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The Transcript

Who Is a Digital Entrepreneur?

Voiceover: You are listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to DigitalCommerce.com.

Jerod Morris: Welcome, everybody, to the first episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. I am Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital and a digital entrepreneur myself, and I’m excited to be joined today by a name and a voice that you know well, serial digital entrepreneur Brian Clark, the founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital. Brian, how do you like the new digs here at The Digital Entrepreneur?

Brian Clark: Oh yeah, I’m loving it. What we need now is another podcast for sure.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, it’s new show art, new music. You even got a new co-host here.

Brian Clark: New year, although it’s already February. How did that happen?

Jerod Morris: I don’t know. I really don’t. I looked up, and all of a sudden a month was gone. By the way, we have new intro music for the show. I don’t know if you know the title of the intro song, but its called ‘Men on a Mission,’ which I thought was appropriate since we are, in a sense, men on a mission here to teach people how to more effectively do digital commerce. So I thought that was a good name for …

Brian Clark: Yeah, I did notice that. Now, did Mr. Bruce pick out this music like he usually does?

Jerod Morris: He didn’t, actually. Jessica was the one who came with the ideas. She had a whole list. I made the final choice, and I think she did a good job.

Brian Clark: Cool.

Jerod Morris: Yes, yes. Let’s transition into our topic today. This is the first episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. In our last episode of New Rainmaker, we talked about what digital commerce is. I thought it would be appropriate to begin this episode by basically just talking about who is a digital entrepreneur.

Why Every Entrepreneur Is Now a Digital Entrepreneur

Jerod Morris: To kick the discussion off, you and I exchanged a few thoughts on an article that we read. It’s a ZDNet article that was talking about some research that Accenture did that basically found that new and emerging technology has the potential to help create up to 10 million new jobs for young people as entrepreneurs around the world step into the role of ‘digital entrepreneur.’

One of the statements in this article was, “Every entrepreneur is now a digital entrepreneur”–which I found interesting and I wanted to get your thoughts on to see if you agree with that or if you think that’s too broad of a statement.

Brian Clark: Both. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. As we move forward, that statement will become more and more literally true. Now, I don’t know any entrepreneur these days who isn’t using digital technology in some form–so in that sense, sure.

The flip side of that being too broad is the way we talk about digital commerce, we really are trying to limit it and delineate away from e-commerce or physical products by talking about products and services that literally exist online. They’re marketed, sold, delivered, supported–everything is basically a digital-environment transaction. There’s a range here of stuff that qualifies as that.

Obviously, one of the easiest or, I should say, lower-barrier-to-entry products is the self-published ebook business where entrepreneurs are sidestepping traditional publications, or publishers I should say, because it is a product that you can completely fulfill, market, and sell online and also create and put into digital format with minimal trouble, hassle, technical expertise.

Whether Airbnb and Uber Fit within Our Definition of Digital Commerce

Brian Clark: Then, if you really think about the outer reaches in the other direction, we like to talk about online courses, plug-ins, themes, software as a service, but if you look at Airbnb and Uber, these are not software as a service. They are software that facilitate services in the real world, but that is digital commerce.

For example, Uber made this point before. If you extrapolated Uber and replaced the entire taxi industry, that software app kills about 300,000 jobs. So it’s basically software platforms that are doing things in very disruptive ways through the ability to connect people. That is an outlier type of situation.

I don’t think I would ever represent to someone that I could teach them how to start the next Uber, but we can talk about software as a service. We can certainly talk about online courses, themes, plug-ins, downloadable software, all of this kind of stuff. I’d say, today, the truth of the matter is, digital technology is a huge part of any entrepreneurial effort whatsoever, whether it just be marketing, but its rarely ever just marketing anymore

I can think back to my real estate brokerage businesses. I never thought about it in this context, but it was all digital, even infrastructure. I never thought of it as a digital commerce company, but it set the stage for me to move into that, which, of course, I did in 2006. When you think about what I was doing at that time and then you look at what came after, like Zillow, that is a digital commerce platform.

I think we all get our feet wet, but the platforms and the technology that’s available to any entrepreneur, you’d have to be crazy not to take advantage of every digital technology that you can in order to be more efficient, to lower costs, to reach a larger market share, reach the right market share– whatever the case might be.

The Big Idea for This New Show

Jerod Morris: But our goal on The Digital Entrepreneur and, for example, our goal inside of Digital Commerce Academy isn’t necessarily to teach someone how to launch the next Airbnb or how to launch the next Uber, right?

Brian Clark: No. And honestly, quite a few of the people that are onboard with this have a digital business, and they’re really looking to find out more about how to grow. Then there is another subset of students who are getting their feet wet, so they are the ones thinking about leading with a gateway product, such as an ebook or developing their first course.

The bulk, if you look at the dollars spent on ebooks, the billions of dollars on online education, and billions of dollars on downloadable software and software as a service, it’s so much opportunity right there where you don’t have to be this person who’s trying to disrupt the whole world with this amazing platform. Interesting thing to me is, Airbnb didn’t start that way, either. They didn’t get really ambitious with their plans until they saw how they had developed something that could scale.

Jerod Morris: Okay. We’re going to spend some time on this show, obviously, diving in to the details and really giving people some tips that they can use to go out and execute effective digital commerce, but let’s think big here for a little bit. Where’s this going?

You and I talked the other day about virtual reality. We talked about how it’s the future of viewing sports, but you even mentioned something to me that that’s going to change how we interact online, different environments that are going to be created. Where is that going to potentially take us in the future?

