Why Digital Marketers Bang On About Content - Episode 4

Why should a business spend its valuable time helping people by writing great content?

I think you just have to put yourself in the shoes of a customer, right? You could see content as a kind of lubricant. It makes it easier to make the sale in the first place.

Well, I guess the very least it puts you in the frame.

And in terms of why businesses should care about helping people, it's because that's how you build a relationship in the first instance, right?

So content is effectively taking away eighty percent of the job of a salesperson?

I think so probably more than I mean, that's the thing. It's it's both the very beginning of the process before you even think to contact a salesperson. Yeah. Content should be there should be kind of informing somebody, helping them make decisions. It's about having a plan. And like you say, it's about drilling down and working out how to actually communicate with people in a way that that resonates with them, that they think that will make them sit up and listen and think, oh yeah, these guys are speaking the same language as me. They're on the same level as me. They're answering the questions I have and are therefore a brand that I want to shop with.

And here we go again. Uh, podcast number, whatever number it is. And we're going to talk about Alex.

Content, right? Content content. Yeah.

Words talk about content. Um, in a digital marketing context.

Oh. Ruined everything. Um, no, in all seriousness. So I guess I wanted to talk about content because it's probably, I think the thing that we recommend most to clients, right? It's the thing we tell them to do is write more content. I think it's one of the most pervasive bits of advice online in general, right? You want to grow your business, write more content. Content is king.

And are we thinking people might be confused about what we mean when we talk about content in the context of helping to grow a business by putting lots of it on your website?

Right? What it is. Why it works. Is it really as valuable as people say it is? Do I desperately need loads of it? Does writing words on a page and hitting publish really equal business growth?

Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, the short answer is yes, it it does, but I guess we need to know why it does.

Right? And I think there's an awful lot of nuance to it too, that gets missed. Right? So I said something earlier, which is Content is King, which is one of those awful buzzwords.

That's been around since forever.

Yeah. And it gets bandied around a lot, but it's kind of part of the story, I think, isn't it? Um, certainly, I guess from my perspective, I know a lot of businesses who have spent a lot of money and a lot of time creating content and not seeing any growth from it. So it's not like content is the panacea, if you like, of, of digital marketing, it's not going to instantly fix all your problems or grow your business. It has to be done correctly. Um, and I guess that's something we could talk about a little bit later on. Yeah.

If you peel it right back, this whole content thing, I think it maybe has its origins in when the marketing world suddenly realised that blogs were a effective way, an effective way of growing. And Julie shaking her head in the background, because Julie's been marketing since like seven There we go. A long time ago. Contents. Always been about marketing. Has always been about content, hasn't it? Yeah. I think that's what you were driving at. And she's right. Uh, okay. In a digital marketing context, then. Then there was a lot of buzz around blogging and suddenly blogging became like, oh, you have to blog to HubSpot. I've got stats showing that businesses who blog sixty, seventy percent more likely to get X, Y, and Z, which is all fine, but what I found was that people thought that writing two hundred words because Sally in accounts had done a sponsored walk at the weekend was what a blog was.

Right.

And that's why it never worked for them, because they never got it.

Because I think we have to peel the whole thing back a step again, isn't it? It's like, what is the purpose of the blog, the blog, your blog, your business?

That sounds like we should write a blog post. Oh, we did. We. Yeah we did. That's right.

Yeah. Um, it has to be about helping people, right? This is the thing. You want the whole idea.

Why should a business spend its valuable time helping people by writing great content.

I think you just have to put yourself in the shoes of a customer, right? When you're buying a car, when you're buying a fishing rod, whatever, the first step along the way is choosing, you know, who is going to provide that thing for you, right? Or at least that's one of the decisions. That's one of the things going on in your head is where am I going to buy this thing from? Who do I trust? Um, but you also have a lot of unanswered questions, right? What size fishing rod, what type of car, what engine size do I need? That kind of thing. And I guess in terms of why businesses should care about helping people, it's because that is how you build a relationship in the first instance, right? That is how you persuade somebody that your brand is the brand you can trust and rely on.

So content is effectively taking away, I don't know, eighty percent of the job of a salesperson effectively.

Yeah, I think so. Probably more than I mean, that's the thing. It's it's both the very beginning of the process before you even think to contact a salesperson, right? Content should be there. It should be kind of informing somebody, helping them make decisions, helping them realise they need the thing that you're selling.

