B2B Content Marketing Strategy: What Matters Most in 2024? Guest Robert Rose

TRANSCRIPT

Michelle J Raymond: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody to the Social Media for B2B Growth Show. I'm your host, Michelle J Raymond and this week listeners, we're going to be talking about what's hot and what's not in content marketing in 2024. So when I was thinking about who do I want to come and have this conversation with, Robert Rose, you were the only person I thought of, so welcome to the show.

Robert Rose: Oh my gosh, Michelle. It's so great to be here. It's awesome. It's awesome. I'm so glad I'm huge fan of the show. So I'm so glad to be here.

Michelle J Raymond: I have been thinking about the questions that I wanted to ask you. And as always, I like to just dive straight into these things because we were chatting before the show as hosts and guests often do and you and I share the same heart . That we're going to be taking a strategy first approach because Robert, I don't know about you, but a little piece of my heart breaks every time I see people busting their butt, working really hard and getting nowhere when it comes to content marketing. Do you share that [00:01:00] same sadness?

Robert Rose: I do. Every time we do a random piece of content, a kitten dies. So I think it's it's, we have to focus on strategy. Otherwise, what are we doing?

Michelle J Raymond: We're busy for busy sake tends to be what happens and people are not getting the outcomes they're not getting the business growth. And this show is all about actionable tips for people to take away, listen to what Robert and I share, and then go away and put it into action. That's why we have these conversations. So I've picked out a few of the kind of trending topics that are going on in content marketing. And I'm going to ask you, where you stand, and maybe we'll get a hot or not on these things, but one of the conversations that doesn't seem to go away, and I'm not going to name any names because we all know he's out there, but where do you stand in the debate of quality versus quantity when it comes to content marketing and how do you think B2B marketers can get this balance right?

Robert Rose: Yeah, [00:02:00] it it's quality and it's not even close. So especially these days with how AI has pervaded really everything that we're thinking about these days, commodity content that is just chucked out there is, it's just not going to do anything. And so the argument with quantity over quality is always something about well you have to be everywhere or you have to be frequent because you've got to pierce the noise. You've got to be able to, get through all of the other noise that's out there and social media feeds. And of course, in search and all these different things, but the experience is that it is high quality pieces that pierce the noise. It is high quality piece that will ultimately rank well in search.

It is a high quality piece that will ultimately differentiate you and make people want to pay attention. In other words, I would much rather [00:03:00] lose the popularity contest and actually win the differentiation contest, right? And increasingly, and this is especially true in B2B.

You're not competing for the first page of Google. We can have a whole conversation about that, but you're not competing against the first page of Google. What you're competing against are the 40 or 50 other pieces of content that your buyer has assembled in their research, looking to choose whatever it is you do. And so if it's not good, if it's just junk meant to rank high in search or sort of be on the front page of LinkedIn, if you're trying to be on the front page of LinkedIn, you're not going to differentiate.

You'll win the, I got a lot of comments on my stuff, but you're going to lose the differentiation when it comes to what really matters to your potential buyer or your potential audience. So it's quality and it's not even close. I will asterisk that with one thing, which is we have to stop being shy about reusing content.

In other words, one of the ways to fill your pipeline is [00:04:00] that great blog post, that great white paper, that great ebook that you created last year. It's still good and you can still promote it and you can still revisit all of the things that you did when you originally wrote it. Don't be shy about reusing content to fill the pipeline of things that you need to publish or want to publish.

Michelle J Raymond: I think the biggest assumption that people make where they go wrong to that point is they assume that people get sick of our content on a particular topic because they've been so saturated and already seen it so often, or maybe you post about it in a certain way, but you haven't posted it in a different format.

And I was talking to someone yesterday and they had this huge win in the business. And so everybody was talking about it. There'd been a company page post on LinkedIn, there was another salesperson had done a post and she said, look, I'm just holding it back because I didn't want people to just go, Oh, I've already seen that and I'm sick of seeing it.

I was like. No. We want the whole [00:05:00] internet to know about it. You cannot get sick of it because we have different audiences. The algorithm it takes care of where it's going to be shown. And these are the kinds of things that I think if you assume that there is ever too many times you can remind your audience of a quality piece of content and quality insights being the differentiator as you said.

