Labcast: Content Marketing — Who’s Telling Your Story?

Believing in the value of content marketing is one thing — actually pulling it off is a whole other story. In this episode of Labcast, OpenView Senior Advisor Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose from the Content Marketing Institute stop by to chat about the challenges of content marketing, how to get around them, and why success all starts with a story.

Building Your Content Strategy with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose (Part 1)

Stay tuned next week for part two of our conversation with Joe and Robert, where the two discuss the benefits of starting simple with your strategy, and why the concept of content marketing is actually a lot older than you think.

For more information, check out our video series, Content Marketing Strategies in 60 Seconds. You can also follow Joe and Robert on Twitter @juntajoe and @Robert_Rose.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Brendan Cournoyer: Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of Labcast. I’m Brendan Cournoyer, and today we’re joined by two guests in studio from the Content Marketing Institute, OpenView Senior Advisor, Joe Pulizzi, and Robert Rose. How are you guys doing today?

Joe Pulizzi: Hey Brendan, glad to be here.

Robert Rose: Hey, Brendan.

Brendan: So today you guys are here, we’re doing a content marketing forum and we’re talking about a lot of different strategies and implementations for content marketing. I thought a good thing to talk about today would be sort of the process of implementing that content marketing strategy into your existing marketing structure.

Robert, last night we were actually having a conversation about some of the challenges of really taking these editorial processes and putting them into an existing marketing structure that is already in place and some of the challenges that are involved what that, figuring out exactly not only where this content is coming from but exactly what to create, who’s creating it, and how to sort of marry traditional marketing ideas with editorial processes. So I thought to start maybe you guys could kind of have a quick chat about what some of those challenges are for especially the small or startup expansion-stage companies.

Joe: Well, this is Joe. I guess I would start, Robert, and I think it’s important to point out the fact that, and you talk about this well about the idea of content marketing as the new muscle in an organization. We have been so, I don’t want to say blinded, but I’ll say blinded by or instructed in mass media and traditional advertising for so many years, we almost forget that there are other ways to do that. We talk about telling a story.

So the first thing, and the first challenge, Brendan, as we go through this is we have to think a little bit different, and I think putting your publishing hat on and taking off your sales hat, which is what we are traditionally doing. We have to take that mindset change and really think differently about the process of marketing. That’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing a process change in marketing, which I want to get you in here Robert, but I think there’s a big opportunity especially for small businesses as we go through this, because content marketing really is a David versus Goliath opportunity. It’s not the person or the company or the brand with the most money that can win today. It’s the one, we believe, with the most compelling story, and that’s an opportunity for all companies if we do it the right way.

Robert: We’re certainly not going to win these days by being more noisy. We’ve got to get beyond this idea that everything that we produce needs to be thrown up on our website and optimized for search. We have been long instructed to throw everything up on the Web and it captures this long tail search. Those days are just over. We’ve got to now be more compelling, more engaging, and tell a better story then our competition, because our competition knows how to set up for long tail search, as does all of our partners, as does the media company that we talk to. So we’ve got to ourselves, you know, one of the things that you say that I really like is it’s time to own the media instead of rent the media. Now we have to become those publishers. We have to become those thought leaders in order to affect marketing success.

Brendan, as you were talking about, it’s really changing the process within the organization. We talked a little bit about that last night where there are two main questions that Joe and I get asked every time we go visit a client or we speak at a conference, and that is, one, how do we measure this stuff? Then the second, which is to your point is:  I know we have great content, but I don’t know how to surface it. I don’t know how to dig deep and mine that content from internally in the organization. There are a lot of processes that we can put in place once we start to structure an organization that looks more like a newsroom or a journalism structure that help us to mine that content out of the organization.

Joe: So I guess I would say just beyond strategy, I mean we could actually talk about your question for a couple of hours, and we will actually tomorrow. But to go through the whole idea of, okay, we’re seeing the morph of a marketing department look more like publishing. What is the simple process for doing that? Okay, just put strategy aside. Yes I hope you have a strategy. I hope it’s integrated with the rest of your marketing. I mean those are huge subjects that we need to cover.

But let’s say that you’ve done all that. How do you go ahead and you create this publishing atmosphere? I mean, people think, “Do we have storytellers in the company?” Well, OpenView does. But some don’t. So what do we do in that case? Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a ton of journalists in your industry that are more than happy to work with you and you don’ts have to hire them. Or you can freelance out. There are small content agencies that would be happy to work with you on your storytelling ability and figure out how to integrate that in with your marketing.

But I think the biggest challenge that we see is, especially in a small company, it can’t happen in a vacuum. You can’t have, okay this person does the social media content, this person does the blog, this person is working on the white paper, this person does e-mail, unless you have somebody that brings that all together. Or it’s a disjointed, it’s more noise then. That’s where an opportunity is for small companies because big companies aren’t doing it very well yet because they have an e-mail content person that doesn’t talk to the PR team, that doesn’t talk to social media. So, David, here’s your opportunity to be integrated about what you do and tell a compelling story through the channels that you choose, depending on what your marketing objectives are, and to make it happen. But I guess the point is you don’t have to do it all internally.

