Have you spent a ton of time on a piece of content, only for it to get no traction or traffic? Does it end up in the graveyard of the Internet? What about a piece of content that drives traffic, but not to conversions? These are huge problems for content marketers. 

Today, we’re talking to Garrett Moon, CoSchedule’s co-founder and CEO. He will share content solutions and information from his new book, 10X Marketing Formula. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Content marketing is not living up to the hype that it promised and not generating the results that were expected.
• Who’s who in content marketing have provided positive testimonials for Garrett’s book.
• One core reason why marketers are not getting results with their content is that it is not good or unique enough to stand out.
• Need to Create Competition-Free Content: As a marketer that is creating content, your content is in competition with other content. Find ways to differentiate yourself.
• What are your top 5 competitors doing for content marketing? If it looks like what you are doing, then do something different.
• When CoSchedule performed an assessment of its competitors, it noticed a similarity in length of posts, consistent use of imagery, and low usage of resources in posts. Find opportunities that move you away from the competition.
• Garrett shared a case study of Groove HQ. It had a regular content marketing blog that focused on useful things for professionals. There was moderate success, but it was not great. The company needed to do something different with it. So, it launched a brand new blog called, Groove’s Journey to 100K in Monthly Recurring Revenue. The company shared what worked and didn’t, and the blog experienced overnight success.
• You need to have an appetite for risk to really stand out, but risk is not the problem. It is failure.
• Marketing has become about the methods we use. However, if you’re constantly building your marketing on top of methods, you’re just copycating what everyone else is doing. Take a risk and try something new.
• Stick with the plan, even if it doesn’t work.
• Content Core: What does your audience want to read about? What interests them enough to click on a link? Clicks don’t necessarily equal value and results. Don’t fall into that trap!
• Find an overlap between the topics you need to cover for your audience of existing and potential customers and the content you need to produce as a company. It’s about what your audience cares about and what value as a business you provide.
• What is the customer’s problem that made them hire CoSchedule to solve? How do you turn solving their problem into content?
• Marketing Projects: Allows customers to manage multi-media marketing campaigns.
• CoSchedule helps customers solve complex problems by offering free, simple tools. If you help your audience be successful without you, they’ll be dying to be successful with you!
• The best way to get results with content is to talk to your customers.

Links: 

10X Marketing Formula

Jay Baer

Joe Pulizzi

Blue Ocean Strategy

Groove HQ

AMP on iTunes - leave a review and send screenshot to podcast@coschedule.com 

Quotes by Garrett: 

“Content marketing is just not always living up to the hype that was promised. It’s not always giving them the results that they feel they deserved.”

“As a marketer and a content marketer that is creating content, we have to actually realize is that our content is now in competition with other content.”

“Risk is all about failure, and I think you have to learn to sort of embrace failure and use it as a learning exercise and a way to improve what you are doing.”

Your customers use social media to talk about your industry, competitors, and brand. They provide valuable information that you can use to generate content ideas, understand why they go elsewhere, and prevent PR disasters. That’s why social listening is so important. 

Today, we’re talking to Joei Chan - content marketing manager from Mention. She shares some examples, tips, and advice that will help you capitalize on social listening opportunities. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Mention is a Web and social media listening tool for brands to track online conversations and listen to key topics and strategies for brand development.
• Joei leads content marketing partnerships to generate demands and leads for the sales and marketing team.
• Social listening is monitoring online conversations to understand what customers are saying and collect feedback about your brand and industry.
• Part of social listening involves understanding keywords and topics that your audience is talking about. Tracking when your company name or brand is mentioned. Also, track content marketing for keywords used in your industry.
• Identify keywords and topics that focus on your goals.
• Social listening is important for marketers to understand and care about because they need to know their target audience. Is what you have in mind when it comes to your audience, reality? Is your perception accurate?
• Social listening also helps you track campaign effectiveness. How far is the reach? Brand sentiment?
• Social listening can be used to improve campaigns and content by understanding what platforms your customers are using and what kind of content interests them. Also, utilize content directly from your customers to generate engagement.
• There are a lot of opportunities that you can discover by listening to what your customers are saying, and then tailor your content based on those conversations.
• User-Generated Content: For example, you can tie into users who like to show off your product after using it by asking them to use a specific hashtag or encourage them to generate specific types of content. It is a team effort between you and the customers.
• You can highlight and leverage user-generated content in various ways to promote your brand.
• Share entertaining and humorous content, even if it is your own expense and you need to welcome humility. Every brand messes up once in awhile. Embrace your failures and be authentic about it.
• Use social listening to find and build your audience. Understand your audience and give them content that interests and engages them. Listen and react to them in real-time.
• Competitive Analysis and Monitoring: Gather information on your competition. Your brand and products are never alone and always compared with others. What are your competitors doing that you can learn from?
• Inbound Marketing and Social Listening: Attract people to your brand through brand awareness and brand perception. What works in your favor? Your social media presence/reputation and positive reviews.

