The Illusion of Data-Driven Marketing ft. Robert Rose

by:

Jessica Jacobson

Listen!

Show Notes

Robert Rose, a sought-after consultant, best-selling author, keynote speaker, and one of the world’s most recognized experts in digital content strategy and marketing, stopped down in the Data Basement to talk with Adam and Brian. Robert is also the Founder, Chief Strategy Advisor and Chief Trouble Maker at The Content Marketing Institute. Some highlights from the chat:

Data doesn’t drive, it rides shotgun. You’re the driver. Data can drive you to do stupid things.
We have to ask really good questions of the data before we get meaningful answers.
Data can unite or divide. If you don’t have same understanding throughout your company, you can have conflict.
“Show me your google analytics, and I’ll tell you a story.” – Robert
It’s okay for your subscribes to go down once in a while. It’s okay for traffic to decrease. Every number increasing isn’t always a good thing.
Many companies are missing a shared definition of success throughout departments. You must define goals and objectives and agree how to measure in order to have a shared sense of journey and destination.
Trying to get more leads is not a well defined objective. Trying to get more leads at the same cost per lead or less is a better constructed objective.
Content strategy is coordinated communication and so many companies can’t get there.
Marketing content – describing the value of products, services and brand. Content marketing – creating value despite product and brand. There are business reasons to do both.
As brands and companies, we now have the ability to reach and provide value to audiences and develop content that delivers that value. We can educate, inspire, intrigue and entertain (separate and discreet from our brand, product or service) from for the purpose of affecting behavior of an audience that benefits our company. This is content marketing.
Content should be intriguing, educational and it should help build relationships.
HubSpot wrapped inbound marketing into package, creating value in content brand. They were clever in the way they packaged it.
How do you strike the right balance between getting leads to sales vs. taking time to build a marketing strategy? By using content, ads, SEO, etc. – executing a lot of small short term investments vs. long term investments.
One of the biggest challenges we see is the need to improve internal communication.
90% of content strategy execution has nothing to do with creating content – it’s about internal collaboration and coordinating communication.

Links

Eli Goldratt – Haystack Syndrome contentadvisory.net www.robertrose.net Killing Marketing Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing Managing Content Marketing This Old Marketing Podcast Twitter – @Robert_Rose Join the Data-Driven Marketer Discord: https://discord.gg/XtueptFubhMore NetWise: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Web I Blog+Newsletter

Episode Transcript

Brian Jones:

I had a group of six friends here in San Diego where I live. This was probably, I don’t know, six or seven years ago, and we were all signed up for an improv class together as a crew and then we were going to do an improv show at an open mic night or something. Instead, everyone got married and had kids and moved away, but we were really, really close.

Robert Rose:

Isn’t that the story of Hollywood in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Adam Kerpelman:

Totally, yeah. Hey, it’s The Data-Driven Marketer sponsored by NetWise. I’m Adam.

Brian Jones:

I’m Brian.

Robert Rose:

And apparently I’m Robert.

Adam Kerpelman:

Welcome back for another hang in the Data Basement. Thanks for joining us. And special thanks to our guest this week, Robert Rose, who is the founder and Chief Troublemaker at The Content Marketing Institute. Or is there the on there or did I just insert that?

Robert Rose:

There is, the. It does have an article.

Adam Kerpelman:

Perfect.

Robert Rose:

It does indeed.

Brian Jones:

So, we actually had a guest on one of our other podcasts where I messed up the intro in exactly that way, where they were, “There’s no the, thank you.” [crosstalk 00:01:13]

Adam Kerpelman:

Rough start, but yeah. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. And at this point, I’ll kind of throw to you for a quick intro of who you are, where you’re coming from.

Robert Rose:

Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me, first of all. I mean, what a fun thing. I love the Data Basement so I’m a sucker for a good pun. I am currently the Chief Strategy. I mean, my official title is Chief Strategy Advisor with Content Marketing Institute and then I have my own firm called The Content Advisory, but ostensibly, I do the same thing, which is to, well, I used to say I run around the planet and work with brands to help them sort out the operation and strategy of their content and content marketing.

