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The Digital Utopia Podcast Episode #9

Using Content To Elevate Your Brand and Increase Sales

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About the podcast

The Digital Utopia Podcast is for SMB Marketers and Business Leaders looking to align their Marketing, Sales, and Service departments so they’re part of one powerhouse growth team.

Each episode will dive into the strategies, philosophies, and tools that will change your approach to organizational growth, give you renewed focus and clarity, and allow you to build a brand that not only helps you stand out—but win.

The Digital Utopia Podcast is produced by Digitopia and hosted by Frank Cowell and Joseph Freeman.

Episode transcription

Frank
See, this is where you need to think about the whole customer and too many companies think of the relationship in terms of their product. And that's their lens on the customer. But the customer is trying to do things that go above and beyond your product.

Joe
You were listening to the digital utopia podcast, a resource dedicated to helping b2b leadership and executives gain clarity and focus in a chaotic marketplace.

Frank
Hey, gang, welcome to the digital utopia podcast episode nine. I'm your host, Frank Cole. And I'm joined by my co host,

Joe
Joseph Freeman.

Frank
Joe, Joseph. Joey, I'm ready to do this today.

Joe
I'm ready to do this. Yeah,

Frank
it seems like it's been a while, although we were just recording a week ago. But it seems like it's been a while live in a crazy world time. Like, it's like broken from, you know, reality right now.

Joe
We need better relationships.

Frank
We do.

Joe
We do. You know. And on that

Frank
that was a very cheesy way to connect it to what we're talking about today. For those that are listening. He's like, I don't know how to banter. Let me connect it to our shows episode, let's let's talk about it

Joe
let's dive in. Okay, so today we're talking about content. In the words of Andrew Davis content builds relationships, relationships are built on trust, and trust drives revenue, which is, of course, not everything in life, but it's a thing. And it's the thing that we talked about here. So if you're looking to accelerate, grow and

Frank
drives, drives business, right,

Joe
drives business, which drives so many other things,

Frank
while profit does.

Joe
So if you're looking to accelerate that growth, and drive revenue, then content is an absolute must, especially in this day and age. So, in the b2b world, this is especially true. You know, it's what helps build relationships and helps inject the humanity into what would otherwise be a pretty sterile relationship, or sterile transaction. So we want to know, what content should we be creating, we want to know, you know, how do we speed up our decision making process, because a lot of people can get pretty stuck and pretty paralyzed when it comes to, you know, thinking about whether or not they need to say something that's super innovative, super smart in their in their content. So we're gonna be talking about that today. So what I think we should accomplish Frank is, we want to know what makes content good or bad. We want to know how to build a content strategy to support different stages in the buyers journey. And we want to know how to operationalize and a culture of content creation in your organization.

Frank
Oh, just little things. That's all just those three things

Joe
and check those things right off

Frank
just little things.

Joe
So let's dive right in. So what makes content good or bad? Frank, what do you think is the best way to start defining your content strategy?

Frank
start defining your content strategy?

Joe
Maybe we should define content first.

Frank
Yeah, what's interesting as content has taken on a very broad meaning, you know, content used to mean, you know, the written word in internet marketing terms that is right, used to mean like the written word, a blog, if you will. But really, content is so much more than that. It's video, it's audio. It's written to visual. And with the advent of home devices, like Alexa and Siri, you know, now it's like, audio takes on a completely different format as well, you know, so there's even derivatives of things like audio. So content comes in a lot of different formats. Sometimes people look at things like software, or tools or resources that a company might give, as content as well, I think that that's a little bit of a stretch, I think those things go into another category we can talk about, which are like lead magnets, and, you know, foot in the door offers. But some people lump those in as content as well, I don't, I think content is everything that you can read here. Consume. And watch, if you will, and but a lot of different formats.

