Monthly Archives: November 2017

7 Ways to PR your Personal Brand on a Budget

7 Ways to PR your Personal Brand on a Budget written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

A personal brand is an essential business tool today. We work online, shop online, socialize online. Our profiles exist across a plethora of channels and each one is an opportunity to promote a professional and approachable brand.

The idea of personal branding has become synonymous with online marketing in particular; as a way for smaller businesses and entrepreneurs to quickly grow their brands and their businesses simultaneously.

However, personal branding takes time – a resource in itself. It may also require budget investment. Small businesses and independent consultants lack both. The old personal branding tactics of blogging or social media marketing may already be taking up all your spare time.

There are clever ways around this, though. Make the best use of the tight resources you have with these 7 best practice tips to PR your personal brand on a budget:

1. Get Media Coverage

You don’t need to hire an expensive PR firm to get some traction with this. The new online media is hungry for stories. You have a story to tell, somewhere within you and your business.

By taking what you do and finding a relevant news angle you can easily bag yourself some space in this online world for the mere price of some time spent writing emails. Twitter is a great place to search for media contacts, many of whom list their email addresses in their bios.

If you don’t have any news, you can create some. Gathering survey results, submitting a guest blog post or offering yourself as an expert for comment.

You can easily find journalists looking for such expert commentary on Twitter. They will use hashtags such as #JournoRequest in tweets. Searching this term will alert you not to media opportunities and journalists who are covering your industry.

Online coverage has the added benefit of providing you with content worth sharing on your own channels, complete with the social proof of a third party endorsement. If they give you a backlink, it may even help your website’s SEO efforts.

2. Invest In Photography

The tactic of imagery in branding has never been more critical than in a world where we are bombarded by a constant stream of messages. We tap or scroll passed most of it.

But a good image can stop us in our tracks. Whether you sell services or you have products to PR, imagery is one area worth investing in.

Now that we conduct so many of our initial interactions online, virtual personal branding has become as important as the handshake once was. So if you intend to spend time promoting yourself as the face of your business, then you will need a professional photographer.

This is also essential for your social media platforms, media mentions, guest blog bios and conference speaking agendas. Just find a photographer whose portfolio fits with your vision when it comes to “brand you.”

There are still ways to save money here, too. Contact photography clubs as many will host evenings of informal training for professionals simply looking to move into a new genre or to offer a new service in their business.

Local photography courses are another option, where posing for a session might be rewarded with some imagery.

3. Brand Your Tools

Many small businesses and entrepreneurs will start out with nothing more than a laptop, a smartphone and a notebook. The dream of a sign above the door may be a long way off. PR-ing your personal brand is part of how you get there.

Branding will eventually boost your bottom line.

Just because you don’t have a huge team yet doesn’t mean you can’t still portray a slick professional image. For example, you should still invest in a professionally-designed logo at this stage, using a small-scale graphic design freelancer, for example, to keep costs low.You can then use this to print a branded notebook, business cards, use it as the header across your social media channels and even print a bespoke laptop cover.

You can then use this to print a branded notebook, business cards, use it as the header across your social media channels and even print a bespoke laptop cover.

Remember that all of those business meetings are opportunities to impress and make your brand resonate. Not to mention the hours spent in public coffee shops working, as people walk past your open laptop case.

The most basic branding tool of all is actually the humble email signature – and it’s free! Don’t forget to set it up and include your logo professionally with your contact details and links.

4. Enter An Award

Awards are relatively inexpensive for the profile return they yield. They reach a highly targeted audience of industry peers and potential customers. Plus the subsequent credibility boosts your ability to speak as an expert in your field.

Of course, there can be large entry fees which put people off applying. But there are equally as many that are free to enter. They cost only your time.

The good news is that once you hone your answers, it’s only the figures and examples that need to be updated for future applications.

Most award providers will then do their own PR around the finalist announcements and results. This may include shortlists and winner case studies in the press and across social media.

Find suitable awards by searching online. Then check for awards run by your professional or chartered bodies. Also look to local business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce. Then see where competitors in your industry are trying to be recognized.

5. Host An Event

Hosting an event doesn’t have to be an elaborate or expensive affair. When starting to grow your personal brand, a conference or gala ball is not going to be cost-effective PR for you.

But small events, offered for free or at cost, sometimes in partnership with other local small businesses can be a great alternative. It could be as informal as a drop-in advice clinic at a local library or a panel session on a particular topic hosted at lunchtime in a local cafe.