Robert Rose:

But I don’t do a lot of running around the planet these days. I do a lot of 16 by nine videos from the confines of my office, but the work is the same, which is I spend my time working with these companies, really helping them sort out their content marketing and their content strategy, which is where I’ve spent the last 10 years of my career, really working with the Content Marketing Institute as Chief Strategy Advisor and working with my pal Joe Pulizzi on books and the podcast that we have and a lot of consulting along the way.

Adam Kerpelman:

I think by the time that this goes live Joe’s episode with us will have aired and so I can promise that this time we won’t descend into a rabbit hole conversation about social tokens and the future of content ownership and nothing like that.

Robert Rose:

No, this conversation will be infinitely more intelligent, I’m sure, than the one you had with Joe and certainly funnier.

Adam Kerpelman:

I’ll let the listener be the judge of that. That’s the right response. Yeah. So you were our first, I would say, what’s the term I’m looking for, I don’t want to say contentious guests, but our first, possible hostile witness on our calendar forum, under the topic you wanted to discuss, you said you wanted to take issue with the title of our podcast.

Robert Rose:

Well, [crosstalk 00:03:44]. I like the idea of first contentious witness. That’s a good role for me anyway, but no, I mean, tongue firmly in cheek here, the idea of data driven, I’m sure this is something your listeners and you guys are well aware of that as I probably too cutely say, I don’t think anyone should be data driven. I think data should ride shotgun. Right?

Robert Rose:

I think the wisdom that we can bring to bear is too important for us to rely solely on… One of the things that I see so often as a pothole that marketers and marketing teams fall into is that the amount of data analytics and information that can be gleaned from different systems is so high and the questions are so poor that even though the information is accurate and whether it’s a data basement, a data lake, a data pool or a data puddle, we’re just making very poor decisions by basically guiding marketing strategy over what the technology is telling us to do.

Robert Rose:

I know that’s not what data driven really means, I totally get it. And so having a little fun with it I would just say that the real goal here is to be informed as well as you can, by data sitting shotgun with you, looking at the map and helping guide you to a destination that you, as the driver have decided that you need to go, which of course are your business goals and all the things you’re trying to accomplish. So I don’t know if that’s contentious witness or if I’m ready for the prosecution or not, but that’s my story.

Brian Jones:

You said a lot of things I like there, especially data puddle. I’ve never heard that before, going to use that one a bunch.

Adam Kerpelman:

I mean, I think that the reality that you presaged already is we for sure agree with you, right? I think when it comes to the idea of data driven marketing, we are constantly preaching the extent to which it’s very much a with great power comes great responsibility sort of thing.

Brian Jones:

Ooh, first spider man reference, here we go.

Adam Kerpelman:

There is that much data, but if you don’t use it right, you’re just going to end up making stupid data driven decisions. Like the existence of the data doesn’t immediately mean that you’re making proper scientific decisions, and the irony is a scientist would know that because if your tests aren’t built the right way, just you’re not even doing science right.

Adam Kerpelman:

So the idea of, oh, well, we ramped up analytics and we’ve got data lake going, and we’re looking at all this stuff and here’s the signal that we’ve got. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t built the right tests. If you’re not thinking of it with the right sort of methodology, which is really how we got to the idea of okay, let’s do a podcast where we try to talk about this because we bumped into so many people that are like, here’s our analytics. And we’re like, yeah, but you’re not kind of looking at the wrong thing to support what you just told me is the decision at the other side. [crosstalk 00:07:08]

Robert Rose:

It’s one of those things where we often see, I have said to clients before, show me your Google analytics, and I’ll tell you any story you’d like me to tell you. I mean, more time on site? Of course, of course, they’re interested in your content. It’s not that they can’t find what they’re looking for and ultimately give up, oh, more visits?

Robert Rose:

Of course those are relevant visits. It’s not just, you’ve randomly, ranked for some Google search that’s completely irrelevant to your business, but happens to draw in a lot of job seekers. Of course that’s all relevant, wonderful, A-list, sweet spot visitors that you’re getting. In many cases, executive leadership in businesses have gotten so wrapped around the axle of making sure that every graph is going up into the right.