Okay, so let's, let's create, um, let's create, um, a made up scenario. Let's create something where content has led to a company making some sort of profit, right? Okay. So how might, what might that look like?

Um.

Not fishing rods or cars.

All right. Well, I've run out of examples. Let's go with lawnmowers then. Um, okay. That's something that, uh, I remember very distinctly, quite near the beginning of my career working with a big lawnmower brand. Okay. It was revoltingly boring. Um, but we did a thing for them where we wrote an article about how to cut lawn stripes. Right? Because we realised something really early on in the process, which is that before people choose a lawn mower, they have a problem to solve. They want to cut their grass and they want to cut it in a specific way. They want to make it look very nice or whatever. Okay. Um, and when they start doing all of that research around the subject of, you know, how to make grass look nice, how to make it have the nice little stripes, you know, the alternating colors.

Yeah.

If you can get them there and put some content in front of them, they will end up almost inevitably shopping with your brand because you've been there the whole way through. You've helped them solve their problem. Okay, so when you say to them, you know, this is how you cut stripes in your lawn, by the way, this is the lawn mower you need. That's a much lower hurdle to pass than just please buy my lawn mower.

Yeah, I get that. I want to believe that. But I can certainly think of examples where I've consumed content that somebody produced and then bought something from somebody else. Right. So it's not the case that simply producing content means that people are going to buy from you.

Right. And this goes back to the whole idea of it being marketed as a kind of panacea, as a cure all for internet marketing in general. You know, you put content out there and you'll get customers. I mean, obviously it doesn't work like that. Obviously, you're going to have some drop off. People are going to look at your content, and then they're going to go and buy your competitor's product anyway because it's better priced, nicer packaged. It's I guess you could see content as a kind of lubricant. It makes it easier to make the sale in the first place.

Well, I guess at the very least it puts you in the frame, right? So if you're not producing the content that your customers potential customers are looking for when they're at that early stage of making a decision to buy something, they.

Never come across you.

Or they never. That's right.

Yeah. Or by the time they do encounter your content, they're not in a in a mind frame where they're still kind of shopping around. Right. So one of the things I think it's fair to say we see with some of our clients is they'll produce content for the kind of, you're going to slap me with that ruler again, the end of the funnel. Like when people have already funnels, when people have already decided what they're gonna buy and who they're going to buy it from, then they produce content that says, oh, by the way, we offer this service that you're looking for. Right. But that just straight up doesn't work really, because by the time people have reached that point, they've probably already picked a preferred provider or they have an idea in their head about who they want to shop with. So it's about, like you say, producing it early enough And in answering the right questions, I guess that it has the most value.

Okay, so producing content helps to put your brand, your services, your company into somebody's mind. Yeah. Um, how does it do that? I mean, what happens for that to be successful?

I mean, I guess it's a fundamental kind of property of human psychology, isn't it? If somebody helps you, if somebody answers a question that you're asking, you're kind of inclined to trust them.

But how does it actually happen? How do they find you?

I see what you're trying to direct me now. Right. So we're going to talk a little bit then I guess, about keywords, right? And the whole idea of writing content that is targeted at what people are searching.

Desperately trying not to pick you up on using the term keywords, but go on anyway. I'll keep going with it.

So I guess, yeah, I guess another really common part of the puzzle that gets overlooked is this whole idea that you have to be answering questions that people are actually answering, right? So you have to be.

Answering questions that people are asking.

Is that not what I said?

No, I don't think we can play it back and see if you did, but I don't think you did.

That's the purpose of this podcast, is to make me seem like an idiot. Yeah. It's, uh.

So you're really saying like, they ask and you answer. That's exactly what I did. You see what I did? And it's a good book. Marcus Sheridan's book is a good book. If you really want to read about this stuff and the audio book version of it's great. Uh, I'd recommend it. It's very good. It's not as interesting as us, but it's a good book.

I mean, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a start, isn't it? Yeah. Um, but no. Yeah. So I think that's the point, isn't it? You have to make sure that you're producing content that, you know, people are actually searching for. Um, and this is where the whole idea of keyword research comes from. So again, you know, if you're going to write content, make sure that you actually know for a fact that people are interested in what you're about to say otherwise.