Links: 

Joei Chan; Mention

AMP on iTunes - leave a review and send screenshot to podcast@coschedule.com

Reese’s Misshaped Trees on Social Media

Imagine knowing exactly what your target audience needs are and when they need them. Delivering exactly the right value at the right time. What would this mean for your marketing?

Today, we’re talking to Kyle Gray, an entrepreneur, bestselling author, and savvy content marketer. He has helped startups reach $1M in revenue, and his work is featured in some of the largest online marketing publications. Kyle breaks down two fundamental frameworks that content marketers can use to be persuasive and maximize helpfulness - making their target audience know, like, and trust them. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• How Kyle helps entrepreneurs create a powerful storyline for their business that drives sales, growth, and engagement.
• Kyle’s Scalable Storytelling Process features three steps: 1) Discover: Find the most interesting aspects of your story; 2) Define: clearly understand what the story is and how it should come across; and 3) Delegate: Bring on people to help you tell the story (i.e., freelance writers, social media marketers, etc.).
• Kyle’s book, The Story Engine, is a busy entrepreneur’s guide to content strategy and brad storytelling without spending all day writing.
• Kyle prefers frameworks because they organize thoughts and ideas. He prefers a framework that combines The Hero’s Journey storytelling formula with The Buyer’s Journey, which maps out what customers are thinking and key questions that need to be answered before they make a purchase from you.
• The Hero’s Journey: An older, wiser person nudges a hero along on an adventure. They depart for the adventure, only to face various obstacles and approach the big enemy. They feel like they may not be able to overcome such problems. However, during the darkest moment, the hero finds a treasure, secret, or tool to help them solve a problem that they once saw as impossible. As soon as they find this, they get results and return home wiser and stronger than before.
• The Buyer’s Journey: Is there a problem? Yes. Learn more about the problem. Make changes and seek help because you are in crisis. Then, you are open to making a purchase. You find your treasure, such as your purpose - an intense focus on your audience.
• Three stages of identifying and understanding customers: 1) Know: They need to know who you are; 2) Like: They need to like you compared to your competition; and 3) Trust: They need to trust that you can get the results.
• Don’t focus only on demographics when it comes to customers. Address their mindset, as well. They may not even know a problem exists, so you need to provide them with valuable content. Once they aware, they can do research and find options. Then, they solve a problem, especially if they have some knowledge and education related to it. They trust themselves to get results.
• Create content for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Know Stage: Use short content, social media posts, inspirational videos, and quick tips to grab their attention and generate awareness. Like Stage: Use big, epic posts and detailed guides to educate and empower customers. Trust: Use Webinars and success stories that focus on the customer as the hero.
• Increase leads and ROI from storytelling: Create a connection with your customers.

Links: 

WP Curve

Self-Publishing School

DigitalMarketer

AdEspresso

The Story Engine book and blog

Dan Norris

The Hero’s Journey

The Buyer’s Journey

The Gut Institute

Hashimoto’s Disease

Frodo Baggins

Gandalf

Alex Turnbull and Groove HQ; Blog

iTunes Review; send screenshot of review to podcast@coschedule.com to receive a CoSchedule Care Package

Quotes by Kyle:

 “I’m a very process-oriented person. So, I love to take people through the same process over and over, and refine it and improve it over time. So, I’ve developed something I call the, ‘Scalable Storytelling Process’.”

“I love to use frameworks to really help us organize our ideas.”

“We not only need to understand the demographics of our customers, but we need to make sure that we create content for each of these different stages of the buyer’s journey.”

“We also take action on problems that we feel most empowered to solve.”