How Emerging Technologies Like Virtual Reality Might Change Everything

Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s very interesting because you really can’t escape the buzz about virtual reality this year. 2016 will be the year that it kicks off. Now, what does that mean for how fast it matures, how fast it’s adopted, how well it takes over our lives?

As you and I discussed when we were riding to the airport the other day, you could imagine a scenario where people stay jacked in all day long and didn’t travel anymore because they could visit virtual destinations without expense or terrorism or whatever. It’s kind of mind boggling. It’s fascinating to me, but things aren’t going to move quite that fast.

But something that you can start thinking about is virtual environments where business is transacted in new and different ways that could possibly be done with the evolving and more powerful websites that we have these days. We’ll talk about that in just a minute, but I’m really interested in it. I’m not sure I have all the answers, but it is something that I’m intellectually attuned to and paying attention to.

I was just thinking about my audience over at Unemployable and was reading an article about digital contracts, effectively where you don’t have to trust the other person to do what’s on the paper. It’s almost like a digital escrow system where things happen, and if they happen, money is released. Could you imagine that when you’re a freelancer trying to get paid? There’s all sorts of business applications for adopting greater use of digital technology that are either just ideas at this point or they just don’t have the momentum yet.

Right now, this podcast is very nuts and bolts. If you haven’t created your first digital product yet, we want to get you there. If you’ve already got products but you’re just trying to grow and then maybe take it to the next level–product category, service category–we want to help you get there.

At the same time, we’re going to keep our eye on the cutting edge, and that’s why, of course, you’ve been putting on those Cutting Edge webinars inside Digital Commerce Academy. Those are going to be a lot of fun because that’s where we get to explore the edges.

Jerod Morris: So I can buy some virtual-reality goggles? That’s not even the right word. What would be the right term for virtual reality?

Brian Clark: It’s a headset.

Jerod Morris: A headset. Okay. So I can buy a virtual-reality headset and demo it?

Brian Clark: Someday it will be goggles, and hopefully it’ll be like contact lenses. It’s going to be interesting to see how it evolves, but for right now, it’s a big, clunky helmet.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, so we will all look really cool while we do it.

Brian Clark: Yeah, you don’t want to have guests over when you are in the metaverse or whatever.

Jerod Morris: No–unless everybody’s in there.

Brian Clark: Right.

Defining the Term ‘Digital Entrepreneur’

Jerod Morris: Okay. Getting back to the initial question for this episode before we move forward, just so we’re clear on who is the digital entrepreneur, who’s the person that we’re talking to. Is it as simple as saying that the digital entrepreneur that we’re talking to is someone who has created or has the desire to create a digital product or service that is marketed, delivered, and supported completely online? That’s our definition of digital commerce. That’s the person that we are talking to here.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s the working definition. I think it’s pretty solid. That doesn’t stop us from exploring hybrid situations or maybe expanding the definition as things change, but it actually is fundamentally sound. Any definition broader than that is really just stepping over into other terminology that we have had for decades, like e-commerce.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. So that’s who a digital entrepreneur is.

What Digital Entrepreneurs Need to Succeed in Digital Commerce

Jerod Morris: We’re going to move forward now in future episodes talking about what you need to succeed in digital commerce. Obviously, it’s going to start with creating a great product–whether that be a course, a SaaS product, an ebook, a theme, anything like that–which is what we’re working with folks inside of Digital Commerce Academy to do.

The next step once you then have that great product is understanding the fundamentals of marketing in the modern age. That great product that you have still is going to have to find a market, and that market is going to have to be compelled into taking action. That’s why we’re going to be talking about, in these future episodes, elements of the modern marketing website.

Do you want to tease that a little bit? This is an idea that you’ve been talking about that you and I worked on a little bit recently, and I’m excited to start exploring these ideas further.

Teaser: Upcoming Series to Kick Off The Digital Entrepreneur

Brian Clark: Yeah, I want to save the meat of this for upcoming episodes. In addition to creating the digital website experience, we’re obviously going to have people on–real-life practitioners, case studies–giving you ideas about how they developed their first products. It really comes down to two things, Jerod. It’s create and sell.

If you haven’t created yet, that doesn’t mean you can’t start the process that’s going to lead to sales, which we call ‘audience building.’ This is a big overlap with what we talk about on Copyblogger and content marketing in general, but there is even a more specific argument to be made.

Now, going back to our geeky extrapolations about virtual reality, there is no doubt in your mind, right, Jerod, that if you put on that clunky helmet, that you are there having this virtual-reality experience. Weren’t you the one who told me that there are some simulations where they tried to get people to walk off a cliff, and they could not do it because their brain just said, “No, I can’t do that”?

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Someone was telling me that. At CES, I think, they were doing a demonstration, and people were wearing the headset. It was a big nature scene that they were in, and it was so real that, when they told them to jump–they had reached a cliff–they couldn’t do it. Something had just happened in their brain that made it feel so real.

Brian Clark: Yeah, so no one would argue that isn’t a viable experience. Yet we hear the buzz terminology applied that ‘your website has to be an experience.’ Of course, all websites are an experience, but are they one that’s transformative? Are they one that provides value in a unique and evocative way that’s also helping you meet your business objectives?

That’s the way I want to frame these upcoming episodes when we’re talking about the elements. I’ve said this a couple times now, but the switch going on now in what constitutes a minimum viable digital website is shifting–just like it did from brochure sites to content-rich sites.