Robert Rose: Yeah, the assumption you should come into every piece of content with is that even if it was your most popular piece, it was seen by a very small percentage of your total addressable market. And so don't assume that they have seen it before. Now that doesn't mean that you reuse a piece that you wrote last week and just continually to harp on that for the next four months. But that piece that you wrote last year or last quarter or, or even two years ago, I, it is common that I will revisit ideas that I wrote back in 2015, 2016, 2017.

And yeah, I'll. I'll make [00:06:00] them more current. I may repackage them a little bit. I might bring them up to date, but it's new. It's ostensibly old content that I'm revisiting and repackaging and reusing and repromoting in a way. That, if I had a great idea and I don't have that many great ideas, let me be really frank. I just don't have that many great ideas. So I need to reuse as many of them as I possibly can.

Michelle J Raymond: So I think if we can wrap up the last one, we're going quality over quantity. And that's not to say if you've got the resources to go wider or deeper, then go for it, but we are not just doing AI generated content, getting it out there in mass volumes for the sake of it. And can we please, for the love of God stop using AI to comment on LinkedIn posts. I am, I'm allowed to say that it's my show, but I need to stop it, Robert. Cause it's like the mosquitoes that are at the picnic.

Robert Rose: It's awful. And if anybody thinks that we don't notice. We notice. It's [00:07:00] very easy to spot. It is not hard to spot.

Michelle J Raymond: I know this is what I've been saying to people. We know what you're on to. That's probably the perfect segue into my next question. Hot or not AI in marketing. Now I don't want to go into specific tools because I think it's, if we go a bit broader and more general. Do you think it's a help or a hindrance for marketers out there?

 Hot or not, where are we going with AI and marketing today, maybe not in the future, but right now.

Robert Rose: I think it's a help. I think it can be a help and I think it can also be a huge distraction.

The one thing that I'm finding is that we're still most businesses, whether you're small or big, you're still in this nature of playing around with it, experimenting with it, individual use cases, rather than how are we integrating it into our team and how the team functions of creating a content strategy, and it's really hard to understand the benefits of it when we don't understand our content [00:08:00] strategy.

And so many businesses don't understand their content strategy. There's that great quote, with no standard, there can be no improvement. And so with no content strategy you don't know what A. I. Is going to help because there's no standard by which to base on whether you're more efficient or more effective or whatever it is.

Now, the key that I find today to answer your question is that A. I. Is really good at helping us express ideas at scale, not it's not good and have telling us what those ideas should be. We absolutely need the humans to help us understand creativity, understand our innovative idea, understand something that we can bring to the world in terms of a, synthesizing two things together to bring together an idea, but it can help us express that idea faster, right?

So whether that means helping us write derivative content. That abstract, the summary, the transcript, translating from different languages to different languages, which is honestly my favorite use case right now for generative [00:09:00] AI is a real time translation and localization. All of those can be very helpful things to help us express ideas in ways that we might not before.

But right now the pressure from so many senior leadership teams seems to be figure out how we can replace a human. And I actually did the math on this. I actually mapped more than 250 use cases across my clients, across my attendees, to my workshops, across my network on LinkedIn and of the 250 plus use cases that I've mapped the highest percentage of them by a long shot, like 40 percent of all the use cases across four categories was in the category of a new capability that would augment our human capability rather than replacing something that we're already doing.

In other words, it's some stuff that we've deprioritized because it's just too hard or too complex or takes too long, but AI would help us do it. Persona development is a great, is a great example of that. [00:10:00] It needs a human in order to drive it and the, so you've got this sort of tension between senior management coming in and saying, Hey, we need to figure out how it's going to replace you and the practitioner is going, Hey, here's all the things that I could do with it. And those two things are in conflict right now. So it's really hard to figure out where AI is going to go as a marketing component. Cause nobody knows what to do with it yet.

Michelle J Raymond: Absolutely. And when I was at Social Media Marketing World, I noticed all of the AI related speakers had rooms packed full of people, madly scribbling notes, but I really loved Ann Handley's slide that she had up we've all seen that slide that goes around from time to time of the MarTech companies that have been around and go back five years, we had maybe a couple of thousand choices. Now it's up over 15, 000 choices. So even turning to tech providers for the solution, you've got to invest time to do some research.

