[A conversation with ...] Robert Rose - about content marketing, content marketing and... content marketing ;).

Karine: Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Marketing Leaders. Today I’m welcoming Robert Rose. If you are in content marketing, all of you know for sure Robert. But for those who might not fully, please Robert, can you tell us more about yourself and how you came to content marketing? 

Robert Rose: Well I have been in marketing for a long time. I'm old, I have gray hair and so and so I've been doing it for about twenty-five years now and really started my career in television where I was on the creative side for a little while and then got into the marketing side pretty quickly and spent my time in the late 90s and early 2000s working with a lot of dotcoms and startups and that whole thing. And then I became the CMO of a software company here in Los Angeles and started a new thing that I wanted to try based on my experience in the entertainment business, which was: We were competing with really big companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, and we were a small little startup company. And I thought to myself, we can be deeper and more knowledgeable and more expert than they can be because we'll never beat them when it comes to media spend or how much our brand is worth and all of that. So I hired designers and writers and basically turned our little marketing department into a media company and it worked. We started to grow really quickly and did very well. 

And then I met this guy Joe Pulizzi when I was out on the speaking circuit telling my story about what I had done. With this startup company, I knew that I was doing something different. I didn't know that it really had a name. So when I met Joe, he and I sort of came together around this idea, content marketing. Joe already had written his first book and was starting this thing called the Content Marketing Institute. And he asked me if I wanted to partner with him on that. And so I did. And we spent the next six years building what would become the Content Marketing Institute and really evangelizing this whole idea of really acting like a media company and building media strategies as marketing. And that's what I did for six and a half years. And now I'm on my own. And I really spend a lot of time consulting with brands all over the world, including in France, and helping them figure out marketing, digital marketing, and mostly how content marketing really works. And along the way, I've written a couple of books and I host a podcast and all that kind of fun stuff.

Karine: Thank you, Robert! I didn't know the story about Joe. There is really a lot of consistency in your background. That’s amazing. Thank you so much for this introduction. And since you're starting with this, that was part of my question and I kept it to the end but I'm going to ask it right now: For the past years, the main mantra was around this idea that brands should be turned into media companies. OK, but considering how media companies are doing, you know, economically and the way they're managing their “digital switch” ( transformation digital) it’s not very inspiring don’t you think? How should we understand this whole idea of “brands are turned into media companies”.

Robert Rose: Well in fact it's exactly the fact that media companies aren't doing well or as well, that we need to take this opportunity to compete. And what I mean by that is that what we can see happening in the marketplace is that direct access to our customers is an all-important thing. You know, especially with what's gone on the last 18 months with lockdown and covid and everything. Having a direct relationship with our audiences, our customers is more important than it's ever been. And we can see this in retail with the drive to e-commerce, the drive to direct to consumers. We can see it and be to be with the closer, more human relationships that we're trying to develop with customers there. And so if we buy that, if we accept that, if we accept the idea that getting closer to our customers is more important than ever, well, then the opportunity becomes, how do you do that? And the way that we do that is by delivering value through content thought, leadership, entertainment, inspiration, whatever sort of value we can deliver through creating original content is a valuable piece of how we develop a closer relationship with that customer.

You can see that happening at the biggest scales where we see companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Facebook and Apple, all of them getting into the content business, buying media companies, becoming having media arms. And the reason they're doing that is that:  “if I have a direct line into your entertainment channel, into your education channel, into whatever you value content-wise, well, then I have a much better and direct relationship with you”. 

So at the smaller level, this doesn't mean that we duplicate the media company, business model. What it means is, is that we treat content and the operation of content in the same way that a media company does for the goal of getting to a better and more direct relationship with our customers so that we don't have to go rent it from a TV network or rent it from radio or rent it in a magazine ad or rent it on a banner ad or digital marketing on some other site. We get to control that relationship and we get to make a better relationship with our customers. That's the argument for it. 

To your point, the media business model is really on shaky ground. That's why we see media companies really getting into the product business. We see them launching new products and launching merchandising and launching ways to monetize their media because it's becoming increasingly hard to do so. So when we see those media companies buying and launching product divisions, we go, yeah, that's, of course, that makes sense. Well, the same holds true for us as product companies as well. It's all about the relationship with the customer.