Joe
Yeah. So I think for a lot of our listeners, they're probably not actually doing content yet. Or if they are, maybe they're just dipping their toe in the water or kind of, you know, grabbing at straws when it comes to what types of topics they you know, are creating and putting out there. So this is a huge, huge topic, right? We could go on for hours about content and strategy and methodologies and what's right and what's wrong. And I think at the end of the day, there's not a lot of definition around what is right or wrong. You just got to start doing something and seeing what works and seeing what people respond to react to and engage with, right?

Frank
Yeah, I think it's important to just get started. Anybody who's heard me talk before and listen to some of our past episodes, knows that I'm a big fan of Stop making excuses and start executing. So I'm a huge fan of that. So if you just do that, I think you're going to be miles ahead. With most of your competitors, because most of your competitors are sitting around, you know, twiddling their thumbs and worrying about you know what they should do, and, you know, if they have the right approach, and then they're doing nothing, so doing something is always better than doing nothing.

Joe
Right.

Frank
So with that said, if you take a moment to think about your content strategy, the best approach is when you start to look at the landscape of what your capabilities are, as an organization, take a look at the landscape of who you serve. And kind of, you know, see where those lined up and see where you have some really great matches, you know, hey, we're really great at this particular offering, for these kinds of people, or this kind of person. And when you get that match, that becomes this hyper focused, hyper specific place, you can start you can say, Oh, well, you know, we're really, we have a lot of competency inside our organization around this topic. And this particular audience that we serve, well cares about it the most. So I would start there, I would find that kind of, you know, intersection between your capabilities, your competencies, and the audience's that you serve. And so that is, I think, probably the most important thing to do is hyper focus and find that, that one pairing first and foremost,

Joe
yeah, yeah. And I think when we work with companies, often, they have a hard time wrapping their mind around content, because I think most people think of content as thought leadership, I've got to say, the smartest thing, right, I've got to say something innovative and new. What we coach people on is that that is something right, you have your subject matter experts that, you know, they can can certainly kind of dish out a ton of content, that becomes really inspiring. But there's another type of content too. And that is simply answering the questions that people are asking the prospects are asking, right. So let's talk a little bit about that. What does that look like?

Frank
Well, so a couple of things. So my opinion on thought leadership, thought leadership really needs to come after you've exercised that muscle of producing content, only after you have someone in the organization who's thought leadership worthy, and committed. So that's actually the last place I would go because it's not as you can't operationalize it as easy, right as you can the other kind of content, which you talked about. And by the way, that other kind of content recently answered questions, not just for prospects, in my opinion, right, it's for the entire journey that your buyers go through, because even once their customers or clients or patients or members or students, whatever you call them, they still need to be served with information, they still need to be served with resources, that's content. And so along that journey, whether they're a stranger all the way to fan, there are questions they have, and concerns they have, and things that frustrate them. So I kind of like to look at those three things. And at every step of their journey, write down what those things are, to where you ultimately come up with an inventory. So yes, many of them will be questions, but some of them will just be points of frustration. You know, like, hey, at this particular point in their journey, we know, they always get frustrated by x. And we know what this particular point in the journey, you know, they become really anxious or nervous or misinformed about this. Right? So if you look at the spectrum of it, not just the questions that they're actually verbally asking, but their emotions that you know, they're feeling, and also the misinformation because you you know, your competitor is out there. There's at least one competitor who's providing wrong information to your clients and prospects. And even if it's not wrong, from their point of view, your competitors point of view, from your point of view, you have a better take a better lens on it. So this becomes your your inventory. And so when you take this approach, no longer will you, you know, sit around the table and say, well, we haven't written a blog in four weeks. What should we write about now? Like when when organizations start asking that question, that means they're relying on this idea of thought leadership to produce their content, which is it's hard to operationalize. You know, what we're doing here through this podcast. This is thought leadership, but we know how to operationalize this because we have the muscle exercises of producing content for years and years of knowing how to produce regularly. And so we're able to do that. And so we can operationalize that pretty easily. But when you're first starting out, you're really trying to get that muscle exercise. The thought leadership stuff is the hardest stuff to operationalize.