We’re not in the post-content era–content is more important than ever. But the actual way the site is constructed has to be thought out in a way that provides an overarching experience, not just a blog or whatever the case may be.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. We’ll spend some time on future episodes talking about that–what that means, what the elements are.

Brian Clark: I think we could kick off the very next episode with that topic.

Jerod Morris: I think we could.

Brian Clark: Why don’t we plan on that?

Jerod Morris: Lets do it.

Brian Clark: Also, see what else we can get lined up for people to get going. That’s the key here–again, whether it’s creating your first thing or accelerating the thing you’ve got.

Jerod Morris: And like you mentioned earlier, that’s what we’re doing with folks in Digital Commerce Academy. Hey, I wanted to ask you a real quick question here in closing. Obviously, you developed one of the first courses in Digital Commerce Academy, your course on courses. It was the first time that you had dug into that material in a while and put it into a course. How’s that experience been for you putting that course together and working with that material again?

The True Value of the Digital Commerce Academy

Brian Clark: The interesting thing about it is that a lot of the fundamentals from Teaching Sells that was our first product back in the day when people didn’t believe that people would pay for online education. Now it’s what, 15 billion a year?

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: But the interesting thing about that course is it’s not really about making courses. It’s not just an instructional design course. If you look at the title, it’s really about the business of online courses, and that’s where people get lost. That’s where they make mistakes because they’re not understanding the market research and what people are actually looking for when they create a course.

I’ll admit that I could send you to Amazon to read a book on instructional design if you just want to make a course. That doesn’t mean anyone’s going to buy it. That’s the fundamental difference of that course. It truly is a business education that involves online education as opposed to, “Here’s what you do first to make a course ,” that kind of thing.

That’s the important distinction. You’ll find, throughout all our instruction, all our Q&As, all our case studies, all the webinars in Digital Commerce Academy, that it is nuts and bolts business-focused. We are not here and you are not there to do things that are not pursuing your dreams, your business objectives. The goal of an entrepreneur is to bring a product to market successfully, and that’s our focus.

Jerod Morris: Yep. Absolutely. If you want more information on that to check out that course, you can go to DigitalCommerce.com. To learn more about everything else that we talked about in this episode, stick with us. We’re going to have some fun over these next few weeks and well beyond for The Digital Entrepreneur, very excited about it. And, Brian, jump off the cliff.

Brian Clark: I have no choice. It’s daily.

Jerod Morris: All right. We will talk to you next week, everybody.

The Transcript

6 Steps to Building an Audience That Builds a Business

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Brian Clark: Hey there, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Rainmaker. I’m your host, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media.

Today, we have yet another very special guest, Joe Pulizzi, or as I refer to him, the guy who I can’t outrank for the term ‘content marketing.’ I’ve been trying, Joe. You know I’ve been trying. Did you make up that word? Did you make up the term ‘content marketing?’ Was you it?

Joe Pulizzi: And I love you. It excites me that you tried so hard to get down first. I really dig that about you, actually.

Brian Clark: I do have a competitive streak. I can’t help it.

Joe Pulizzi: Did I make up the term? I started using it when I was running custom media at Penton Media in 2001. Actually, the backstory about that is, we were in the custom publishing industry, and we were called Penton Custom Media, two very boring terms. You go with custom publishing at Custom Media, nobody wants to buy anything from you.

So I was like, How can I get these chief marketing officers at least interested in what I’m talking about? I tried everything. I tried branded content, custom content, and I’m throwing it all at them, and then I started using content marketing in the pitch, and I could see the reaction change. Like they were, “Oh, hey. I’m a marketer. We do content-y type stuff. Maybe that’s what we’re doing.”

If you’re targeting marketers in every way — and you know this, because you and I both work with a lot of marketers — they’re very simple people. You have to keep things simple, and things resonate with them around the term marketing. I saw that, and I said, “Hey, look. This thing that we’re doing, this building audiences thing through relevant, valuable content on a consistent basis — we better call it something like content marketing because that’s what’s resonating with these folks.”

Yeah. I can’t prove it. I can’t prove that I was the first one, probably as much as you were responsible for popularizing it, because you didn’t like the term, but then you started using it. I said, “Thank Jesus for that.” It helped us.

Brian Clark: Well, maybe I just didn’t like it because I didn’t come up with it. I don’t know. So yeah, I talk about now, In 1999, I started doing this thing we now call content marketing, and then in 2006, I started a blog talking about this thing we now call content marketing.

But it was you who convinced me, and grudgingly, I guess, and I don’t know what my issue was with it. I don’t even think it occurred to me that it needed to be called something. But for those of you who don’t know who Joe is — you probably do — he is the founder of Content Marketing Institute, the world’s leading enterprise solution provider. No, I’m trying to come up with a tagline for you.

Joe Pulizzi: Leading training and education company for enterprise marketers, something like that.

Brian Clark: Exactly. According to Google.

Joe Pulizzi: Hey. If Google said it, it must be true.

Brian Clark: It must be true.

Joe Pulizzi: Absolutely.

Brian Clark: Also, more impressively, is that Content Marketing World, without doubt, is the largest and the finest content marketing conference out there. It s something I’ve been involved with every year since the beginning.

Joe Pulizzi: Every year, that’s right.

Brian Clark: It’s so aimed at the enterprise. Why am I there every year?

