,000 I’m pretty emotional about it, and getting that emotional connection is really going to be what drives success ultimately.”

Pamela: It’s so true and I’d like to remind folks, too, that just even removing the brand conversation for a little bit and just saying, what is it that gets you to click on the video or to click on something and share it with your friends? If it’s a cat video or if it’s babies, it’s an emotional connection, right?

Robert: That’s right.

Pamela: So, it’s taking it down to the bare bones of what we as human beings naturally gravitate to and then taking a parallel approach to our brand or our marketing, but it is a challenge isn’t it coming out of that industrial model marketing of process and systems, which is still important for implementation and really taking an emotional core to something that I’m guessing, especially since as you mentioned B2B, this is some new territory for these folks.

Robert: Yeah. It absolutely is. There is that Maya Angelou quote that says, “People will never remember what you told them, they’ll only remember how you made them feel.”

Pamela: Yeah.

Robert: It is new territory for organizations, business to consumer, too. This is new ground for many organizations for how to stop thinking in campaigns and rather start to thinking about how we tell a larger story, different themes, or campaigns within that larger story and how we transform our marketing organization into a storytelling organization that can engage consumers at whatever part of the story that we need to engage them in, in an emotional and engaged way so that they stay engaged for the life of the product or service.

Pamela: Well, and you know obviously, especially business people, we like to have a system or a process to kind of wrap our hands around this. If it’s too fluffy or too vague, it’s something that we just feel we can’t implement. Again for reasons, I want to make sure we talk about it because you really connect some interesting dots, Robert, in a traditional storytelling model and then bringing it into how brands and companies can in their own way implement.

So, I’d love for you to paint this picture for us, if you would, a little bit, just this traditional story model, and go ahead and share a little bit about Joseph Campbell’s model, if you would, and tell us what that is and how you connected those dots from a storytelling, a classic storytelling perspective into something brands and companies can actually use in their marketing department.

Robert: It’s something that has really worked for me, and so when Joe and I wrote the book we really wanted to focus on it a bit because it is a process and less than a template, it’s not a template. Joseph Campbell, and for those in the audience may not be familiar with Joseph Campbell books, but one of his most famous is a book, “A Hero With A Thousand Faces” where he talks about the classic hero’s journey and how infused it is to almost all of the great classic stories that you’ll remember. And there was another guy by the name of Peter Vogler who ended up writing a companion piece to that, specifically on Hollywood and how great Hollywood movies also follow the great Joseph Campbell classic story structure.

It’s not a template per se, but one of the quotes when Vogler is describing the Campbell storytelling process, he likens it to the way physics is. It’s sort of setting the principle that governed the world rather than sort of a template and how that really immediately translates itself is, this isn’t something where you have to have every step along the way to make a great story, but every great story has some of or most of these steps in them in a logical way. I won’t belabor, I know we’re short on time today, so I won’t go through the entire process of the hero’s journey, and there’s many great sources of information out there, but just to give you a sense of it, our classic story starts in what’s called “The Ordinary World” where we find our hero either looking to or getting out of the ordinary world in which they find themselves.

A great example of that, of course, is Dorothy when she finds herself, literally, in a black and white world and wishes her way out of it. Maybe, someday on a rainbow something’s going to happen and get me out of this place. And ultimately, she’s then pushed out of it and into her grand adventure. And that goes through to a call to adventure, then it goes through a refusal of that call, where the hero might then refuse. This is a great example, every cop movie you’ve ever seen where the cop is walking out of the station and the lieutenant is yelling at him, “You’ll never get out of here, you’ll never retire” and the cop turns around and goes, “One more case”. That’s the refusal of that call. And all along the way we meet mentors, sages, when you think of Rocky with his sage, you think of Yoda.

Then, we go into the actual unknown, and we spend a good part of our second act in what we call the unknown. Going through tests and challenges. Building up our character’s ultimate arc to what he or she needs to learn over the course of this story. Then, ultimately it comes to the climax of the story where they face their biggest test and challenge where they have to overcome that. in the classic story. Then, they have to make what is the road back. One of my favorite classic stories is, of course, “The Graduate” where literally Dustin Hoffman has to jump in and take the road back and get to the wedding before it actually gets committed, and he has to save himself and his love from getting married.