Joe
Right. Right. So you mentioned sitting around trying to figure out what you should write about. So what would be a really easy way to to get started, where do you come up with the topics? The questions how, you know, what's an exercise you could do?

Frank
Okay, simple exercise. So the first step that I mentioned a moment ago, find that cross section between a competency that you're amazing at, and a buyer persona, who has that need or can be fulfilled by that competency of all the buyer personas you serve, pick one, and pick the competency. Okay, so you got that pairing tangible example. So you might say, Hey, we're really great at digital strategy for CEOs of five to $10 million b2b organizations. Okay, we're really great at leading digital strategy for that crowd. Okay, so now we've got, and we can get even more specific, right? It might be, you know, a SaaS CEO, and executive team five to 15, five to $10 million in revenue,

Joe
which you should know if you've already put together your buyer personas correct about that in an earlier episode.

Frank
Correct. And so we would take that pairing, and then we would say, Okay, what is their, when they're, when they're searching for digital growth strategies? What is their one of their biggest pain points that they have? You know, and so you might say, well, they just struggle with, you know, balancing, you know, doing digital marketing, and generating results with things that also build long term brand awareness and equity, they struggle with knowing how to figure that out. They don't know what the mix should be. Okay, so there's a very valid point of confusion, they have a very valid frustration they have in question they have. So then what you can do is then talk to your team and say, Okay, what is what are all the things that we can educate this buyer persona, as it relates to that particular point of frustration, then you can start there. You can also bring your your sales team in your customer service team, and, and you can put sitting around a table and say, based on this person, and this core competency that we have around digital strategy, what are all the questions they have, when it comes to digital strategy? What are all the frustrations they have? And so together in a room, you can come up with probably three to five dozen points that you could be talking about?

Joe
And who better to provide that than the sales team and the customer service team, right? They're hearing this all day long.

Frank
I mean, look, I come across so many marketing departments that are not engaging their sales and service teams. It's the most asinine thing I've ever heard. They're producing content for the marketplace. And they're not involving the people that talk to the marketplace the most. It's crazy. Yeah, it's it's like, I don't know what's going on in the marketing world, or what they're teaching these people. But it's certainly it doesn't make for great content. So you have to get your sales team involved. You have to get your service team involved. And have them give you the feedback on the questions. They ask the frustrations, they have the misconceptions. That's another big one that a lot of the content industry doesn't talk about? What are all those points of misconception that these people have? Because if you just purely go based on the questions, you're only going to get what's on the surface. Right? But if you look at frustrations now you're getting feelings, and sometimes that gets verbalized. But then if you go to misconceptions, they're not even verbalizing it, because they don't know. They don't know, they don't know. Right? So there's a few different lenses you can look at when it comes to this particular person in this particular topic.

Joe
Okay, so when we think about the types of questions we might come up with, what are these are these, you know, how do I your example? How do I build a digital strategy? Are these more like, how much does it cost to implement and what types of questions are good questions here?

Frank
Both any, any and all of those questions? So how do I? What's the difference between what does it cost to? How long does it take a comparison between vendor a vendor B, you know, there, say, a friend of mine, Barbara flow who has a company called impact. One of his business partners guy named Marcus Sheridan, he wrote a book called they ask you answer,

Joe
fantastic.

Frank
It's a great book. And so in this book, they talk about five categories of how you can come up with these questions. It's kind of like similar to the ones I just rattled off. But again, questions are one aspect frustrations or another misconceptions or another, and you could probably come up with more, right? Like, I'm not saying I'm the be all end all when it comes to you know, these are the three things, but like three lenses to then start to create your inventory. And I promise you, you'll come up with in one session, you'll come up with like 235 dozen points that you can be talking about answering questions, and also making educational pieces around misconceptions, and how tos, how to overcome this frustration.