Karine: Other questions related to this topic: We notice that brands that are starting a content marketing strategy, the push that's going to make them go from unknown to known is often made by a media because at some point the journalist or media is going to say: “Oh gosh, you did this great content there. I'm going to interview you for a special content I'm currently writing on”. Rand Fishkin and the way Moz truly started with the Newsweek magazine’s interview is an example but both you and Joe in your books shared several examples of this too.  So is that the way now the relationship between a brand and media should work?

Robert Rose: For sure! It can, absolutely. So you have classic marketing between owned, earned, and paid media: owned media is our own website, our resource center, our magazine, our blog, our email newsletter. We have earned media, which is what you're talking about here, getting reporters and others to write about us. And then there's a paid media where we pay for the privilege of getting in front of an audience. And all of those things are totally valid. They're absolutely valid strategies. And our job as a marketer is to mix those things right, to mix those things up into the right strategy. One of the great examples of that is Monster.com. They're a big job board here in the US and I guess around the world as well, but mostly here in the US. And what they discovered was by creating this valuable resource center, teaching candidates how to get a better job, teaching candidates how to update their LinkedIn profile, how to do interviews, you know, all basically best practices of how to get a job. What they found was that they were getting all this data and they started to be able to develop original research about, you know, who was the what? What are the most popular jobs these days? What are kids really interested in becoming employed by? And that original research they put out, big magazines and newspapers wanted to cover that research because that's a great story. And so just by creating content, they start developing enough research and data to develop a research product that mainstream media wants to cover and write about them. That’s a great sort of way of thinking about using our owned media property to generate great earned media. And then on top of that, they actually have a little bit of an advertising budget to promote the resource center. So they're starting to mix all these things up to say here's how we can use all of this content generating data to get our voice out into the world and, yes, develop a much better relationship with our customers.

Karine Abbou: Yeah, basically all this is possible because at some point a brand decided to start content on its own and under its own brand. It cannot happen if you don't start at some point.

Robert Rose: Yeah, exactly right. You have to start.

Karine Abbou: About that, I was really surprised to still hear a lot of business owners or marketers in France, saying: “Yeah content marketing can work for some but it doesn’t work in B2B. I am selling. In my industry, selling airplanes, wheels, and stuff. It doesn't work this way. I don't do content marketing because why do you want to write about it? Even if I find something interesting to write about, it won’t be interesting for anybody anyway”. You still have a bunch of people thinking like this.

Robert Rose: Well I'll tell you, one of my favorite B2B campaigns of all time comes from L'Oreal who created a B2B platform for small salons. And it was this wonderful blog and resource center that helps small salons understand how to run better, basically how to manage their small salons better. And the philosophy was, if we can help these small salons manage their business better, well, more small salons will succeed and they'll buy more of our product, which worked. Now, sadly, and it's interesting, I had the chance to talk with L'Oreal about this. The person who ran that program ended up leaving the company. And so the program sort of fell, fell away after that person left. But there you know, they're thinking about resurrecting those kinds of programs again.

Karine Abbou: So. Precisely that’s another point. One of the questions lots of people asked is: “how do you get people to consistently buy into content marketing and especially the sales department?”. How do you manage for your content marketing program not to collapse once the guy who launched it leaves the company? That's a challenge. This is such a challenge.

Robert Rose: It's a challenge everywhere.

Karine Abbou: One of the questions I’ve been asked to ask you was: Does Robert Rose have concrete tips, advice, things that we could really mean to help us do the same because it is so hard. And as you just explained, sometimes, once the person who's carrying the burden of all these leaves, everything stops. So it means that in a way the company didn't really buy into it. Right. It means that content marketing was not really a “mindset” within the company.

