Your new content marketing strategy roadmap for 2024 with Robert Rose

Hey, before we get to the show, I just wanna remind you that we have created a private Facebook group just for you, our podcast listeners. There are almost 1500 agencies, agency owners, inside that Facebook group every day talking about what’s going on inside their shop, asking for resources, gut checking decisions, talking about everything from pricing to hiring, to biz dev. All kinds of things are happening there. We’re starting conversations. You guys are starting conversations. What I love about it is the community’s coming together and sharing resources, encouraging each other, and just sort of having a safe place to talk about what it’s like to own an agency. So all you have to do is head over to Facebook, search for a Build, a Better, Agency Podcast Group, or Build, a Better, Agency Podcast.

And you’ll find the group. You have to answer three questions. If you don’t answer the questions, we can’t let you in. But they’re simple. It’s, do you own an agency or do you work at an agency? And if so, what’s the URL? What are you trying to get out of the group? And will you behave, basically? So come join us. If you haven’t been there for a while, come on back. If you haven’t joined, join in to the conversation. I think you’re gonna find it really helpful. All right, let’s get to the show.

Welcome to the Agency Management Institute community, where you’ll learn how to grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money, and keep more of the money you make. The Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by a white label IQ is packed with insights on how small to mid-size agencies are getting things done, bringing his 25 years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here with an episode of Build a Better Agency. And you are gonna be really glad that you tuned in for this one. This is one of our favorite guests. We’ve had him here before. He’s been a speaker at the summit, and he is just all around, probably most of ours. One of our favorite guys in terms of being smart, in terms of being generous. I know all of you are familiar with his work and follow him closely. So you’re gonna be excited when I tell you who it is and what we’re gonna talk about. But first, before we do that, just a quick reminder as we come upon the new year, we’ve got lots of great workshops in 2024, starting in March. We don’t have any until March, but March, April, and then all the months following, we’ve got workshops here in Denver all through the spring, summer, and fall focused on agency owners.

We have the AE bootcamps, all kinds of good stuff. So if you’re curious about when those are, and getting registered for those, head over to agency management institute.com. And under the How We Help Navigation link, you’re gonna see workshops. If you click on the word workshops, you’ll actually get to a list of all the workshops and there’s details about each one. And you can click on each one and read more about them. So if you’re thinking about professional development and growth and learning for yourself or someone on your team, that’s a good place to start. All right. Okay. Let me tell you, or I guess remind you about our little bit about our guest. So Robert Rose is really a content king.

He understands content and the strategy behind content better than most will ever understand it. He has written several books on the topic. As you know, he is a key figure at Content Marketing Institute. He is one of the lead dogs at Content Marketing World. If you’ve ever been to that conference, which is a great one. And this fall, he just put out a new book called Content Marketing Strategy Harness the Power of Your Brand’s Voice. And it’s awesome. It is very how to, it is very illuminating in terms of how we should be thinking about the strategy of content marketing for ourselves and for our clients.

And so I can’t wait to dive into this with Robert. I wanna talk a little bit about how the book came to be, the main tenants of the book. We’re gonna talk a little bit about ai. So I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff that I wanna run by him. So buckle in, ’cause this is gonna be a very fast episode. And before you know it in a blink, the hour’s gonna be gone. So let’s welcome him to the show. Robert, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for coming back.

Oh my gosh. One of my favorites on the entire planet. Thank you so much for having me back, my friend.

So we have a lot to cover and I’m, I’m sure we’re just only gonna scrape the surface. But let’s start with the book. So you have written several books. You have a brand new book I have coming out, which I’m gonna hold up, even though only you and I are gonna see it, content marketing strategy harness The Power of Your Brand’s Voice. So what prompted this book? ’cause I know as an author you sort of get a nudge of like, ugh, that book has to be written. Right? So what was the, what was the nudge for you?

You know, here in All, in All Full Transparency here was, here’s the very quick story, basically. So for the last 13 years, I have been creating a, a class, and it’s primarily driven through content marketing university, which is I do through Content Marketing Institute. And every year for the last 13 years, I have been tweaking it and changing it, improving it, hopefully. And in 2021, and I am conscious of the day 2021, ’cause 2020 was a weird year. Yes, it was. I basically felt like it was done. Like it was, I finally felt like I had, you know, in the classic sculptor, I had uncovered the el elephant after chip, chipping away everything that didn’t look like an elephant, and was really proud of it.

And basically really started to think I should codify this in some way. Like I should, you know, ’cause it’s, you know, it’s a big PowerPoint, it’s a lot of videos, it’s scripts, it’s, you know, sort of all this thing. I should codify it into a book and just sort of of have it. And in the middle of 2022, the summer of 2022, basically Kogan page, just I guess, you know, in sort of a synchronicity, emailed one day and said, Hey, listen, we are thinking about, we really want to have a book on content marketing, and would you wanna do that? And I said, that’s funny, you should mention that. And I said, but here’s the thing. It’s gonna be a really geeky book and it’s gonna be about strategy.

I said, it’s not gonna be about content. It’s, you know, in other words, there are plenty of books out there, including some that I’ve written that storytelling and the great content and how to create impactful SEO and all that great books out there. And it’s not about marketing, because there are great books out there about marketing as well. But what there’s not a great book out there about right now is content marketing strategy, sort of how all of the things that we do, the activities that we do in a business sort of fit together to create some sort of competitive advantage with this practice that we call content marketing. And they were like, well, that’s exactly what we want. We want a textbook, we want a geeky university style textbook of, of, of strategy. And so it was a match made in heaven.