Joe
So we're trying to understand what makes good or bad content so after hearing all this is there bad content Or its content, just content? What are your thoughts on that

Frank
there is bad content bad content is when someone says, Hey, we should do content marketing, because it's good for SEO. And I need SEO because any more visitors, I need more sales.

Joe
Now it is good for SEO.

Frank
It is. But if that's the driving reason, right? If that's, if that's your lens on creating the content, more often than not, your content is gonna be crap.

Joe
Yeah,

Frank
because you're writing it for Google, you're not writing it, to truly dig in and solve and provide value. So content has to come from a place of value, first, enrichment, not promotion. And the problem that, you know, moat that a lot of organizations take when they do it, just because they're only in on the content game because of the SEO thing. And they're only in on the SEO thing, because of the leads thing. That's it, that's the only reason they're in, they're not in to build brand, they're not in to give value, they're not in to create differentiation, not in it to change lives in to transform their buyers along this journey. And when you're not in it, for those reasons, then your stuff is garbage. It's just literally trying to, you know, appease a search engine algorithm. And the problem is, is yes, you may get more traffic, but that traffic is not going to do much of anything. It won't convert.

Joe
Right? Right. So now you have a list of content that you need to create, right? You got your sales team in the room, you got your customer service team in the room, you came up with, pick a number 76 different things that you could write about or 80 or 82. How do you now take that and prioritize it in a way that you can put it into a content calendar where you can be sure this is actually going to get produced? Because it's one thing to come up with the ideas and brainstorm the whole nother thing to actually start producing it? That's, that's pretty hard. Right?

Frank
It is. So one of the things that you want to do from a priority standpoint is take a look at how that content fits the various relationship levels that people have with your brand along the entire journey.

Joe
So remind us what those are

Frank
Yeah, they go from stranger to visitor from visitor to lead leads to qualified qualified opportunities, opportunities, customers and customers to fans, right? Those are the seven relationship levels. And so you want to start identifying this content, as it relates to the relationship level that it's best paired with. Right? And so I would start there and start categorizing your content or tagging it. And once you do that, then you can step back and say, okay, where do we have the biggest bottleneck in our company right now? Do we have the biggest bottleneck getting our customers to stick around and refer us? Or do they? Or is that working well? Or is our biggest bottleneck, we just need to attract more people into our leads database? Or is our sales team just not closing the opportunities at the rate that we think they should, you can kind of look at those three major, you know, milestones along the journey.

Joe
Let's go back to kind of the lead generation part because I think, when we start talking to companies, a lot of them want to have, they want to have more leads, right? So they start thinking they need more traffic to get more leads, we actually preach top down optimization, right? Correct. So let's talk a little bit about that. Why wouldn't I create content that will just attract more brand new people,

Frank
because that's a long term game. And in any effort, you want to experience success and feedback as soon as possible. And this is the problem I have with most marketing agencies, by the way, is that, you know, they're out there chasing the new, and the new is very expensive. And the effort and the types of initiatives you deploy for the new are hit and miss, always, I don't care who you go to what firm you go to. It's expensive. And it's hit and miss relatively speaking, when you start at the other end of the spectrum, and you start with your existing customers and the people who are already paying money to you, and you dig in with them. And you survey them, and you talk to them. And you make sure you produce content just for them. Right, whether it's a knowledge base, or what have you, or you're helping elevate them to the next level of their career or what they want to be transformed into. And call that elevate at that final stage. When you start there, you're going to get feedback much quicker, you're going to increase revenues much faster, because those people are more likely to spend, and those people are more likely to prefer. So if you want to talk about getting leads fast, the best thing to do is activate your existing customer base, and figure out how to get them to refer you into more business.

Joe
Well, let's talk about that. Because we're trying to solve right now for how to create a content strategy that will support each of the different stages in the buyers journey right in that kind of Ascension path. And I think it's pretty easy to come up with the questions to answer and the content that would help somebody who just doesn't know anything about you. But a customer who's been with you for a while who actually knows a lot about you has experienced the actual service service or product, what do you write about for them.

