I had so many people over the years now that have said to me, "I've read a lot of stuff or listened to talks or watched stuff on content marketing and it never made sense until I read They Ask, You Answer." And then it all made sense. And again, that's because I didn't want to sound like a marketer. There's not a bunch of acronyms in that book. I'm not suffering from the curse of knowledge, which is a lesson for really all of us that are trying to produce content and win trust.
Yeah, totally. Why do you think people don't get it until they read your book? Is it because it's the marketers making it sound more complicated than it has to be, or is it just that they just haven't thought about it?
Yeah, I think there's a mix of failures that are happening out there. I think one of the big failures is that marketers tend to speak like marketers, and what that does is it turns off most people.
Welcome back to Digital Marketing from The Coalface. Now, ever since we started the show — we're on episode what, 52, 53?
Something like that. There's something. I've lost count.
Pretty much every episode — and I mean this — we've mentioned a book called They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. And what we thought we would do is reach out to Marcus, and we thought Marcus would say, "Oh yeah, sorry guys, too busy." But you know what? He didn't. He actually said, "Yeah, love to come and talk." So we'd love to introduce everyone who doesn't already know about Marcus. Marcus Sheridan, the author of the book They Ask, You Answer. Marcus, thanks for coming on.
Hey, it's a pleasure. I'm happy to be here. And I think we're going to have a great conversation.
I think to kick things off — Julie and I are both familiar with the story, the whole River Pools thing and you becoming the pool guy and all that stuff. But it'd be lovely to hear a potted history of where you were, where you are now, how you got there, that kind of thing. That'd be super.
Yeah. I'll give everybody the quick 101. I started a swimming pool company in 2001 out of university called River Pools with two buddies. Things were going okay. We were fighting to grow it and survive up until about late 2008, and that was when the crash was. And a lot of people remember that. And I remember the day of the crash, because it happened very suddenly. Within 48 hours of the crash, we had lost five deposits from people who had said they were going to get a pool. So we lost a quarter of a million dollars in business in the first 48 hours. And then over the coming weeks it got worse and worse. And by January of 2009, I thought we were going to file for bankruptcy and I was going to lose my home.
My two business partners were going to lose their homes. And at the time I thought my 16 employees I was going to have to let go. And so that's the beauty of pain and stress though, right? It forces us to do things and think about things and consider things that we hadn't thought about and done and considered before. So that's when I started to really lean into the internet and learn about it — things like inbound marketing, content marketing, social media, blogging, all this stuff that I hadn't really paid much attention to before. As I was studying it, what it essentially said to me was: Marcus, if you just obsess over all of your customers' questions and you're willing to address them on your website — the good, the bad and the ugly — you just might save your business. So I said, "Well, shoot. If there's one thing I can do, it's listen and talk about it. I can teach you about it, write about it."
And so that's what I started doing. I can recall — this was in 2009 — I sat and brainstormed at my kitchen table one night, all the questions I'd ever received in a home from someone asking about swimming pools. And then one by one over the next couple of years, I would answer those — usually every single night, one article or one video that I would produce. To make a long story short, it became the most-trafficked swimming pool website in the world and completely changed the business. We exploded and got through the hard times, then we became a manufacturer of fibreglass pools and then became the first franchise of fibreglass pools. And now there are River Pools locations all over different cities in the US.
It just continues to blow up. And the last thing I'll say is that during this process, I started a personal blog and I started writing about what I had achieved — not really achieved, but what I was seeing.
This is the Sales Lion.
Yeah, it was the Sales Lion in late 2009. I knew something was up and I was like, "Everybody should know about this." And so that started to take off and then companies started to say, "Can you teach me that? Can you show me how to do that? Can you speak from our stage?" Before I knew it, by 2012 I was speaking full time. The company River Pools was off to the races. I'd started an agency. The agency eventually became Impact, and today it's got about 70 employees and we help implement this thing called They Ask, You Answer all over the world. And the book They Ask, You Answer, of course, came as a result of all of this about four years ago. And what's crazy about the book is it has continued to increase in sales every year since it was published, which is extremely rare for most books.