Robert Rose: Yeah, that's true. But that's you know, that's a bigger topic than we've definitely got time for today, which is the culture of people leaving and strategies falling because people leave because that happens at marketing. That happens full stop. Right. I mean, they're a very famous example of that is Coca-Cola, you know, shook up the industry by changing their whole website presence to be what they called the hundred years of Coca-Cola. And it was a story, it was beautiful and it was videos and this whole experience. They changed their whole corporate website to be around that idea. And then the people that created that whole idea left and they went right back into sort of bland, boring old corporate website again. So that happens at the marketing level and, you know, we are not paid enough to solve that problem. LOL!! Back to content marketing, you know, the key in selling it is not the content. It's that relationship that we build with audiences. And what I mean by that is that there are a number of ways that we can create value with content marketing as an approach. Some of them have to do with sales. Some of them have to do with, like I just said, getting earned media coverage. Right.

Monster.com was a great example of the content marketing team really selling their process into the PR and CALM's team because they were giving them amazing things to issue press releases on instead of like “we hired somebody new. It's awesome. Isn't it great that we hired a new VP?” Nobody wants to cover that! Instead, they're giving them original research that says you can go sell that to a magazine and get better media coverage on our company for sales. 

There's a couple of things. One is you can certainly generate more leads. And that's always one of the biggest arguments, right? You know, you go out and you educate people and you help the company be found because all this wonderful content you're creating is creating more organic traffic that actually pulls those people in and it creates more leads for the business. Maybe that's true. 

The more important thing is that when we create content marketing and start to create a process for sales, what we start to do is differentiate ourselves in the way that we're helping that customer make a decision, whether that's education, whether that's inspiration, whether that's entertainment in some cases. 

But let's just stick with sales for a minute. And it's usually education and some sort of guidance. For example, I always love to use this, this is an example of a B2B software company. They're called Front Line Research. They're a software company. And what they did was they made ERP software, like the most boring software you can think of, like just operational. You hire how to hire people and put them into the system and Paychex and all that stuff for schools, it's very, very niche software. So it's only operational software for schools, very B2B, very sales driven, very product-driven. Well, they created this content marketing program that basically says “We're going to teach these operators in schools how to do their job better, how to be better operators, how to be better managers, how to hire better teachers, how to hire, how to run their operations better”. They are just teaching them. 

What they discovered was that it was so much better for those salespeople to call up the schools that they wanted to sell into and not go “hey, I've got a product you should buy today”, but instead said “hey, I've got something you should learn and you should actually get engaged with” and so, start selling this idea of education. 

Such an approach got those people on the phone where they could be delivered with interesting information: “This is wonderful! I'm getting educated”. And then when they call back we can tell them “hey! have you been educated on this stuff yet? Would you like to have a demo of this software that we have and blah, blah, blah?” It's a much, much more open audience because they've been engaged, they've been invited in, they've been educated. And what they found is that it increased their lead generation by 30%. That's the kind of program to sell this in. 

Now, the key and the biggest mistake that marketers will make is overpromising, in other words, saying: ”yeah, this is going to start generating leads immediately”. It's not if we build a blog or a resource center, it's going to take months, maybe even a year or so before we start building that momentum with an audience that says we've got something that's really good. So it takes time.

When a company comes to me and says: “tell me how content marketing is going to make sense in the first month”. My answer is always:  “It's not. You might as well just buy more ads”. 

But if you say, how is this content marketing program going to succeed in eight months, nine months, a year, 18 months? Now we can start talking because now what we're doing is - and we need to remember this when we build content marketing - we're building another product. We're building another service to our audiences with the sole purpose of building a direct and better relationship with them. So the business case you're making is not a better, more efficient campaign, the cheapest campaign, less expensive, none of that is true. 

Content marketing is more expensive and it takes longer. But if we invest in it at least a little bit, it doesn't have to be all of our marketing budgets. It could be a tiny piece of it. But if we invest it in a long-term investment, it will pay dividends, CEO dividends, lead generation dividends, it will produce better customers that spend more. All of these things are case studies that exist and that could be used as examples in whatever industry you're in. But that's the real key: it's a long-term investment that we need to be doing. And quite frankly, I'm sure almost everybody out there can point to competitors who are doing it.