Frank
So this is where you need to think about the whole customer. And too many companies think of the relationship in terms of their product. And that's their lens on the customer. But the customer is trying to do things that go above and beyond your product, right, you have to, or your offering, I use product as a general, you know, business term, whether it's service or physical. So when you look at your product, what you have to ask yourself is when they originally bought this product, what were they hoping to accomplish? Because nobody buys the product, because they need the product, they buy the, what they hope the outcome of the product is. So if you look at that outcome, say, Oh, well, they really want to accomplish this outcome. Well, what are all the other things that contribute towards that outcome above and beyond your product? Right, those that clues you in to how you could be thinking much bigger about this customer of yours. I may have mentioned it in one of the previous episodes, but a gentleman I interviewed for my book, kind of Ron court of sekisui, manufacturing, you know, he said their business radically changed the day, they realized that what they were selling wasn't what they were selling. And once they realized their job was to help their clients transform how they do business, everything changed. And they were they won more business, they wanted at the margins they wanted to win it at, they were referred more business, like everything just radically changed. Because when you think about the entire customer, and not just the machine yourself now, the service you gave them, then that they again, that clues you into the kinds of things that you could be doing or writing about.

Joe
Right? So again, I'm gonna put you on the spot.

Frank
Oh, no.

Joe
Tangible example. So at that, that fan level or that customer level, either one of them, but would be a tangible example of what you could do to really serve them well with content.

Frank
Yeah, so let's say you have a group of people that are project managers, let's say that's who does business with you. And let's say they, they've purchased some project management software. Okay, that's your product, right? You gave him software, the software is awesome game to have the best software project management software on the planet. It's got all the time tracking, it's got all the Gantt charts, it's got all the, what's he do right,

Joe
then done, you move back on to a new new prospect, right?

Frank
That's what most people do. But what you could be doing is saying, Wow, well, what are project managers trying to accomplish? Let's see, managing the project through software is only one aspect of it. They're also trying to improve their skills as a project manager, they're also trying to improve their communication skills, they're trying to improve their visibility within the organization, all kinds of things that these people want to do. Right, not just like, click away on your software. And so you could create an event for them, and feed them content through this event. Have, you can bring speakers in, you could do some sort of virtual event, especially with popular today, you know, with people getting together less and less, you could do some sort of virtual event for project managers right around how to accelerate your career as a project manager. And the whole content in that event could have nothing to do with your product, you might reserve one little slot to talk about some of the latest announcements with your product, and maybe do a feedback forum. But there you could bring in speakers that talk about, you know, communication skills, you can bring in people talk about, you know, business skills

Joe
unrelated to your product.

Frank
Yeah, why not? You're trying to transform the whole customer, because ultimately, that person is trying to go somewhere. And your your product is just a piece of that journey. And too many, again, too many times businesses think like, their product is you know, the be all end all like they think it's the main thing and this person that finish line, right. But you think it's this, they think this they think their product has this amazing Ville visibility in this person's life. And it's it's something that they care about a ton, but oftentimes they don't.

Joe
Yeah, so that all sounds actually really great and actually philanthropic and maybe altruistic. At the end of the day, we're businesses, we want to make money. So how does that actually aid us in furthering, okay, right,

Frank
if you want to talk selfishly, let's talk selfishly right. Now, if you want to be selfish, and say, Well, what are we going to get out of that? Frank? If we do all that stuff, we don't just want to create warm fuzzies Okay, so let's get selfish, selfishly, got a captive audience. Okay. Talk about your new product features, right? Talk about the rollout of something. And so you can generate upsell conversations, right? You can increase your MRR, if you're this software company by you know, selling more seats, whatnot. So you got a captive audience, too. You can get referrals, right, so now you can get referrals because now you're engaging this audience more. So the more often you engage them, the more you have an opportunity to ask them for those referrals and even rollout of referral program for that matter. I mean, what better way to roll out a referral program, when they're a captive audience taking in content and education on something they really care about, as opposed to just sending an email blast about a new referral program you've got?