Honing your presentation skills could prove very lucrative for your personal brand. Think about creating your own “talk” or short workshop on a useful topic that you could deliver to groups.

Initially, you might offer this for free to industry associations, non-profit organizations or your Chamber of Commerce.

When you’ve delivered a few, create a speaker profile with your topics and testimonials and make a point of sending it to program chairs, event planning people and the heads of industry associations who organization conferences.

Eventually, you might find yourself as a keynote speaker at a big industry conference and this will work wonders for amplifying your PR efforts.

6. Create Free Content

Blogging has been a key tool for people trying to PR their personal brands for much of the last decade. However, the online space is now crowded with similar information, making it hard to get noticed and grow your brand with written content.

One proven method is to you create something of value for your potential audience and then give it away for free on your website.

This could be anything from a substantial eBook to a small checklist or a downloadable template. It can be as simple as an article that takes someone step by step through a process.

If you can provide it in exchange for email addresses, you can grow an audience of people to whom you can deliver your most valuable content directly.

Those people can then refer you to friends or colleagues and ultimately end up doing your PR for you.

7. Start Live Streaming

If the now well-known personal branding tool of social media marketing isn’t working for you, then you can always look to the next big thing: live streaming. Video is now increasing in popularity among the public.

Live streaming on places like Facebook or even in short bursts on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram Stories can seem more manageable. Webinars are also very popular among B2B audiences.

The public expects live videos to be “unpolished” because it’s fast and raw. So there’s no pressure for expensive equipment or fancy editing skills.

These messages also tend to reach a lot more people. So if you can find the confidence and practice your skills, it could prove a great way to communicate to potential customers, for free.

All of these tactics mentioned are not only helpful to the promotion of your personal brand in their own right. Each one is also a content opportunity for your digital channels.

You could secure media coverage for winning an award, for example. You could post on LinkedIn about your new branded stationary for meetings. Or tweet a shout-out to the photographer as you change your Twitter profile picture to a professional one.

Always think about getting the maximum return for your spend and you’ll be sure that your PR budget is working hard for your personal brand!


About the Author

Leanne Ross

Bio: Leanne Ross is a digital consultant, creator of award-winning business and tech blog aCupOfLee.com and author of “Talk is Cheap: The Digital PR Your Startup Needs But Can’t Afford.” She has guest lectured on PR and Digital Marketing at both the University of Ulster, Ireland and the University of Otago, New Zealand.

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Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit

Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.

Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.

Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.

Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?

Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.

Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.

John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.

Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?

Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.

And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.

John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?

Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.

Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.

And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.

John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?

Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.

So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.

So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.

That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.

Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.

And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?

And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.

What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.

And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.

So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.

John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.

And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.

That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.

We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.

You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.

Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.

Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.

Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.

But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.

John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?

Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.

John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.

Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.

And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.

So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.

John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.

Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.

John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.

Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.

John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].

Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.

John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?

Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?

And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?

However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.

So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.

John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.

Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.

We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.

Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.

And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.

Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.

Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.

John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.

Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.

Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.

I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.

John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.

Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.

And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.

And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?

They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.

We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.

John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?

Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?

If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.

So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then created the largest audience around the discipline of content marketing and monetize it 10 different ways today.

But I wanted to get your take, Robert, because I don’t know if you agree with me or not on that one.

Robert Rose: Well, I do. Here’s the way I would frame that. I would say that existing brands and larger companies actually have a distinct advantage of doing this because they can afford to take the risks and do the things that need to be done that immediately volt them. Johnson and Johnson’s a great example of this, right? Being able to acquire BabyCenter.com for what is extensively a rounding error in their overall marketing advertising budget and try it and make it work.

And so I think larger companies have an inherent advantage there because they can actually do the things that need to be done to rise above the noise and make themselves a more content-orientated brand.

Now, to your point, they don’t do it. And the reason they don’t do it is because they get in their own way with the institutional momentum and the inability to change and the, quote on quote, not on my watch type of programs that are going on in most large organizations. So, you get more CMOs or most senior level marketers who go, yeah that’s a really interesting idea but I’m going to wait til I’m out of here before you try something like that.

Joe Pulizzi: Well the time issue’s important. Because when you’re building a business, you know it takes time, it takes patience and, in a lot of cases, it takes three years. And if you tell somebody, you go in and say oh yeah, we can build a loyal audience. It takes 12 to 18 months until we get to monetization, they’re like oh forget that. I’m used to my six-month, by-month campaign. That’s what we’re going to do.