It's taken off. It's huge in the UK. It's just been absolutely cool to see it happen. It resonates with people and it's one of the least theoretical, most practical sales and marketing books you'll ever read in your life.
Yeah. I mean, that's one of the reasons that we're huge fans of it. And looking at the Amazon reviews, 92% of the reviews are four or five stars. People just love it and they particularly like the fact that they understand it and they can see how they can just go right ahead and implement it — use it as a blueprint. And I guess the basic premise of the book was to give people that blueprint.
Well, you say something there, David, that I think is actually really, really important. I didn't write the book to sound smart and I didn't write the book to appeal to marketers. I wrote the book so anybody — especially a business owner, a CEO — could read it and say, "This is so obvious. Why are we not doing this?" And that to me is the definition of great communication: when we say something and it's so clear and so understandable that the person listening says, "That totally makes sense. Why would we not be doing that?" I had so many people over the years say to me, "I've read a lot of stuff or listened to talks or watched stuff on content marketing and it never made sense until I read They Ask, You Answer." And again, that's because I didn't want to sound like a marketer.
There's not a bunch of acronyms in that book. I'm not suffering from the curse of knowledge, which is a lesson for really all of us that are trying to produce content and win trust.
Yeah, totally. So why do you think people don't get it until they read your book? Is it because marketers are making it sound more complicated than it has to be, or is it just that they haven't thought about it?
Yeah. I think there's a mix of failures that are happening out there. I think one of the big failures is that marketers tend to speak like marketers. If you go online right now and you typed "content marketing" and looked for its definition, you would see a definition written by marketers for marketers, and what that does is it turns off most people. Because if you think of where most of the influence in a company happens, it happens within leadership and sales teams — and finance. If they're not getting it, nobody's going to get it. They're going to be met with resistance. And this is also why there are so many marketers out there who are frustrated. I get these emails all the time: "Marcus, I feel like we should be doing this, this, and this. My leadership team just doesn't see it. My sales team doesn't see it and I'm just getting pushback." A big part of the reason is because of the fact that we speak of it from a marketing context. So we've got to learn to change our language.
Somebody told me something one time that I thought was really beautiful and it very much applies to the way we communicate online, and that is this: it's dumb not to dumb it down. We oftentimes communicate — whether it's over video or over text or whatever — to try to impress our audience. You can actually subtly pick up on this. Anybody that's watching or listening right now: there's been times when you've been on YouTube, looked at a thumbnail, and before you even clicked on the video, you thought, "I don't like that guy." What makes you say that? Because the person was trying — without even knowing it — to look intelligent or smart, and therefore you were saying, "This person thinks they're smarter than me," before you'd even watched a second of the video. And it's the same thing when you start reading a post online — do they immediately win your trust because they're speaking almost like you're talking at the coffee shop?
And so if I don't come across that way in this conversation, I've failed our listeners today. Look, there are other things too. To this day, there's a huge problem when it comes to understanding trends in the marketplace. One of the biggest trends that every business owner and every sales team needs to understand — and we talk about it at the beginning of They Ask, You Answer, and I mention it in almost every talk — is that on average, today's buyer is 80% through the buyer's journey before they reach out to a company. Essentially, marketing is roughly handling 80% of the sales cycle today — and that's an average. Sales is handling 20% on average.
Now, if you know this, you have to say to yourself, "My gosh, what does this mean for sales and marketing?" It means marketing should have a clear seat at the leadership table, which oftentimes it does not. It means sales needs to become more involved on the marketing side of the business. It means marketing needs to be more responsible for ROI and actual revenue, not just fluffy metrics that don't mean anything in terms of paying your bills. And this number is only going to grow over time. So if it's only going to grow, we as an organisation have got to figure out what we need to do to adjust.
Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree with that. Do you think having separate sales and marketing teams is almost a thing of the past — and they should just all be together?
A revenue generation team sort of thing.
Yeah. We call them revenue teams at Impact, my agency, and we believe strongly in that. I would say one could argue there's always a place for somebody that's sales-specific and somebody that's marketing-specific. That being said, they shouldn't feel like separate teams per se. Maybe separate specialties, but not teams.
They shouldn't be competing. You tend to find in big organisations that they're competing with each other.