So going back to Sally from accounts who did a sponsored walk, nobody with the best will in the world, you know, good luck to Sally, but they're not really interested in that. What they're searching for in Google is not like, tell me stories about people that work for companies who've done sponsored walks. They're really trying to solve a business problem, or they're trying to research which product to buy, etc.. And what we need to do as digital marketers is understand the problem that they've got, the words and phrases that they use when typing things into Google to look for answers.

Those are the key words.

Yeah, those are the keywords. And if we get that right, then there's a good chance that when they're doing this research, they find our content and get exposed to our brand or our client's brand, etc..

Yeah, that's the fundamental idea, right? Okay. But I think it's fair to say that it goes badly wrong. A lot of the time, because people will either overlook one of those kind of fundamental aspects, like, you know, knowing what the problem is, actually answering the problem or because, you know, somewhere along the way, they kind of lose track of what they're trying to do and end up just churning out content for the sake of it, right?

I think there's a danger of that. Yeah. I mean, maybe maybe we've done that in the past as well. I mean, Julie and I often used to joke about writing blog posts and just basically saying the same thing in ten different ways. And you think, well, was that really helpful and useful to people? Maybe it was, I don't know. And it certainly seems to have worked for us in terms of getting, you know, search traction and, you know, generating lots of business via search. So that that goes without saying. I suppose that it has ultimately worked. But yeah, I mean, I think it's almost like glib the way that people talk about content marketing as if you just basically churn stuff out. And it, it really isn't that at all, is it? I mean, like you said, it's about carefully considering what people are searching for and making sure that your content speaks the same language that those customers are using.

Yeah, it's about having a plan. And like you say, it's about drilling down and working out how to actually communicate with people in a way that that resonates with them, that they think that will make them sit up and listen and think, oh yeah, these guys are speaking the same language as me. They're on the same level as me. They're they're answering the questions I have and are therefore a brand that I want to shop with. I think one of the things we see both from bad content marketing agencies and also from clients who have maybe used bad content marketing agencies in the past, there's this whole idea that, you know, with content, it's just more is better. Yeah, right. Something publish something and everything's gravy. The problem is that then you end up in a situation where that inevitably doesn't work, and you end up with kind of business owners, marketing directors, that kind of thing coming to you and saying, oh, well, you know, I tried the content thing, I spent, I spent ten thousand pounds on content. It got me no leads at all. Yeah. It's rubbish. It's not that it's rubbish. It's just that they're kind of badly executed. Yeah. You have to do it right. Really.

Yeah. That's right. And the thing as well is, is that what you what you did might not work but it might actually start working at some point. It's not a quick fix is it. Usually. Usually it's not a quick fix.

I think this is another thing that, you know, you have to a be really willing to learn from your mistakes and to kind of investigate the data. And when you start publishing content, you know, see what works, see what doesn't. The stuff with bad engagement statistics, the stuff that people spend three seconds reading and then leave the page. Don't do that anymore. And do the things where they spend four or five minutes on the page. But that is a learning experience and it does take a long time, I think, to get to that point. You can't expect to just kind of start writing content.

It can be really sobering. If you look at the stats and you look at, you know, the effort that you've put in to writing blog posts, and then maybe six months down the line, you go and look at that blog post that you spent half a day agonising over, and you wrote two and a half thousand words, and you put some lovely pictures in there. And it's been literally, it's been viewed four times.

Sure, I do this all the time on our blog still, and I've been working on content marketing for donkey's years. And there'll be times when, you know, I write a kind of two thousand word blog post and I think, well, that is that is the shit. Really pleased with that. Yeah. Um, and then I go back a week later and it's had half as many views as a blog post you wrote ten years ago with five hundred words.

You've either got it or you haven't. Alex. It's as simple as that, really. There we go.

But, you know, I think that's the thing, isn't it? You have to be a humble enough to to realise that you're not going to get it one hundred percent of the time and be willing to actually kind of learn from that and say, you know, this works, this doesn't. Yeah. Because one of the other things I think it's fair to say that we see quite a lot of is people will kind of get stuck in a rut with the content. They'll produce the same kind of thing over and over and over again and somehow expect the results to change. I don't think that's really ever a thing, though. I don't think it's suddenly going to start working out of nowhere.

But isn't the whole experimental aspect of it, and I'm going to see if Julie nods. Now, isn't the whole experimental aspect of it really what marketing has always been about? She's nodding. Yes, nodding.

