The Transcript

How the Integration of Content and Commerce Creates a Winning Difference

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Brian Clark: Hey, Rainmakers. Welcome to another episode of the show designed for all you digital entrepreneurs out there. I’m Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media.

Today, we’ve got another very special guest, and hopefully this turns out to be the perfect follow-up episode to last week’s show. Let me briefly introduce him before we get into what that was all about. Robert Rose, many of you may know him. He is one of the other big personas over at Content Marketing Institute along with the ineffable Joe Pulizzi. Ineffable — you think he’d like that one, Robert?

Robert Rose: I think it depends on how you spell ineffable.

Brian Clark: I didn’t even catch that. Very nice. Very quick. You Californians — you ve got to look out for them.

Anyway, he’s the chief strategy officer over at the Content Marketing Institute. He’s also the co-host on This Old Marketing Podcast with Joe. He’s a senior contributing consultant for Digital Clarity Group. In particular, we’re going to talk about Robert’s second book today, which is called Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing. We may touch a little bit on Joe Pulizzi’s upcoming book, Content Inc.

Of course we will all be in Cleveland, wonderful Cleveland, in September for the big show, Content Marketing World, the biggest show. Robert, thank you so much for joining me.

Robert Rose: Thank you, Brian. This is super fun. I’m super-happy to be here.

Brian Clark: A little behind the scenes here — I hit Robert up on a Friday afternoon. This show will be out on a Thursday, and we record on Monday, so lots of warning, right? You just sit around basically waiting for podcast interview requests?

Robert Rose: When Brian Clark calls, you jump. That’s the rule that all marketers should have.

Brian Clark: Thanks. Check. Mail.

Robert Rose: You got it.

The Audience-First Model That s Becoming Increasingly Popular among Startups and Why It Works

Brian Clark: It occurred to me on Friday, as I was revisiting last week’s show and having read Robert’s newest book, Experiences, that he was the perfect next guest. It was a long shot, actually, despite what he says, that I was able to get him, and I appreciate him being here on short notice.

Quickly, for those of you who may not have caught the last episode , and also for Robert’s edification, last week we talked about this maybe new buzzword or phrase, native commerce. Robert, are you familiar with Thrillist?

Robert Rose: I am. Sure. Yeah.

Brian Clark: It’s a great story. They obviously built the audience first, had an advertising business model, and discovered that one particular advertiser, JackThreads, a clothing line for hipsters — which is a good match for Thrillist, let’s face it — they were advertising over and over and over again. Anyone with any kind of marketing background or advertising background, especially in direct marketing, if you see the same junk mail over and over again, pay attention. It’s working, because someone is spending money to keep showing up.

Thrillist basically said, Let’s look into this closer. They do the due diligence and see the revenue that’s being generated from the channel. They acquire JackThreads, and in five years, they go from $8 million in annual revenue to $100 million and become contact marketers, right? Much more lucrative model. I think that’s one of the best just dollar-to-dollar ads-versus-commerce type spends ever.

Last week’s guest was Ryan Deiss, and he explained that to me. I hadn’t actually heard that story. I said, “Okay, it’s content marketing.” He said, “No, it’s something more, because there’s such an integration between product and media in the content.” I’m sitting over here going, That’s content marketing. This is what I want to kick over to you, to begin with. I realize that he’s seeing a disconnect, because content marketing done well, that s what I think of. That’s how our business was built. You build the audience first.

That’s why I mentioned Joe’s new book, Content Inc., coming out in September. He’s basically talking about this model that is becoming more and more the norm at the startup level, which is, you start with the audience. You figure out what they want to buy, or in Thrillist’s case, you acquire what they are buying, and then you’ve got a successful business, as opposed to the old product-first model, where you build it and then you pray that someone wants to buy it.

The disconnect that I’m seeing is that the way we think about integrated product/content marketing is the way it should be done, and I think Ryan was saying, But that’s not how it’s being done. You’re doing content marketing if you write some articles for your website or you start a podcast. That doesn’t mean it’s effective content marketing. He went on and on to talk about creating experiences, like why Bass Pro Shop will never get killed by Walmart or Amazon, as the case may be.