That's exactly right. Which is like, how is that possible? The silos are still very, very strong. I oftentimes see things where marketing is producing content and I ask sales, "Do you even know the content they're producing?" They say no. "Have you ever helped produce any of it?" No. And then they look at the content and say, "I wouldn't even use this because that's really not what I'm dealing with with our prospects and customers." So that's very, very problematic. That's why sales should be very involved in the editorial process of the content that gets produced on a website, because they've got their ears to the ground. They know the questions, worries, fears, and concerns that the marketplace is asking about.
Exactly. The people who are actually speaking to customers — your sales and customer service people — are a really, really good source of questions if you're looking to create content. And often the marketing people don't remember to speak to them.
Yeah. It's a huge issue, which is why I'd argue: if you have a sales meeting and at least one person from marketing isn't there, you're probably missing major opportunities, and vice versa. If you have a marketing meeting and at least one person from sales isn't in the room, you're missing opportunities and you're going to have miscommunications. And oh, by the way, if you're listening to this and you're saying, "Well, I've got a small business — I'm only one, two, three employees" — first of all, you shouldn't be thinking like that anyway, because that's a very myopic point of view. The idea is that you're going to scale at some point. If you're successful as a company, you're not going to stay this size. Unless you're a lifestyle business and you don't want to scale whatsoever, and that's totally fine — but most companies have to grow in order to continue to succeed.
It's very, very hard to stay the exact same size and succeed in a marketplace. Generally, you have to grow like a tree. A tree stops growing, it dies. The same is scientifically true for most businesses. This is not just my opinion. And so if you're listening to this, a lot of it is about saying, "Okay, this is where I'm going to be. This is how I have to plan ahead, regardless of the size of my business right now."
Yeah, that's a really good point. Think like a bigger company almost.
Well, you should. Early on in my swimming pool company, I was carrying one brand of fibreglass pool shells — this is before we were manufacturing. I really loved this brand and the company, and then suddenly I found out they could be for sale. So I approached the owner, the CEO of the company. He said, "Marcus, we're always for sale. If I'm not creating a sellable business, then I'm not creating the right business.
It doesn't mean that I'm going to sell it tomorrow. I'm always thinking: can this business scale and therefore be sold?" And I'm like, "Ha." It took me some time to understand that, but eventually I did, because if it's sellable, that means you have systems, you have frameworks, you have order, you have profitability, and it's not completely dependent on one single person to survive. And that's why I say to people who occasionally complain, "There's going to come a day when your lifestyle business won't fit your lifestyle. And are you going to have anything to show for the work you've put into it?" And by the way, there's no better way to scale a business in my opinion than They Ask, You Answer.
I was going to say — as a small agency, there are 10 of us, but we get approached. There are a lot of bigger agencies buying smaller agencies right now, and so we've got the processes in place. We've got something like a content machine and we recognise where our strengths are and why we're saleable, and it is down to the They Ask, You Answer philosophy. We've followed it for a long time. We were probably doing it reasonably well before we'd even read the book, and I shared it with the guys and said, "You really need to read this." So we've been following the philosophy and it absolutely works. It creates value. Even for small businesses, it creates a presence in the marketplace that makes the bigger businesses look at you and say, "How are these guys killing it the way they are?"
And then they'll maybe look to go out and acquire.
And that's also why it makes you appear like a much bigger company, because you have much bigger influence online. Even when I had the Sales Lion, people would say to me, "So how big is your agency? You guys seem really, really big." And I'm like, "Yeah, we're three people." Literally, that's what it was at the time — and that's the power of content. And then if you look at the River Pools example, because of what we did with They Ask, You Answer, it exploded us in Virginia where we started, and then I expanded to Maryland and then said, "Well, I can't expand anymore to install pools. How could I expand further? Because I'm getting leads from all over the country that I can't do anything with but maybe sell."
So I said, "What if we started manufacturing pools?" We started manufacturing pools and could have dealers all over the country. And what was really wild is we didn't even need regional sales reps like most manufacturers, because the influence that we had created with the end user online meant they wanted a River Pool so much that they became the regional sales reps. They were going to the local pool builder and saying, "I want a River Pool. Do you carry River Pools?" "No, sorry, we don't." "Okay, well then I'm not going to get a pool from you. Do you know who does carry River Pools?" I'm getting a call that day from that dealer saying, "Hey, how do I carry your product?" So it's really amazing how it allowed us to scale so very much, and I never could have done that had we just been doing paid advertising or many of these other short-term, less organic, less long-term strategies.