Robert Rose:

We weirdly compete against ourselves to make sure that all those lines are going up and to the right and not understand that it’s okay for sometimes the traffic to go down. It’s okay for unsubscribed rates to go up for a minute. There are things that we can make the business decisions about that mean decreases in numbers. Every number going up is not always a good thing. [crosstalk 00:08:30].

Adam Kerpelman:

I often say, “I can get you followers. It just might not be people.

Robert Rose:

Oh, exactly. Yeah. I used to tell my boss when I was the CMO of a software company, I would tell my board, you want leads, I’ll pour leads over this place. I’ll give you all kinds of leads. I’ll go out there and create content that say 50% discount and get free food, steaks for free, anything you want, I’ll get you clicks and visits and leads and no problem, oh, you want them to be good leads?

Robert Rose:

Oh, I’m sorry. That’s a different question. And so it is a game that we play and the challenge doesn’t come when we’re sort of siloed off on our own, the challenge comes when we are… I’ve watched, literally watched business teams compete with each other for traffic, because that’s how they’re KPId, right? In other words, the blog team is measured on visits.

Robert Rose:

The web team is measured on visits. And so therefore the blog team goes to the web team and says, “Hey may we have a link on the front page of the website to the blog?” And the web team says, “No, sorry. I get measured on visits, you get measured on visits. If I siphon my visitors off to you, I’m going to lose my bonus.”

Brian Jones:

Totally.

Robert Rose:

And they’re right. That’s the crazy part. They’re right. So we have to ask really good questions of the data before we start getting meaningful answers.

Brian Jones:

Yeah. This is a spot where I think we overlap a lot with, and this is a common topic that comes up here is how much actual science, math-based science and engineering mindset is coming to the marketing space to do this stuff, because I run technology for a company. I’m a CTO so I built a lot of our software over the years that processes our data and builds our platforms and stuff and we go through that same kind of phase with our product where we’ll be building numbers, numbers will be going up, we’re getting more information in the system, but then we’ll make some big upgrades and Part of the upgrade is, numbers will drop for a little bit.

Brian Jones:

It’s like, wait, what broke, what happened? We can’t tell our customers that we have less information than we used to have, but it’s the same process. It’s identifying ways to improve something by making raw numbers lower. The interesting thing here with marketing is as I’ve started to really wrap my head around how to build and grow a great team that is data driven, but is also doing it well, is there’s a lot of iteration it’s really, really hard to get to numbers that are useful and to not have to constantly be changing the numbers that you’re referencing, which then means the time period that you’re looking over to make decisions now changes and old data’s not useful anymore because you’ve changed your metrics.

Brian Jones:

There’s so much iteration. How does a team deal with that? How do you move forward when you really can’t control the experiments, right? There’s a very organic and it’s almost biological, population studies in scientific groups. It’s hard. It’s really complicated.

Robert Rose:

Yeah. This is going to be a bit of a glib answer to your very, very deep question, because it is a hard thing to figure out. So my glib answer is to me, measurement architecture or architecting a measurement program is a design problem, not an engineering problem, and businesses often look at it as an engineering problem. In other words, they look at the finished result and then they sort of, reverse engineer how to get there. And so they let the data tell them what they should think.

Robert Rose:

So in other words, looking at it as a design problem, we start asking hypothetical questions or making hypotheses and then we start to say, well, what would be our definition of success if we were able to glean it and now we can start to design success statements around that. I’m a big believer in OKRs. I like that as a framework and maybe for your audience that doesn’t know what a OKRs are, they’re Objectives and Key Results.

Robert Rose:

It’s a measurement, sort of methodology, if you will. Andy Grove from Intel is the one who really, sort of championed it and then it became big at Google and Microsoft and other tech companies. But to me it’s a great way of… The thing that’s missing, we have so much analytics tools. The thing that’s missing is a shared definition of success. So in other words, my vision of what engagement means or what a visit means or what a video view means or what a conversion means could be very different than what the sales team or the VP of sales or the CEO’s vision of that is.

Robert Rose:

So we have to start to say, let’s get a shared objective, a goal that we’re trying to reach. And then what are the measurement attributes, the unambiguous, unassailable definitions of what success would look like. Now let’s go measure it and if we have 1, 2, 3, or five of those that sort of define what success and this objective means, well, now we’re starting to design something that makes sense. Now we’re starting to design something that has a shared context, by the way, whether or not it’s accurate, because we don’t know, it may turn out that it wasn’t that way, but at least we all have a shared sense of the journey, the shared destination that we’re trying to get to.