And I was like, great, let’s go. And so I, you know, starting in the, in the winter basically of 2022, we finally got to a deal, and here we are at the end of 2023 and the book is out.

So I will say for the, the listeners, it doesn’t read like a geeky textbook. I mean, it’s, it reads like, thank you. It reads like one of your books. It’s, it’s, it’s good, it’s practical, it’s great stories, it’s great examples to help people understand the, the structure of what you’re talking about. So if, if you’re listening, you’re like, I don’t wanna read a textbook. This is a typical Robert Rose book. It is not a textbook. It, it, it may have a lot of thank you for that juicy meat in it, but it, it doesn’t read that way.

Yeah. Well, I try and keep it, you know, I mean, I try and keep it entertaining anyway, you know what I mean? Yeah. It’s like, that’s, that’s the, you know, if if you’re not having some sort of interesting, fun sort of, you know, entertainment, I, I don’t think you’re learning. So, you know, but I guess what I mean to say is that it’s, it’s not, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s not a wind you up and get you excited book. It’s a how to for sure.

Right. Well, that’s actually what I was just gonna say. That’s what I love about it, is it is a how to. And so when we think about this audience agencies, and, you know, I think when content sort of started to become a thing, agencies have, you know, you and I will recall, we’re really struggling to figure out how to monetize it, how not to, you know, get paid a dollar to do something that was gonna cost $10 to do. And Yep. How to really help their clients understand the value of creating content and having a strategy around it. And I think we’ve come a long ways in terms of sort of figuring out how to price it and how to get it done well. But I think a lot of agencies struggle with clients wanting to rush right to the creation of the thing without having a strategy.

So I think this book in particular, in particular for agencies, for on the client side, is a great framework to sort of use to educate clients about why strategy matters and how to create strategy. And as you know, you know, with the book that Steven and I wrote and all of that, I’m a firm believer that content is how agencies should market themselves as well. So it’s also everybody, a field guide on how you should be thinking about your content strategy for yourself and for your shop, and how to build that out so you’re not just banging out x number of blog posts a week or whatever your cadence is, but that there is a, a framework and a strategy by which you hang all of the content.

So it accomplishes what you’re trying to accomplish. I mean, that’s the power of this book is the strategy part. And as, as you say, it’s not the sexy part. Right. So let’s talk about, let’s talk about that a little bit. So I know you, you talk about that content strategy isn’t necessarily the sexiest part of content marketing, but it is, it is the roadmap. It is, it does tell you where to go as opposed to just getting in the car and driving around aimlessly.

Yeah, I mean it’s, you know, the, and you make such a great point with regard to agencies, because having worked, I mean, I came outta the agency world and, and, and now I’m myself am am really an agency. I’m small, you know, sort of solopreneur kind of thing as a consultancy, but it’s the same business. And, and it’s a dual sword, right? I mean, where we are helping our clients in many ways develop their prowess as a trusted advisor to making their marketing and content better. And we ourselves need to do the same thing, right? And enable our organization to market ourselves better. And so the idea here is, is that what has gotten conflated in so many ways with regard to content marketing and our approach to it is the content itself.

In other words, we spend all our time, time to create, you know, something viral or something amazing or impactful or innovative or, you know, storytelling and all of these things. And we spend all our time there. And those things are ephemeral at best, right? They’re, they’re only going to exist as a successful metric for the time that they’re created. And best case scenario, somebody starts copying us and we become just part of the noise again. And so it’s not how we can become great every now and again and how, or how we can help our clients become great every now and again. It’s how do we build an operation that can consistently create great things, and that’s both for our clients as well as for us.

And so the way to do that is to, you know, we often think, oh, content marketing is marketing like a media company. Like right, you we’re gonna create all these cool trailers and films and cool things that a media company would. And it’s like, no, it’s not that. It’s about operating as a media company does. So the processes, the digital asset management, the activities we do, the foundational charters for our teams, the ways that we construct those teams and the activities that they perform in day to day, so that we operate as such, is the way that we create that consistency and really treat it like a strategic function in the business, no matter if we’re doing that for our clients or for ourselves.

Well, and I’ve always said, you know, if you’re not ready to do this for clients, then you’re the perfect Guinea pig. Do it for yourself first. Exactly. Build it out for you. And then when you have it, you know, at a b plus level, great. Roll it out to clients.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it, it’s, it’s, it’s a challenge in the sense that you, you, you know, when we think about how does content get made, and this is true in agencies as well, we think, how does content get made? And mostly we go, it just happens, right? You know, we, we, we, we have an idea and then, I don’t know, the team kind of does stuff and magic comes out the other side of it. And then by the way, that’s businesses as well as agencies. Yeah. And that messy, magical stuff might literally be us. Like we might literally get the creative brief or whatever, and it’s like, make some magic happen and we make some magic happen, and out comes content on the other side, and then they go, how did you do that?

And you go, I don’t know, we just did it. It it’s project by project or piece by piece or whatever. And it’s actually putting a system to that that’s really important.