To me, it's the gift that keeps on giving. That's what's so wonderful about it. And one thing I've got to say about content production in general — any of this digital stuff that we do — it's tough at first. At first it feels like you're rolling that snowball up the hill, but eventually it crests that hill. If you just push hard enough, there's one day it'll start to go by itself, and then it just keeps rolling down the hill and growing and growing. That's the momentum that River Pools has been in for a while, and that's what's possible for any organisation if they have the right mindset.
How long did it take you from starting to write these blog posts to actually seeing something happen?
This is one of the most common questions when it comes to content marketing and producing content online. The big mistake I hear a lot of marketers say is, "Well, if you're going to really see success with content marketing, it's going to take you a year or more." That is not a good answer and it's not accurate either, and it means they don't fully understand what we're talking about. So let me help everybody really catch this vision. When you do They Ask, You Answer well, you start with the most fundamental questions your sales team gets all the time. When you're producing text and video content that addresses those, this literally helps your sales team the moment the first article or video is produced. It actually helps before that because if the sales team is helping produce it, one of the major benefits — that many companies don't understand or see — is that when you have your subject matter experts help produce content, they get better at being subject matter experts.
They become cleaner with the messaging. If a salesperson today helps you produce a video that answers a particular question, that forces them to get better at their job. It's really beautiful. They become better communicators, better subject matter experts, and therefore better with prospects and customers. But let's say I'm a sales professional and I've got an article or video that just came out that really helps explain cost for my particular product or service. Now, because I have that video, I can send it to the prospect before the initial sales call. Therefore, before the call, they're really learning about pricing — what drives cost up and down, why some companies are expensive, why some companies are cheap — and they have a much better sense of what we charge. And they love that because they've never gotten that from anybody.
By the time I get there, our ability to move much faster in the sales process is significantly greater because their trust is higher and because they know more. So what happens is if somebody's doing They Ask, You Answer well, they immediately integrate content into the sales process, which means two things: closing rates go up and sales cycles go down. That's the immediate benefit, and it can and should happen within 30 days of producing your first articles and videos. Now, in terms of what Google does — well, Google is going to be longer term when it comes to search. If you're producing the right content, it can happen pretty fast, especially in certain industries that are less saturated. In the book, I use a phrase called CSI, which is Content Saturation Index, and every industry has a different level of content saturation.
As you all well know, the marketing agency space has a lot of saturation. It's very, very difficult to make headway in Google search because there's been so much content produced. Take other industries — especially certain niche or B2B industries — and you can just dominate because there's far less content. So the timeframe for Google giving you search love is really contingent on that CSI. But even beyond search, remember this: the moment you start producing great content — especially They Ask, You Answer-style content — which is completely obsessed with the questions, worries, fears, issues, and concerns the buyer is thinking, asking and searching about — the stuff many of your competitors have never even thought about producing — as soon as someone comes to your website and sees it there, it's going to be a much better user experience.
And so because the user experience is better, your leads are naturally going to go up because when they're vetting you online, they're much more inclined to reach out. People say to me, "What if our industry is just absolutely saturated?" Even still, it's worth it from a UX standpoint on your website to create something really special. And the last point I'll make about this is: when somebody comes to your site, do they immediately say, "Oh my goodness, I feel like I've come to the promised land"? Everything I've ever wanted to know, I've learned from these people right here. Do they leave wanting or do they leave satiated? That's the power of the They Ask, You Answer website.
Yeah. And I think the other gift that content brings to the table is that when people ask questions in other environments, you've got answers you can share with them. In social media, if you've done a podcast or a video or written a blog post and you see a relevant conversation, you can just drop it right in there. We've even started sharing educational content in our proposals. We embed videos and podcasts into proposals. Now, a lot of people are just going to read through the thing and want to talk — they're not going to invest the time — but it's there if they want it. They can see the depth of knowledge. They can see what we think about their business and our business. They can see our passion and they can see that we're invested.