Yes, he did it right. Absolutely.

But well, the thing is, I mean, somebody said in a tweet recently, and I thought it was very good that I think it was a tweet. And they said, you know, we're going to spend all this money on marketing. Dear Mr. Client, we're going to spend all this money on marketing. If you're not prepared to flush that money down the toilet, then don't do it, because that might happen. Yeah. And it's horrible, isn't it? I mean, we've all spent time, effort, money on marketing that hasn't worked.

Yeah. And I think it's it's both obnoxious and inherently false when marketing agencies pretend otherwise. Right. Stuff goes wrong all the time. Those are really difficult conversations to have with clients. You know, we publish this huge blog post, this huge article, this content cluster. Slap me again. No, no, but.

I'll go with that.

A group of interlinked pages of content. We spent a long time developing it.

Go on, finish what you're going to say. And then I want to talk about that.

Yeah, we shoved it live and it didn't work. Um, that's the thing that happens all the time. The thing is, like I say, there's always something you can learn from it. And I guess that goes back to your point about this is what marketing is actually all about, right? It's about experimenting. It's about trying different things until you find the winning formula.

So going back to what you said about content clusters, because I think, again, this is something that's missed a lot and, you know, digging into it what we're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, If we talk about content clusters, we're talking about building up bodies of evidence around subjects. So if, for example, you're trying to get a page to rank for some particular search term in Google, if you have one piece of content on your website that mentions that and it only mentions it once, don't be surprised if you don't ever get good traction. If you never see any traffic coming to that page and it never appears in a search result, right? Because what we're trying to do with clusters of content is say, right, we're talking, we've got two or three pages, we've got ten blog posts, we've got four videos, and we've got six case studies all talking about subject A, and that can then be will be viewed by search engine algorithms as a cluster of content about a subject which, all things being equal, will suggest that there's an expertise in there, and it might then get some Yeah. Visibility and search.

And I think if you peel things back, that's that should be kind of really fundamentally obvious. And it isn't ultimately, the algorithms that you're talking about are trying to mimic a human as much as they can, right? They're trying to look at things as a human would and say, is this expert content? And the question you have to ask yourself is, you know, if you were, say, googling stomach aches and you landed on a website that had one article about stomach aches and the rest of it was about ladders, would you think, oh, these guys know what they're talking about?

Yeah.

That's right. I mean, and this is a kind of fundamental thing that a lot of businesses will do is they'll pick up on a keyword or, or a kind of subject area that they can talk about, and they'll write an article about it, and then they'll be surprised that, yeah, like you say, they don't start getting any traction for it because you do need that kind of peripheral evidence that says we are actually subject matter experts rather than somebody having a crack at writing a page.

Yeah. Because it's fair to say, I think that when we talk about content helping us get better rankings, it's not just because we're using words on a page and maybe using lots of words and lots of pages. It's because we're producing content that potentially, and hopefully other website owners find and link to when they're writing their content. So if I'm writing a piece about, um, I don't know if I'm writing a piece about carburettors for one of our, you know, automotive clients about performance tuning a certain brand of carburettor. I might mention, um, that we use a certain type of, or seal on the, on the carburettor. It's getting horribly technical. I don't know where I'm going. I'm lost. Yeah. I'm lost as well. And I'm the one saying it. But, but then we might link out to somebody else who's written a whole article about how to choose the right or seal when you're for a carburettor, because it has to be resistant to oil and petrol and all the rest of it. So we might link out to their content and they'll have done exactly the same as somebody who's looking to buy or seals. You know, we'll go and like do some research. Oh, these guys talk about that. And so because they've got a piece of content that's going to help us reinforce at the point we're making in our content, we'll link out to it. And so that, so that readers of our content can go and see it. And by doing that, we're actually saying to Google that piece of content on all sales is, is really good because we're linking to it. Yeah. And, and, and having all that content helps to get these all important citations and links, which we've talked about in other blog posts.

Yeah, definitely. I think that's the kind of utopian ideal of the internet, isn't it? It's just lots of different experts linking to each other and saying, you know, these guys are the guys to go to if you need to know about this. And that's kind of, I guess what we're all working towards a place where, yeah.

That's, that's exactly what Google set out to do. They said, look, rather than like in the olden days, you may not remember, but you had like, for example, like the yahoo directory. And you remember what was the other one.