Joe Pulizzi: Because everybody aspires to be a big company. It’s interesting. You know this, because I think we’ve had some conversations on when you target the enterprise, you can’t target the mid market. You actually have to say enterprise, and you get the mid market.

Then you get small companies that actually want to aspire to be big, so then we got a lot of really high-growth small businesses. That’s what we target. So you get mostly marketers at large businesses, and because of that you get the mid market, and then you get the small businesses that want to be big.

It’s just interesting. That’s why you fit in. You probably target what, the growing small business, mid-market audience? Would you say that that’s your target?

Brian Clark: I think a lot of our customers fall into the biggest group of the small business market, which is the very small business, but it does move up from there.

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah.

Brian Clark: I think, again, a lot of the work you have done has made what we talk about relevant to even larger companies. I think our hearts are with the small companies, because that’s our affinity. But the information percolates all over the place, which is fascinating to me.

Let’s get to the issue here, because historically, an enterprise-focused institute and conference, and now you’ve written Content Inc., which is squarely aimed at the startup and small business world, the whole audience-first theme that we’ve been talking about for years. I was fortunate enough that you allowed me to write the foreword to the book. As long as I get in somewhere.

Joe Pulizzi: Allowed is a good way to put it. It defaulted to you. You had to write that because it’s your story. Thank you for that, by the way.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It’s a great book. It’s going to be out in just a few weeks here. It’s available for pre-order, called Content Inc. There’s also an excellent podcast that Joe’s been running called Content Inc. also.

How do you like that? Let’s talk about podcasting. Everyone is doing podcasting now. You’ve taken to it. I love your show with Robert, This Old Marketing. How has it been reaching out to this new audience with a podcast? Because it seems like that’s your primary engine.

Joe Pulizzi: This is all a big experiment. Actually, everything is, even writing the book to this audience. Because as you said, we’ve never targeted the small business, startup, entrepreneurial audience, so to start with that was completely selfish on my part, because I wanted to write this book.

I literally said, This book needs to be written. What we’ve done at CMI, what Brian’s done at Copyblogger Media, and dozens and dozens of other examples, they need to be told, because we have to get away from this idea that you have to be a big company to do this thing called content marketing.

I think there’s actually a better way to launch a business, and it’s the way that you and I launched the business. I said, Okay, I’m going to do this book, but I’m not going to make it about me. We’re going to talk about some examples, but let’s talk about what all these companies did and how they went audience-first and then built products and services on the back of that. I said, Okay, well, what’s the best way to do this?

With Epic Content Marketing, which I wrote in 2013 and is squarely for enterprises, I started to release blog posts ahead of time. That was the thing: “Okay. I want to tease it out. We’re going to give pieces of the book out ahead of time.” I said, “Let’s do something different with Content Inc.,” and I said “Whoa. Let’s just share everything ahead of time but do it in a podcast form.”

So far, it s seemed to work. Every week, we get more subscribers, more listeners to the show. People have started to talk about it more, and honestly, we haven’t really marketed that much at all. It’s just sort of there. It just sort of happened, and we’re letting people know about it. I like the fact that it’s almost like we had the blog-to-book idea. I would say “Hey, if I’m going to write a book, do a blog-the-book. Just plan out six months of content, write your chapter outline, start blogging, and then in six months, you’ve got 80 percent of a book, and you’re done.

I started to do the same thing with podcasting. So I started to write episodes of the podcast, which became chapters of the book. I started to release those, edited them down, and then we’ve got part of the book done. As I’ve been going through and doing this podcasts — two a week, and they’re really short, like five to seven minutes long — then okay, I’ve got more content for the book.

It seemed to have worked out well, and it just takes a lot of the burden off me from a content production standpoint. At the same time, I can build an audience. I think that that’s a smarter thing to do than everybody just saying, “Wait. We’re not going to send any content out. Here comes the book, and now it’s ready.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi: I think you just give it all out as much as possible. Build some anticipation over it. Build your audience so that when you release the book, it’s already there. The audience is basically your customer list for buying the book or the audio book. It’s all ready to go.

Brian Clark: You’re demonstrating the principle of the book in a way that you’re building an audience to sell the book. I like that. You’re getting very meta, Joe. That’s been our thing for years.

Joe Pulizzi: My life is meta.

Brian Clark: Exactly, right.

Joe Pulizzi: We’ll see if it works out. So far, it looks like We’ll know right away. September 8th, the book comes out. It comes out at Content Marketing World. I think we’ll know within the first two weeks if that strategy has paid off. Fingers crossed, it looks like it will work.

Brian Clark: Well, I m certainly going to help, because again, my foreword cannot be unseen. I mean, I must have spent 20 or 30 minutes on that Joe, and you had to write the whole rest of the book.

Joe Pulizzi: It could go down as the greatest foreword in business history.

Why Startups Are More Innovative Than Large Companies at Content

Brian Clark: Let me ask you this: I had your partner in crime, Robert Rose, on last week. We were kind of dancing around this thing, but I’m not sure we ever just came right out and said it, but I almost came out and said, “Don’t you think the real innovation in content marketing really comes from the startups who build the audience first and all that?

I never came out and said it, and then right after I asked you to be on the show, I see you’ve written an article saying Why Startups Basically Beat the Pants off the Enterprise at Content Marketing. I mean, the headline was something to that effect. Tell me what you think about that.

Joe Pulizzi: I totally agree with that. It’s the premise of the book. I’ve spent too long — 16 years now — working with these large companies. There are so many politics, red tape, fiefdoms that you have to deal with, meeting after meeting to get something done.