And they trust more, don't they? Because they can see that we know what we're talking about. So it gives them that trust, maybe more than someone who just says, "Here's a price."
Yeah. And they see that you've put in the work — that you've put your money where your mouth is, if you will. What's interesting is I try to teach organisations this, and it's hard for them to understand at first, but the rights of a teacher are greater than he or she who does not teach. When you have really taken the time to produce content that's teaching the world, you have the ability to use it, leverage it, and ask things of your customers and potential customers that other people couldn't do — because you are the teacher, you're the authority, you are the voice. And that goes a long way.
There are a lot of other benefits to producing They Ask, You Answer-style content that many people don't even think about. They think, "I want more Google traffic." But it goes way beyond that. If you have a great They Ask, You Answer site that answers all the questions somebody could have about your product or service, this is incredible for recruiting. We've seen many people say, "Marcus, the sales and marketing gains were great, but the greatest gains were that I attracted some of the best employees I've ever had because of They Ask, You Answer." Which is crazy and really, really cool to see. And then there are the gains of the person who comes to me and says, "Marcus, because we answered these questions so well through text and video, for years I knew I should produce some type of training manual for my sales team. This became the training manual for my sales team."
Producing this content is essentially writing the gospel according to you — according to you, your company, your team. That's a beautiful, beautiful thing to have. And I think every company needs the gospel according to them.
So that leads nicely onto something I was jotting down as we were talking. Marketing are producing all this fantastic content, so people are well along their journey about making a product or service decision by the time they hit the sales team. So do you think that salespeople need to be better subject matter experts in the modern era than they used to be? Because there's a danger. I mean, you could walk into a car showroom to buy a new car and if you're anything like me, you pretty much know everything about that car before you walk in. And if you say to the salesperson, "Does this one have the paddle gears?" and the guy says, "Oh, I'm not sure, let me go check —" they're on the back foot straight away, aren't they?
There's a big issue here. I think every single person listening to this right now has been in a situation over the last year or two where they went looking for a product or service from a company and immediately recognised they knew more than the salesperson did.
And this is very problematic. Salespeople have never needed to be more of a subject matter expert than they are today because the bar has been raised so steeply. And a lot of them have excuses as to why they can't necessarily keep up with it, but that doesn't matter, because we as the buyer just do not care in that moment. Most of us can tell within the first 30 seconds if we know more or less than the salesperson. That never happened 30 years ago, pre-internet. Rarely ever did we know more than the salesperson. But if we do know more and we immediately recognise it, it really doesn't matter what they say next — their authority is nothing in our eyes. That sounds very harsh, but it's true, because this is the psychology that we all experience. Companies need to do a much better job of making sure that subject matter expertise is at a very high level.
The idea of helping produce content very much lends to that. Let's say you do kitchen appliances and you're like, "Well, I've got so many kitchen appliances." This is true. You've got to know about a lot. But let me tell you, if you're producing review videos every single day about the appliances you're selling, you're going to be the smartest person in the room. Nobody's going to come in knowing more than you.
Can I ask a question about SEO? Because we talk a lot to our clients about SEO, or they ask us for SEO and we end up talking about content. So when you were producing the content right back at the beginning, were you thinking about SEO at all or were you just answering questions?
Here's what's interesting about it. If we look at what Google is, boil it down: the obsession of Google is to give you the best, most specific, relevant answer to your question as quickly as possible. And that's been their obsession since the beginning of Google. Now anybody that has approached their content strategy from that angle, from that lens, they have tended to be very successful. That's why They Ask, You Answer really is — and I don't say this in a braggadocious way — far and away the foremost SEO strategy that's ever been built, because it's timeless.
It's not going to go away. Over the years, when there was the next Google update — the algorithm changes, the Penguins and Pandas back in the day — I remember celebrating every time, thinking, "Oh good, my clients are going to crush it even more because some of these other metrics that should never have been metrics in search are going to go by the wayside."
Yeah, we're the same.