What will work for your business? [00:11:00] Not necessarily what works for everybody else or what's popular. There's nothing worse than taking the popular suggestion, and then I have it all the time. I try and use it and I'm like, this does my head in, I cannot relate. I don't understand the language. I don't understand the interface. It doesn't make logical sense in my brain. So therefore I go, all tools are like that and throw them away, which is not the right idea. And I'm with you. I love how I can take transcripts and things like that. That is, tasks that take a lot of time for not a lot of reward, but are still Important.

I love it for using that, but I feel like it's this vicious cycle going on. And there's, it's like the AI gives us the content to post, people post it, that AI then learns about that's the content that's getting posted. And then it comes back around and gets reposted by other people. And we're just in this vicious loop where what we're saying is take some originality, some thought leadership and some [00:12:00] genuine, really considered content and use it to improve it as opposed to outsource your brain. Can we just agree that we shouldn't be outsourcing our own brains?

Robert Rose: I think that's exactly it, right? Here's the thing, generative AI, and this is really what we're talking about here is just generative AI as a category, cause there's AI and analytics and there's AI and modeling and all sorts of things, but generative AI, when it comes to content and marketing the key is just to your point.

We don't trust it yet, and generative AI requires trust because it is unpredictable. In other words, you can ask it the same question twice, and you'll get two different answers. And by the way, it will never tell you which is the best one. In other words, if I say, Is this the best you can do?

You know, like write me a 500 word article, and then we'll write a 500 word article on the topic. And you say, is that the best you can do? And it'll say, Oh, no, sorry, I can rewrite it for you. And it'll rewrite it for you dutifully. You go, is that the best you can do? And it'll go no, no, no, [00:13:00] I'll rewrite it again and add infinitum.

You can do that process and it will never tell you. The third one I created was the best one dummy. Use that one, right? It will always change and so it's thus it requires a certain amount of trust in order to say, ah, that is it. So what we have to and the way we think about technology is where trust is removed.

Think about Excel for a second, right? If you do an Excel spreadsheet and you make a bunch of stuff, if it's a mistake, like if you see a mistake at the end of that Excel spreadsheet, it wasn't Excel that screwed up. You screwed up. You made the mistake somewhere. Gen AI isn't in that space yet.

So for all the use cases that actually remove the need for trust and dependability, then you go, ah, I can actually see the value there. You know, creating an abstract or creating a summary is a great version of that, right? Where I can yes, that is what we talked about. Yes, I basically [00:14:00] if it didn't get it right. I know I wasn't clear. Basically, it was the technology worked.

So the use case is therefore valuable because I don't need to trust it. It's just there. And that's where we that's where this bridge is going to be so hard to cross in terms of who's When will it be okay for it to generate new things for us that we as humans have to be able to recognize as good?

What does good look like? Because it will never tell us.

Michelle J Raymond: It sure won't. And I've struggled with that. You've got to know the right questions to ask. And if you're not an expert on that area, it's what you don't know, you don't know, which comes into play big time with these tools and getting the most out of them.

And so it's been really interesting for me. I've had that battle. I found the things I like still playing with some other ways to use it. Cause I like the idea of it being a sounding board or a brainstorming tool, or, look for gaps. I think Andy Crestodina was [00:15:00] talking about, gap analysis. It's really good at things like that.

It is. Bye.

Okay. I get this, but I think it always comes back to what's the strategy. Are we back at that beginning before we go and find the tools and start creating this content? So I think this is a recurring theme that you and I are having here today.

Obviously AI gets so much attention and I get it. I understand it's the topic du jour right now, but what either social media platforms or, maybe methods that are out there for marketing. Do you think are underrated when it comes to effective content marketing today?

Robert Rose: I mentioned two and it's especially true for B2B marketers, which is one TikTok .Seeing a lot of traction. Early traction for B2B marketers and there's some great content creators out there that are doing some remarkable things and really driving great engagement, great traction. In some cases, lead generation for sure, [00:16:00] but the, I would say it's a, for B2B, it's a very underappreciated platform right now. And I think, I know right now, especially in this very moment, there is talk here in the U S about banning TikTok and all of that. And it's really scaring a lot of people off. And I think, in terms of if I was putting into a long term strategy, I'd probably be a little circumspect about it, but I would be playing and in fact, my own, my own strategy, I'm playing around with it and, using it and finding some quite interesting, traction with it.