Well, and I think for a lot of agencies it’s, it’s either there’s no system or it’s the system of Right. Everybody’s gonna be in a conference room and nobody leaves the conference room until their blog post is done, or, or whatever. That’s right. The thing is right’s. So it’s either this mandated activity, but still it’s at the activity level, not really the strategy level. And, and, you know, I I I rail against the idea that a lot of agency content is still, you know, the Pantone color of the year blog post that, you know, all 10,000 agencies write as opposed to them really understanding why that would be relevant or not to their audience.

That’s right. And either letting it go or putting their own spin on it so it actually has, you know, that’s right. That’s

Some connects,

Right. Appreciate everything else they’re doing.

Yeah.

So where do we get content wrong? Where, where do we, or where do we, or clients, where do we get the strategy wrong in terms of the operation? Is it that it just isn’t codified and it’s not sort of an a, a system and process in our project management system and that we have sort of tools to use to sort of do it the same way over and over? Is that the mistake we make? Or is it somewhere else?

It, well, it, it’s in all of those places, but I’m gonna pick on one very particular thing because what we have found is, is that if you can at least get this one thing right, then a lot of it becomes a lot more sane or a lot more doable. And, and the switch that we have to make is that when we, when we meet with clients, and inevitably today, especially in the world that we live in, the feeling is we create too much content. Like we create so much content and we don’t know what’s working, and we don’t know how to make more of it. And we’re trying to make more of it as best we can. And it quite literally is the throw enough spaghetti against the wall, and some of it sticks kind of right, right.

Mentality. And the reason for that, and when we actually uncover, and we actually go in and do the audit and do the work, what we find is, is that the vast majority of businesses don’t create too much content. They actually create too many digital assets. And that’s because we’re not in most content teams and agencies. We’re not in the content business, we’re in the digital asset business. In other words, we get asked for a digital asset. It could be an ebook, a white paper, a webpage, a landing page, a website, an email program. You know, we’re thinking container first. And then we go, great, now we have this strategy to create a container. Well, one of the elements that we have to put into it is content.

And so we think, how are we gonna pour content into this container to make it work as best we can? And unfortunately what happens is, in most cases, we either duplicate ideas we’ve already done, or we create ideas as best we can for that container. And what happens is, is that great big, wonderful content ideas get put into really small containers. I’ve seen so many amazing what could be entire brand campaigns poured into the con contents of a blog post, simply because that was what was needed at the

Time that was due, right?

Yeah. That was what was due, or the reverse, which is actually worse and happens more often, which is really small ideas get put into these big pieces like a white paper or a research project or a campaign, because that was what was due at the time. And so we have to reverse that thinking. First of all, in any internal content team or the agency, the first thing we have to do is create as a process the content. What is the idea? How are we gonna express that idea, the words, the pictures, the ideas, all of these things in a mishmash of focused, you know, sort of expression, then figure out, great.

Now what are all the containers that we need to actually express that in the right way? Just switching those two ideas can change us from sort of an asset factory into a true content creation machine.

Yeah. It’s interesting because when I think about sort of how most people approach like a content plan or a marketing plan, it’s okay, every quarter we’re gonna produce a eBooks, and once a month we’re gonna produce a blah, blah, blah. And every year we’re gonna do a piece of research and have an executive summary. Yeah. And out of that, we’re gonna produce 52 blog posts, but Exactly. But there’s no idea or like meaningful meat on the bone in any of that. It’s a laundry list of things to make as opposed to ideas to share.

That’s right. Our editorial strategy in so many ways is a widget strategy, right. You know, you see so many editorial strategies that look exactly like what you just said. You know, you get the Excel spreadsheet and the plan is, okay, we’re gonna create 50, you know, 50 eBooks, plus we’re gonna create, you know, 14, you know, blog posts, you know, per, you know, quarter. And we’re gonna do a podcast and they’re gonna have seven episodes of it and, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they’re just widgets, they’re just content widgets, right? And then we go, great. Are we approved with that? Because that’s how we associate, we’ve come to sort of, in our minds associate cost. Right?

Right. I was just gonna say, I, I think that’s what agencies are thinking is like, well, crap, I, the way I sell a content package

Exactly, is by container.

Yep. It’s four large things and three medium things, and that’s right. 12 little things, right?

That’s right. We’re getting paid for exactly the wrong thing. Right? Right. We’re getting paid for exactly the wrong thing because honestly, creating the next ebook, let’s just be honest, the mechanics of that, we know how to do, we know exactly how much that costs, right? What we don’t know is how much the great, amazing, innovative idea that we need to generate. And that’s always the hard unknown part, right? It’s like, oh, what are we gonna put into this container that we know exactly how much it’s gonna cost and we know exactly what that profit margin is going to be, right? And then everybody’s like, well, let’s just do the easiest thing that we can get away with for the client, right? Because honestly, if they approve it, we’re good. And we’ve made our margin for that particular project and rinse and repeat.

So I’m sure everyone listening is like, okay, but how if, if I, if I lead with great big ideas first, and that’s part of the strategy, and then I’ve operationalized how I figure out what the container is and how we make the container, how, how does an agency approach that from a scoping and pricing point of view?

Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s hard. And at your wonderful event, I got the chance to present my little smile graph where Yep. You know, it one of people still re

Of the most people that all the time.