Jeeves?

Ask Jeeves. And then there was there was loads of them. Yeah. But there was basically an element of somebody going through and aggregating and deciding what was good and what was bad. And I think, you know, the guys at Google recognise that that's not scalable. Yeah. And they came up with this idea of right. So we'll, we'll, we'll measure how popular a piece of content is, and that will elevate it up higher up in the search rankings. And they measure popularity using a raft of different measurements, metrics, and certainly citations. Links to content is one of those that they use. Now I think we'll talk about link building and and links and citations in other podcasts. But fundamentally having lots of great content increases the chances that people will link out to you. I mean, we produced a piece of content which was like a comic strip explanation of search engine optimisation. And that's been linked to by, I mean, universities have used it in their coursework and they've linked out to it, and it made it a very strong piece of content for us because it provided use utility, if you like, to other people.

I think as well, like you're touching on something here that's like super fundamental to the whole idea, right? It's ultimately all about that human element. It's about appealing to people. You have to make content that people will look at and think, yeah, I want to link to that. I want to send my visitors that I've worked hard to get on my site to this site. Yeah. And I think a lot of people miss this. A lot of people are kind of creating content for search engines. Right? Is it well optimised? Does it rank well? Yeah. That's not the point. I mean it's it's the point in the short term you have to use.

That's a given. Yeah. It's not so much not the point as it's a given that it's well optimised well presented. So the search engines can index it and understand it in inverted commas and make sure that it's in with a chance of being presented in a search result.

Sure. But that's not why we're writing it, right? We're writing it ultimately so that somebody else looks at it and thinks, this is really convincing, interesting stuff that I want to share with my audience. And if you kind of ever get away from that point, if you ever lose track of that, that's when I think the whole thing goes south very quickly, because then you're just churning out content that nobody really wants to read. Yeah. And it's not going to get you the results that you have been either promised or that you want. Really.

Yeah. And there's always a danger if you do that. I mean, we do see it with, with customers, um, where they churn out content. That's what you, what would be described in search engine optimisation terms as thin. Yes. So they'll write a blog post that's got two or three hundred words, right? And they write lots of them. And so it kind of looks, you know, if you're just gonna measure it. I mean, think back to university. I mean, one of the guys I used to study, study with at university, you know, he almost used to beef up his, his assignments because he was convinced that they would basically just sort of it feels quite heavy. It must be worth something because there's a lot of pages in there. And so give him an A, he's got an A because, because it was like twenty, twenty five pages thick and all the other assignments were only ten pages thick. So I think there's an element that we think that um, that quantity, um, is, is, is important. But certainly if you write content that's looks weak. Yeah. How could you possibly have written a blog post about how to restore an Aston Martin, for example.

two hundred.

Words in two hundred words. And for that to be of any use. Yeah. Yeah. But and I certainly I've seen, um, we're into the sort of detail of it a little bit now, but I've certainly seen content that you might describe as long form content. Two and a half thousand. Three thousand word. It does seem to kind of get decent search traction.

Yeah, I.

Know a lot of the blog posts you write are quite long, aren't they? And probably for a reason.

Yeah. And well, I mean, I think it's kind of like there's two reasons for it, right? First is obviously if you write more, you can cover more ground, right? You can get more of that interesting information in there, more of the meat, if you like, for people to kind of dig over. I think the other thing is, yeah, there is an element of the fact that a lot of the time search engines and indeed people are looking for detail, right? Nobody comes to the internet and Googles a topic like how to restore an Aston Martin because they want a five minute precis on the subject. It's just that's just fundamentally not when people are researching, they want to research. And if you don't provide them the information that they need, they're going to go and find it somewhere else. Um, and I think this is again, something that people lose track of a lot. It's like, oh, people on the internet have a short attention span. People on the internet do have a short attention span. Definitely the customers that you want that are researching your subject matter. You know, they don't have a short attention span because they're looking to read the kind of content you're producing.

Okay, so that was interesting that you said read the kind of content. So when we talk about content outdated. No, not at all. When we talk about content marketing, um, we're not just talking about the written word, are we? No, we're talking about things like we're doing now, like this podcast, which we hope people find helpful. And if they do find it helpful, they might be positively predisposed towards speaking to us about a gig. Maybe if they don't, they don't. If they get something from it, great.

But you're not there to give the secrets away.