Then, ultimately there is the returning with the elixir, what Joseph Campbell calls returning with the elixir, but this is really where the character has changed, where the ultimate climax of the movie, my favorite example of this, of course, is every romantic comedy you’ve ever seen. I call this the magic speech when the guy or girl runs through the rain on the road. Jumps through hoops. Gets all the way back. Meets the girl in the rain, they have the big magic speech where he says, “I’ve changed, and you’ve changed, and we’ve changed and we should be together.” And ultimately they kiss and that ends the movie.

Pamela: And we all feel wonderful, very complete.

Robert: You can literally see how Joseph Campbell looked at classic stories, and you can find almost all of them, every great classic movie, story, novel, play, that you’ve read and apply that to it and that’s the great classic story structure. What Joe and I then did was we took that idea and then applied it to a story mapping process that we call the brand hero’s journey. Again, it’s not a template, but it’s really an idea for how you can start to use a larger ecosystem to put together your larger story, which helps you then create editorial calendars, the story strategy for telling the stories that you want to do through content marketing.

Pamela: It’s really exciting because once you start to use, as you said, this process, I was thinking it can allow for more creativity, more freedom for those that are walking through the story. The idea is once they let it go they just really start to pile through, you know what I mean?

Robert: It’s an amazing point you just made. There’s a wonderful quote from John – I love the Daily Show – and John Stewart was interviewed on Terry Gross’ show, and one of the things that Terry Gross asked him was, “It must be just chaotic, it must be chaos when you’re in that writers room and you’re thinking about all of these ideas and all that kind of stuff?” and he said, “You know, there’s actually a lot of rules to it”

He said, “We set up a really tight structure within the writers room and the larger thing we’re trying to tell with every show and across the series and we operate within that structure, and what that does is it actually gives us a lot more creative freedom. Because that structure allows us to be free within there and not be so constrained with worrying about whether an idea is good or bad or within what we should be doing, because within that structure we can be much freer to think about really cool and innovative things. In other words, because we have rules we can choose to break them when we want to.”

Pamela: Well, it’s actually exciting and if you’re listening and connecting to anything we’re saying, you know you’ve been there. You’ve been in that focused moment and there’s something about being so focused that what it is you’re looking to achieve that your creativity just doubles. It triples. It works overtime and this is one of the pieces that I thought was so important to having you participate in this radio show, Robert, was to really drive that point home. That it is through process and through something like what you’ve created here, this Ten Step Brand Journey, using pieces that are laid out in front of you that will actually provide more creativity. More opportunity to share your hero story that every business has the opportunity to tell.

Robert: Yeah. What we really wanted to do, quite frankly, one of the things that we often say is look, your story is unique and the way you tell it is going to be unique. Your organization is unique. So, coming up with some cookie cutter process isn’t going to work. Coming up with some template that is available for anybody to use to create a content marketing strategy isn’t going to be tenable because every organization is unique and the way that they’ll approach it is unique.

What we can do is much in the same way that Joseph Campbell applied this idea of the hero’s journey, we can provide, at least, a set of ideals where if we hit all of these beats, if we hit all these points, we will, at least, know that we are structuring a story that is well structured. It may not be compelling yet, and we may need to get more creative within that structure, but, at least, we’ll know that we got a set of boundaries within which we can operate.

Pamela: Well, this is where the ideas bloom from the foundation.

Robert: Exactly.

Pamela: It’s so exciting. Let’s walk through again, we’re definitely going to give the audience information on how to connect with you so that they can dive deeper into not only the hero’s journey that you’re discussing, but also this Ten Step Brand Journey. You really eloquently share in your book, “Managing Content Marketing”, a case study basically, that walks through this. How would you like to tackle this just to give our audience kind of a Cliff Notes version, if you will, in terms of going through this brand journey and using a little bit of this process?

Robert: Sure. Well, let me just quickly outline the Brands Journey giving you a couple of examples like I did to the Hero’s Journey, and then I’ll show you how that actually applied in a real life situation that we actually did. So, the Brands Journey starts much like the Hero’s Journey does in the ordinary world only we call it the ordinary or the conventional market. Which is, here is where you are today and there are pains. There are pains either in the sense that your competitors are having. The industry is having. Your customers are having. What is the ordinary market that you find yourself in today? Where do you as an organization sit within it?