It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a classic thing. And, and basically for those who may not be familiar with it, it’s, it’s ostensibly where do you sit in the hierarchy of strategy and value to a client? And if you know, so if you think of it at the very highest sort of corner of your smile, that’s strategy, right? You know, you’re at the trusted advisor consultant status and at the bottom of your chin is content words creation, container creation that’s commoditized. You’re only as good as the last one you produced. Right? And quite honestly, it’s a race to the bottom for how efficiently you can actually do that. And at the other top is measurement, right? Where you can provide insight and ongoing sort of strategic value by showing and giving them insight into how to get back around to strategy again.

And the idea is, is that you wanna sit at one of the two corners of the smile, or both if you possibly can. It’s really easy if you sit at the top to move down into the commoditized container category, it’s really difficult to move from the chin up to one of the corners because you’re just, the perception of you in that particular client’s mind isn’t that you’re trusted consultant, it’s that you’re content creator. So what you have to do is you have to start selling it that way, employing it that way, even if they don’t pay for it. Because that’s the way to make somebody sticky, is to make sure that you’re sitting at that strategy. Right? So what I always advise is to say, even if right now you’re sitting with a new client and all you’re getting hired to do, and they send you an RFP or a creative brief, and they say, we need 14 eBooks, you go, great phase one of our ebook creation strategy is to sit with you and talk about your long-term goals, ideas, expressions to map out and roadmap your content strategy.

Yeah. What we’re going to do from a content perspective, we’ll talk about the 14 eBooks at another time ’cause we know exactly how to do that. But what we need to understand are the ideas that we’re going to express over time that you’re going to express and work that out with you in a workshop, in a series of workshops. Whole, whole thing. So that we can provide you the best services available. If you can get, if you can charge for that, if you can get money for that, that’s the best thing. Right? But if you can’t, you have to start working it into your methodology so that at some point you can get paid for it.

Well, and again, if you don’t do that, then you’re gonna measure the wrong things on the other end of the smile. Right? ’cause you’re gonna measure clicks and things like that as opposed to, you know, were the ideas sticky? Were people talking about them? Did they raise their hand to talk to you more about the, like, if you don’t have the strategy, then you don’t know how to measure what actually matters.

That’s right. And, and if you don’t wanna call it strategy, because we often don’t, by the way, ’cause it’s strategy with a small s you’re not coming in there to teach them how to make better products or better services. Unless you’re getting hired to do that. Of course, you know, that’s true marketing or business strategy. What it is, is planning, right? You’re putting planning and prioritization to the messages and stories and ideas that they want to express. You’re making content, the ideas. That’s what you want to get paid for is great content, great ideas. That’s where you become sticky. And then making your sort of, you know, ebook widgets or white paper widgets or webinar widgets. Well that’s just part of the, you know, that’s just part of the factory process.

Yeah.

So much, so much to do. And yeah, it’s fascinating because it’s not like this is new to us. We’ve been doing this for a while now, but I, I think we, I think agency, I was, I was having a conversation with a bunch of agency owners last week and I was saying, you know, the challenge is that they were talking about how do you price strategy and, you know, of course most agencies give it away and all of that. And I said, you know, you have to understand that our history is, we gave all of that stuff away back in the day to get media commissions. And that’s what paid for for everything. Of course. Yeah. And then we finally got to the point where we were doing things that weren’t gonna run through paid media. So then we got paid to make the things, but we’ve never, unless we were a PR shop, we’ve never, ever as a, as an industry led with our thinking.

Even though today it’s really the only thing we have left to sell that has high value. But it’s a mindset shift for us, right?

Yeah. Oh, it’s a total mind shift for us. But, but if you look the rise of the consultancy as trusted advisor on this, right? There’s a reason that Accenture and Droga five are having so much success to the expense of the WPPs and the Omnicoms of the world, right? And there’s this reason that the Deloittes and, and the PricewaterhouseCoopers and the McKinseys and all of them are having tremendous success while the agencies that are, that are stuck in the media models and the stuck in the widget business are the struggle because they were successfully able to combine being the trusted counselor of senior level executives with the creative side, you know, of being able to make, you know, make the donuts.

And that’s the same kind of ideas that we need to come to the table with and not necessarily give it away. One of the, you know, so for small agencies, one of the things that I always recommend is like, I know you, you know, you definitely don’t wanna give it away. You want to have perceived value there, but in some cases you’re not getting asked for that. So it’s like forcing it on them. They don’t, they, they, they, they sort of go ick. And you go, listen, this is part of our methodology, this is part of our approach. And if you buy, quote unquote this phase of it, we’ll knock it off. You know, we’ll knock off what we’re gonna pay, you know, what you know

Or something. Right?

Right. In other words, we’re going to teach you to fish and we’re going to give you this content strategy or this ideas or all these things. And we are going to use that as a tool to make everything we do better for you. Now, we’d like you to pay for that. And if you do, you’re going to actually do this. If you don’t, you’re gonna pay a premium for these things because we do it anyway.

Right? Right. We’re gonna bake in the price one way or the other. Right?

That’s

Right. Well, you know, it’s interesting because, you know, as, as we have watched the consultancies, the McKinseys of the world, so you, going back to your smile analogy, they’ve always sat in that upper, you know, left corner with the, with the strategy. But then what they’ve all been doing is they’ve been buying agencies, right? So they’re buying all these agencies so they can fulfill the bottom of the smile part, the commodity part. Exactly. Right. And then they’re able then to have more control over what they can measure and that the measurements are better. ’cause they’re controlling the whole cycle. And so I find it sort of fascinating that everybody, agencies and I we’re gonna take a break and then I wanna talk about ai of course.