Karine Abbou: I think I have a good example of that. I recently worked in a niche and highly competitive industry and I discovered from the competitive research I've made that none of them were doing content marketing. Absolutely none of them. It's a regulated industry. I was really surprised. So I dug deeper and I understood why:  They all wanted their marketing budget to generate leads starting day 1. So the only option was Google (or Facebook Ads). So for such positioning could we consider some approach like this: Ok, my marketing budget is $1,500 per month. I want lead starting day #1. I cannot afford to wait six months. So here is what we are gonna do: We’re gonna spend $1,300 on ads and save the remaining $200 to create X or Y content. Would that be doable theoretically? That said, it’s clear that we have to be super, super, super smart and I don't know, even genius to find the small niche that with only two hundred dollars per month will help us create content that could be transformed and be seen as a proof of concept within the next six months. Don’t you think?

Robert Rose: Yes, it’s just a function of time. As I always say, our job as marketers is to manage a portfolio. You know, in the old days when I was you know when I didn't have gray hair, we used to call it the marketing mix. We called it: “ how are we mixing up our media strategies and our creative strategies in a way that produces the best results for the least amount of spend?”.  That's all. That's what we do. And so today, I would argue with as many places as we can put money because in the old days, there were only a few places to put money. You could put, you know, print ads, television ads, radio ads or sometimes fax machines with fax marketing. That was it. 

But today there's everything. There are blogs, there are webinars, there's e-commerce, there are search ads, there are wikis, there are social media, there are all these things where we can put our money. 

And so we're portfolio managers trying to figure out how to divvy up our budget among the things that we have to divvy it up against. And what I find is that content marketing should be a piece of that pie. 

Now, to determine how big a piece of that pie it is is really a business decision and a strategic decision that you make with your executive team. 

So if it's a really small piece, let's plot it out. It's just going to take its function of time. So if I only get five percent of my marketing budget to put toward content marketing, fantastic, it's going to take 20 times as long as I'm making that up. Obviously, I don't know the exact numbers, but it's going to take a lot longer than if I have more money or more time to spend on it. Because why? It’s just going to take longer to build the audience. It's just like if I launch a product as a business, but I only put five percent of our product development budget in it. What's the likelihood of time that that product is going to be successful, which may or may not be once it finds its customer base? But it's going to take time because I don't have the budget to market it and I don't have the budget to distribute it, and I don't have the budget to focus on product development. 

So just like any product, content marketing requires time, budget, and effort. And if you get two of those things, great, if you get one of those things, great. But ultimately, it’s just a function of time. So, yes, I think you can do it for free if you're willing to put in the hours, the time, and the effort to do it. But obviously, having more money helps to speed things along.

Karine Abbou: OK so here is one idea I had that might be considered as a solution: would it be considered conceivable for a strategy to say: “OK, we're in a very competitive industry, we're probably a little bit late because so far we did only Google ads, Facebook ads, and that was it. Now we want to give content but, we’re already “late”. Lots of people already either have a blog and they're blogging for so long. They have a podcast and they have had a podcast for a long time. So the idea would be to take a little portion of our resources and invest, for example, quarterlies in a nice piece of content, like a research industry report or ranking in our industry, and we will do one piece of content that would be downloaded from our website. And that's going to be it for now. Is it a good way? Because today in 2021, it’s not as black or white as a few years ago. Most of the time people want to do content, but they don't want to spend time doing something in the long run for the next six months, every day a little bit. They're not ready for that. They don't have the time for that. They don't have the money for that. But they're not against saying, OK, we can give it a try. I'm going to take a small amount of money paid for this, I don't know, journalist or writer or whatever to do this type of content. And let's see if it brings some leads. 