Adam Kerpelman:

Well, it’s funny, because part of what you’re saying is a thing that I tend to be on the one on our team that brings up frequently, which is you can’t even understand your end result. And then you have to go back to designing tests to try to understand how you got that result. Even if you do get it, because you can also come up with your idea of the end result, let’s call it more leads and then do a bunch of stuff and have no idea what worked.

Adam Kerpelman:

And then you can’t proceed strategically past that and you end up almost in this sort of locked up state of well, we’re afraid to turn anything off, even though we’re bleeding money into the advertising vacuum, because we don’t know which is the thing that worked to actually drive that result. And it’s about testing design often. And sometimes within a team, you’ll have the department that cares about revenue.

Adam Kerpelman:

Look, we just need leads, get them however you want. And it’s well, we need to take a minute and make sure we do it the right way, or else we’re not going to know where those leads came from and then I’m just going to keep having ask for the same ridiculous budget every month, instead of being able to optimize for better leads or sort of whatever.

Brian Jones:

Yeah. Robert, can you give an example of how you would approach setting this up? What’s a good example of something that a common mid-level marketing team would run into setting up their goals and their OKRs and how would you suggest they approach that?

Robert Rose:

Yeah, I can actually. We were just talking about a great example of this, which is the idea of okay, we’re trying to get more leads, right? That in itself is not a well designed objective because more leads with what? More leads at, okay, you want more leads? Can I spend as much money as I would like?

Robert Rose:

Does it matter how I get there? Of course, it does matter and designing those testing objectives are also a huge part of this, but just to answer your question, one of the things that I like to do is construct an objective with the consciousness of saying, we’re trying to do so profitably. In other words, if I say more leads, great, but that’s just value. There’s no cost there. So restate that metric for me, or restate that objective so that I can do it profitably. So maybe it’s, I want more leads at the same cost per lead or less maybe.

Robert Rose:

So if our standard is $50 per lead, I want more leads in the next quarter at the same cost per lead or less. That’s an objective I can get my head around because now what I can start to do is to say, what are the key results that I need to meet that objective? Well, one I can get there through delivery of more leads to the landing page, just making this up but two, I can also get that goal, that objective met if I convert more of the leads that I’m getting there.

Robert Rose:

So there’s two key results right there. So increase my conversion rate on the landing pages I have, or two just dump, more qualified leads on top. Now, one of those two things is likely to be better for me in the long run, and I can start to gauge that, but third might be lower my cost per thousand on advertising by, 15 bucks or something, because I want to spend more money driving more leads to this landing page, and I want to spend more money on the landing page to drive more conversions. Therefore, I need to decrease my costs somewhere else. So my third key result in that OKR design might literally be decrease my ad spend and so if I meet decrease my ad spend plus increase my conversion, plus dumping more leads on, now I’m designing something that’s really going to be a shared success for that objective because I’m doing all good things that ultimately one of them may be wrong, one of them may be better, one of them may be worse, but now I’ll start to understand contextually where I want to start to lean in on my efforts.

Adam Kerpelman:

I think the interesting thing you said a couple of times there, right? In terms of shared success, again, sort of relates to a note that I wrote while you were saying something earlier that, data can either unite or divide. And I think on this podcast, we frequently talk about kind of the utopian case where getting everybody rallied around, understanding the data in the right way. Like you said, the OKRs can create, to use one of my least favorite corporate buzzword synergy between the departments where everybody’s pushing toward the same thing. The same time, it’s almost like playing with fire, because if you don’t have the same understanding of the same stuff, of the same data, then you can have the conflict that you talked about before, where you literally have two internal departments that are pushing against the same metric.

Robert Rose:

It’s such a great point. It’s such a great point. I had this the other day, I had a client literally say to me, the VP of marketing, ostensibly, the CMO, because they didn’t have a CMO, a smaller technology firm. So the VP of marketing there, who is the head of marketing was saying to the directors and the managers, we create too much content. Just their observation, we create too much content. So the directive is reduce the amount of content we’re creating. Nobody can understand what that means and so we’re having a big meeting about it and we’re talking about it. And I said, “You don’t know that. You can’t know the answer to that question because you’re not measuring the efficacy of the content you’re creating.