So it’s an investment. You’re trying to build an asset and you are investing over time to build this asset and as you said, Robert, some CMOs are unwilling to do that.

Robert Rose: And that’s a problem in the public markets in general, big companies and small companies, this short term myopia that we now have on instant results. That’s a whole other conversation for different [inaudible 00:24:46] is the what’s wrong with the public markets right now and the short term thinking.

John Jantsch: We start initiatives. We don’t finish them.

Robert Rose: That’s right. Exactly.

John Jantsch: So, here’s the big question. If we are going to be killing marketing, does that mean we’re going to be killing the marketing department?

Robert Rose: No. Absolutely not. Although it’s funny because when we start thinking … I’ll talk about another big conversation. I had this wonderful conversation with Mitch Joel not too long ago, which is has marketing become too big for the marketing department?

I think it was the HPCA CEO who wrote the great post said marketing’s too important for the marketing department. But it’s true. It’s because everybody’s. You know the idea of optimizing the customer journey has become such an integral part of the business strategy that it becomes really everybody’s remit in some form or fashion, whether that’s customer service or whether that’s sales, or whether that’s marketing, it’s legal. Everybody interacts with customers these days and so with data, with AI, with technology, with storytelling, with content, with everything that’s going on, has the idea of marketing itself become too big for the CMO?

You’ve seen all of these other titles emerge recently, chief digital officer, chief customer officer, chief content officer, all of these sort of subjugated titles that sit underneath the idea of the CMO. Look, I’m a marketing fanboy. I’m a history buff. I think it’s never been a more exciting time to be in marketing and a more challenging time and I think the marketing department is more strategic than ever. But to our earlier discussion about the term content marketing, at some point does it just become so ingrained into the business that it just becomes something different? Maybe. I think that’s a really interesting idea.

John Jantsch: Yeah, the solution department, or something.

Robert Rose: Yeah, well interestingly … I’m forgetting his name … Eduardo Conrado, who is the chief innovation officer at Motorola Solutions, he merged IT, sales and marketing together and started calling them the experience group.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m seeing a lot of buzz about that around IT, for sure.

Robert Rose: Yeah.

John Jantsch: So, you profile, rightly so, Netflix and Amazon and other companies that people can certainly see a great example of what you’re talking about. But they might not be able to relate. Are there a couple of companies that maybe we’ve never heard of that you think are kind of grabbing this and running with it and probably we will all hear of them at some point?

Robert Rose: I know Joe has a few of these. Let me just go with a couple here. So one, Indium. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them. Indium is a soldering company and not a large company, mid-sized company. And as a not very large company, you would go wow the level of content that they have. They have 23 different blogs focused on different flavors of solder and they basically create the trust with their engineering customers to answer every question that they may have.

And they translate, by the way, every one of those 23 blogs into six different languages. So if you said who’s the biggest media company in soldering, I would say it’s Indium. Another one that I would throw out a big Cleveland hat tip to is Lincoln Electric, another mid-sized company that makes welding torches.

And what they’ve done there with their efforts to go after new kids that are graduating college to inspire them to become welders and making welding cool again through the idea of what they do through a print magazine and all their online efforts is actually darn interesting.

And the last one I’ll mention is just fun one because we’ve just covered it on the podcast, which is this guy Joel Salatin, who is a farmer, small business farmer out of Virginia. And he has basically looked at the struggles of running a small farm and said I’m going to transform my farm, which he really believes in humane practices and green practices and all of that. And he’s written 10 books, he’s created a website, he’s now turned his farm into a little tourist destination where you can come tour about how a green farm works.

And he’s basically created an entire media brand for himself and his little farm to supplement what he’s doing as an active farmer. And Joe has some, I’m sure [crosstalk 00:29:35].

Joe Pulizzi: Oh man, John, we can go on forever. I’ll give you a small and a big example. The small example, and you mentioned it the small business, Jenny Doan created … She had a small quilting company, really, really small business and she sold custom quilting material. And she started a little YouTube channel around it and if you go back years ago, it was really hokey and her and her son were doing it. Well she’s become the godmother of the quilting industry, if you will. She has over 300,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel now. In Hamilton, Missouri, where they’re out of, she is now the largest employer of anyone in Hamilton.