Like, oh, okay, I'll get, I'll get.

We're doing this for, for.

Altruistic reasons, not no other reason whatsoever. Yeah, forget what I just said. Um, but if we, if we think about, um, I've lost my train of thought now if we think about um, producing content in order to, you know, help with search and everything else, we're not just talking about the written word, are we?

No, that's very true. And I think, you know, in some ways things like video content, podcasts, that kind of thing is, is a lot more nowadays, at least a lot more kind of engaging for a lot of people. Right. This is how people prefer to consume their content now.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the reason we started this podcast is, is both of us are avid consumers of podcasts. We like the medium, you know, whether it's whether you're driving or going for a run or whatever you're doing, podcasts are just great. It's just like this infinite channel of fantastic information, entertaining and otherwise information. And yeah, I mean, it's certainly, you know, I think I, I've been, um, maybe impacted in a way that's resulted in me making a purchase of something because of something I've listened to and on online, you know, in a podcast.

Absolutely. But I think the thing that's really interesting is I don't know if this is the same for you, but certainly for me, I only consume a very small handful of podcasts despite the fact there are a lot out there. Yeah. Right. Which is, I guess, something that I think is really kind of fundamental to the whole thing. Ultimately, people are only going to trust a few brands, a limited handful. I'm sure there's research on the subject. I don't know statistically what the likelihood is.

Somebody might tell.

Us. Yeah. I mean, by all means tell us how stupid we are. But you know, it's like the whole friendship thing, isn't it? The studies that say you can only ever have five close friends at any one time. Yeah, I think that's probably true of brands, too. There's only a handful that you go back to time and time and time again, but the ones that I do go back to time and time and time again, if they recommend a product or a service or a platform, probably much more likely to actually give it a go.

Mhm.

And I think that's kind of the point really, isn't it, with all of this. You've got to produce content that makes you somebody go to brand.

Yeah. And I think, you know, going back to the idea of podcasts and videos, etc., it's about understanding your ideal customer. So if your ideal customer, you've, you established that your ideal customer is a consumer of video content, then by all means, right? Two and a half thousand word blog posts, but they're not going to consume it because they prefer to listen or watch. And that's, you know, that's what you know, we're with our podcasts now going after a different group of people, if you like, because we're now producing video and producing podcasts because we know that we're missing opportunities by not doing that, by concentrating on blog posts, the blog, the blogging, the written content that we've produced has served us very well. It's been very effective as a as a business growth tool. And now we're doing this, you know, we're doing these things as well because we know that there are other people out there. So I do think because this stuff is now easy to produce. Yes. Um, it's something that most businesses should be looking at. We're certainly having conversations with a lot of our customers around it, aren't we?

Yeah. I think one of the things that's really interesting, um, is just the fact that it makes all of your content much more scalable, right? So this is a big problem that a lot of businesses face is kind of producing enough of the useful, interesting detail, rich content in the limited time that they have. Um, and I think the great thing about things like podcasts videos is that it does let you kind of scale that up quite quickly, I think, doesn't it? You can talk a lot easier than you can, say, type an article or.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I mean, do you think that doing like, for example, with this, are we going to do transcriptions of these podcasts in order to get like written content as well? We might, or if you've ever tried to write a blog post by talking into, you know, voice recorder and then sending it off to a transcription company, what you get back is usually just a stream of consciousness. I mean, honestly, I tried it and it's, it's, it's not the best. The spoken word and the written word are so different.

I'd love to see that.

And ultimately, I mean, what about I mean, how do we make sure that the time we're investing in podcasting and videos for ourselves and for our customers, how do we make sure that that's giving us bang for buck in terms of getting more traffic to our website and generating enquiries and making sales for us?

I mean, I think this just goes back to what we were saying at the beginning, doesn't it? You have to be willing to a measure everything and B, be really brutally honest with yourself about what's working and what's not. I mean, if, for example, we launch this podcast and one person listens to it in three months, will we continue to kind of build them at the pace that we're doing it at? Probably not. And it's the same thing with clients content. You know, you have to be willing to, to say, you know, actually we got this a bit wrong. Let's try something different instead. I think the important thing is to always be trying something different instead. Do you know what I mean? It's not to just kind of sit there and say, oh, well, we tried content, and content didn't work for us because that's not true. We tried.