That was when I said, “I’m taking for granted that you’re creating the right form of experience,” because let’s face it, it’s all an experience. It’s just not a good one, very often. So I’m going to kick it over to you right there.

Robert Rose: Sure. What a great team-up point. Ultimately, what we’re talking about here is really a chicken-and-egg sort of idea, right? If you’re looking at this as a startup company or as a company that has just introduced a product into the market, building that audience first is an easy perspective to have. Maybe not one that can get executed well and maybe one that’s extraordinarily difficult, depending on your product or the value you’re trying to create.

But it’s different than if you’re a business that’s been in business for 25 years or 10 years or five years, and you’ve already got a product out into the market and you’re looking to, How do we evolve our marketing to actually address this exact issue?

You’ve got a really interesting situation with JackThreads getting acquired there. We’re starting to see that more and more, where instead of trying to actually organically build something from the ground up — because there’s nothing saying that Thrillist couldn’t have said, “You know what? We could build our own JackThreads and take years to do that and duplicate the success and editorial strategy that they’ve got and build our own audience so that we don’t have to advertise there any longer, or quite frankly, we could just acquire them.”

Layering Products, Content, and Experience as a Differentiation Strategy

Robert Rose: We’re starting to see that more and more, especially from e-commerce companies, especially from those companies that have products out there that are sort of being threatened by the Amazons or big boxes of the world and where they can actually create a more compelling, integrated experience in its totality.

That doesn’t mean just an editorial experience. That could mean a physical experience. It could mean events. It could mean all manner of things that cross over the boundaries of physical and digital, but to create something that’s differentiated, that, quite frankly, an Amazon or somebody that’s competing with us and threatening with us can’t duplicate.

That’s really the value of acquiring something like JackThreads. The editorial is great. The experience itself is great. And we can layer over this idea of an e-commerce layer to it. They are not the only ones out there. This just happened with a publishing company in Australia that actually did the exact opposite. They were a publishing company that then acquired a product company to do the exact polar opposite of this, where they’re now layering products into their editorial strategy to differentiate themselves as a publisher.

We’re starting to see this real merger — Joe has talked about this for a long time — this real integration of product and media to become different types of content-driven experiences. Of course, this is what we talk about a lot in the book.

Brian Clark: You just nailed it right there: integration. Yeah, it’s an integrated process. It was a light-bulb moment for me in the sense that maybe people aren’t getting the integration, and I’m taking it for granted, the old curse of knowledge thing.

Let’s unpack this a little. If I hear what you’re saying, that it’s a different process, I agree when you’re starting as an existing company or maybe even an existing line of business, something that you know people want, and the only thing you’re being innovative about is your marketing and creating a better experience than Joe Blow, okay? To me — and of course I’m a big advocate of what we’ve done since 2006 and how we built our company — the easiest companies I’ve started were legal services and real estate brokerage services. I knew people wanted them. All I had to do was create a better experience.

If you’ve ever seen, for example, most broker or realtor marketing with the Glamour Shot on the bus-stop bench, I was like, This is shooting fish in a barrel. This was 2002, and I had, over the previous three years, figured out a lot of stuff. But to me, that wasn’t hard at all. Yet I think I hear you saying that a lot of enterprise-level companies or even mid-level or small businesses, they’re doing business. They just need to catch up to the 21st century, and they’re struggling. I found that easier than creating something new, feeding off an audience.

Why Smaller Companies Have an Advantage over Larger Companies in Creating Innovative Experiences

Robert Rose: It’s exactly right. You just nailed it. Joe and I have talked about this, where this is truly the advantage that smaller companies these days have over larger enterprises. The larger enterprises, I can tell you from my own experience that they are having a real problem unwinding the classic purpose of marketing, which of course has been to describe the value, in ever-cleverer ways, of the product or service we put into the marketplace.

They do the bus ad. They do — whatever industry they’re in — their version of the bus ad or the Sunday circular or the TV advertisement or the banner ad or the email or whatever collateral-driven approach they have. That is their purpose, and unwinding that to get to what you’re really talking about, which is, How do I create something that is beyond the product or service I’m putting into the marketplace but that adds value to the experience for the consumer?