Joe
Right,

Frank
right. So you've got a captive audience there. And then the other thing is, then you could set up feedback forums, to then help you improve your offering. So that way, you can go get more business. With with based on improved product set, yeah. Right. So I mean, if you want to get real selfish, you can get some very tangible things that will directly impact your bottom line.

Joe
Yeah. When we talk about thinking outside of the box with content content can jump off the page, right, we did talk about video and infographics and what have you. But think HubSpot does a great job of this as well, you know, for their, for their customers to make them fans, they have things like inbound, which is a whole conference full of content right now, that's a big expensive endeavor. And they've worked really hard to get there. But we need to be thinking outside of the box, they have partner day, right for any of their partners to come and just learn. And there's there's no additional cost for that. That's just something they offer to make you better. Correct. Right. So you can really be thinking off the page with this.

Frank
Yeah. Again, content is, can be a very limiting way of looking at it. Certainly content is one aspect, you might you know, could throw the another word on there, and offers content and offers, right. So that way, like a conference like inbound or doing an event for your project managers, that's an offer, you may not charge them, you may charge them, whatever, it still falls under that category of an offering. In fact, I like to look at all content and offerings as products, to be honest. Because even if your prospects or clients aren't paying for it, it's still an offering. And they're giving you their time and attention,

Joe
which is a form of payment, which is

Frank
it's a form of payment. Absolutely right. If anything today, it's social currency.

Joe
Okay, so we've talked about good and bad content, we've talked a little bit about a content strategy, how to go about starting to get this rolling. Now let's talk about actually operationalizing. It, we talked to a lot of customers or prospects that get really excited about this, at least a couple people in the company get really excited about it. And then once they start to try to operationalize it kind of falls flat. They do it for a couple months. And then it's hard to keep it going. So first, let's talk about who should be writing the content in your organization. It's

Frank
like, you know, wanting to get fit, you go to the gym, you just want that, that trainer guy to just like move your muscles for you. Would that be great? You just show up and you kind of like pushes on your abs. And in six weeks, you have amazing abs because he's like, as the amazing that's not how it works? Unfortunately, no, no.

Joe
So then, if we're going to commit to doing this for the long term and really doing it, well, let's talk about that, who should be doing it. Everybody in the organization? So what does everybody all the writers in the organization?

Frank
know, everybody in the organization should be contributing content on in some shape or form?

Joe
Okay,

Frank
so if you can't get everybody, then at minimum, we're talking about marketing, sales and service.

Joe
So how do we motivate these

Frank
minimum, those three organizations within the larger organization?

Joe
Because these people have jobs? Right? They're they're already busy, you know, spinning their wheels trying to do what is actually in the job description? How do we motivate them to want to take part in this and actually encourage and inspire them? to do it? Because a lot of them, I don't think if you've never written before, you wouldn't even think you could do it?

Frank
Well, I think writing then becomes a constraint. Okay, so I think you have to the number one thing is you have to make it easy. How do we make it so writing may not always be the easiest thing? You know, I've been banging this drum for a while that I think what a lot of people should do is just pick up their, their iPhone, and do a selfie video to answer each one of those questions or talk about each one of those frustrations or misconceptions that are in the inventory that you created.

Joe
What like 30 seconds, two minutes? Yeah, ever longer takes however long

Frank
it takes, yeah, don't don't put any constraints on it, like, most people aren't going to sit down and write.