’cause everybody is, but I think everybody’s worried about how AI is gonna consume all of the billable hours and the projects and all of that. Well that’s just yet another person commoditizing the commodity. We already have been producing. Where I think we should be worried as agencies is if we can’t compete with the consulting firms, they’re the ones who are gonna put us outta business because that’s exactly right. They too are gonna be able to leverage AI and whatever tool comes after AI to make the things faster and better.

But that’s right.

We have to be able to compete on the strategy side. And I believe that we can, we just undervalue it in ourselves and with our clients,

We are usually better equipped than they are.

Right.

Because here’s the thing, when you talk about an Accenture or a big consulting firm or somebody like that coming in and offering what they’re getting is not the senior, you know, the senior level experienced partner who’s going to come in for most of their clients. Now, for obviously for Ubic clients, they’re getting that, but for most of their clients, the, you know, this is why you always get the, you know, you always get this question, and I know agency owners out there get this question ’cause I get it all the time. It’s like, are you gonna be on our team? Yep. Or is it gonna be one of your B players or C players or D players? Yeah. Some kid, it’s, you’re always like, well no, of course I’m gonna be on your team because we’re a small agency and that’s the way we work. Right. It’s like it’s because they’ve had an experience with a larger consulting firm where the senior level partner disappears after the deal is done and they get a bunch of, you know, I mean there’s that very funny John Oliver thing about McKinsey now.

Right? Right, right. You know, basically, you know, they’re getting the recent MBA grad who knows nothing about anything. And so, right. Actually we’re better equipped in most cases to provide specific sort of industry level or thought leadership or that kind of expertise to our clients simply because we are the ones living it every day. And so, right. We’re, we’re actually have, we can move faster, we can pivot better, and we can be smarter than they can. We just can’t scale the way they can and that’s our advantage.

Well, and honestly, I think a lot of age, you know, we run agencies through an exercise and help them get much more practical about setting their growth goals for the year, because I think everyone has this misperception that they have to go out and get way more clients and way more budget than they actually could possibly serve. The reality is for most agencies, if they grow, if you assume that they’re gonna have some attrition, right? ’cause everybody does. I don’t care how good you are. If you figure that if you grow even 15 or 20% year over year, that’s really like, well you’re doing great. 35,

15% or percent per year. Yeah. Yeah. You’re, you’re crushing it. Yeah.

So, so for most agencies, when they actually do the math, it’s like, oh, and you figure some of that growth should come from our existing clients. So I don’t have to go find that many new people to gimme money.

Oh, of course. Stickier and stickier. Right. The more, you know, the more we can sell into our existing customer base. The, and, and that’s where, again, where strategy pays dividends, right? Right. Because if you’re, if you’re literally, I mean, we used to have this saying in one of the agencies that I ran years ago where I had one of my account managers, he used to, he used to liken himself to the, you know, the old Peanuts cartoon where Lucy would hang up the, you know, the doctor is in. Yep. He would literally go sit over in the client’s office all day. He got a cube over there and would sit there and literally hang out a sign saying the doctor is in and people would pass by. And just the handout projects, basically, because we had that trusted relationship, that strategic relationship, he would literally just walk over there, have lunch, hang out all day, and people would just, managers would come by and go, oh, could you do this?

Can you do that? Can you do this? Can you do this? And he would come home with a list of projects every single day.

Yeah. Single day. Yeah. Which, which is an underutilized skill, which is a whole different conversation. But yeah, of course. I, I, I think the point is that when we are the strategic partner, when we do lead with strategy to your exactly whether we get paid for it or not, number one, the odds of us keeping the client much greater ’cause we become the one that they come and chat with. We become the thought partner, the thinking partner. Number two, there is great opportunity always to upsell that in an effort to help them with their business. It helps our business too. I mean, it has to be for the right reasons. And number three, we’re not gonna have to compete on price where we have to sit at the commoditization of making the things, which is where the whole AI discussion comes in.

So I wanna take a quick break and then when we come back, I want to hear sort of how you are viewing AI and how we could leverage it as a valuable tool. Should we be afraid of it? Is it gonna put us all out of business? We’re gonna do all of that when we come back from the break. Alright. Alright, we’ll be right back. Hey, sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to make sure that you are thinking about how to connect with your clients by figuring out what they love and maybe a few things that they’re not so crazy about with your agency. So at a MI, one of the things we offer are client satisfaction surveys. We do both quantitative and qualitative. So an online survey, but also interviews with some of your key clients.

And then we come back to you with trends, recommendations, what they love, what they don’t love. Lots of insights around how you can create an even tighter relationship with your clients. So if you have interest in that, you can go under the How we help tab on the a MI website and very bottom choice on the how we help tab is the client satisfaction surveys. You can read more about it, but whether you have us do it or you do it yourself or you hire somebody else, it is really critical that you be talking to your clients about what they love and what they wish was different or better. So do not miss the opportunity to tighten your relationship with your client whether we help you or not.