Robert Rose:

So quite frankly, you may not be producing enough content. And it’s like that scene from Amadeus, when he finishes playing the thing and the emperor comes up and says, I’ve really liked it, except there was too many notes and Amadeus goes, well, just tell me which ones to take out and I’ll take them out. You don’t know the answer to that question and so it’s silly to even disagree about it until you can actually go and measure the basis of the thing that you’re trying to measure. So it’s such a great point that you’ve got to have that, you’ve got to have a shared understanding of what those things are. Imagine playing football with two teams who disagreed over what, how long a yard is.

Adam Kerpelman:

That’s a first down.

Robert Rose:

No, it’s not, it’s not a first down. It’s eight yards for a first step. Wait a minute, what?

Adam Kerpelman:

We’re playing metric football.

Robert Rose:

Exactly.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. I literally wrote down what is too much content? It’s not helpful, I don’t know. It makes me think of a thing I had somebody explain to me in an acting class once, which I was in because I wanted to be a director and they said… My. Worst experience on set was with a director who came up once and said, okay, do that again, but be more funny. And that’s a perfect example of useless direction because what? Okay. Does that mean slip on a banana peel? Or, goofy your voice?

Robert Rose:

Yeah, right. Do it in this silly voice. Yeah.

Brian Jones:

So I think maybe it’s a good segue actually to what, really we had talked about as the main topic to discuss so far, but we’re 20 minutes in and we just ended up jamming on the name of the podcast, content strategy and content marketing ultimately. Yeah. I think maybe an interesting place to start that we’ve ended up using repetitively with a lot of our sort of content marketing expert guests is what’s your just definition of content marketing or content strategy, I guess?

Robert Rose:

Yeah. Well, and they’re two different things for sure, but coming together and we can certainly get to that if you’d like to of why I think they are coming together, but they are different. At Content Marketing Institute we offer all sort of very business dictionary definitions of such things and so it has words… I’m sure synergy comes in there somewhere, your favorite word, but ultimately it is, we now have as brands, as product companies, as service companies, we now have the ability to directly reach and provide value to audiences and develop content that delivers that value. Whether it’s education, inspiration, HOWTOs, entertainment, whatever it is, the content is valuable in its own right. Separate and discreet from our brand or our product or service and we do that in order to drive some profitable action from a customer base that we want to engage.

Robert Rose:

And it’s about that simple. It’s just literally delivery of valuable content that is discreet and separate from our brand or our product or our service for the purpose of affecting the behavior of that audience in a way that benefits our company and that’s content marketing in a nutshell. There are lots of tighter definitions, but the reason I like to explain it that way is because it just separates it out from marketing content, which I don’t think is going away, love marketing content. I’m a student of advertising, love value, propositions, love features, benefits, reasons to believe all of those things dig it and it’s different. It’s just different and so if I can take my logo off of the content and it delivers value in the same way that it does with my competitor’s logo or with no logo, then I know that I’m meeting the objective of content marketing, it’s valuable. The content is valuable.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. That’s the first time I’ve heard it that way and I love it because it’s the way that I tend to think and sometimes find myself needing to defend within even the marketing department. But yeah, the idea that the content that can be valuable on its own. And I think sometimes inside of a team or, higher up the ladder, you’ll get people that don’t necessarily understand that and they have this sometimes awkward response. That’s well, wait a minute, we could monetize that by itself and so now I’m having all these other thoughts about how we should do things differently and it’s no, that’s kind of the point.

Robert Rose:

That is exactly the Point.

Adam Kerpelman:

To get people to care.

Robert Rose:

I find that [crosstalk 00:25:52] often happens as soon as you’re trying to sell things. As soon as you’re trying to do the selling steps with your marketing, which sounds silly, because like marketing’s to help you sell things, but you’re not necessarily doing the selling with content marketing. Right? You’re intriguing. You’re educating. Like you said, you’re promoting behaviors. You’re building relationships but the sell step, which comes later down funnel that becomes more and more strictly designed interferes with that. It’s like hey, this great piece of content, that’s really educational and we’re getting tons of people visiting, why don’t we just add a bunch of ads to it that drive people to the signup page or put pricing on that page. It’s like, wait, wait, wait, that’s not the flow the user’s going through. That’s not their experience.