Robert Rose: It's brilliant, it's absolutely brilliant. I love that as a way to start. OK, here's the thing. When we started it at Content Marketing Institute, it was three of us. We were 3 people doing all this stuff. What we did was we said, look, we're not going to have the bandwidth to do a lot of content every day.  We just don't have time in the day, nor do we all have to pay rent and we all have to, you know, go do things to put dinner on the table. So how do we do that? The thing that we came up with was we said we'll do a research study. We did. And it's today, it's our biggest piece. It's the big content marketing research that we've done for the last 11 years. The very first one was just a few hundred people. I mean, we literally emailed them ourselves, got them to fill out the survey, et cetera. The key is that we asked enough questions. We made the project big enough so that it would feed our content on a monthly basis. And ultimately it became a weekly basis pretty quick so that we could say here's one research project. But every week we're going to have a blog post featuring one piece of it. Just one. You know, maybe there were twenty-five questions in the research. So that gave us at least twenty-five blog posts because we could talk about the results of each question in a blog post and feature the research and build our audience that way. And it became one week per blog post that we announced the research. Now the funny thing is we took that research and then we also segmented it by industry. So that gave us enough blog posts to say here's what tech companies do versus manufacturers do and give that. So those twenty-five questions now become 50 blog posts. And you see where I'm going with this. We were just clever in the way that we segmented the research to say it can give you so much material for your content.

Karine Abbou: Awesome! No, let's say, for example, you add to this, I would say a newsletter with a little content curated nicely and smartly, and then you're done. Have you’ve started something relevant? No.

Robert Rose: Yeah, exactly.

Karine Abbou: I have other questions related to the lack of attention. This is the war of attention and France is no exception. In France, we noticed that the answer to the attention crisis could be what has been called “slow content”. It’s becoming sort of a massive trend. What are your insights about this? Is it relevant? Is it not a good trend? Is it something we should pursue? 

Robert Rose: Well, the crisis with attention is often framed in a way that says we have to grab attention and that's hard in today's world because there's so much competition for attention. That's usually the way it's framed. The argument is framed that we need to be somehow more controversial, more provocative, more basically whatever that more is, you know, more click Baity. We have to somehow grab the attention of people because there's so much washing over there. You know, they're their streams that you have to stand out. And there's an element of truth to that. But it's really dangerous. It's a really dangerous game to play because grabbing attention is not terribly difficult. I can get somebody's attention. 

Holding someone's attention is really important. That's the real key. And once you have someone's attention-holding it so that they want to continue their journey with you and continue more and more, you know, whatever that next best experience you want them to have, that's where the magic really happens. 

So is that a function of slow content? Maybe I would rather sort of frame it up and say this is just a really good argument, that once you get someone to your website or once you get someone to your blog or once you get someone to your webinar, the content needs to be really good and you need to be really careful and considered about how you're treating the people who spend time with you. 

I was working with a client just a couple of weeks ago where they said, you know, we target small businesses and all we need them to do is raise their hand and say, I'm interested in talking with someone. And so because once we get him on the phone with a salesperson, we can pretty much close him. And I said, OK, that's fine. And they said, so the content doesn't need to be very good, you know if it's spelled right and if and it's but what we really need is like clickbaity stuff to make people go what, and click on it and raise their hands. So really provocative questions are real. And I said, well, what's your close rate on that? And we started to look at the numbers and as they started to add more and more clickbaity things there, the tensions start. Yeah, they did get more people to raise their hands, but the conversion rates started to fall and fall and fall and fall because people would realize once they got somebody on the phone, there was nothing there. It was all a vacuum of nothing. And so you can fool people once by grabbing their attention and getting them to come to your website, but you won't fool them again. 

So my advice is: make that first meeting count, make that first click count when they get to your content, deliver way more value than you promised. You may attract fewer people, but the ones you get will stick around and stay. So is that slow content? I don't know. Maybe...

Karine Abbou: I understand and I fully agree. But the next question could then be how do we prevent ourselves from going into a sort of marathon for producing more and more and more and more content and better quality? Because at some point it's not going anywhere. And I. Because if everybody does that in your industry (and at some point, you can think that they will). Maybe to start, you were in a niche and it was relevant. But the niche is not a niche anymore. And so you're finding yourself running with other people, into the content creation even more and more and more and trying to get even better quality to get the retention that we so much want to get. And at some point after a few years, we did everything perfectly, and then we're stuck again. So how is it going to end?

Robert Rose: Well, there I would say welcome to marketing!! 