Content will always work, right? I think, I think I pretty much hang my hat on that. If you do it right and you do it consistently. Which brings me on to the subject, which you alluded to there of cadence, like, so how often we often get asked this. So, okay, you know, we have a conversation with a customer and we say, look, we really want to up the content game. And they say, well, you know what? We might be able to manage to produce one blog post a month. And I'm thinking, okay, so in the next twelve months, we're going to put twelve new pieces of content on your website.

I think I might know the client you're talking about. Yeah. I mean, this is a massive axe that I have to grind with, with the way some people approach content for sure. Like you have to understand, like you were saying before your audience, right? What they want to read and what their kind of attention span is, and also how hungry they are for more content. And if you've got people out there who are kind of frantically researching things and not finding the information they want, and you're they're sticking one blog post a month up, how can you possibly expect your business to grow at a pace like your audience wants more content than that? Yeah, you have to be there producing it.

That's right. So, um, okay, so talking about about how often and how much content. I mean, at what point do you say, actually, if that's all you can produce, don't bother. I mean, it's one blog post a month. I mean, you know, in three years time, one blog post a month will have built up a, you know, you'll have thirty, forty blog posts and it's likely that they'll be generating some traffic and getting you some traction probably. But if you want to produce, if you want to get leads, if you really want to move things forward. Then you need to do it at scale. You mentioned doing content at scale and talked about blogs and videos and all the rest of it. So how do we, um, actually, what do we define as content at scale? I mean, I guess it depends on the size of the company we're working with. Does it.

I guess it depends on the company's capacity to produce content, because I think one of the things that I think you'll agree with me with is that some of our smaller clients are very, very good at producing large amounts of content or, you know, they have people within the company who are very engaged, very switched on and like to talk about what they do. Some of our bigger clients that you'd expect to be able to produce a lot more content can. Yeah. Um, so I think, you know, yeah, it's more about, I, I always think that it's more about what the capacity of the audience is, right? What does the audience want to see? How much space is there to produce content and then, you know, fill that. I'm not a big fan of the whole idea that, you know, oh, we can't produce more than one blog post a month because, you know, nobody within the company cares very much. So we'll just do one every year for three years because every month for three years even. Because ultimately what happens is six months down the line, a manager sticks their head around the door and says, why are you bothering with this? It's not getting us any results and it all dries up. Yeah.

Um, we've seen that. We have seen that happen.

Yeah. And it's very frustrating, right? Because you're like, well, in three years time there'll be a decent amount of blog posts, but nobody's patient enough to wait for that. So I think you have to. Yeah. I don't know if I could put a number on how much content you have to be able to produce.

I suppose the market you're in dictates. I mean, if you're trying, if you're going head to head with, say, two or three other businesses and your website's got ten pages and their website right now, their websites have all got between two and three hundred pages. So they've got way more content. Yeah. And by having way more content, they are going to appear for way more searches and they are going to get way more traffic, chances are. I mean, you might get that ten page website that somehow has killed it, and they've written something that the whole world wants to read about, and they get a shedload of traffic. These are kind of black swan events. They just don't happen.

Right? Well, they happen very occasionally. And then customers come to you and say, oh, but look, you know, I'm being outranked by somebody with five pages of content. So clearly everything you're saying is rubbish. Yeah. I mean, those are outliers, right? Yeah. No, I agree one hundred percent. I think ultimately it all comes down to what you say. And I think also as well though, as looking at what your competitors are doing and seeing how much content they produce. The other thing you have to think about is often the complexity of the buying journey, right? So how many steps does.

What you mean by buying journey? Right. Come on, talk to me about the buying journey.

Right. So we're talking lawnmowers before, um and fishing rods and.

Interesting life you lead.

All right, all right. Um.

Fishing rods. I can get across that.

You like to.

Buy. I like fishing rods. Fishing rods. Okay, cool. I'm actually buying a fishing rod right now for Caron. Right. Well, she's she's impressed me so much when we've been fishing that I've decided she needs to be upgraded. There you go. She's actually managed to pass the test, and she she she she did. She got a lovely bass at night in the surf in Cornwall. So she's now earned the the the chance for a better fishing rod. So there you go. I'm in the market for a better fishing rod next.

Yeah. Well so this is the thing isn't it. There are. I mean, what are you considering when you're buying a fishing rod. What are you asking. You know, do I need this feature? What kind of fishing rod should I be looking for?