All right. All right. Let’s get back to the show. All right. We are back with Robert Rose and we are talking about his new book Content Marketing Strategy Harness, the Power of Your Brand’s Voice, which again, all of you should be reading and it it is, it is a great how-to book and it will give you lots of really practical things to do inside your shop also with clients. But right before the break we were sort of shifting. So you and I just recently were speakers and panelists for the marketing AI Institute’s event for agencies in November, which was awesome. So I know you’re thinking about AI a lot, just like we are.

So

How

Are, how are you viewing it and how are you, is it a threat? Is it an opportunity, is it a big scary thing that, you know, is amorphous? Is it something we can actually leverage to get from the bottom of the smile back up to the strategy side of the smile or the measurement side of the smile with clients? Like, what’s your take on it?

I’ll just, I’m just gonna go say yes.

Okay. Yes. To

All

Of the above. Thanks. Thanks for being on the show. Good talking to you. Yeah, exactly.

You know, it is, it, it is all of those things. I mean, and you know, as, as we sit here, you know, there’s just so much chaos and craziness happening even as we speak. So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a very uncertain time, let’s put it that way. There’s a lot of fud out there right now with clients, with agencies, with marketers of all shapes and sizes. And so I think mostly the history is yet to be written. And so here’s how we are looking at it though, is what we can all agree because, okay, so first of all, the world does not need another research study on how many marketers are feeling like their job is going to be fundamentally changed by ai.

Right? Right. That’s like we, we get it. Right. Right. We, the answer is yes, we are going to fundamentally change and we’re all feeling it. What we, what we have come to realize, however, having done this for a couple of clients and, and actually, you know, been looking deep into this, is that AI is, and, and specifically what I’m getting to here is generative ai, right? Yeah. So there’s AI and analytics, and there’s AI and factory management, and there’s ai, you know, there’s AI being inserted in just about every business process, but let’s specifically talk about content creation, generative AI more specifically. And what we’ve found is, is that that is a content strategy problem, not a technology problem.

And, and what I mean by that is that what we’re seeing in all that sort of research out there is that businesses are largely, and this includes agencies experimenting, right? Yep. But what we’ve discovered is that it’s not, businesses are experimenting, people are experimenting, you know, so individuals are experimenting. And it goes right back to what we talked about at the top of the show, which is the lack of process around content creation is basically when we start thinking about content creation and that magic stuff that just sort of happens, well, we don’t understand as an institution, and I don’t care if you’re an agency or you’re the end client or both.

What we don’t understand is as an institution, what our process is. So we have zero idea of whether AI is actually going to be helpful, more efficient, more effective, et et cetera, et cetera. We don’t know what good looks like, we don’t know what smooth looks like, we don’t know what efficient looks like. We can’t measure the content creation process. Thus everything looks like an opportunity and everything looks like a threat and everything looks like it’s going to change everything because we just don’t know. Right? So what we’ve been doing is, is, is we call it our AI readiness opportunity. And when clients ask for it, we say, we have to sort your content strategy.

In other words, we have to sort your process first. We have to understand and map out the ways that you create content, because then we can start doing specific team level, business level, sort of use cases to see where there may be efficiency gained, there may be effectiveness gains, et cetera. Because as I’ve said, this is my little bumper sticker, you know, for, you know, for ai. And, you know, instead of the whole AI is gonna take your job thing, right? Right. My bumper sticker is, my bumper sticker is, is basically generating content is kind of the least interesting thing that generative AI does. Yep. Right? It’s, it’s, it’s working with it can make you so much smarter and so much better and so much more effective, but you have to kind of know what it is you’re doing before you can do it.

And so that’s the way we see it right now.

Well, and one of the things I’m seeing, and I’m curious if you’re seeing it too, is I think our clients, and I, and I know this was a takeaway from Macon this last summer, a lot of, we had a lot of a MI agencies at Macon and, and their collective and individual takeaway was they were sort of relieved at how little the brands knew about or were actually leveraging AI yet and how hungry brands were for their agencies to show them and teach them and counsel them on how to bring it into their business. So I, I feel like, again, getting back to that Strat sitting at that trusted advisor spot, if we can wrap our arms around what are some ways that AI can be additive to our clients, I think we get to teach them.

That’s right. That’s right. And, and, but at the end of the day, we say, what is it that we’re going to teach them to do? Like what will they be able to do that they can’t do now? Right. And ultimately we have to understand what it is they can’t do now. Right. In order to actually get them to a place where they understand, you know, there’s a whole, one of the things that I’m so struck by is the Dunning Kruger sort of aspect of this whole thing, right? Right. Where we actually have to be able to recognize what good looks like before we can actually recognize, have the skill to understand what is good, right? So there’s the, you know, and it’s fascinating to me because everybody goes, oh, we can use gen AI to create automagically, create sales emails and, and blog posts and all of these things, and we’ll just, we’ll just start using it to create content.

It’s like, well, how do you measure today? What, what’s good today? Who’s creating the best? What do you understand is to be the best experiences that I, I don’t know, we’re just, we’re doing as best we can, right? Adding more to that soup, adding more meat broth, vegetables, et cetera, to that soup. Is it gonna make the soup any better? Right. It’s just gonna make more mess. And so we have to be able to understand what it is we’re actually trying to drive and teach right. Before we can actually get them to understand it. And so really figuring out the processes and the strategy and the ways that content can be made better in their process is fundamental to understanding whether AI will actually help or hinder it.