I do though think there are a lot of hacks to elements of search. Let me give you some examples. One of the things we talk about in the book a lot is the Big Five. The Big Five are the five subjects that buyers research the most — and businesses tend not to want to talk about them. They are: cost questions, problems or negatives, comparison-based questions like "versus," reviews, and "best." Many times you've searched for the cost or price of something online, you've searched for negatives or problems with something online, you've compared something, you've looked for reviews, you've researched "best" or "top" or "most." These are the Big Five. They run the internet economy.
Now, most businesses aren't willing to talk about them, which is incredibly naive and shortsighted, but some businesses are. When you start to really learn how this works, you start stacking Big Fives together. For example: "A review of the five best swimming pool companies in Richmond, Virginia" — that's two of the Big Five right there, reviews and best. Another example: "Fibreglass versus concrete pools: which is the best type of pool for me?" — again, stacking two together. So I thought about search a lot, but what's interesting is that if you read the book, it doesn't feel like a book about search engine optimisation — but it is. I wanted people to get almost a masterclass in SEO without knowing they were getting a masterclass in SEO.
I like that. Yeah. People tend to think that SEO is some sort of techie magic thing, and it's not. It's about answering people's questions and giving Google what it wants, because Google just wants to answer people's questions, doesn't it?
The thing I always have to remind people when it comes to this is: just be more specific. Because remember, Google wants to give you the best, most specific, relevant answer to your question. So the classic example from the book is that I wrote one of the first articles in the entire world on "how much does a fibreglass pool cost?" And that article has since done over $20 million in revenue for the company. Now, if I had written "how much does a pool cost," that would have been a $20+ million dollar mistake, because I was missing one word: fibreglass. I always just tell people, lean towards more, not less specific when it comes to the way you're producing your content.
And by the way, that aligns with the way we search today too. Over the course of the last 25 years of searching on the internet, we've all become more, not less specific. Nobody searches the word "pools" anymore. We have learned that specificity renders better outcomes, and therefore specificity also renders better outcomes when we're producing content.
It's an interesting point because quite often I've gone and found something online and people said, "Well, I searched and I couldn't find that." And I've shown them how I searched — it was a long string of words, almost a whole sentence. And then it threw up results and I started drilling in from there. That's how I use it, and that's why I can find things that sometimes other people can't.
I mean, I think that comes back to the idea that great content trumps everything else. We're not against technical SEO, we're not against core web vitals, we're not against the analytics tools that we use. But I think great content can pretty much trump everything else. Google is trying to provide great answers to people who are asking questions — that's how it generates its revenue through advertising. So if you're producing that great content, a lot of the other things that you maybe aren't getting right can be kind of forgiven.
Yeah. Let's say you've got all the technical sides right, but you don't have the great content. Are you going to make sales? No. Are you going to keep people on your website? No. Are you going to be able to use the content in the sales process? No. But if the content's great and it's done in the They Ask, You Answer way, you're going to be able to do all those things, and the Google Lords will be more forgiving of some of the technicalities that might be falling short on your website. That's just the reality of it. We don't want to be lazy when it comes to technical SEO, but the fact of the matter is 90 to 95% of SEO is really understanding the way people search — being specific in the way they do it and the way you do it — and then answering the question as well as you can.
That will cover 95% of your bases.
Like you said earlier — when you say that, it's so obvious, isn't it? But people overlook it, maybe over-complicate it. Just stick to the basics.
I mean, I think people don't want to admit that they haven't put the energy required into their content.
As an agency — it's hard. It's really hard work, isn't it?
We all know how hard it is to get content off customers. I mean, it's sometimes impossible. What would you say to businesses who push back on content marketing because they don't want to give away the crown jewels? They say, "We can't possibly put this information on our website because it's a secret. We don't want our competitors to find it."
Yeah. Most people's secret sauce is an absolute joke. Because whenever somebody says, "We have a secret sauce," I love to say, "Do you have anybody that works for you that's ever worked for any of your competitors, or do your competitors have any employees that have ever worked for you?" And the simple answer to that is almost always, "Oh yeah, I guess that's true." There are very few real secrets in most industries. The way I describe it to people is: at this point, as buyers and consumers, we want to see the sandwich made in front of us. We really do. If we can see the thing, we can believe it, appreciate it, value it. So let's not get caught up in this idea of secret sauce. That is a myth for most companies, far and away.