It’s one of those things where — and you understand this better than most, honestly — How can I add value to that consumer’s life? Maybe they buy from me, and maybe they don’t. Maybe they purchase something from me down the road. Maybe they purchase something from me today. Ultimately, my goal is that I can differentiate against everybody else that’s out there with the bus ad or the circular or whatever they’re putting out there by creating a more valuable experience.

Content is a great way to do that. There are certainly others. Uber has disrupted an entire industry by simply having a different interface and a better experience into taking a car from Point A to Point B. Airbnb has created a completely disruptive experience by making it a better experience to actually go stay in a remote location.

You start to really cross a boundary, especially in businesses that have those traditional approaches. Is that marketing, or is that product development?

That’s where the big companies really struggle with this, because quite frankly, it hasn’t been the remit of marketing to do this, historically. But for startup companies, it’s everything. There is no separation between those. There are no siloes that have been built up over time, so it seems completely natural to say, “What we’re going to do is we’re going to create a better content-driven experience that differentiates us in the marketplace,” and that is your shooting fish in a barrel, because quite frankly, none of the competitors are doing it.

The Big Difference between Traditional Marketing and Content Marketing

Brian Clark: I’ve been think a lot, even before your book came out, but you said the struggle between traditional marketing and what you’re supposed to be doing now. To me, traditional marketing was a promise of an experience, and content marketing begins the experience.

Robert Rose: That s exactly it.

Brian Clark: That’s the simplest way I can put it. On the last episode, we had this real-world analogy where someone comes into a place. They’re having an experience. And then they exit through the gift shop. I love that, because think about how well certain companies — not the traditional company, but certain companies, everything from theme parks to the Bass Pro Shop or whatever the case may be — they’ve designed that entire space in this experiential mode.

I remember there was a book. Do you remember this book? Fifteen years ago I think, The Experience Economy? People were talking about this forever. I think this was very much pre-content marketing. To me, again, as a scrappy entrepreneur type as opposed to the enterprise budget, content is the best differentiator, what marketing and advertising were supposed to do. Back in the good old days where you actually could have a USP: My toothpaste has … Wait, what did Ultra Fresh have? Remember that?

Robert Rose: The stripe, right?

Brian Clark: The stripe, yeah. It’s meaningless, but it was a differentiator. I think that content is the differentiator now, because everyone can replicate everything. Go to China. You can get it done. Look at someone’s service model. You can copy that. But content and the voices, that’s what’s unique. That’s all we have left. But it matters, because it does a better job at traditional marketing.

Robert Rose: That’s exactly right. It is, in fact, the only differentiator that’s left. The experience that we can create, the content that we can create that surrounds the product or service, is really the only differentiator because, quite frankly, just as you said, the product, especially in today’s technology-driven world, can be replicated. If it can’t be replicated by your neighbor, it can certainly be replicated in another country, maybe in a digital disruptive way.

Those relying on your product differentiation to scale and to provide for continuous competitive advantage is just a flawed strategy, and there are companies that are washing up against the shore of that every single day, that have said, We can’t be disrupted because we have first-mover advantage or We have a better product.

A better product does not necessarily mean success, and today, especially, with the sort of world flattening and all that kind of stuff, the idea of creating a content-driven experience … I use that word a lot, because certainly, just as you were saying, the experience economy has been out for 15 or 20 years.

Customer experience management, or CEM as an acronym, has been around just as long, 30 years in fact. Customer experience management in its totality takes everything into account. If I’m selling shirts, the difference between wool or cotton or whether I’m going to have a hang-tag off the collar or the hang tag is going off the sleeve, those are all part of the customer experience as a practice and a product development mode.

Even in the book, Carla and I draw a boundary around this. We say, We’re not here to tell you how to develop your product. What we’re here to talk about is how do we, marketers, create an additional valuable experience — content-driven or otherwise — around the product, separate and distinct from the product, that differentiates your approach to solving that consumer’s need or want? That’s the real difference here, is that what you’re doing, what people buy these days, is that approach.

Every single step along the way — from the first time they meet your brand till the time that they’re getting nurtured as a lead to the time they become a customer to the time they become loyal and evangelistic, and quite frankly, will share our story across all the platforms that we’ll never have the capacity to be on — that’s the brass ring here. If we can create great experiences at each one of those layers, then we win and ultimately have a shot at getting to that evangelistic mode where the customer is sharing how wonderful we are at solving their problem.