Culture change has to happen of some nature, or you have to have a content champion that’s so strong that it s actually willing to risk their job, at least doing it the way that it’s been done, to make some of these decisions to say, “Look, we’re not going to market the way we’ve always marketed. We’re going to go out and build an audience that knows, likes, and trusts us, and if we do that, we believe in our heart of hearts that it’s going to help our business, and here’s how. Basically, that’s the approach.

There are very, very few large businesses that can do that, because they’re so set in, We have these products to sell. That’s what marketing’s for. Get the darn brochure done, set it, and make sure the sales people have what they need. Marketing, get out of my way, and I’ll sell. Especially in large B2B companies.

Now what we notice is, if you have a belief structure around the practice of content marketing, that you really believe that this is the way that you can go to market, you have one person that could make that decision. And you have such other focus on a content niche, which is also another issue with large companies. They want to target every one of their buyer personas, audience personas, and in a B2B company, that could be seven to nine people, and then their content becomes so irrelevant, it doesn’t do anything.

But if you’re a startup, you’re focusing on that audience — building that audience, focusing on that person and that audience that you’re building — that becomes your future customer database.

It takes time, and it takes patience. Large companies have no patience. Large companies — usually the ones that we work with — are public companies. They’re on some kind of a quarterly fiscal financial release schedule. Nobody has patience for anything.

If you go in to a chief marketer’s office and say, “Hey. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to target this audience, which is not a large audience but it’s a particular audience that we could be the leading informational expert for, and we’re going to distribute content to them. We’re going to build them. They’re going to know us more, like us. It’s going to lead to this. We’re going to build subscribers. We think this is going to happen — that’s the hypothesis, but we don’t know for sure. We might have to change it. And I need 15 to 17 months to make that happen.

The next two words are — with a contraction in there — “You’re fired.” That s basically what it is. Get out of here. Let’s do some advertising. Let’s drop some demand right now.

Brian Clark: It’s amazing, the short-term thinking at the largest institutions on the planet, because it’s this quarterly mentality. I know there’s so much money at the enterprise level, but I’ve never wanted to deal with what you described, that mire of entrenched silos and infighting and the inability to move quickly.

That’s also why I refer to myself as unemployable. Could you imagine me in that environment? I’m on the evening news at some point.

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. I wouldn t even start to imagine that crisis. I don’t think any large company would imagine that. “Let’s go and get that Brian Clark. He’s going to really disrupt

Brian Clark: No one’s in the history of the world have ever said, “I wonder if we could get Clark to come on board.

Joe Pulizzi: We just had our team meeting, and we were talking about it being a noble effort. This is a mission that we can really get behind, because who’s going to do this? Who really cares about this? There’s a lot of really good people and marketers in these large companies that are struggling, and that’s our job to support them and to give them the air cover so they can go in and make change happen.

If you can make change happen — a good example is Julie Fleisher of Kraft. The change that she’s made happen in Kraft has been phenomenal. I don’t even know how much they respect it inside Kraft, but she’s so respected outside, and she’s an inspiration for marketers at large companies all over the place. Because we know it can be done, and we know that that is a real asset inside that organization that’s valued.

We need more of that, because it’s the large companies that have large access to these large audiences that can actually help the world communicate better. Because we all know that we don’t need another ad. Do we need more advertising campaigns? For that matter, do we need more content campaigns?

I hate that term. I hate content campaigns.

Brian Clark: No, it’s not a campaign. It’s a shift in thinking.

Joe Pulizzi: What is a content campaign? I didn’t even know what that is. Is that a short-term content viral burst?

Brian Clark: Do magazine publishers have magazine campaigns? No, they produce a magazines. It s more that type of thinking than it is a campaign.

Joe Pulizzi: Well, yeah. We’re going to go do a blog. What the hell? What does that mean? We need, “Oh. Somebody get content for the blog today. Today we have to do a post. What?

The Coming Exodus of Talent Leaving the Enterprise for Startups

Brian Clark: You know what occurred to me, when I heard you were writing a book and thinking about the audience you have? A lot of the enterprise people will send certain designated people from the marketing department or corporate communications or what have you to events like Content Marketing World. They’re in charge of figuring out this content thing.

Then these people come back, and they’re inspired. They re fired up. They know what to do, and they know what will work if they can get internal buy-in, and it doesn’t come.

Has it occurred to you that some of those people in the existing audience may be looking at Content Inc. and thinking, “You know what? I know how to do this. I’m going out on my own. To me, that would be fantastic. Some of the enterprise companies out there may not think that s so great, but have you thought about that?

Joe Pulizzi: The dirty little secret that’s going on in our industry right now is you have a lot of really smart people in big companies that understand how to build audiences, that don’t get quite the respect they deserve or need or even support.

And yes, frankly, I’ve never seen — and I’m not saying any names, because we won’t do that, no names please — there are a lot of people that you and I know right now that are dissatisfied at their corporate job, and they want to do something for the greater good. They want to do something for themselves, and they want to do something for their families. And they know that they can go build an audience if they have the level of patience and determination and passion. They’re going to get there.

To answer you, that’s a long answer to your question, but yes, absolutely yes.

Brian Clark: But I mean, how could it not be?