Yeah, it's for a certain type of fishing. So it's for lure fishing in the surf for a specific type of fish. It's a very specific ask.

So there's quite a lot of decisions going into this. Right. So this is the buying process. It's answering all of those questions that you have in the beginning up until the point at which you're ready or feel qualified to go out and pick a fishing rod. Yeah. Um, and the point is that for something like a fishing rod, there are maybe kind of, I don't know, twenty or thirty things that you need to work out before you can pick the right fishing rod for some.

This is for Caron. Alex. It's based on price.

That's it.

I don't want to spend. I don't want to spend more than twenty quid. No that's not true. Um budgets one hundred and fifty quid. So yeah, the price, the price is you know for that particular rod I've decided. Yeah. Yeah. Because mine was about that so I can't possibly buy one. That's more. I can't give her a better fishing rod than I've got, can I?

Because then what if she fishes better than you?

I'm pretty sure she does anyway, actually.

Um, but no, I mean, you know, and this is the thing, isn't it? When you're buying a pair of trainers, say there may be only five questions that you're asking because I don't know, maybe you don't really care about trainers very much, but this is the whole thing is if you're selling fishing rods, you need to be thinking about where you can kind of produce content across those twenty to thirty issues or questions. If you're manufacturing trainers, maybe there are less opportunities. I'm sure that's a bad example because I'm sure people really care about, I don't know the material that souls are made.

Well, given the price of them, they probably do. Sure.

Um, and picking the wrong fight here, we're gonna get letters from angry trainer heads being like that. Um, but yeah, no, I mean, this is the thing, isn't it? It's just like, understand your market and understand how much there is to say and the complexity of your product. Because I mean, we have clients who, you know, they've come on board and they sell horrendously complex solutions to people's problems, like horrendously complex, but they think that there's only kind of one or two moments in that buying journey in inverted commas where they can appeal to people. And it's a huge mistake because as soon as you kind of sit back and say, well, the only content we can produce is around these issues, you're just kind of closing yourself off to all the other important things you could be talking about.

Mhm. Okay. Got you. Okay. So in a nutshell, before we just wrap this one up, um, content is mentioned a lot. Content marketing is mentioned a lot. And what we are fundamentally talking about is producing the type of content, i.e. videos, blog posts, podcasts, white papers, stuff to download. Maybe that's still not, maybe that's still a thing, I don't know. But we're talking about.

We have ebooks on our site.

We do.

So you better hope that's right.

I do worry wonder about that. Um, we're talking about producing the content that we know people are looking for. I mean, Google is a search engine, but it's really an answer engine. People ask questions and get answers, and we want to make sure when they're asking questions and getting answers that we are. Our clients are providing those answers. And by having content. That's. That's how we we put ourselves in front of those people.

Yeah. And I think, you know, the, the thing to stress is that there is a very real value to it, but that it is very easy to get it wrong.

It's very easy to feel in the early days like it's a complete waste of time. And I can certainly understand how marketing managers are struggling to sell the concept to the board, to the C-suite, maybe. Um, I think that is changing. I think people are becoming more enlightened and recognising that. Wait a minute. Yeah, that's what I do when I use Google, when I'm trying to solve a problem. So I can understand that our clients are doing the same. But it is, it is a bit of a almost, um, well, it's a strange concept to get your head around, especially if you're really kind of coming at it from a really skeptical place, which I think a lot of people do.

Yeah, I think it's a tough sell. I think it's easy to lose faith in it. And I think also ultimately, you know, at the end of the day, I think it's fair to say that for all of the clients where we've driven, you know, really significant growth, it has always been through content.

So it really has. Yeah. Yeah.

It is also the only thing that definitely works.

Yeah. I think that's the bottom line isn't it. I, I would I think no matter what market you're in, if you do the right research, if you create the right content strategy and execute that strategy effectively, then there's very little chance that it'll completely fail. Yeah. You'll have good moments. You'll have bad moments, you'll have real successes, and you'll have blog posts, as you mentioned earlier, that you put body and soul into that get no traction whatsoever. But ultimately, every time you produce a decent piece of content, it goes on your website. It's just like incrementally improving the body of evidence, which helps you create that all important authoritative website.

There's always a.

Benefit. There's always a benefit to it. Yeah. Great. Did you get some lunch?

Yeah.

Let's do that.

Let's do it.