Joe
Right,

Frank
you know, writing is is a skill. Writing takes a certain style of brain activity that may not be compatible with how people you know, in mote their their feelings, and in, get the words out, you know, for me, I can write really, really well. If I have rough content to start with. Okay, if I start with a blank sheet of paper, it I won't do I won't do it. It takes me a long time. And so I have to like work on bullet points over a long period of time until I have enough bullet points where it feels was like a rough draft, then I can go in. So that's a huge blocker for me. Some people can write and they enjoy it. Some people would rather just speak, some people would rather just be asked a question and then answer it, like interview style, interview style. So first things first is you have to make it easy and have several different formats for people to be able to do this. I like the selfie video style, because you could just answer that question address that pain point of that misconception. And then you can just have someone on your team, do the transcribing. And you can create the video itself can be a video you put on the internet, and on your site. You can turn it into written content and create a more polished version

Joe
may have an actual writer Yeah, review the video and turn it in. Yeah,

Frank
turn it into words and then go research and get some of the stats and the links and all that do that you can then have someone create potentially a visual graphic based on you know, this content, maybe it's visual in nature to where you can have an infographic style, or you can maybe even simply and or do a quote graphic, you know, maybe this person said something that was especially poignant. And it would make make for a great quote graphic

Joe
a traditional pullquote,

Frank
like a pullquote

Joe
magazine.

Frank
Exactly. So maybe you make a graphic that's square for like the gram, right? And get those on there. I just said the gram is so cool, by the way that am I supposed to say that? I'm looking at Ariane here, the gram is okay to say, Okay, I just called it the gram. People, my team would probably laugh, because, you know, I'm 47. And they're like, what is this guy doing saying the gram, anyway, make a square one for the gram, right. And so you can, you can create a lot of pieces from the video. Now, people get self conscious, you know, when it comes to the video thing. So that's another hurdle again, make it easy find what people are most comfortable with. That's, that's the first thing. And then I would say once you do that, it's important that you get in a rhythm. And you're producing consistently. So don't grade the content harshly, right? Like don't give anyone real negative feedback in the beginning, you need the muscle to be exercised, that's the most important thing is the momentum, you hear me talk about this a lot on our show, but momentum is so critical. And then you know, once you have that, you know, then it can flow, it can improve, you can give feedback on on how to like, say, Okay, now we can make this better. And then finally, the third component is incentivize it. Right? Like, show people how the content they're creating leads to better customer relationships leads to new leads that come in, it leads to, you know, the sales, team closing deals easier, incentivize that and show the team how that's happening. And whether that's a little bonus you do or you throw little company parties and like, celebrate, you got to celebrate the wins. And you can do that individually and recognize individual contributors, you can do it collectively. But you have to like make it fun. And you have to expose how this content is actually turning into real results.

Joe
So you're suggesting that you block out time, you know, regularly once a week, twice a week and actually make this happen, right? Don't just rely on people to do their own selfies and send them to you. If you're the Content Manager, you actually have to get in there and Sam scheduling time when we're going to make this happen.

Frank
You need someone who is the general, right. Okay, you need someone who is the general who's going to say, here's the here's the calendar, here's who's doing what, and I need this by this timeframe. And oh, by the way, that general should also ensure that training has happened. For these people. You can't just tell people, I need you to answer this question right on this topic, right on this question, right on this misconception, you can't do that. You have to give training and say, Hey, here's a template for how you for a few different styles of how to answer the questions. Here's a video format that you could use, and here's you know, give them options. So that and train them on how to actually produce the content.

Joe
So where do you get these types of templates? And how do you find this?

Frank
Yeah, so well, shameless, self plug here. But, you know, our company, you know, has those tools and resources. If you want to find more, you can go to building your digital utopia.com and get some of those resources and download. You know, we have a template for a blueprint. And we also will be launching an academy soon where all of these very specific resources around scripts and templates and calendars, we're going to have all of that in there for people. And that so that that'll launch soon. And if you're listening check now maybe it's launched by the time you're listening, but you'll go there and we'll have tools and resources for you Yeah,

Joe
so last question, how frequently should you be posting publishing this this content?