Joe Pulizzi: This is our future entrepreneurs. And they are going to Content Marketing World. That’s why Robert Rose and I, we ve kicked around, “Hey. You know what, are we going to do like this startup thing around, because we see so many of these possibilities of companies launching from these corporate marketers that really want to be entrepreneurial. Because they’re already entrepreneurial. If you’re a content marketer, you probably have that entrepreneurial spirit already, because you have to in order to survive in a large company atmosphere.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s why my new project is aimed at the power of the small, the power that a media producer mindset could bring to a startup or even a production-style environment.

And you hear all the things that are threatening or radically changing the future of work, including automation, robotics, computerization. But it’s also just the dissatisfaction with how large companies work, and I think there’s a big movement coming. I think content may be the catalyst in a lot of ways, because the light bulb has gone off, as you’ve mentioned, for a lot of these people that are like, “Wait. I can do something here without a lot of money, with all these tools that are out there and just the freedom to do it correctly. I think that’s awesome.

Joe Pulizzi: It’s the golden age for entrepreneurship. Right now. And I think that the whole content movement and the no barriers to entry in the technology area and we’re all publishers. It’s all the same thing. We can all do it.

Just a quick story, because I think it’s interesting. I was speaking at a startup event, a bunch of venture capitalists in the audience — it was around the Cleveland area — and they were all talking, “We need more investment. We’ve got some group. We got this great momentum going on with these companies that are launching, and they’re creating these differentiated products and going to market. I heard the same old spiel or whatever: “You created a great, unique product. Put a lot of money behind it. Get that investment. Get your series A. Blah blah blah.

Of course, there’s me, the content guy, I’m like, I don’t even know why I’m on this panel, but hey, I’ll answer your question. I basically said, “You know what? We’re all doing it wrong. We are all launching businesses the wrong way thinking that our idea is so good that we’ll be able to figure out our audience s needs right now — that we’ve got it. That doesn’t work that way, even if you look at maybe the most famous accelerator on the planet. Y-Combinator has a 10 percent success rate. That’s pitiful.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to say, You know what? Let s go out and build an audience first. Let’s understand them better than anyone else in the world, and then we will know — just like you did. You’ll inherently start to figure out what products and services they need and when we’re ready to sell, we will have our buyers, because they’re going to buy anything we offer them because they trust us. I just think that’s a better way for startups to go today but nobody does this.

Everybody talked — even Peter Thiel in Zero to One, the book. Even though I love what he’s done: investor in Facebook, co-founder of PayPal, and he wrote a great book called Zero to One. But it starts the same as every other startup book. You have to create a product that’s different than anyone else … You know how hard that is to do?

Brian Clark: I know, and what we were talking about last week with Robert was that content, media, is the last way to truly differentiate. I can manufacture anything I want in China. I can copy any service model. It’s this unicorn thinking that drives me crazy.

Joe Pulizzi: It’s not a new concept either. I mean, Don Schultz, who is one of my heroes, the father of integrated marketing. I read an article that he wrote in 2003 in B2B Magazine. B2B is no longer around well, it s part of Ad Age, but the magazine’s gone now.

He wrote and said, “Look. Everything that you are creating as a business, as a commerce-backed business, can be duplicated except for how you communicate. He said it, and here we are. You’re talking about it. I’m talking, Robert — we talk about that all the time. But now, the difference is that you actually have more power to make change happen through content, because you can communicate directly. You don’t have that power 20 years ago. You had to have some kind of budget behind you. You don’t have to have that today.

Brian Clark: Yup. Preach, brother. This is the choir over here. Amen.

Joe Pulizzi: Preach it. Amen.

Multiple Examples of Successful Companies That Were ‘Audience First’

Brian Clark: All right. Let’s talk about some examples of companies who have done this. Now, there are a lot of companies that are really well-known to my audience. I think we do owe them acknowledgement here, because a lot of our peers have done what you’ve done and what I’ve done. We all have different businesses, and maybe we ended up with a different answer about, What problem or desire am I going to solve? and yet fundamentally, the mechanism that you lay out in Content Inc. is the same.

Joe Pulizzi: It’s the same thing. It’s basically, focus on who that audience is going to be. Figure out what your passion area is, mixed with what is something that you actually have authority — you like to use the word authority — to communicate on? What’s that content differentiation area? We call that the content tilt. Then build that base. Build that audience over time.

Some of the examples, of course we use the Copyblogger Media example throughout the book. We use the Content Marketing Institute example. We basically did the same thing, but we monetized it through different ways. You monetize that through the products that you sell. We monetize that through mostly our events, like Content Marketing World.

You ve got Moz, Rand Fishkin, who did the same thing. He built 100,000 email subscribers and made the pivot from the consulting business to selling products. We know the folks at Social Media Examiner have done the same type of model, where he monetizes his through mostly online products and services.

So there’s the ones I think we know about. The ones that we talk about in the book that we don’t know about, which I think are so interesting. If you look at somebody like Michelle Phan, who was a designer online, started a blog in 2005, started to build an audience, launched her books in 2010, launched her Pinterest page in 2011. She has now something like 13 million followers on Pinterest when it comes to all the designs she shares. I actually get her email newsletter, believe it or not. Now she’s got licensing, merchandising deals with Target, with Microsoft — a multi-millionaire. It’s just amazing what has happened by building an audience.

One that you may not have heard of that I think is good for the people listening to this who are trying to figure out, “Hey, I want to sell products,” is Trish Witkowski over at Fold Factory. Basically, what she’s selling is direct mail templates. Like If you want to put a mailing together, here’s some templates you could use.