Someday, I believe, ten years from now, we’ll all know this stuff. You won’t have to worry about it, and we’ll just get it. It will be natural to us. We already are content creators. We see that on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. But marketing departments aren’t there yet. So we’ll know how to do that, but right now we have to borrow that expertise. So go out and do that, borrow that and help them help make you more of a storyteller.

Robert: One of the other things too is when you can do it internally and you want to find those resources and uncover those stories in the organization, there are some simple things that you can do to pull out the content and the story that you want to tell. Then have a freelancer or have someone craft it into something that’s compelling. One of the common challenges I see that is, okay we have a CEO or we have a product development person or our CTO or somebody that we want to blog or tell our story, but they’re not very good writers.

So one of the things that I’ll often suggest is have them leave you a very long voicemail or have them dump it out in an e-mail or just go interview them for an hour, take them to lunch and pull out the information that is really compelling and wonderful and all of those great stories that you want to tell. Then craft it and put it under their name, put it under the company name, whatever it ends up being. But pulling the information out of the organization and really treating it like it’s a news organization where you are going to have to report, and pull that information out of the product and the subject matter experts that can really establish your brand as a thought leader in the industry.

Joe: Well, as a journalist, you need to have a nose for the story, right? So as a marketing person today, you better understand where the stories are being told in and around your product and the story you want to tell to your customers. So that could be salespeople, customer service, even an IT, god forbid. It could be a story there that needs to be told depending on what your personas are and what you want to have happen. So I think if we’re looking for the story, we can find it. But in the past, we haven’t even looked for the story because we’re out there just contributing to the . . . you’re renting that media.

Robert: We don’t know what to ask.

Joe: But if we want to own the channel, we’ve got to come up with the stories, and they’re right in front of us, but we’re not looking at them.

Robert: Exactly.

Brendan: So, Joe, you’ve talked a lot about you don’t have to do everything internally. You can certainly outsource things. You can work with freelancers. I’ve always said coming from a journalism background myself, content marketing has created a huge opportunity, a new opportunity that didn’t use to be there for people with that skill set to now go in and work with these companies and help create content for them. But certainly internally, some of the roles and responsibilities do change, and I was wondering how do companies kind of look at that where, okay, now we’re going to sort of change, not necessarily get rid of all of our traditional marketing practices, but we’re going to start doing some different things, some content related things, some social media related things? What are some of the key responsibilities and how do those roles change within a marketing structure I guess?

Joe: Please don’t get rid of the things that you are doing well. What we want to do, and we just talked about this a little while ago, I mean, content marketing can make everything you do a little better, even your traditional advertising, even your events. How can you get your story out there in the places where your customers want to engage in that story? Could marketers still do this role? Absolutely they can. But I think marketers look a lot more like publishers or maybe chief editors.

So what we’re seeing and we’re seeing it with OpenView portfolio companies as well, they’re hiring journalists to be in these upper level marketing positions because they understand how to tell a story. What that tells me is marketing is indeed publishing today, because the journalists are coming in and they are now the marketers. So it’s like, oh my god, what happened to the industry here? It’s going batty because journalists are taking over the world, but you know what, and I really do feel that they are.

I feel that as a small company CEO, so the CEOs listening to this, if you can’t articulate a story effectively, I think you are doing a disservice to your company. It doesn’t mean you have to be the best blog writer, like to Robert’s point just a little bit ago, I think that you can actually have somebody help you tell that story. Do an interview, get that story out there, because you’re there for a reason, because you’ve done some amazing stuff or you have some amazing insight about the industry. Let’s share that industry insight and let’s position you as the thought leader that you should be, and let’s leverage that in our marketing in order to create more attention or to do cross sell or customer attention or brand awareness or whatever the goal might be.

Robert: There’s a wonderful story. I’m going to attribute it to UPS, although I’m not quite sure if it is UPS. The story is that they had a choice of whether they could hire customer service people who could drive or drivers who could do customer service. They found that it’s much easier to teach customer service people how to drive than it is to teach drivers how to do customer service.

I’m finding a similar trend now happening with marketing. The technical aspects of marketing, whether it’s buying media, whether it’s SEO, whether it’s HTML, whether it’s blog construction, all of that can be taught or outsourced. What is harder to fill these days is being a great communicator. So I’ve been watching organizations hire great storytellers, great communicators and teaching them marketing, because that piece is becoming more and more commoditized as we go forward.

Joe:  You know there are a lot of people that are going to shoot you down from what you just said.

Robert: I hope so. It’s fascinating. It’s true though. It’s true. Great communicators, I’ll take a great communicator over someone who can code up HTML any day.

Joe: Well, Don Schultz, the father of integrated marketing communications, always said that your competition can copy everything that you do except the story that you tell.

Robert: That’s exactly right.

Joe: The way you communicate.

Robert: That’s exactly right.

Joe: So if that is the thing that differentiates us . . . I mean you said that really well today, which I love the quote and I tweeted it out. Differentiating means telling a different story, not telling the same story incrementally better.

Robert: Right.

Joe: And that is so true. To do that, the same old marketer is just not going to cut it.

Robert: So if you are an existing marketer, learn storytelling and learn how to be a great communicator and learn how to write. If you’re a great storyteller and a great writer, sure, learn marketing but you can learn the marketing. I think that’s the future.