The other that I would mention is actually surprising to me, which is, and it's a, it's a weird ironic twist that I've seen with social media. And maybe best expressed in how great LinkedIn is right now which is organic. Reach and organic engagement is a thing again. And the reason it's a thing again is not because of the algorithm [00:17:00] changes or anything like that.

That's still as crappy as it's always been. But the key is that what we've seen over the last few years with the demise of Twitter and the raise of LinkedIn and Facebook and basically and TikTok as content consumption networks, rather than content sharing networks, is we've seen a real decrease in users participating in content.

In other words, comments are down. We've seen this really pronounced in blogs, right? The amount of comments that we see, basically the number of comments, the number of shares social media and one of the things that I've said before is social media is just becoming media. Yeah. And so it's becoming less about the conversation and more about the content consumption as a strategy.

So as a brand, as a marketer, that's an opportunity for me to reach audiences where I don't have the combination. I don't have the competition of somebody posting their breakfast, for example, or commenting on people posting their breakfast there's I'm [00:18:00] competing against my other marketer competitors for consumption and that consumption is higher.

And so you can actually really do a lot of really great things with organic reach. And LinkedIn is a great example of that, where depending on how you use LinkedIn, and I know you're an expert on this, you can really drive a lot of value with with the social networks right now, especially with B2B online.

Michelle J Raymond: And LinkedIn are telling us you don't need to be popular. They're actively trying to stop you from going viral. They are there to get you to talk about this. Talk about one topic to one community consistently and drive conversations. It is that simple. That is all we need to talk about with the algorithm on LinkedIn and I love that.

I love where they're going with this. I also love a bit of a sway towards long form content, making a bit of a comeback as well. I like to see people express beyond 1500 characters. [00:19:00] That I think takes more effort and I think the people that put that effort in I reward them with my time and energy consuming their content.

 I'm a little bit over the short form. Personally, cause I like to dive deeper and understand how things work. So I don't know if you're noticing that with your clients, but I think there's room for B2B thought leadership. And I don't mean just long form. Actually share your expertise. You've got a whole business to pick from in many cases of people that have got years and years of experience.

Bringing that whole team together is a big deal, but I think the quality of the output would be worth every single minute that you put into it, especially if people are reusing, like you said. I think it's a huge opportunity for businesses.

Robert Rose: Indeed. And I would just yes and that by saying comment right to just exactly to your point, I actually get probably more traction from thoughtful comments that I make on other people's [00:20:00] posts than I actually get on post themselves.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, absolutely. The huge part for me is it's social media. It's the social in social media that we lost focus on somewhere along the way. Send someone a direct message just for fun.

But speaking of the social media algorithms. They're always changing, they're always evolving and, reaching engagement for brands can get tougher as platforms get crowded or, they make these internal adjustments to the algorithms. What strategies do you think marketers should take a look at to stay ahead?

Robert Rose: Well, one is not try so hard to keep up with them, right? Just, if you just focus on creating great stuff consistently, you're going to be fine. You're going to be just fine. Trying to game the system is really just is it's an impossibility, right? You can't keep up. I don't care who you are. You cannot keep up. And so just create great stuff and create, value. And this goes back to our quality versus quantity. [00:21:00] Think about the quality of what it is you're putting out there. And by its very nature that it's scarce, people will pay more attention. In other words, if the advice you're getting is you got to post every two hours on LinkedIn and it's got to be all sorts of things, big blah, blah, blah. You've got to keep feeding feeding, because you've got to stay in the mind. What you're doing is you're teaching that community that you're engaging with the people who do see you based on the algorithm, you're teaching them to ignore you, right? Because you don't have anything that important to say, but when you create the right balance of high quality and not a lot of it. You're teaching people that if you're posting it's it's something important. It's something worth reading. So you're actually capturing their attention more, which honestly, if they like it quick and they get, they start commenting on it, that does help the algorithm and that does help you to actually put you in front of more [00:22:00] people.

So in a weird way, it's almost like higher quality and less frequently is going to get you more engagement. Thus, you're going to help you stay in front of people for longer it's just easier.