This is why we get paid the big bucks, right? You know, here's the thing: First of all, nothing's guaranteed to succeed. You know, just as many great content marketing efforts fail as succeed. There's an element of all the things that we talked about, that whole mix of things that we talked about, that not only play into marketing like, but there's also some amazing marketing campaigns that fail because they just never get traction. Or there's some that work for a while, but then, quite frankly, kind of fizzle out. And then there's some that actually take a long time, a slow burn. But once they get going, boy, you can't stop them. And we have everything in between. 

So this is we're setting up a really good measurement system and a really good level of insight into what's really going on, not only with your own marketing but with your industry is a really important thing. 

A great example of this. When HubSpot started, what they were talking about couldn't have been more niche. What they were talking about was this whole idea of inbound marketing - all of that stuff existed. Everything that was in inbound marketing already existed, it was already out there: marketing automation, building landing pages, building SEO strategies, all that stuff. All they did was package it up and call it who it's new: inbound marketing. And it worked. It worked fantastically well. Everybody went. Yes, inbound marketing. This is great. There's a book. There's a website. I can go learn about this stuff. And all they were doing was packaging all the digital marketing stuff that we were all doing in a really clever way, very niche, very focused on digital marketing in the early-mid two thousand and did it very well. 

Now, all of a sudden it becomes big, right? It becomes a big thing. It's not a niche anymore. Everybody wants to talk about it. Well, what they did was they sort of doubled down and said, yeah, it's not only for small businesses, it's for big businesses, too. It's for everybody. And they expanded the definition of inbound to include CRM and sales and all these things that they do. And they sort of doubled down on the concept and redefined it so we can do those same things, too. If we find the ways that we develop a niche audience, we can either broaden the audience, broaden the topic or go even further: This is getting too wide. We're going to focus only on one vertical or we're only going to focus in here because that will differentiate us. Does that make sense?

Karine Abbou: Yes, it does very much. Permission marketing. Seth Godin. He was the first one talking about those things and it ended up being something packaged into “Inbound marketing” which is a very good marketing concept to promote and sell the technology. A great technology. That's probably the conclusion. Another question, related to what you just said: In France, lots of people reach out to me to say, OK, here when we're selling content marketing successfully, usually the only content our customers are ok to create is content about the “product”. They’re buying it but only if it’s content about their products and services. That's it. So some people started to call it “product content”. And they basically say: that's the only thing we succeed to sell because that's the only thing that works. I said, OK, yeah, but then it means that you're producing content focusing on the bottom of the funnel, not the top of it. And the answer is: “Yes! Other types of content are the whole thing with storytelling and things and people don't care about those stuff, storytelling, and things, it's too much of money invested for something we cannot truly measure”. 

So it's sort of shutting down the industry in some ways because everybody's doing the same thing and nothing else is really tried unless, of course, for global brands with huge marketing budgets. But my focus here is on small businesses and smaller marketing teams. It’s a pity, no? What are your concrete advice or tips to our marketing colleagues that are struggling, selling their services for all types of content, including storytelling ones?

Robert Rose: Well. You know. This is a challenge we have here in the US as well. And which is: it's very easy for businesses to say we just need a better brochure. We just need a better product marketing sheet. We just need better product content. Right. And we need to be more clever about the way that we describe our products. We need to have more content about our products and we have to have more things about this. 

One of the trends that we definitely have observed is (and maybe this will be something that will occur sort of you can look forward to in France): businesses here in the US sort of say: OK, we kind of get this content marketing thing. We'll hire some people and they'll hire a couple of people to do it. Then what happened was (and this has been a trend over the last three to five years), they go to these content people and tell them: “you’re good at creating content. You should do all the content. You should do all of our marketing content, our power points, our product content. You should do all of it”. 

And so content marketing people are now responsible not just for great content marketing, but they're responsible for doing all the product content as well. 

And most of them are kind of overwhelmed with demand they don’t really know how to handle because they just don’t have those types of skills. They answered things like: “I'm not a copywriter, I'm a journalist”. Or “I've never written a marketing copy before. I don't know how to do that”. 