They also say things like, "Well, if we tell them everything on the website, they won't phone us up. We'll have nothing to tell them."
Yeah. One of the stories I love to share regarding that one, Julie, is there's a company in the US called the Geek Squad. They fix computers for people. They have a great website that answers a lot of questions. And so somebody went to the CEO and said, "Why are you answering all these questions? Aren't you hurting your business?" And the CEO laughed and said, "Don't you realise my number one customer is the one that tries to fix it themselves?" And look — if you went to five websites and all five say, "Yeah, we can fix that," but one of them shows you how to fix it, which one are you going to call? It's just so obvious.
And the last thing I'll say about this is: if they don't learn it from you, who are they going to learn it from? You can either own the conversation or they can learn it from your competitors. The idea that I'm just going to hide it and allow them to learn from my competitors makes me want to vomit. I'm not okay with that.
So just moving on a little bit — how has the content marketing space changed since They Ask, You Answer was written? Other than the sheer volume of content being produced, has it changed in any fundamental way?
That's a really good question, David. I don't think it's changed very much. Because 10 years ago when I started teaching They Ask, You Answer, people said, "This isn't going to make it." That's like saying trust isn't going to be a big part of your business in 20 years. What a stupid thing to say, right? Because this much I know: trust is a principle that's never going away. It's always going to be core to business success. What's not core are platforms. Platforms come and go. So you build a business on a platform like Facebook or Instagram, then you could have problems. Just like with search — link building will eventually not correlate with search engine results.
In other words, because link building is something that can be gamed, Google is going to find a way — maybe through AI — to not be reliant on outside signals. Eventually their algorithm is going to be based on one thing: true quality of experience. All the other stuff that currently affects search will eventually not affect search. And so if you have that mindset, you're much more built to last. That's why 10 years ago when everybody was doing really stupid link building techniques, I was like, "This ain't going to last. It doesn't smell right, doesn't look right, doesn't taste right, and I ain't going to touch it." And a lot of those companies ended up paying the price for their sins later on.
We've got to think long term. If I say to somebody, "Do you think answering your customers' questions and being seen as a teacher, being seen as an expert, being the trusted voice — is that fundamental to you in five, 10, 15 years?" — everybody with a brain is going to say yes. And with that, we know They Ask, You Answer is going to have legs for a long, long time. Again, this is why the book is selling more today than it did four or five years ago.
I kind of think I know the answer to this, but it's an obvious question to ask. How do people with boring businesses do content marketing? People who genuinely believe that nobody's looking for information about what they do.
Embrace video, right? And trust me, accounting firms are pretty boring on their surface. I've spoken at accounting conferences. But here's what's not boring: spending my money. The moment somebody is getting ready to spend money that they value — and for 99% of people, they value their money — all of a sudden that thing becomes very interesting.
Anytime anyone is spending money, there is much interest. So then you have to say to yourself, "What do they want to know? What are the questions, worries, fears, issues, concerns?" Because somebody can get just as excited about choosing the right accounting firm as they could choosing their next vehicle. Someone listening might say, "There's no way." But the psychology is the same. I've got worries, I've got fears, I've got questions. I don't want to screw this up. There's a lot of money involved. How can I find someone that's going to help me and take me to the promised land so I don't have to have this pain and stress anymore? It's a big, big deal. So please, please do not call your industry boring or unsexy, because it absolutely has major value to the person in the moment that has that particular problem they're trying to solve.
Marcus, could you just tell us a bit more about where you are now and the vehicles you use and the services you offer?
It's been a fun ride. I've been able to see and assist hundreds of companies become the most trusted voice in their space — exploding their sales, their marketing leads and activities, and ultimately their revenue through They Ask, You Answer. Our company Impact helps organisations implement They Ask, You Answer. Just like a company might help you implement Traction, EOS, Scaling Up, or some of these other systems out there, we do that today. We're coaches, consultants, trainers. And unlike most agencies, we do not produce any content — we don't do services. The way we do it is we empower you to learn how to do these things in house. And it's a really beautiful model. I actually believe it's the future of the way agencies need to think in order to be profitable.