Brian Jones:

This concept has always existed. There’s always been the idea of user behavior and what is someone doing in the moment that they’re exposed to your brand and into your marketing? But I feel like that concept is just more and more robust and important these days because less time is invested in individual things. We hop between stuff faster and your brain’s switching from work to consumer and entertainment to professional. And so seeing something out of context or being given something that you really didn’t want in that moment even if you wanted it some other moment is just so much more jarring these days.

Robert Rose:

Yeah. In a very simple sense, marketing content is describing the value of our products and services and brand. Content marketing is creating value despite our product or [inaudible 00:27:44] and there are business reasons to do both. I’m never one to recommend or prescribe that a business go all in one way or another and in fact, we often describe content marketing as a multiplier. It is a multiplier of value for the marketing content you’re creating because if you can create that trust and value and engagement with an audience member before they experience your marketing content, they’re only going to trust your marketing content that much more. And the example I always use, it’s a great one in the technology business, of course, is HubSpot and inbound marketing, right?

Robert Rose:

Inbound marketing didn’t exist before they invented it. You can go back and look at the Google search trends and you can see 2007, 2008, a HubSpot basically came out with inbound marketing and there was nothing going on with inbound marketing. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there. We were all creating content for search and we were doing marketing automation and we were using email and we were doing inbound marketing. They just wrapped it up into a beautiful package, into thought leadership called it a methodology, named it, inbound marketing, wrote a book, delivered value, showed you how to do it and made a gagillion dollars off of that by creating that value in that content brand and that’s the perfect example of that. Is if you can invent an entire category of marketing that quite frankly existed well before it did, and they just were very clever in the way that they put it all together, now you’re talking about something. Now, you’re actually really delivering value and differentiation.

Adam Kerpelman:

Well, I think the thing that can be heard there is that you have to wait for that multiplier sometimes. And so one of the other differentiations between content marketing and marketing content, and then you could chase that even further. Just lead gen or whatever you want to call it is, it is a multiplier, but it’s not going to pay off until the machine has been running for a little while, which is not always what the people looking for the results at the end of the funnel want to hear. I have found at least.

Adam Kerpelman:

I mean, it’s the difference, so many businesses call what they do in marketing demand generation, but that’s not, of course it’s just demand identification. It’s peppering enough advertisements and marketing content out into the wilderness to basically scream into an auditorium. Hey, anybody here need my stuff? And a few hands go up. Now you have identified demand, right? You’ve identified demand for that thing. Content marketing is different where you’re walking into the auditorium of people who know nothing about what it is you do and so you educate them on the idea and you get everybody all excited about that idea, which takes longer and it takes a bit of time and you’ve got to warm them up and educate them and inspire them, but then when you walk in and go, “And who needs this stuff?” Way more hands go up. It’s true generation of demand.

Brian Jones:

So how does a company that’s either getting started with a new product or just a small company getting off the ground or a company that has been running a team and marketing and branding for a while. How do they strike the right balance as you’re getting up and running with this because you’ve got the demand of, I need to bring in leads for a company, I need to be driving the sales team, I need the supporting sales team making sales. But I also really do have to take a six-month year long multi-year approach to building brand trust and building information out there and getting just the simple fact of getting content indexed and getting it shared places. All of this takes time. So what’s the right balance, knowing that there’s not necessarily one answer?

Robert Rose:

Yeah, there isn’t one, but you said the magic word there, which is balance. And remember balance doesn’t mean equal. Balance means what’s the right balance for us today in terms of, what our needs are, where we want to wait things. In other words, the way I look at marketing, the marketing mix, classic marketing mix, going back to university, which is, where are we spending our money? Fun fact, the marketing mix actually came from the author who made that term, and I’m blanking on his name just at the moment, but was talking about marketers being like bartenders and said their goal is to mix very tasty cocktails. So the idea is what is our marketing mix look like? I think of it like an investment portfolio.