So they can't keep up with the demand. 

That’s the big problem that's happening here in the US right now: business is demanding more and more and more content and it's imbalanced product content versus content marketing. And the team's answer: we just can't keep up.

So what we like to say is that the most common way to figure that out is to first understand what's really working. In most cases, when you really understand what's really working, when you actually go out and measure what's getting downloaded more, what's getting more engagement, what's holding the attention of our consumer more, it's usually not the product content. It's not the stuff that's describing the value of our service or how awesome we are. Our brand content. 

We usually notice that the stuff that's getting downloaded, the stuff that's getting consumed, the stuff that's holding our consumers' attention is usually the “thought leadership content”. It's usually the entertaining stuff. It's usually content marketing. 

Once you notice that, for sure you’ll always have someone in the team saying: “Ok, it's holding their attention, but they're not turning into sales”. This means in a way: this content doesn’t help our bottom line.

And the answer to that is: “Well, they're not turning into sales because we haven't connected those two things yet. All we're doing is going by that and putting a bunch of stuff over here and going black and putting a bunch of stuff over there”. We want to do more of that. Well, why don't we get better and cleverer and connect those two things so that we have a strategy around how we're mixing those things together instead of just operating in silos, instead of just operating separately from one another? Oh, here's your sales staff. Oh, here's your marketing stuff. Oh, here's your content marketing stuff and not connecting those three things. And we can be much better at understanding our buyer's journey and how they go through things where they need to get educated and then where they need to get like where we want to tease up. You know, here's a great webinar that's going to educate you on this one particular thing. And at the end of the webinar, by the way, if you want to download our product one, here it is. Here's our product marketing. All those kinds of things just have to be much better integrated as a way to sell what it is we want to do instead of looking at it as either this or that. That makes sense.

Karine Abbou: Yes, it does. Definitely. I wish we could have more time to do almost a live case study, like, taking an example. Well… maybe you’ll come back for a session like this?

Robert Rose: Of course!! I'll always come back. You know this.

Karine Abbou: Thank you, Robert!. It does make complete sense. But I was wondering when you were saying that: “in order to do that, marketers should really need to do a great job at first deciding on their mission statement of what they are going to talk...

Robert Rose: Well, that's exactly right.

Karine Abbou: All those links.

Robert Rose: Between how they're going to measure success. Right. I mean, getting an alignment. I just wrote a post on this. The most important thing a marketer can do is get with their senior management sales, get everybody together and go, “what does success look like?” What are we? Let's get a shared understanding of what success really looks like because then we can develop a measurement plan and the measurement plan then can say “this is how we want to mix up our content to reach those measurement goals”.

Karine Abbou: OK, I like that very much. Very much. Last question and then we're ending with the funny part of questions and quotes and stuff. It's about storytelling, OK? We're struggling so much in France, having a clear vision of what is storytelling. I think everybody understands. The problem is “how do we implement storytelling in our common strategy and in which way is it going to help ourselves?” Here is what some people think: I’m not so sure that working on my brand DNA, my story, where I'm coming from, who I really am as a brand, are really things that are interesting to our customers. Unless you’re Channel or Cartier (in case maybe when a woman buys a Chanel outfit it might be because she enjoyed all the Chanel Story behind it), how could storytelling in that sense: talking about yourself, your story, your why, your DNA, etc. really helps? Between you and me, do customers really care about that stuff?

Robert Rose: No, and so and here's the secret: one, it's probably more important for a small business that isn't Cartier, Chanel, or Louis Vuitton to actually do storytelling than it is for those brands because they are well known and they have already a mental sort of image in consumers heads about what they do. So for those that are unknown or for those that have a very much smaller customer base, it's even more important. The key is understanding the difference. 

Now, I'm hoping this translates because it's the US or an English punctuation thing, but it's understanding the difference between the brand story and the brand's possessive stories. 

So the brand story is the one we almost always focus on, why we exist, what our brand is, what our unique value proposition is, who we are, what our purpose in the world is, and all that stuff. And every small business should have that. Every small business should know its brand story. But such a brand story is only important in capturing the values that we have as a company, as a brand, that what we want to instill into the world, the things that we want to write. 