Michelle J Raymond: It is, and I am definitely on team, you don't need to know the details around the algorithm. Cause like you said, none of us will ever know. By the time anyone thinks they've figured it out, they've already moved on and changed it again, but ultimately, I think it takes the focus away from who are you creating the content for? Is your strategy to create content to keep an algorithm happy, or is your content strategy to keep top of mind for your B2B buyers, for the target clients that you have, for the brands that you want to work with, are you creating for them? Or are you creating for an algorithm?

And I think as soon as you start losing the focus of why you're doing this, and again, we're back at that strategy word again, I think that's when it all falls over. And for me, that's what I'm just trying to [00:23:00] get listeners back to is back to why are we doing this? And it's not for likes and comments.

If you are trying to grow your business, it is you are creating content that helps the person on the other side, make a buying decision, encourages them to take an action to reach out to you, keeps you top of mind with that company. And all of these kinds of things are where we're at, not how can I get the algorithm to love me more?

That is a futile exercise. It's just never gonna work.

Robert Rose: Exactly.

Michelle J Raymond: That's an end of rant for that one today. But yeah, say you are a B2B marketer, because I could go on about that one all day and my listeners. who listened to this show regularly. I love you all for extending me the grace that I'm allowed to have these rants.

But if you're a B2B marketing manager or someone responsible for a content strategy within a business, cause I know it could be all kinds of people. What areas, if they're reviewing the content marketing strategy, what areas would you give most attention to?

Robert Rose: [00:24:00] You know, it, these days it would be my owned media strategy and my first party data strategy. And this really goes for whether you're a marketing manager at a larger organization or whether or not you're, a solopreneur, like I have been just focused on my first party data audience acquisition and owned media acquisition approach. And the reason for that is, which we could, We could wax philosophical about, the deprecation of the third party cookie and privacy laws that are happening in your country in my country and so many different places and all of that is basically having us lean into the idea of how do we build audiences that we can address when we need to address them?

Despite what all the things that we need to do on social media, how are we pulling in our audiences so that we actually get insight from them so that we actually can engage them so that we can ultimately sell to them? Yes, but ultimately service them with value more. [00:25:00] And so anything that focuses on how do we get good at that? How do we start to really look at the idea of knowing a potential customer from the first time we meet them on our blog and subscribing to our email newsletter to when we're actually adding them to our CRM system as a customer and everything in between on the attributes and the insight and how we've delivered value to them, whether or not that's personalized or not, it doesn't matter, but that's the real focus.

And the other thing that I would really encourage as a layer on that is as B2B marketers, we have to get out of the confines of the PDF file. You have to start thinking about your content in a much more structured, digital, mobile friendly, all of those kinds of things where they are digital experiences that you go through and not files that you download.

So many resource centers and libraries and they're all, eBooks and PDF files of case studies, and they're just files that people [00:26:00] download and you don't get nearly the kind of insight into what's really resonating with your customers as you do when they are structured content hubs or little types of digital content where you can look at individual pages that they're looking at.

So I would, those are the two things that I would really be focused on right now and as a B2B marketer.

Michelle J Raymond: I think that's the next level when I was talking to Joe Pulizzi a few episodes ago, we were talking about this kind of content and it's the next frontier for me. He said print, didn't he? He said

Robert Rose: print, didn't he?

Yeah! Didn't he say print?

Michelle J Raymond: He did have a few words around that as well, and I can see where he was going with that. But I think for my audience, yeah, it's just, that's just because you've got your newsletter and you're all across that it's, the next frontier that he's going down.

But for me personally, I think it's having that control, as my business grows and evolves, it was easier for instance, me to have a LinkedIn newsletter set up, which I absolutely love my LinkedIn newsletter. But I [00:27:00] have no way of leveraging that for myself and looking at, you know, in depth analytics, or maybe reaching out in different ways to some of those people that are subscribers, who I do appreciate. But now it's okay, where do we level up and just having that closeness that can come with that interaction and owning it in case something happens and stuff does happen as the listeners of this show know. I've had the LinkedIn legal team come knocking on my door. So what happens if I lost my account then?