Robert Rose:

So you’re marketing content, your ads, your SEO, you search buys. Those are all day trading things. Those are all short term investments that we’re trying to get returns on, where we execute a lot of small short term investments to identify demand and find those early hand raisers so that we keep the lights on. We have to keep the lights on to make sure that we can pay the rent so that we can afford to do some level of long-term value investing.

Robert Rose:

Invest in the home, invest in solar panels for our home, invest in the kinds of things that are going to take a year or two years to actually come to fruition but when they do, they actually, can provide for a lot of exponential benefits and finding that balance for an early startup is hard. I totally get it. I’ve been in those Friday afternoon uncomfortable board meetings when they’re saying, how many leads did you generate this week? So maintaining some level of investment and all that is, is a focus on where do you want to balance your portfolio short term versus long term. That’s what I find anyway. And it’s different for everybody.

Brian Jones:

Totally. I like the comparison to investments because that really touches on the psychological approach, different people’s sense of risk, which is part of marketing too. There’s, a lot of parallels there with investment dollars and you got to spend money to understand what’s going to work sometimes.

Robert Rose:

And understanding your target audience and understanding that your total addressable market and finding out how quickly you’re going to run through that and how realistic it is given the competition in the market space and all. The thing that I love, not to continue to bring HubSpot into this or anything but what I love about that example is, they kind of went, they certainly did other things. They certainly in terms of the other marketing activities they were doing, paid media and advertising and webinars and all the active things that they were doing. But interestingly, I think one of the reasons they kind of went all in on this inbound idea was because there was so much competition in the space that they were in. They needed to create a space in where there was much fewer competitors.

Robert Rose:

And so by sort of carving out this unique space like they did, they sort of, not to put a too fine a point on it, they put baby in a corner. They said, look, let’s go. Here’s all the competitors we can sort of put against the wall. There’s nobody else like us and so for them, it was a huge component of their marketing investment. Whereas somebody else, it may not be that are generating leads regularly and, can put butts and seats, for them it might be a very small level of investment just for brand or just for loyalty or just for some other business purpose.

Adam Kerpelman:

The funny thing is that HubSpot example has probably been used industry wide to justify bad decisions. Since that worked, the number of times that I’ve heard somebody say, well, you need to define a new vertical, own a new vertical. And it’s sort of, I mean sometimes, but [crosstalk 00:36:05]

Robert Rose:

Especially in technology startups, I totally get that. It used to be before HubSpot by the way, when I was doing the whole startup thing, it was all about Salesforce and the idea was you needed to define a category like Salesforce didn’t become coin operated. Coin operated is everybody coin operated. Are we coin operated yet? It’s like, oh my God, give me a break.

Adam Kerpelman:

You don’t understand what an inviting segue that would be to talking about social tokens and all this stuff we promise we wouldn’t talk about. [crosstalk 00:36:44]

Robert Rose:

You thought I was a contentious witness before, wait till you get into that copy.

Adam Kerpelman:

Well, so we’re almost out of time here, but I think maybe a place to wrap up is actually one of the points you threw out in terms of talking about, which it feels to me like a good place to wrap up everything we were talking about with content, because it actually kind of pushes the other direction, which, I’ll let you mostly make the point, because you told us earlier, so I get to steal the one liner. But ultimately before we started recording you, you were talking about how content strategy is basically 90% not actually about content. So just setting up a machine that turns out content does not a content strategy make, right?

Robert Rose:

Correct. Absolutely, yes. I say it and it’s bumper sticker advice, I totally admit it but the point of it is that one of the things that has happened and this gets to the point of we were talking earlier about content marketing and content strategy meeting. One of the trends that we see coming out of the last year and a half of weirdness is businesses are, in some way, invested in content marketing. In our research, 90% of businesses we talked to are doing something. Maybe they’re doing it horribly, but they’re doing something. And what we see, this trend that we see is that they had built teams that says, okay, we need to think about content structure, process technology, digital asset management, content management systems, taxonomies, translation, localization, the plumbing of content.