Then, comes the challenge, the big “what if.” What if things were different? What if we could solve X? Sometimes, we call this the BHAG, the big hairy, audacious goal that we have for ourselves. The larger story. The big brand promise. Whatever that big thing is that we’re trying to accomplish as an organization where we’re going to be the industry leader. Or we’re going to be the most entertaining. Or we’re going to be X, or Y, or Z that is really going to lead this space in delivering value to our constituents. What is that big “what if?” What if it was realized? What would the world be like if we realized this big goal?

Then, rejection. Why would people reject it? Are we going to reject it? Are our customers going to reject this idea? Are our competitors going to be naysayers here? Then, our sages. Who are our sages gong to be? Are they going to be within the organization? Do we have a Steve Jobs in our organization who can help deliver this message and who can help us through the tests and challenges, teach us the way we need to go? Are there influencers out there that we need to make relationships with and help tell our story a little more effectively?

Then, as we cross into the unfamiliar, we’ll cross into this new world of “what if.” What if we can do this and we’ll map that road. We’ll actually map out what the competitors are going to say. What the naysayers are going to say. What our customers might say and how we’ll overcome that. When people comment on our blog, what are we going to say? What is our response going to be when they say you can’t do the “what if” or the “what if” isn’t possible?

Ultimately, we’ll find ourselves facing that ultimate challenge. It might be a product launch. It might be a new brand relaunch. It might be a new website. It might be any and all of the above. Whatever that thing is that you’re doing, that final challenge where the story culminates, we’ll then look back and we’ll see everything that we’ve structured, and we’ll see everything that we’re told and we’ll begin to retell it. We’ll begin to look back and say, “Here’s where we were and here’s where we’ve come”. That gets us to the final renewal or celebration which allows us to then celebrate the fact that we are now in the big “what if.” We’ve now realized the big “what if” and we’re there.

Now, in many cases the big “what if” may be something so big that you can’t tell it within one smaller story. You’ve got to have a larger story that sort of encompasses everything and smaller stories within that. I often use the example, the big “what if” in your organization you might liken to the Star Wars universe. In that Star Wars universe, of course, it’s never really resolved what’s going to go on, but within that Star Wars universe you have movies, books, cartoon series, television series, regular stories all throughout that then that they themselves tell. Character stories or heroes and realize different fulfilling emotional, engaging stories within that larger universe.

For the hierarchy there, that’s for you to decide how the hierarchy should be laid out and how big you need to make that story, but this structure hopefully helps you put that into perspective a little bit. To help you put it into perspective, we did this actually for… Joe and I worked on a project for PTC, Parametrics Technology Corporation. They make CAD software.

Pamela: This is a prime example of what normally wouldn’t be considered an emotional business, right?

Robert: Exactly right. Very B2B software related. Their big challenge, their big “what if” was they were going to change the paradigm of design software. They wanted to do that with a new product they were launching called Creo, and this new product in addition to their brand was going to be shifted over this time. This new product, in addition to their brand, was going to be shifted over this time. This new product was really going to be reflective of their idea that the CAD industry for 25 years had been pretty boring and pretty – basically non-innovative, nothing really happened in an innovative way.

They wanted to really change that idea. They really went out on a limb to use this idea of content marketing, a new blog, and out reach to influencers and content as a way for them to build that shift in both the brand as well as a more traditional product launch, is what they were doing.

So, we ended up mapping, using the Brand Journey, Joe and I, a story structure that helped them put together a more granular editorial calendar for how that could be rolled out across the six or seven month time frame. What we did was in Act 1 that sort of initial sort of setting up. We refocused on customer pain. What was that ordinary market really like? What is the ordinary world dealing with? Their customers, designers, and product designers that are using the software, why do they hate using the software now? Why do businesses really not like using this type of software?

Recognizing, PTC did, that they were actually part of the problem. The innovation that hadn’t happened the last 25 years was their fault, too. So, let’s express that, but then offer up that there’s a new way. That PTC is going to start leading the new way of how to do this, but not engaging in discussion in that quite yet. That moved us sort of into crossing the threshold into this new unknown, which was going to engage.

That’s when we were going to engage with influencers. With customers. With partners and say, this is the new way we’ve just laid out, now tell us what we’re doing wrong. Now tell us why it won’t work. Now have this conversation and that’s when we introduced comments to the blog. Moving to influencers. Talking to the actual partners and customers about what was going to happen. By that point, we built up credibility with story and content that we could point back to that and say, this is what we’ve said. This is what we said. We weren’t scrambling for an argument or for the story that had already been told. We were introducing the test and challenges into that part of the story.