Frank
No less than?

Joe
Are you making this up?

Frank
Yeah, partly I'm making it up. And I'll tell you why I'm making it up partly. So no less than two to four times a month. Okay. And anything more than that is always better. Assuming you remember the, the principle of value first, right? The customer service mindset, right? That philosophy that is that we've talked about as part of the digital utopia methodology, the customer service mindset says, you know, anything we do comes from a place of service, even if they're not yet our customers, we're going to service them as if. And so as long as you're specific with that content, you're not just, you know, throwing out general thought leadership, and you're just doing stuff just to satisfy the gigs. And as long as you're doing value, first service driven content, then as much is it more is always better. Mm hmm. But, but again, more is not better if it's garbage.

Joe
Yeah, and if you have a hard time just getting started, you know, 51% of companies say that just by updating old content, kind of dusting it off the shelf, giving it a new spin and cleaning it up, that can actually be a good way to just get the muscle starting to exercise.

Frank
Yeah,

Joe
put that out there that can give you a little bit of a boost,

Frank
you got to just get in the rhythm. You know, with anything, you know, that we've talked about in anything in life, you have to get in the right rhythm, a great book to talk that talks about rhythms and habits is a book called atomic habits. It's been very transformative in my life, one of the things that I learned by reading this is when people say they want to have these, like, really awesome habits in their life. So they can just be this like, stellar example of a human being. Oftentimes, when they try to do that they have these real, you know, big habits and big goals. But the problem is, is they don't have the habit of habits, the habit of habits is actually the first habit you have to learn. And that was really eye opening. For me, when I read this, it like hit me like a ton of bricks. And I took that approach. And I've been taking that approach. And it's been very transformative. So that's what we're talking about is your organization has to be in the habit of habit. So if you're an organization that doesn't really have a culture of habits, use this, do this here, and start doing this. Because we're talking it's it's low, it's low risk, right? There's no, there's no liability to like, not writing the greatest blog post, right? Or not putting out the best, you know, one minute, two minute video, there's, there's, it's, it's low liability, you're not going to hurt anything, right? Unless you're just being a total jerk. Of course, you go in saying things that are awful. But I don't think any of you are going to do that. I think if you go with the right intent, don't worry about the perfection of it. Just get in the habit of habits and and start there.

Joe
I do think it's important to have a strategy, though, you know, according to sem rush, 78% of companies say they have content specialists, 1 to 3, content specialists on board. And we actually see that we actually talked to companies where there are people who are doing content, but they're not really doing content, right. They have a blogging network that's creating or regurgitating stuff that's found on the internet and mashed up and put out as little short blog articles. But but true content is really meeting people at each relationship level

Frank
there. Again, it goes back to what I mentioned earlier, it's because companies, too many companies approach content, because they're, they're trying to do the SEO thing, you know, and that's why they're doing it. And instead of the Y being, hey, we're going to create the most amazing position for our brand, we're going to create the most amazing impact for these buyer personas. And we're going to transform their lives better than anyone else in our industry. And we're going to think like a media company, when we do this, then you're going to produce amazing stuff. Are we out of time, I think we're out of time, do

Joe
we're out of time again,

Frank
we're out of time. Okay, folks, it was really fun on this topic, we're going to actually go deeper on this, we're going to go deeper on the top down part because I want to go into the kind of content and the offers that you must be engaging with when it comes to turning, you know, customers into fans, and how that can actually be your growth engine like that can feed everything else. And I want you to stop chasing the new and we want to show you and talk about how going deeper with your existing base is going to be actually the genesis of everything you want to accomplish from your growth strategy. Books. If you'd like to learn more on the digital utopia methodology and everything Joe and I've been talking about today, and come up with a plan for mapping out your content, go to buildingyourdigitalutopia.com download our content experience worksheet. Thanks for joining us how Have an awesome day. We'll see here next time.

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