I don't think services for agencies will continue to be the future, because AI will always find a way to devalue common activities. But what AI is not going to do is become a world-class coach and consultant for an organisation. And I think this is where agencies need to go to stay ahead of it and to be very profitable. I've also got a book coming out with Phil Jones later this year — he wrote Exactly What to Say — and it's going to be very specific to websites. So if you can imagine the love child of Exactly What to Say plus They Ask, You Answer, you'll probably come up with the title.
We'll look out for it.
Yeah. And hopefully I'm going to be in the UK a couple of times to speak this year — quite excited about that. I'm trying to do a specific They Ask, You Answer conference in the UK because there are so many practitioners there. I'll be at the Entrepreneur Circle later this year in September with Nigel's team, but I'm going to try to do an event that's just for They Ask, You Answer practitioners in the UK. And I would just say: for those people listening right now, make sure you follow me on LinkedIn because that's where I put my best content. I don't have a personal blog today — I put my best thoughts each day on LinkedIn. In fact, as we've been talking today, I've written down a couple of thoughts. I'll take something that you've asked me today and I'll turn it into a piece of content on LinkedIn. I do that at least 300 times a year, so if you really want to connect with me, that's the best place by far.
Yeah, they're always good posts. There's always something to think about in there.
What we'll do is put in the show notes at fromthecoalface.com a link to the book on Amazon — not an affiliate link, just a link — and a link to your LinkedIn profile and Impact as well, for anybody that wants to get in touch. I know this is always asked: is there anything we haven't asked that you're thinking, "Guys, how did you not ask this?"
I would just say: for the person listening to this right now, don't be intimidated by this stuff and do not over-complicate it. Besides that, it's wasteful thinking. I didn't have the most-trafficked swimming pool website in the world from the start. I had a business that was going over the edge, and my simple goal was to produce one piece of content a day until I either lost the business or saved it. And that's how we became the most-trafficked swimming pool website in the world. That's what changed my life. It ultimately led me to a place of incredible financial peace and allowed me to travel the entire world. They say we often overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in 10 — and that is incredibly, incredibly true. Almost 13 years ago, I was near bankruptcy, and today I own multiple businesses. I've had a few exits at this point, and it's just a stunning turn of events as to what can happen.
I'd also say that the beauty of understanding They Ask, You Answer is that your competitors are still not going to do this. Whatever industry you're in, they're probably not going to do this. So if you do They Ask, You Answer, you're only competing with 5%. That's a pretty good deal. And there's room on top for all of you in the 5%. So don't for a second say it's too late. We're just getting going. It's very exciting times, especially when it comes to video — there's so much to do with video still.
Last thing I'll say: we get told sometimes, "You should be everywhere — be on this platform, be on that." That's terrible advice. Don't be everywhere because you're not going to be. There's a reason you're not going to find me on Instagram or Facebook — I am not there because I want to be the best in the world on LinkedIn. So oftentimes we try to be a jack of all social media trades and end up being a master of none. You're much better off being a master of one. As Jim Collins would say in Good to Great, find out what your hedgehog concept is when it comes to that platform or media that you want to use. At River Pools, at first it was textual content and then it became YouTube content. And eventually we started to introduce social media — I didn't do social media for six or seven years at River Pools.
That's why you don't hear me talk a lot about social, because social is fine, but social is rarely foundational. What is foundational is the way we teach and the way we engender trust. Social is platform-centric, so it's going to come and go. And if anybody wants to reach out to me personally, my email is marcus@marcussheridan.com. Feel free to reach out anytime and ask me questions that you might have had as you were listening to this.
Fantastic. It's been an absolute pleasure. If you want to come on From the Coalface and talk about any aspect of digital marketing, talk about your business, or talk about anything related to growing a business, we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at fromthecoalface.com or redevolution.com. Marcus, it's been a pleasure. And if anybody hasn't read They Ask, You Answer, you need to read it. It's a fantastic, very easy, very accessible read — one of those you can't put down types. I listen to the audio book version, which I loved, and I keep going back to it. So that's everything from myself and Julie.
Marcus, thanks so much. Thank you.
Yeah, my pleasure.