That led us to the product launch where they had a huge product launch event, which culminated in all sorts of things for the content marketing program. Interviews with customers there. Videos of the CEO. All kinds of stuff at their big event and that was sort of our third act or second to third act, big climax where we introduced Victory. We basically claimed victory into this new “what if.” Now, we can show you how it was done. We can show you behind the scenes of how our product was designed. We can show you behind the scenes of how everything was put together.

We can reflect back and say, see we actually did what we said we’re going to do, and now we’ve won over some people. We haven’t won over everybody, but we’ve won over most people. We can now show you case studies of customers who have actually done this and use that structure to basically, at a very high level, put together an editorial map that help us put together the more granular editorial calendars.

For example, we didn’t have customer case studies in the first act. It just didn’t make any sense for that part of the story. We put them all in the third act when we had already built the vision and the “what if” and had come through the tests and challenges and we’re ready to look back and that was really what we did with the story map, and it so helped them put together their editorial calendar and, of course, they’ve had really great success with that blog and the product launch since.

Pamela: In one of the things that strikes me as you walk through this Brand Journey, with this particular example especially, but again we hear the words engagement in community all the time in content, but really laid forth, it isn’t quite a process so much as it is a natural evolution of a story that naturally engages. It’s really kind of interesting because part of the process is to get, as you mentioned, the comments on the blog, to work with your customers and get the case studies. Before you know it instead of focusing on engagement, just by telling your story and participating, you’re engaging. Does that make sense?

Robert: That’s absolutely right. There’s been some writing actually of late that have talked about how when you’re storytelling as an organization, ultimately the customer is your hero. I don’t agree with that for that very reason. I think the Brand is ultimately the hero of the story. It’s your story. It’s your organizations story. The Brand is the hero of the story. The customers are characters within it. Those characters may be extraordinarily important and what happens to them, they may have their own character arks. They can have their own engagement. All that is extraordinarily important, but the customer is ultimately the audience. They’re the one that is going to consume this content. Consume the story and be engaged by it.

Now they may also be – Zappos is a great example of this – they may also be characters in it. They may also be participatory in it and they may be engaged with it, but there are many times where the customer engagement just doesn’t even exist. There are brand stories out there where customer engagement is not the end all be all.

Pamela: Yeah. If you’re telling the story that you intend to tell, it’s almost like – I don’t know if I’m having an ah-ha moment as you talk Robert, or it’s just me. You know how you hear things and you kind of seep it in at different levels every time you go through the information?

Robert: Yeah.

Pamela: It really is kind of hitting me that if your story is solid and you’re really sharing what it is, that big hairy audacious goal that you really wanted to get out into your audience, your audience will naturally – and I guess your audience, too, could be a qualified audience.  They will naturally engage and participate because they want to be there. They want to participate at whatever level makes sense for the story, right?

Robert: Exactly right. From the classic storytelling framework, you look at how many fan boys and girls there are to the Start Wars/Star Trek, Twilight, name any movie or great story that has a fanatic following, and you’ve got exactly what you’re talking about and move it over to brands that are telling amazing stories. Probably the brass ring for all of us is, of course, Apple where I often say, what is Apple’s social media strategy? They don’t really blog, really tweet and the reason they don’t is because they’ve been able to create such a passionate fan base. They’re telling their stories, they’re telling the Apple story for them.

Pamela: Right. Right. It’s really very, very interesting that in that particular situation you’re not even dealing with direct marketing on the social and Internet space. It’s all coming from the audience.

Robert: That’s right. That’s another important point, which is this is a process. The story itself that you’re telling, depending on how big it is and what it is you’re trying to accomplish here, what you’re doing is you’re engaging in a process not a destination. What I’ll often remind clients when I start working with them is once we create the story and once we create the channels by which we’re going to tell it, that’s just the price of admission. Now, we actually have to go tell it.

Now, it’s unlike before where we would design a campaign and it would be all pre-designed. It would roll out and you would have your ads go out. Your website is done. You sit back and you sort of watch what happens. It’s rather the reverse of that. You basically, you design your story. Now, you go and participate in it. You actually join in and ride along. It’s the beginning of a process where you have to adapt and change as you move forward.