So she created — and Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping, tipped me off to this one — a video show, a regular video show, called The 60-Second Super-cool Fold of the Week. Just to think that you don’t have to have a lot of audience or subscribers to do this, she built her subscribership up to 3,100. So you might be thinking, “That’s not that much. For a B2B audience, that’s a good, solid audience. She’s been able to get about a million views of her videos over that time, and she’s been able to rack up well over $500,000 in direct revenue because of the videos.

By the way, that was an existing business, so she’s trying to figure, “Okay. How do I take an existing business concept and add in what we know as the Content Inc. model to that?” And that’s worked really well for her. I ve got a lot of good ones.

I love what Ann Reardon’s done, the baking queen of Sydney, Australia. Basically, in 2012, she was up late at night. She had a baby, and she was doing night feedings. She got bored. She was a qualified dietitian at the same time, and she created a blog called How to Cook That, and she did regular videos. But her content niche, or her content tilt, was around impossible food creations.

I don’t know if you remember, did you see the video of the Instagram cake? Brian, did you see this?

Brian Clark: No. I didn’t see that.

Joe Pulizzi: You are the only one that didn’t see it.

Brian Clark: You know me. I have to work for a living.

Joe Pulizzi: Basically, the outside looks like a chocolate cake, and you cut into it, and it was a replica of the Instagram logo. She did that inside the cake. It got millions and millions of views, so she went from 100 subscribers in 2012, to now, she’s got 1.7 million or something like that subscribers. Sixteen million views. I think her monthly view level is 16 million. It’s unbelievable, and Ann has been able to transform her business. She’s got licensing deals going on, promotional deals, merchandising deals. It’s just amazing.

The other thing you don’t think about when we talk about the examples — and you’re probably the best example of this, but I do a little bit on this as well — is the number of different ways you can monetize the platform. The average is like five to six different ways that people do.

It’s like “Oh hey, I’m selling this product. Well if you have a Content Inc. model, and you create a platform and an audience that knows and loves you, you could sell lots of different stuff. That’s what we see on all the examples we cover in the book. It’s like an average of four or five or six different ways. Like at Content Marketing Institute, we monetize in like 10, 11 different ways with different products we have. I think you guys probably have what? Four or five?

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi: When you look at it with the event, and the sponsorship, and the products that you sell, and the affiliate stuff. I mean, you ve got a little bit of everything going on.

Brian Clark: Yeah. We actually built the Rainmaker Platform by building each part and selling it, the classic bootstrapping strategy. Then we end up with, “Wow. We ve got a lot of stuff here.

You almost think about consolidation at some point, but as long as this thing is something that satisfies the problem or desire of the audience, they’re going to be inclined to work for us hosting. We got into that really to build the hosting component of the Rainmaker Platform, but that was the hosting that Copyblogger uses for its own site. Some people are like, “Sign me up. You know, we didn’t even push it hard, so yeah. It’s amazing.

Joe Pulizzi: It really is. The most amazing thing, just to kind of wrap up all examples and I think there’s a total of well over 50 examples in the book, and I love them, because most of them started with nothing. They started to create amazing content consistently over a platform.

But the one thing that we did, is when we did the interviews for the book and we look at each of the models, every one — and I’m not kidding you every one followed the same six steps. They did it in different time frames, but basically, the same six steps.

What’s the passion area? Define that first. What’s the content tilt? How are we going to build the base over time? How do we then harvest the audience? Then we move in to the diversification of, once the minimum viable audience is attained, we diversify into books or events or into social media channels or whatever. Then monetization.

The same thing. And that’s why I believe that if somebody reads the book, they could take this model and actually replicate it. Learn from you and I and everyone else and do this if you follow these steps. It just blew me away.

Actually, the most exciting for me is the simplicity of the model. It’s actually not complex at all. Like, if you go to building the base, it’s pick one main content type in one main content channel. Consistently distribute content over time. That’s like mind-blowing. But that’s what it is. That’s what everybody did. It just blows me away.

When Content Inc. Is Available for Purchase

Brian Clark: Yeah, I know. We’ve both been talking this for so long. I think sometimes, What’s not to get? But I will say that the way you boiled it down in Content Inc., over time, you find ways to explain things slightly differently, and you’ll see the light bulb go up.

So Content Inc. is released on September 8th. It is available for pre-order right now on Amazon. I think everyone who listens to this show needs a copy of this on their shelf. Other than my foreword, it’s a really good book. I ve got to do the false humility here.

The Inspiration behind the Content Inc. Summit

Brian Clark: Let’s talk a little bit about the Content Inc. Summit. So we ve got the big enterprise event, and companies big and small show up to Content Marketing World. But on the following day, September 11th, will be the Content Inc. Summit.

I want to talk about an example, and this is a guy who’s going to be there along with me and you, John Lee Dumas, the podcasting mad man. I mean, literally, this guy’s story amazes me. Not because of where he’s at, necessarily, although that’s impressive, but just how he attacked the world of podcasting as his content channel. Maybe you can run through a little bit of how John exemplifies some of these six steps or maybe the early ones.

Joe Pulizzi: Basically, he said, “We re going to focus on the entrepreneur, and we are going to solve entrepreneur’s problems and help them build their businesses. Specifically, we’re going to do this through this channel called podcasting, and we’re going to consistently deliver that message over time. He basically built that audience. He didn’t really have a revenue line or an idea of, How do we consistently build revenue?

I think what I love about John more than everyone else is that he does those monthly podcasts where he shares all of his financials. I dig that. Talk about some pure authenticity. It’s giving everything up.