Robert Rose:

And then we also need to think about this journalistic, branded content, content marketing, creating thought leadership, creating a resource center, and they had built sort of teams to do that. Well, what we’re finding is that those teams increasingly are merging together to become one, hopefully function in the business called content. We just see that as sort of a top level trend. Interestingly, what I find in there is that when we start to create that operation, when a business starts to look at that operation, the immediate thing, and they even call it this in so many instances, we want to build a content factory, right? We want to build something where we can churn out as many assets as we possibly can on demand from the rest of the business. And we become this content vending machine where the team becomes sort of, funny enough, coin operated, where sales or somebody puts in a coin and out comes an asset.

Robert Rose:

And when content strategy starts to get really functional, really measurable and really scalable is when you realize that it’s all just about coordinated communication, it’s just about how can we align how the business is communicating in a way that is coordinated and consistent and scalable. And most of that means better communications internally. Most of it means better technology to facilitate that communication internally and so, as we put together content strategies, it is literally five or 10% of the time that we’re thinking all right, now, what kind of content are we creating? What’s the cool story we want to tell? It’s very little of that. It’s mostly, how do we get that? Like you were talking about earlier, the shared purpose. The shared idea, the shared goals, getting that internally aligned across a larger business especially, that’s the biggest problem and the biggest challenge that we see.

Adam Kerpelman:

The people can’t see it on the video, but I’m grinning sort of at Brian, like an idiot, just because I was brought in largely at help with our marketing stuff and the first thing I did was like you said, building a machine, but then immediately people are sort of like, how come that machine is not spitting out all of the answers that I wanted immediately. And I was kind of like, well, because now we have to go figure out the part where I need to talk to all of you to understand what the content actually needs to be to represent our offering and our purpose and things like that. And people from sales are literally sitting there going, where’s the white paper I was expecting to pop out the other side of this machine as soon as you set it up. It was kind of like that’s not really, what it’s about. [crosstalk 00:41:30]

Brian Jones:

It’s been super interesting how much time it truly takes to work with the business as a whole and all the stakeholders and all more so than just stakeholders. The people who really have input that can drive the content. We’re not a huge company. So there’re a handful of people that I go to to get the real juice out of the content marketing that we’re in the marketing content, both, I guess, that we’re trying to put together and it’s amazingly time consuming to make really quality content that, and this is the key that also is, driven by your customers and your market and who the sales team is talking to and what you’re hearing in market and feedback you’re getting through your systems and it’s so much to coordinate and you really got me. I was gritting to the idea of coordinating internal communication to really produce your external communication really is the bulk of the work. It’s not writing, even a white paper and people think white papers are like pages and pages of text, but like compiling that and designing that and making sure it’s useful content is most of the work.

Robert Rose:

[crosstalk 00:42:45] To bring it full circle, I used to tell this all the time when I originally came out to Los Angeles and I was going to be a rock star and then I was going to be a writer. And what I tell people now who want to do that same thing, is I say, remember the job of being a rockstar and the job of being a writer is not writing or playing music. The job is a marketing job. The job is a sales job. The job is a networking job. The job is a truck driver job. The job it’s transportation coordination. It’s management is business. I said the writing and the music playing, that’s a very small piece of the reward of what you get to do.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. I think Anthony Hopkins maybe is the one who once said that he does the acting for free. They pay him to wait around in a trailer in between.

Robert Rose:

Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it.

Brian Jones:

That’s great.

Adam Kerpelman:

Awesome. Well, unfortunately we’re out of time, although obviously we could keep going forever. So we’ll have to have you back on. Before we wrap up, where can people find you?

Robert Rose:

You’re very kind. My little hovel on the web is contentadvisory.net. As I like to say, the dad genes of domains, but we could get it, so that’s why we got it. So contentadvisory.net is where you’ll find the writing, the consulting and all that kind of stuff. And then of course I’m on all the social channels except for Clubhouse because I think Clubhouse is stupid.

Brian Jones:

Yeah. Clubhouse is a feature, not a product. [crosstalk 00:44:21].

Robert Rose:

Exactly. He’s exactly right. Could not have said it better myself.

Adam Kerpelman:

Thanks everybody for listening and thank you Robert for joining us. This has been another episode of The Data-Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

Brian Jones:

I’m Brian.

Robert Rose:

I’m Robert.

Adam Kerpelman:

Take it easy everybody.