 And, these are the kinds of things that I'm looking at right now. What is the backup plan? Where is my attention going to be focused? And I think they're important. Things to just simple

Robert Rose: things, just simple things like, for example, I have my audience in a database and I can tell you of the thousands of people that are in there if you said, show me all of the people who attended web of your audience who attended the last 3 webinars. And are also email subscribers. I can do that. I can pull a list for you for that. And [00:28:00] it's a simple thing to, it takes work. It takes a strategy. It takes a focus, but having that capability is now I want to send an email to just the people who subscribe to webinars because I'd like to invite them to a new webinar.

I'm not going to spam my entire list. I'm just going to send the people who attend, who I know, like our webinars and send them an invitation and that kind of power to be able to target your message to the people and deliver the value that they expect in a way that doesn't overwhelm them. That's the real magic of having that first party data and how you've acquired it and who they are because you're just delivering more value to them over time.

Michelle J Raymond: So strategy and value. I think that is the key to all content marketing, right? It's just easy. That's, that's it. We just throw those words around, just do this and just do that.

 Don't skip over that step. I think is what we're going and maybe go back and have a look and see, is the one that you're following right now working for you? Is it doing what you set out to do? Make time to go back and check these things [00:29:00] out. But as we wrap up today I would like to know, Robert, what is one last actionable tip that you would love to leave the listeners with that you think when it comes to content marketing strategy, what matters most in 2024?

Robert Rose: It's a summary of everything we talked about which is I'll give you, I'll do two, which is one for those of you who are in control of your own destiny. In other words you're working for your own agency, your own consulting boutique, your own business, as a marketing team of one or a very small marketing team.

Just remember my mantra on this is market where you're going, not where you are. In other words, think about the stories that you want to tell in the thought leadership and the content you want to create as to where you're going. And instead of always focusing on where you are in that and for example, when I set up my shop as a content marketing strategist, as a content strategist, I was still making money writing email copy and writing ghost, writing white [00:30:00] papers and doing those kinds of things. But I marketed myself as a content marketing strategy 'cause I was marketing myself where I'm going, not where I was. Because that's a key and core component of your content strategy and that strategy that you have.

The second thing I would note is start thinking content before container. And that's a hard thing. This goes for you, whether you're a marketing manager or a solopreneur, wherever you are in business, we are trained as marketers and communicators to think container first. I need an ad. I need an email. I need a white paper. I need a PDF file. I need a PowerPoint. I need a webpage. And then we go great. Now, what kind of content are we going to put in there? And we come up with a great idea. And I've seen so many great, big, wonderful ideas get trapped in the context of a container that was because that was the first way we thought about it.

So think what is the story first? What is the content? What is the idea? And write a whole document about that if you want. And then go, Ah, it would be great as a podcast episode. Oh no, it would be great as a white [00:31:00] paper. Oh no, it's a better webinar. No, it's start thinking about all the ways you can reuse and retell that idea in different containers, rather than just trapping single ideas into single containers, because that's because you thought container first. So content first then container.

Michelle J Raymond: I love that because I'm sure that there are some white papers out there that would have been more engaging as videos or, short form that could have been long form or long that could have been short. And I think again, it always comes back to who are you creating it for?

 The answer is never to tick a box internally. Cause we haven't done a white paper for a while, so we better hurry up and get one back out again. Or as you said, PDF seemed to be the download of choice. And, ultimately if I'm going to a website to download something like that, typically it's, I'm doing competitive research and I just want a copy of it to see what they're doing and it's not actively me looking to purchase, I hate getting stuck in those follow up sequences. I was like, stop. I just downloaded something. We're not [00:32:00] best friends just yet. Just slow down. There's,

Robert Rose: all I did was got your

Michelle J Raymond: free downloads.

Robert Rose: Settle down.

Michelle J Raymond: We're not friends. Relax is probably what I would say. So I think we've covered lots of hot and what's not in content marketing today.

Robert Rose, you've given me something to think about, especially the point of creating content for where I want to be, maybe not where I'm at right now. And I've got some big plans for the future. Thank you for dropping that specific little golden nugget. I'm going to take that one away and do a little bit of a content strategy myself.

Cause you know, I, it's up to me to take the same actions as the listeners. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Robert Rose: Thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure.

Michelle J Raymond: No worries. And until next week, listeners cheers.