Brian Clark: Yeah. At Moz, Rand was the first one I remember who had that kind of ultra-transparency. We try to do it to a certain degree, but it’s hard. I think we’re a little more old-school. Buffer does that really well. But John, yeah. He just lays it all out there.

Joe Pulizzi: Basically, he built an audience, and then once he built that minimum viable audience, he was able to sell.

The root for Content Inc., for the summit, it s the same thing, right? I had the last book — Epic Content Marketing — great for enterprise marketers. I wanted to have something for that small business, that entrepreneur, to say, “Hey. Here. This is for you. Just do this. Like they would say, “Hey, Joe, can I hire you for consulting? I’m like, “No. Save your money. Just read this, and then do it, and you’ll be fine.

And then we re going after the same thing at Content Marketing World. I mean, we ve got 11 concurrent sessions at Content Marketing World, mostly really shaped for — there are some SMB sessions, but most of them are shaped for the big boys. So we’re like, Okay. Well, I want that same thing for small businesses. Hey. This is for you.

You’re going to be talking. I’m talking. We ve got Matthew Patrick coming in, who — I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work on Game Theorists. He s got 4.8 million subscribers and has built an amazing business. He’s like YouTube’s number-one go-to guy or go-to to figure out analytics for YouTube. He’s going to be on there.

John Lee Dumas is going to be there. Andrew Davis, of course, is going to be kicking it off. It’s going to be fantastic, and I love it. You can be a small business startup entrepreneur in that room, and you will get nothing but six hours of value. You will come out of there inspired, but you will have enough that you will be able to say, “Look, I can do this for my business,” or “I can add this on to my existing business.

That was the hope. We’ll see. I think we’re going to get a really good crowd for it, but again, it’s a different audience that we’ve targeted. It’s on the back of Content Marketing World on Friday, 9 to 3.

Brian Clark: Yes. I’m attending both, but tell us how this works. If you want to go to the Content Inc. Summit alone, is that possible?

Joe Pulizzi: Yes. If you want to go to the Content Inc. Summit alone, actually, the easiest way to do it is just to go to the book site. Go to Content-Inc.com, and that’ll take you to the book site, and there’s a link right at the top for Content Inc. Summit. Just click there, and you’ll just go to the Summit site instead of having to go to Content Marketing World and go through all the other hoops. You don t have to do that. Just go to Content-Inc.com, and you’ll go directly to that page, and it’s going to be a blast.

Right now, of course, that’s where my passion is at, because I love to see these smaller businesses or entrepreneurs actually feel like they have a chance, and you and I both saying the same thing. You actually have a better chance in some cases that the one with all the budget money, because it’s so much more difficult in a large enterprise to do this.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Okay, we’re going to link that up in the show notes as well for easy access. Joe, my friend, you know, every year, I give you a hard time about Cleveland, which you love. You love your city.

Joe Pulizzi: I do.

Brian Clark: I’m looking forward to being there, and I’m really excited. I don’t know, after all these years, I still get fired up, and that’s a good sign, because if I don’t, I need to retire.

Joe Pulizzi: Hey, man, you’ve been along for this ride. It’s hard to believe. Remember the first year, we were just hoping for a couple hundred, and I said, “Brian, would you please speak? I need your help,” and we had 600 show up that year. Now we’re going to be over 3,000 this year.

Brian Clark: I know. That’s amazing.

Joe Pulizzi: It’s hard to believe.

Brian Clark: You put on amazing show. Every year I m just like, This is huge, and yet — no names on this side either — I’ve been to a few shows where they were just horrible. I mean, everything was wrong. The speakers are not treated well. But you really put on a class show. It’s amazing. I know you work hard to do it, but you make it look effortless while wearing orange, I should mention.

Joe Pulizzi: You know what, if you wore a little bit more orange, I think the world would be a better place as well.

Brian Clark: I’m a Broncos fan now. Can I wear just a Broncos jersey, or is that going to offend your Browns sensibility?

Joe Pulizzi: You know what, you’re fine in the convention center, but if you wear it around downtown Cleveland, you may be lost.

Brian Clark: I don’t mess around in downtown Cleveland. I just keep eyes forward.

Joe Pulizzi: We still remember the drive and the fumble.

Brian Clark: I know. You never get over that stuff.

Joe Pulizzi: Oh no. We can’t get over it because we haven’t won a championship in over 50 years.

Brian Clark: If LeBron could bring it home, I think it might ease some pain, but …

Joe Pulizzi: It will ease all the pain. It’ll all be forgotten. So hopefully soon, because people are dying here.

Brian Clark: I was going for the Cavs. God, I just want you guys to win something. Anything.

Joe Pulizzi: It’ll happen. It s certainly not going to be the Browns this year. But it could be the Cavs.

Brian Clark: All right, my friend, thank you again. I will see you shortly. Everyone out there, seriously, for the price of the book, I think you’re going to be over-delivered with inspiration but also methodology, and I think that’s important. So Content Inc. Check it out. Joe, take care.

Joe Pulizzi: See you soon, bro. Thanks for all your support.

The Transcript

How the Integration of Content and Commerce Creates a Winning Difference

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by The Showrunner Podcasting Course, your step-by-step guide to developing, launching, and running a remarkable show. Registration for the course is open August 3rd through the 14th, 2015. Go to ShowrunnerCourse.com to learn more. That’s ShowrunnerCourse.com.

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.