Nike is a great example. So Nike is all about the athlete and athletics. Everything Nike does is about the athlete, right? That's their brand. We're here to support the athlete. That's what we do. The brand’s stories that come out of that, those are the stories that we want to tell, the key difference is, that’s where we want to introduce classic storytelling techniques like, you know, “our villain and the adventures and telling the story of our customers”. That's where the customer becomes the hero in the brand's stories. 

Our customers are the hero. That’s why we tell their stories through the lens of our brand. That's the difference. Great example. And so the difference is that in the brand story, everything is beautiful, wonderful. We live in peace and harmony and we all have unicorns and rainbows. And it's a gorgeous thing. And that's our brand. The brand stories are filled with tension and struggle. And, you know, how do we overcome challenges and all of those things? Those are the stories that we want to tell. So just using the Nike example: We're about celebrating the athlete. Everything about athleticism is beautiful. It's wonderful. Athletes are all beautiful. And if you see their brand and their website imagery and all, that's perfect. But then the stories that they tell, things like Colin Kaepernick and kneeling for the flag and the national anthem here in the US, all that tension and challenge, those are the stories that they tell. That's where we should focus. Our blog posts and our storytelling efforts are on the brand’s stories. But we can only do that once we really understand our brand story. Hope that makes sense.

Karine Abbou: Yes, it does. When it comes to storytelling I often take the story of the Plumber...The plumber doesn't need to focus on why he became a plumber, why he did that, how we get that the story of the plumber itself is not really relevant except to understand how he's going to sell his stuff. And that's not something that's going to sell properly. But stories of people that have been helped by the plumber, for example, and the superheat, I don't know, very big, very warm summer with kids at home during covid or whatever. So remember that we've come into this house and fixed the plumbing issue. The plumber could tell a story where he definitely was the “life’s saver”. That could be sort of a story that would be part of storytelling. For example right?

Robert Rose: Exactly, exactly. It's how they overcame some challenge, some resistance, you know, defeated some villain to actually become better. And our brand, our product, our service was a mentor or an educator in that process. And so how did my customer become better? That's the story that I want to tell. And I can think of all kinds of ways that I can do that if I've got a great brand story to start with.

Karine Abbou: OK, that makes sense. And that's great. So the next conference we're doing with you, we're focusing only on storytelling and methodology for storytelling.

Robert Rose: That's my favorite topic.

Karine Abbou: Yeah, I know!! We’ll save it for the next interview ;). So to finish just in a fun way, here are my “traditional questions”: what is marketing? What is a marketing leader? And related to that for you, what is the very best book everybody should read?

Robert Rose: Look, I'm a very unashamed fanboy of the Harvard Business School, so a lot of the books that I recommend come out of that business school. But Peter Drucker's book on management, to me, covers both bases. It covers both how to be a marketing leader and a business leader. And I think it's the one book that every single marketing student of marketing should have. I can put it back there on my shelf. So it's a book I have handy at all times. It's probably the best business book I've ever read.

Karine Abbou: He was amazing. Yeah. He anticipated many things that happened today. Regarding France, just a few questions because I know you worked a lot with France, so you for sure have some favorite brands. Can you give us three of them?

Robert Rose: Yes I do. I mean I have many, many, many favorite brands in France. You know, me and wine … so I would say Chateau Margaux is my go-to. Yeah!! Does that count?

Karine Abbou: That absolutely counts.

Robert Rose: And Cartier is my other favorite French brand. And then there's a coffee brand called Coffee. I will mispronounce this. So my apologies. Coffee is a French coffee that you can get here in the US. It's expensive coffee but it's lovely wonderful French coffee.

Karine Abbou: Robert, for anyone who’d like to reach out where can they found you?

Robert Rose: My little home on the World Wide Web is a place called Content Advisory Net. That's my consulting firm and where I blog and those sorts of things. And of course, I always blog a lot on Content Marketing Institute blogs specifically about content marketing, obviously. And then, yes, my podcast with my friend Joe is called This Old Marketing.