INBOUND this year, HubSpot, they’re going to have 10,000 people show up to that thing. They’ve created an experience with the idea of INBOUND that has differentiated them across so many different ideas.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s excellent. You and I were chatting briefly before we got on the recording about Sally Hogshead, who is fantastic.

Robert Rose: Fantastic.

Brian Clark: Different is better than better.

Robert Rose: I love that. I’m so annoyed that she came up with that line. It’s such a great line, and it’s so true, and it’s so wonderful. Yes, different is better than better. There’s a wonderful book, by the way, called Different by Youngme Moon, who is a professor at the Harvard Business School.

Brian Clark: I have that book. Yeah. It’s good.

Robert Rose: It’s just a delightful book.

Why It s Important to Think Like a Media Producer to Create Value

Brian Clark: Your book, start with your book, obviously. I think once you get it, from the things you explore and experiences, you go back and you look at positioning in a whole new way. I’ve been trying to teach people positioning for a decade, because it’s so important. I think the battle is won or lost right there, and with a content brand as opposed to product or service, again, to me, it seems easier.

You have to think like a media producer. Friends was different in its way and became a huge hit. But when you start thinking about, How can I make a different radio show or TV show or magazine? it’s almost like it makes more sense, because we’re all immersed in the popular culture, and therefore, all these examples, once you realize that they’re actually relevant to you, might help. I don’t know. What do you think about that?

Robert Rose: I think that’s exactly right. Even a slightly higher look at that is, What value can we add to that consumer’s life that nobody else can? Of course it should align.

I’ll give you a concrete example of this. I worked with a small financial services company, and this is not a big sort of Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch type of company. They’re eight people. They are consultants, but basically their job is the same as a Goldman Sachs or a Merrill Lynch. They teach people how to buy low and sell high. That is their remit, that they are offering their service to their customers as consultants and managers of a fund.

How do you differentiate against all of the huge, huge ocean of content and facts and everything that’s out there that’s commoditized in that business? What they recognized was, their mission — their why, if you want to go the Simon Sinek way — was not to help their customers be better investors. They understood that it was bigger than that. What they were really trying to do was help their customers be better people, and if they could help their customers be better people, it opened up a whole new world of opportunity for them to create value for those customers. It didn’t mean that they stopped doing the core thing that made them money. That’s what they’re really good at.

What they could do is wrap around all of these things. They started to do things like something as simple as a book club. They recognized that their customers didn’t have time to really understand what they should be reading, not from a thought-leadership perspective, but just the classics and Shakespeare and comedy and what they should be reading. They started this book club service that they offered out. It’s the number-three reason that their clients renew every year now.

Then they parlayed that and created this whole physical event now where they have a customer event, not to exhibit how thought-leadershipy they are and why they’re such smart investors, but they invite poets and musicians and people who are doing great work in South America and all this kind of stuff and letting these people interact with them. Of course the conversations turn to things like economies, and What’s going to be the future of technology? and all this kind of stuff, but it’s wrapped like a TED conference, to help you be a better person. That’s the number-two reason that their customers now renew every single year.

The number one, of course, is the wonderful information they get. Now, those are the top three reasons that their clients are renewing every single year. That’s something that Goldman Sachs just is not going to duplicate. Their competitors are not going to duplicate that. It’s just something totally innately valuable to their customers that they can deliver that nobody else can.

Brian Clark: I love it. I love it. Target aspirations: who do they want to be? What’s the life they want to lead?

Robert Rose: What’s the emotional connection we can have? Why do they care about us, right?

Brian Clark: It’s the old copywriting thing at its essence: benefits, not features. Yet we all tend to fall back into what you want is a mutual fund. No, I don’t want a mutual fund. What I want is enough money to hang out with my grandchildren and watch them grow up.

Robert Rose: It’s the classic Ted Levitt. People aren’t buying a nail or a hammer. They’re buying a hole in the wall. That’s what you’re really trying to deliver value against.