Because one thing we’ve discovered, and this is fascinating to me, is that in the few projects we’ve actually done for clients, we have found it actually doesn’t make things more efficient. It actually make things more effective. And they actually need net more resources to do these things with this technology than they did before. In other words, AI gives them capabilities they didn’t have before and weren’t doing persona research, you know, competitive research, topic research, SEO research, all these things that they were sort of went, eh, I don’t have time for that because we’re too busy throwing spaghetti against the wall. Yeah. Well now you do, you’ve got great tools to do that, but you actually need net new resources to be able to do all of that.

And so it’s actually a, a resource multiplier, not necessarily something where fewer people can get more done.

Well, and to your point, it does loop right back down to the strategy, right? Like

Everything does. Yeah,

I think you’re right. Everyone is thinking of it as an efficiency tool, which I think is reflective of sort of where we’re, we are economically in this year as well. Everybody’s about cost savings right now, right? Everybody’s based on budget

Conscious and how much we value our writers and content. Right? Which is not much, right?

Not much, which as a writer is sort of offensive, but I, I’m used to it. Yeah. I, I worked with an art director for many years who was like, you know, no one reads the words, right? Like, they read the headline and they look at the picture and I was like, yeah, you’re a jerk. Yeah,

Right. I’ve got, I, I got, I got one of my favorite designers, a t-shirt that says, I know how to draw hands.

Yeah, I love that. So, but you know, again, it just, it circles right back around to how we started this conversation, which is when we understand what, to your point, what good is, right, what matters, what’s gonna actually engage our clients or our audience in a way that brings them closer in, that creates a relationship that makes them trust and value us. When we define what that looks like and where we can really stand out in that conversation, then you can sort of look at the AI tools and figure out, okay, how do I, how do I do that even better? Right?

I think that’s exactly, I think the question has been asked so far, how do I do that faster? Right? That’s right. So I think everybody’s like, oh, I can crank out a blog post in three minutes and I can do a blah, blah, blah. So I think it’s all been about speed as opposed to better. And if we don’t know what better looks like, we don’t know how to ask the tool for the better.

I’ve, you know, the, I’ve been shifting it instead of, you know, saying, how is it gonna make us more efficient or more effective? I’ve saying, how is it gonna make us more profitable? Right? Mm. Because it could be that

Putting

More people and more effort into this will actually exponentially expand our capabilities and make us more profitable, but we’ll have to spend more in marketing or the team or the resources in order to get that done. Or it may be efficiency where yes, now one person can do the tasks that used to take a lot of different people in order to combine. Right? The honest answer is it’s probably both. Sure. And it’s more complex than that. And so by understanding the complexity of what it is that actually needs to get done, we can apply the tool in the right way. Whereas, you know, most of the clients that we have seen are not using gen AI to create content either because their internal teams won’t let them, legal won’t let them, it won’t let them, you know, they’re sort of already have this sort of, you know, scraping and IP rights and Yeah.

You know, copyright rights and all those things are sort of top of mind for them, but they’re finding that the real value isn’t there anyway. The real value is in looking at it as a research assistant or going back and forth and creating, you know, abstract or derivative content or internal search, right. Internal search for Yeah. Content repositories and pulling it up, translation and localization, you know, the kinds of things where we can really drive a lot of value and efficiency that have nothing to do with replacing our writers.

Yeah. Well, and again, the opportunity is, you know, yes, we’re all gonna use the tools to a certain extent and a lot of agencies are using them, but I think the opportunity for us is really about teaching the clients what the tools can do and, and helping them. I I have always believed, even back in my early days as an agency owner, I always believed that there were, there were three levels of work. There was work like, look, you have to pay us to do this. You don’t, you’re not qualified to do this. You don’t know how to do this. It’s super important. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, there was work that was like, it’d be kind of dumb for you to pay us to do this ’cause we can just show you how to do it or give you the template or the tool and you guys can do it internally.

And then there was this, the kind of the mushy middle, which is kind of depends on if you have more time or money, we can do this for you if you have more money than time, right. But if you have time, again, we can show you how to do it. And I think AI tees us up to be that I’m gonna teach you how to fish strategic partner that says, look here, here are all the things that we know that we need to do from a marketing and a content perspective. And we’ve put together the strategy, we have the framework, we have systemized this per your book, we’ve done all that, and now let’s divvy up the work based on who has the resources. And I think we get to stay in the strategy role and sometimes we let the client do some of the commoditized stuff themselves.

So let’s teach ’em how to use the tools to do that better, more efficiently, more effectively. And then let’s keep the media work, or

We do the commoditized stuff, right? I mean, it’s like, you know, it’s, it’s, it, it goes back and forth, right? I mean, you know, I mean one of the things that I, we advise our clients to do with, as it relates to agencies is we say, you know, one of the first thing, you know, ’cause what this is especially true in small businesses where I will often talk to a smaller, medium sized business, and they’re like, yeah, I’m a marketing department of one, or I’m a marketing department of three people, and how do we do this new thing called content marketing? Or how do we do this new thing called blogging or building a podcast or anything like that? And, you know, ’cause we just don’t have time. We’re too busy doing, you know, search and, you know, search ads and Facebook and we’re, we’re, we’re so busy doing our day jobs, right?

