Robert Rose is one of the early pioneers and evangelists of content marketing and the author of “Content Marketing Strategy”.
When you stop to consider the numbers, it must be very hard these days for any content creator or producer not to be completely cowed by the odds of building a meaningful audience.
Estimates vary but there are something like 600 million blogs in the world. There are an estimated four million podcasts. About the same number of videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. More than three million photos get uploaded daily. No one knows the exact number of brand newsletters but no doubt it’s also in the millions since a large majority of businesses report having one.
Marketing consultant Mark Schaefer once famously called this meteoric growth “content shock”, by which he meant the “intersection of finite content consumption and rising content availability”. Anyone producing branded content these days is not simply sparring with close rivals for the attention of highly distracted customers, they are up against every influencer, opinion leader, web publisher, blogger and creator, all of them just as keen to get noticed. No wonder much of the content that brands produce today is ignored. The content glut simply suffocates the chances of discovery.
Yet brands keep trying. Content marketing has become a mainstream strategy. No company dares to rely exclusively on paid media anymore to get their message noticed. Owned media is heavily counted on to generate organic web traffic. And customers today expect to find the information they want on demand, whether through search or social media, using whichever device is most convenient.
From the early to mid-2000’s, marketers began to slowly catch on that quality content was the key to earning higher search engine rankings and generating more inbound web traffic. Which is why content marketing quickly became indispensable. By the time the Content Marketing Institute was founded by Joe Pulizzi in 2010, a burgeoning class of content specialists had sprung up, drawn from the journalism world. Today many businesses have a dedicated cadre of specialists whose job it is to produce content that can be consumed across all forms of media.
Yet despite the ubiquity of content marketing, the problem remains: how to crack the code of building an engaged audience. Which explains why only “28% of marketers rate their organization’s overall level of content marketing as extremely successful”.1 After all, marketing’s main remit is to generate demand. Most of the time that means one thing: turning prospective buyers into qualified leads who can be nurtured through the sales funnel. Certainly that is all Sales cares about. Product management too. And those internal groups are the ones clamouring the loudest for more and more content they can use. So that means the content team is chained to a production assembly line, churning out as many promotional assets as they possibly can, with the sales KPIs of the organization foremost in their minds. No one is thinking too deeply about what the information seeker wants or needs.
That is where most organizations are going wrong, according to one of the world’s foremost experts in content marketing, Robert Rose. Content producers need to start thinking like publishers, he argues. More than that, organizations need to turn their content operations into media businesses with the dedicated goal of attracting a captive audience.
It is a radical prescription. Getting organizations to think less in terms of selling and more about sharing takes a huge mindset shift. But with the right content strategy, Robert Rose believes it is achievable. And so in his latest book “Content Marketing Strategy”, he presents a detailed blueprint for success. Ever since he co-wrote the landmark book “Managing Content Marketing” with his fellow evangelist Joe Pulizzi thirteen years ago, Robert Rose has been on a mission to convince organizations that the only way to break through the content clutter is to offer information of unique value that someone might actually be willing to pay for.
I started by asking Robert about his early career arc as an aspiring playwright and screenwriter and whether he still harboured yearnings to become one.
Robert Rose: Oh, every day. Every single day. Yeah, I miss it. You know what, it was funny, because what drove me away from that whole idea of being a musician or being a screenwriter or a playwright, which is where, whatever limited success I had was actually writing plays, not screenplays, wasn’t the doing of the thing. It was the business of the thing. And what I discovered was I didn’t enjoy at all, I got no satisfaction at all, of the job of being a screenwriter or a playwright or a songwriter, because the job is a sales job. Of course, any artist that is going to make it in any sort of popular medium, you are a salesperson at heart, which I am not, and so it’s not just about creating great work, and then, yay, somebody finds it. You actually have to market it and sell it and sell yourself, which I was not great at. And the industry is not terribly inviting. Let’s just put it softly, and so, that was what drove me away. So the doing of the thing is something that – I mean, I still play music in my spare time, but I haven’t thought about writing a screenplay or a play in a long time. But actually, funny enough that you mentioned it, I have over the last couple of months ago, I started thinking I should probably put my fingers to keyboard again just to see if anything’s there. But, yes, I do miss it very much.
Stephen Shaw: Well, after all these years in the marketing business, you probably have a pile of stories you can tell about this business.