Brian Clark: Think about how J. Peterman sells a sweater. It’s not the sweater. It’s the lifestyle that surrounds the sweater. My compatriot here, Robert Bruce, once bought this sweater, and he had to share with me the paragraph that got him to buy it, because it was him. They nailed Robert. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and he was standing on a craggy cliff overlooking the frigid water. He’s like, I had to buy it, man. It was me.

Robert Rose: Reading his copy of Wuthering Heights.

Brian Clark: Exactly. Exactly. It’s always been that to some degree. I love the fact that you guys call your podcast This Old Marketing Show, because another theme that we’ve had for the last 10 years is, don’t listen to everyone saying the sky is falling. Fundamentally, human beings are still the same. The context has changed radically, and their sophistication and entitlement has changed radically, and you have to go with them, right?

Robert Rose: I love that line.

Robert s 4-Step Process for Defining a Content Mission

Brian Clark: I’m going to put you on the spot here. If we accept that we’re all creating experience of some kind, just most of them aren’t that good, and they’re not that tied to our actual business objectives when dealing with actual human beings, give us the Robert Rose three steps, five steps — give me a listicle.

Where do you begin when you need to take that step back and say, What’s the right desirable, valuable experience that I have to begin to initiate here?

Robert Rose: I’ll put it this way. It’s in my workshop. It’s a four-step process, actually, and it gets to a content mission or a differentiation, if you will.

First of all is understanding, what is it we want to do? What is our goal? I live in Los Angeles. This isn’t show business. This is not the show Friends. This is content marketing. This is trying to drive a business goal. What are we trying to do?

In many cases, I find that businesses don’t really understand. Are we trying to become more aware? Are we trying to put more butts in the seat? Are we trying to close more, better leads? High-quality leads? Are we trying to create more loyalty? What is the problem we’re solving? What is our goal?

Secondly, who is the person that can help us satisfy that goal? That might be a customer, but quite frankly, it might be an influencer. It might be an influencer to that purchase decision, not the actual buyer of the product or service itself. You said it well: who are they as people? Not as a target demographic or a segment, but who are they as people? What are their needs, their wants? What do they long for in the day? What does their day look like? Who are they as people?

Then third, what unique value proposition, what unique value, can we deliver to them separate and distinct from our product or service? What do they need? What value can we deliver to them at that stage that would satisfy that original goal that we have? In other words, what value can we deliver to them?

In the case of the financial services company, we can deliver them the value of a highly curated, educational stream of books that they should be reading. What value can we deliver to them? Inherent in that, it has nothing to do whether it’s a website or a social media track or a blog or a printed magazine or whatever. It’s what value? What is the story? What value can we deliver to them?

Finally, four, what makes that different than anything else they can get? If you start to look at that, you go, Wow, that really looks like a product-development methodology if we really start to look at that.

I would really encourage people to look at the product development methodologies that are out there, because that, to me, is what marketing is starting to more resemble. It s the agile, lean startup idea of a media product that we can create that differentiates us in the marketplace and ultimately drives to a profitable business action: either selling more of our stuff, differentiating us in the market for awareness purposes, creating more loyalty to our product or service, or creating an evangelistic state where they’re out there sharing their story with their friends and family.

It all starts with those four things, which is really understanding what it is we’re going to develop, what unique value we’re going to develop for those consumers.

Brian Clark: Excellent. Excellent. This is a true story. It still amazes me to this day. I was doing Copyblogger for about a year and a half before I hooked up with Tony Clark — no relation — who is now our COO, but he was my first business partner. We created the first Copyblogger product together.

We started a conversation by him coming to me and going, “You’re doing what I would call agile or lean content development.” I’m like, What is this guy talking about? He’s a software developer, so he was well steeped in agile and lean. This is before The Lean Startup came out. I was doing it intuitively because I didn’t know what the audience wanted. It s a real-time environment, so I had to depend on them to tell what they liked and what they didn’t, not by asking, but by watching.

Of course, our product development is exactly the same process. It’s weird that you brought that up, because I don’t think I’ve heard you say that before. It’s very close to the same process, because you can start with your best guess, but you’re going to find out what reality is pretty quickly. If you choose to ignore it, you do so at your own peril.