Content marketing is a highly competitive space. Every single day, nearly 60 million blog posts are published and five billion YouTube videos are watched. Are you always trying to edge out search results to be on top? Discover how to reframe your mindset when it comes to content marketing.

Today, we’re talking to Garrett Moon, CoSchedule CEO, about how to handle such competition when it comes to content marketing and his new book, 10X Marketing Formula: Your Blueprint for Creating Competition-Free Content That Stands Out and Gets Results. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Marketers are responsible for bringing in leads, sales, people - big tasks - to support core business metrics. Garrett’s book describes taking the formula, process, tips and tricks, and things that work and don’t for CoSchedule and making them available to anybody to use and implement in their business and marketing process.
• Gartner’s Hype Cycle: How new technology is adopted. When content marketing took shape a few years back, all of a sudden, everyone is adopting it and reworking their marketing teams, creating content, doing blogging, building email lists, and other tasks. Content marketing made a lot of promises to us.
• Now, Garrett believes we are entering the trough of disillusionment. We adopted content marketing, but what about those big promises that were made? What about the results? Why are you not getting the results your were promised?
• How do marketing teams provide business value? Content marketing need to be reinvented.
• Garrett describes the Me Too epidemic in marketing. There is so much free content online where pieces of strategies, tactics, and other items are copied and pasted. However, it does not create an entire picture or blueprint.
• The goal is to create a framework from start to finish process on how to find something unique to your business that only you can do and be successful with. Something that stands out and gets results.
• Creating Competition-Free Content: Not only your business and products is in competition, but your marketing is in competition with other marketing. Find a way to break past that barrier created by competitors.
• The book, Blue Ocean Strategy, refers to the Bloody Red Ocean, which is full of competition and where businesses are fighting each other to stand out - they’re at war with each other. However, the Blue Ocean is wide-open and uncontested. Your free to swim around and move about because you have successfully been able to differentiate yourself from the competition.
• To differentiate your content marketing, focus on your topics, how you create content, and how to connect that content and share it with your customers.
• 10X reference: look at what you are doing and ask if what you are doing will help your team multiply results, including increasing sales leads and the number of visitors to your Website.
• Marketing teams needs to focus on 10x growth rather than increments of 10 percent improvements. Marketing teams are designed to produce results, not worry about risks.
• Agile Manifesto: focuses on how software development could be better. A powerful way to cause engineers to rethink and reframe what they’re doing.
• 10X Manifesto: focuses on how so much of marketing is about mindset when it comes to how we do and approach things.
• Results or Die: 10X marketers work in a results or die oriented business, not 10 percenters allowed. Many think of marketing as a process for things they do - marketing is the blog, social media channels, conference booth, etc. There’s all these deliverables that a marketing team creates and hands off to others, such as the sales and support teams. Marketers are not here to produce Web ads or build a Website. They’re here to help produce business results and help grow companies.
• 10X marketers understand that growth requires failure, strength is in progress, not perfection. Teams that embrace failure (fail fast) understand that it is not about failure but acknowledging imperfection.
• Marketing comes with assumptions: assume methods used to get the message out will work; assume there’s the right mix of email ads; assume messages are right; assume the timeline is correct. Ever realize how much you are guessing?
• The problem is in the marketing plan. It becomes a risk-removal tool that leads to pointing fingers and placing blame on others. Instead of a plan, start with a goal.
• To start down the 10X marketing path, list what work you did this week. Are these 10X or 10 percent activities? Do any of these activities have the ability or potential, in a short period of time, to multiply results by 10X?

Links: 

CoSchedule; Garrett Moon; 10X Marketing Formula book

Gartner’s Hype Cycle

Blue Ocean Strategy  

Agile Manifesto

SpaceX; Elon Musk

Quotes by Garrett: 

“Everyone was really excited about it (content marketing). There was a lot of energy. A lot of hype behind it, and a lot of big promises that content marketing made to all of us.”

“If we’re going to really double down. If we’re really going to continue doing this, how do we really make it sing? How do we really make it pay for itself and become a true part of our results?”

“For us (CoSchedule as a start-up), it was results or die.”

“Once teams start looking at what they’re doing, how their processes are built, one thing they tend to find is that much of what they’re doing is based on mitigating risk vs. generating results.”