Pamela: Wow. I think it just lends itself to some really exciting creativity regardless of whether you’re B2B, B2C, like you said this example of PTC being a software, and what doesn’t seem like super sexy and exciting and creative actually can turn into quite a storytelling experience for everybody involved. Of course, let’s get down to the brass tacks here, they got the product launch out. I’m guessing their audience increased, right?

Robert: Absolutely. They’re doing great. I think, I don’t remember the last numbers I saw, but they’re getting hundreds of thousands of visitors to that blog and engagement all across on the product by everybody’s estimation. Now, causality and all that stuff, I’m certainly not one to claim that the content marketing piece is the cause that the product is doing as well as it is. The product itself is strong and they have other marketing efforts going on in spades on top of that. What I will say is that the content marketing contributed to that in a way that engaged that audience and has kept them engaged over the long haul.

Pamela: Right. Once again, that is one of the reasons I call my show Content Marketing 360 because you’re talking about a 360 – it’s still marketing, right? – we sell this 360 degree approach here; traditional marketing, digital marketing, content marketing, hit the streets and make the calls marketing, right? So all of that does come into play, but I think that’s an important piece is it becomes one part of a bigger picture and that one part for so many businesses I think they’re confused and they want to. They just are challenged with how do we.

Robert: That’s right. That’s an important point, this is the second most common question that I get, which is a topic for its own radio show, which is content marketing is a process that is infused into your marketing department, it is not a tactic. It is not something that competes with your other marketing tactics. So, often when I hear organizations trying to build the business case for content marketing they say, “Well, should I pull money out of my traditional advertising or traditional marketing budget to pay for content marketing?” I usually say to the extent you can – no. Content marketing is a process that will infuse all of those tactics to be better.

There are plenty of examples of that, but really it’s something that traditional marketing tactics that most marketers are doing today can be made better with content marketing, and then ultimately it can help you do more with less. It can help you engage more deeply and all of those wonderful things, but it’s not in competition with what you’re already doing.

Pamela: Right. It is also something, I think, that content can bring to the table is ensuring that the message is consistent, regardless of what venue or avenue you push it out or participate in. It’s a fascinating time, Robert, to be in marketing. My background has me having positions with larger organizations and went through the layoff process a couple of times. I sit here now in 2012, and I feel like marketing is a rock star again.

Robert: Yeah.

Pamela: It’s kind of nice to be on that stage as opposed to being part of the expense column that needs to be eliminated.

Robert: There is no doubt about it that marketing is… To bring up another great movie quote, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Pamela: Yes. It does. Fortunately, for people like us who are creative by nature, content marketing in and of itself has been around since the dawn of man, really, but we just get to use some of our creative energy in a different way to help businesses, like PTC, drive to that bottom line.

Robert: Yep.

Pamela: It’s an exciting time and I just love that you have this gift to share with our marketing audience, our business audience because I believe it’s a really important part of what needs to happen. Here’s the thing guys, if you’re listening today, I’m having my ah-ha moments and I’ve read the stuff over and over. So, what I think is important here, too, is you’re always a student. You’re always a student of good process, good information and I know this wonderful orange book that you and Joe Pulizzi have co-wrote, I have on my desk at all times.

Robert: Nice.

Pamela: It’s a great resource and it’s excellent because it’s easy to manage, easy to get to, and you guys break some really good stuff down. So, here’s the deal, as we tie a little bow on our conversation, what’s one last little – I’m listening today, I’m a marketer inside of a company or maybe, I’ve run my own business, I’m listening to this, where’s a good starting point? Where’s that first toe in the content marketing water that you’d like to say, “Hey, here’s a great starting place.”

Robert: I’m so glad you asked that. This comes back to what I was talking to just a few minutes ago, which is that content doesn’t have to compete with your other tactics. So, one of the things that I will often recommend as a great first starting point for content marketing and getting it infused into your organization is look at your existing tactics. You’re already doing stuff. Whether it’s pay-for-click marketing, SEO, PR, events, advertising, print, television, radio, all of the different tactics that you’re running and just pick one. Just pick one of those and now take a content marketing process and infuse it into it and see if you can improve the results there.

I’ll give you a quick example. Software company, I know they’re running pay-per-click campaigns through search marketing, Google ads and they’re Google ads are like most software companies, call to action there is, click here to talk to a sales guy. Click here for a demo. Click here for a free trial. Very typical call to action type in Google ads and they’re click through was great. But also because their click through was so great, as you know, when you do Google ads you actually pay for the privilege of having those people click through.