Why Assets Must Be Tied Together by a Strong Editorial Strategy

Robert Rose: That’s a great point, even in its simplest sense. If we take that all the way down to its simplest expression, because when I talk about this … The second half of the book is really the methodology that we prescribe that looks at that. I say, Let’s pretend you’re a business-to-business small company, and your idea of content marketing is to build a resource. We’re going to build a resource center. This stuff is going to be gated with a landing page. Great. I get it.

The way that that resource center typically gets built, from a marketing lens, from a campaign-oriented lens, is we say, We’re going to run a campaign, and we’re going to create an asset to support that. We’re going to run another campaign, and we’re going to create an asset to support that, and on and so forth. Rinse and repeat all throughout the year.

What ends up happening, and I can tell you that this is what I mostly fix when I talk with companies these days, is that they look back over their 12 months or 24 months of content production, and some of the assets that they created were great. Some of them were, Ah, they’re fine. Some of them were not great. Some of them were created in too rushed a manner. The overwhelming thing is, none of them are connected. It’s just 24 different kinds of assets.

There’s no connection. There’s no reason that the twenty-third makes the eighteenth more valuable or that the first made the eighteenth more valuable or anything like that. Instead, I say, If that’s your goal, to create this resource center, what does that resource center represent? What unique value to the consumer does that resource center offer? Is it a university? Is it an academy? Is it a path of training? If everybody read everything in your resource center, would they be a more valuable profession? Would they be a better person? What valuable thing would that resource center represent?

Then, if you start working backwards — very much like in an agile, lean startup What are all the component pieces that that would need to encompass? Now you’ve got yourself a pretty interesting editorial strategy.

I guarantee you, if you create those assets in that connection, and if they’re really focused on delivering value to that consumer, they will inherently be wonderful direct marketing pieces. They will inherently be very valuable and support all the lead-generation and awareness-building and all that stuff you want to do as part of a campaign-oriented approach, but you’ll be building toward this wonderful, valuable thing, so when you look back in 24 months, you’ll go, We’ve built this amazing thing here that’s really valuable in and of itself. That’s the real magic.

Brian Clark: Okay, two things here. If that’s not the best reason to go pick up Experiences … I think a lot of people. They’re getting it conceptually, but it’s more of, Okay, now what? Like you said, the second half of the book does a bit of a deep dive on that.

Robert Rose: Full caveat there: my books tend to be focused more on larger companies.

Brian Clark: I was going to say, it’s written for the enterprise reader. I picked up on that right away, but Robert and his co-writer are excellent writers, so you’re not going to get lost by that. At least I don’t think so.

Robert Rose: I hope not. I hope not. But I do want to throw in that caveat because it’s been mentioned to me a couple of times that it feels very big business.

Brian Clark: When I started reading it, I was like, Man, I know all the money that’s at the enterprise level. I know why everyone goes upstream. My passion is to work with smaller businesses, so for me reading, I’m like, God, I’m glad I don’t have Robert’s job. He’s really good at it, though, but I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to have to convince corporate people to do anything, because it’s a whole different world, right?

Robert Rose: It is a different world, but it’s a fun one. I enjoy it, I have to say. It’s a fun one for me. Trying to untangle that ball of twine is really an interesting challenge for sure.

Brian Clark: That’s putting it generously.

Robert Rose: Yes.

Brian Clark: The second thing, I’ll let the audience decide, but I think my hypothesis that you were the perfect follow-up guest is correct. We’ll have to wait and see. So again, thanks for the short-notice appearance. I appreciate it. If Pulizzi’s not treating you well, you can always come over here, okay?

Robert Rose: That’s a very kind offer. Thanks for that. I’m going to go use that for leverage right now.

Brian Clark: I’m going to get some sort of threatening email from Joe later. If he wants to go to war, tell him he can be Biggie, but I’m Tupac, all right?

Robert Rose: There you go. I like it. I like that very much. That’s awesome. We’ll showdown in Vegas.

Brian Clark: That’s right. All right, everyone. Thanks again for joining us. I hope this was informative. I learned a few things. I learned some different frames around which to think about the right experience. Again, I recommend the book Experiences: The Seventh Era of Marketing. Thanks, Robert. Enjoy the rest of the week, and I will see you in Cleveland shortly.