And her fabric company has become like a Disneyland and people come from all over the world to come see her, and they’re growing like crazy. And how did they do all this? They just built an audience on YouTube and teaching people how to quilt. This is amazing stuff that they were able to do.

The other one I’ll share with you, John, is just because acquisitions are huge in this whole thing, and we cover aero electronics in the book. My favorite case study right now … There’s a long story about why they did this and we covered that in the book, we don’t have time here, but they purchased … They’re a B2B electronics distribution company. They have more skews than Amazon.com, they sell electronics geared to engineers. And they purchased 51 different media properties so they are the largest media company in the electronics industry.

They reach 76 percent of their total addressable market through those media channels. And by the way, it’s all profitable. Those are the things that we’re going to start seeing happen, and Robert and I cover this in our This Old Marketing podcast all the time, the more and more you’re going to see acquisitions in media, not media companies to media companies, it’s going to be media companies to what we perceive as a traditional product brand.

And now what are we? Are we a media company? Are we a product brand? Well, we’re both. We have to make a decision on how we want to monetize it.

John Jantsch: And there’s an element of market domination in first movers on that, too. Isn’t there?

Joe Pulizzi: Oh absolutely. We’ve been talking to companies about this, I think, the first time when you and I were in Singapore, Robert, we were talking to the big CPG company out there about how they can [crosstalk 00:32:00]. You know they were going after certain audiences and how instead of building it, why don’t do they look at acquiring it first? And to some of these companies, it is a rounding error. Although us at Content Marketing Institute, we purchased two properties like that, and in our case, it’s doesn’t cost a lot of money. So yeah. Absolutely. If you can take a shortcut and say well, I can build this. It’s going to take me 12 to 18 months, two years to sort of build this go-to destination, or oh here it is over there.

That blogger has already built it, or that influencer has already built it, or that small media company has already built it. Let’s just go out and buy that and then we become the expert. I mean it’s a little more difficult than that but that’s what’s going on right now and I think if any company out there, I don’t care what size, if you’re not looking at that as a possible opportunity, I think you’re missing something.

John Jantsch: Well, Duct Tape Marketing is officially for sale, guys.

Robert Rose: There it is.

Joe Pulizzi: We’re all for sale.

John Jantsch: So, Joe, Robert, this was awesome. I can go on another hour probably but I will tell people go pick up Killing Marketing if you want to at least get a big small … I mean we’ve discussed really small companies and really big companies, but I think if you really want to get a sense of where we are headed in terms of what marketing looks like in the future, I think this is it. So, guys, thanks. Hopefully we’ll see you in Cleveland or LA someday.

Robert Rose: Thank you so much, John.

Joe Pulizzi: Thanks, John. Really appreciate it.

John Jantsch: Take care. And thanks for listening to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Wonder if you could do me favor? Could you leave an honest review on iTunes? Your ratings and reviews really help and I promise I read each and every one. Thanks.

 

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How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit

How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose
Podcast Transcript

Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose

Most of the success stories in business marketing circles these days involve product and service companies thinking and acting like media companies.

My guests for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast are Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Advisor of Content Marketing Institute. They are also the authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. We discuss this topic and how to get businesses to think differently about everything they are doing in their marketing efforts.

Pulizzi is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council.  He’s the author of five books, including his latest, Killing MarketingHis third book, Epic Content Marketing was named one of “Five Must Read Business Books of 2013” by Fortune Magazine. If you ever see Joe in person, he’ll be wearing orange.

Rose’s first book, Managing Content Marketing, spent two weeks as a top ten marketing book on Amazon.com and is generally considered to be the “owners manual” of the Content Marketing process. Robert is also the co-host, along with Pulizzi, of the podcast PNR’s This Old Marketing, the #1 podcast as reviewed by MarketingPodcasts.com. Rose innovates creative and technical strategies for a wide variety of clientele. He’s helped large companies such as AT&T, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Petco, Caterpillar, ADP, Fairchild Semiconductor and KPMG tell their story more effectively using digital content strategies.

Questions I ask Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose:

  • Does the book discuss the next evolution of content marketing?
  • Will the approach to marketing discussed in the book kill the marketing department?
  • What companies are good examples of using this approach?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

  • How to make marketing a profitable part of the business
  • Why building a loyal audience is key to transforming a business
  • Why marketing can not only be an investment, but a profit center

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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