We don’t have time to make. And so it’s like, well, nobody gets any more time than anybody else. We’re all a lot of the exact same amount of time. But here’s the thing, if you’re going to delegate something, our knee jerk reaction as a small business is to, is to basically delegate the new thing, the innovative thing, right? So in other words, what happens is, is that they, they want to do content marketing, so they hire an agency to do content marketing and then it doesn’t quite work the way they thought they were because they don’t know what good looks like. The agency doesn’t quite know what good looks like. And so it’s, it’s fraught with sort of disaster. And instead what I say is, no, no, you go learn how to do the cool new, innovative thing and give all of your tasks to an agency that delegate what you know how to do the machine to delegate everything that you know how to do backwards and forwards.

And you’ll know if they’re doing it well, right? Then you do the cool thing and actually learn and have the institution learn how to do the cool, innovative new thing. And by the way, if you need an agency to teach you how to do the cool, innovative, you can do that too.

Yeah. There’s just so much opportunity, honest to Pete. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So again, as I said on the outset of our conversation, I knew we would just sort of scrape the surface, but we’re already at the top of the hour. So yeah, I need to let you go. But before I do that, I wanna make sure everybody knows how to get the book, how to follow you. You, I am I’m guessing most of the listeners are following you on LinkedIn and some of the other places where you put content. But what is the best way for them to get all of the Robert Rose goodness?

Well, that’s very kind of you to ask about that. So we have, I have two platforms. The first is our consulting site, which is where I blog and do all the things with regard to helping businesses and sort of my agency website, if you will. That’s content advisory.net would, you know, love everybody to visit that. And then of course we have our new, which is associated with the book, sort of our coaching slash there’s some free resources there, all of them related around content marketing strategy. But it is our new coaching website where you can actually get coaching there as well. And that’s content marketing strategy.com. And then of course, yes, I would love to connect I’m threads in LinkedIn these days. I’m off the, I’m off the little man child’s platform for forever.

Yes. I think most of us are quickly exiting that. Yeah. Yes, as always, I am, I am grateful for your time and how, how generously you share your expertise. So thanks for, thanks for being with us again. I’m so happy being here, my friend. Such a good supporter to agencies and particularly our agency,

So thank you. It’s my, it’s my, it’s my background. It’s my, it, it’s where I grew up. It’s, it’s everything to me because I started my marketing career, well, I started my marketing career in television, but I’ve spent 90% of it on the agency and consulting side. So I have a huge love in my heart for all agency owners, small and medium and large. And it’s just, I’m so passionate about it. So I’m, I’m truly privileged and honored to be here.

Yeah, it’s always great to see you. Thank you. Alright guys, this wraps up another episode. I’m telling you, go get the book if you haven’t already read it. It came out in the fall, so you may already have gotten it because if you’re a Robert Rose fan, I’m sure you grabbed it as a pre-order. But if you haven’t grab it. And, and by the way, I’m an audible listener, but this is a book that I bought like a hard copy of. ’cause I knew I was gonna wanna write all over it and I was gonna wanna bend pages and I was gonna wanna highlight things and cut things out and put ’em on a mood board and all the things that you can’t do with an audible book. So if you’re normally a, a listener of books these days, like I am, this is one that you’re gonna want to be able to reference back like a textbook, even though I’m telling you, even ignore what Robert said, it doesn’t read like a textbook.

It’s, it’s a, it’s a great, it’s a great easy sort of fire you up. Like, because we do strategy every day, whether we charge for it or not, you’re gonna love the frameworks in this. You’re gonna love the examples of this. You’re gonna, you’re gonna think about how to read it and then use stories that you got from the book to talk to your team or clients. So it is gonna be, it’s a, it’s a tool for you. And so you’re gonna want the hard copy so that you can, like I said, write all over it. So grab the book, come back afterwards and listen to this again and start doing your to this. So this is gonna air right at the beginning of the year. So this is a great time for you to really rethink your strategy around your agency’s content, your strategy and thinking and sort of position around ai, both for your agency and with clients.

So this is, I like this as like a, let’s, let’s set the stage for 2024, leveraging this book, leveraging this conversation, and really a commitment to recognizing that the value you bring is in your smarts. And so making sure that you do everything you can to position yourself as that strategic partner, that trusted advisor, that thought leader, that authority, whatever word you want to use. I want you to really think about that in 2024. And this is a great way to start that thinking. So grab the book and do that work, and I’d love to hear what the sort of takeaways are for you from that. In the meantime, before I let you go, of course you know, I wanna thank our friends at White Label iq.

They’re the presenting sponsor of both the podcast and this year’s 24 Build a Better Agency Summit. They’re coming back as the presenting sponsor there too. So they do white label design dev and PPC for lots of agencies all over the world, but lots of a MI agencies throughout the US and beyond. Great people born out of an agency. They totally get that you need to make some money too, but they take really thorny development projects and make them easy and make you look like a hero to your client. So head over to white label iq.com/mi and check them out and be sure when you reach out to them, tell them that I said hi.

Okay. Alright. I’ll be back next week. I’m super grateful that you come back and listen every week. I promise you another great guest like Robert, to get you thinking differently about your business. And in the meantime, you know how to find me. So I will see you next week. Thanks for listening.

That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency. Visit agency management institute.com to check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.