Pamela: Right.

Robert: So, you pay for that traffic. What they were also noticing was that their sales guys were constantly tied up with this great conversion because they were doing demo after demo after demo and the free trials were getting downloaded so they had server space being used for the free trials and lots of costs coming in from Google. So, they had a lot of costs going to this marketing program, but by all accounts a pretty successful program because they’re converting at a high number. They’re getting sales guys busy at a high number. And they’re getting a lot of free trials out there, but they weren’t selling a lot of product.

So, what they actually discovered was a lot of these people are just tire kickers. They were just on their lunch hour and why not take 30 minutes out and get a demo? Why not take 25 -30 minutes out and download a free trail and try it out and bug some sales guy with questions that’s just interesting them. They were in the wrong part of the funnel for the wrong part of the call to action and engaging at the wrong level. So they switched it. They switched that pay-per-click campaign to download this free white paper on Building the Business Case.

This free white paper was made across a number of personas to a CFO, to the director of IT, to whoever it was that was going to be looking at this particular software. What they noticed is that they’re click through went way down. Conversions went way down. Of course, their costs went way down. The sales guys stopped doing as many demos.

What they also noticed was, when they got leads because the call to action in the white paper was call the sales guy and get a demo, when they started doing those demos those leads converted into customers. So, their ultimate conversion rate raised by customers. Their costs went down. Sales guys had more time to do cold calling and other productive things, and so ultimately they were much more efficient marketing organization by just switching one call to action to a white paper instead of talk to a sales guy.

So, just as a first start take one step, one part of the funnel where you’re either great challenge or great success and just try experimenting with a content marketing program in that existing tactic. That will start to illustrate all kinds of things to you about what content is resonating and what other opportunities you might have to improve the funnel. Then, as you improve the funnel, use that money to fund other things. A blog. A video series. A podcast. Other types of content marketing channels that might tell your story a little more effectively and with a little more emotional engagement.

Pamela: That’s great advice and what a great example. You know it’s amazing, you just get people at the right point and here’s the thing, most of these companies already have a pretty solid idea of what they’re sales process is like. So, just understanding that and connecting it to content like in your example, it’s getting that qualified prospect conversion. It’s beautiful and what business owner doesn’t want that.

Robert: That’s exactly right. Understanding your personas, who you’re marketing to and the most important part of personas do is the “why”. Why do they care? Why do they care about you at this particular stage in their life?

Pamela: Yeah and how can you help them?

Robert: How can you help them address that why.

Pamela: Amen. Well, Robert, thank you so much for all your information and time today.

Robert: Oh, thank you. This was totally fun.

Pamela: This was good stuff. We get to be on the radio again on the Internet. I love the Internet. Thank you so much. I want to tell our folks how to connect with you directly so if I want to find out more about Robert Rose and the good work that you do, share with us how the best way we can do that for you.

Robert: Sure. The easiest way to get a hold of me through a number of all my channels as it were is to go to about.me/robertrose and that will give you links to everything that I’m all about. Also, of course the Content Marketing Institute, which is contentmarektinginstitute.com, which is not only me but just a whole slew of information about content marketing I think we have more than 70 or 80 bloggers now contributing to that wonderful content and storytelling and all sorts of things. I would say either of those two URLs are a great way to start.

Pamela: Excellent. Of course, you are the co-author of this great resource, “Managing Content Marketing: The Real World Guide to Create Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand” that you’ve co-written with our good friend Joe Pulizzi over there at Marketing Institute. So, please go out there, guys, grab this book, because if you’re in marketing you need this on your shelf. If you’re a business owner and you’re wondering why marketers keep talking about this, this is a great resource to help you to open up your eyes and ears if you’re even just thinking about how to get going.

You mentioned, Robert, the content you put forth you want to create the “how to”. We want to create the “how to” and I think you’ve done a fine job of getting that together in this managing content marketing, so thank you so much for doing that.

Robert: Thank you.

Pamela: Of course, thank you for being a part of our radio show and I’m going to be seeing you live and in person and hopefully our friends here at content marketing 2012 once again in Ohio and look forward to seeing you in all of your glory sharing more of your good storytelling techniques, tips, and insights. So, Robert, thanks again for being a part of our show.

Robert: Thanks so much for having me. This was, again, so much fun.

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