 All right, ladies and gentlemen moving ahead to our next power pack session by a global speaker I'd like all of you to come forward and join our online conversation using the hashtag E4M content jam I'm sure you don't want to miss this session. So stay right here as I introduce you to our global speaker He is a CMO influencer, motivational speaker and CEO of Marketing Insider Group He has worked with more than 100 brands in building effective thought leadership, content marketing and employee activation programs After 25 years in sales, marketing and leadership roles with brands like SAP, Moonson and a number of high growth startups Today he enjoys sharing his experiences and client stories to inspire leaders like you into action that creates impact He's also the best-selling author of pre-books including his latest being people suck, the content formula, the digital marketing growth hacks Ladies and gentlemen, with your virtual applause, let's bring Michael Brenner, he's right here with us on the screen Give him your virtual applause and he will be talking on how marketing is changing to focus less on ads and more on customer focused content Very warm welcome to you Michael Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here and I'm really excited to talk to everybody. I just watched the last session and I thought it was amazing And one of the things that I think is really important to do, especially when we're speaking to brands and the marketers inside brands And all of us that are trying to grow our business is to understand the context of content marketing in the larger marketing landscape And even to understand the context of marketing in the larger business landscape And to understand the context of business in the context of everything that's going on in the world today and pandemics and lockdowns and racial injustice and all of the things that we're seeing And so I'm really excited to talk to you today and I'm going to share my screen and if you could let me know if that's working for us Absolutely, I'm going to be right here with you until the screen comes up All right, Michael's going to be right back with us and he's already put every topic into discussion with this hyper loop Everything is interconnected, right? So I'm super excited to know from Michael and his presentation I'm sure you are too if you have questions if you'd like to comment suggest Don't forget to use the hashtag e4m content jam and don't forget to give them love send them some thumbs up Show some hearts and yes comment to us. What do you feel? How do you feel after a couple of sessions that's been for the day one of content jam? Okay, we're all good. Okay So as I said, we're going to talk about the context of content marketing the context of marketing the context of business In the world that we're living in a world that doesn't want to see ads And one of my my main messages to marketers and businesses is that anyone can buy ads anyone can buy clicks It's hard to create customer focused content that engages the audiences that might potentially buy from us And so but that's really the opportunity That's the gap and that's really the challenge that we're going to try to address today How marketing really is changing? To focus less on ads and more on the kinds of content that our audiences are interested in and willing to engage with us on And so we are living in a world of disruption. I don't need to belabor this point I think we all feel it. We all know this is happening and yet one of the things I love to point out Is that the disruptions that we're seeing in 2020 the disruptions that we're seeing right now Have been happening for quite a while the changes that we're seeing the accelerations Of digital transformation have been going on for quite a while And so I want to use this picture of my children to try to Demonstrate what it is that I'm talking about and so we're on this beautiful vacation on an island down in Florida A couple of years ago and my daughter was celebrating her 15th birthday And on her 15th birthday, we received an email from this company. You may have heard of Uh, it's company called linkedin the world's first commercially viable social media platform and linkedin had also Told us it was celebrating its 15th anniversary And so we were pretty shocked to understand my wife and I that our daughter shared a birthday with this with this social media platform One that we all use one that we all use around the world. Um, and so of course I looked at my other children Sure enough. My second daughter Shares a anniversary not the same day. It's actually a week apart But the launch of facebook in 2006 and then we looked at my son Shares an anniversary by a couple of weeks with the launch of the iphone here in the united states Um at the anniversary of when we all started walking around with the internet in our pockets That was a new phenomenon back in 2007 and then sure enough child number four Shares an anniversary with the launch of snapchat And of course today we can't all imagine not being able to send pictures with bunny ears and rainbow puke filters The point of all this is that the digital social mobile world that we all live in we somewhat take for granted And we especially I think often forget how recent that phenomenon is My children are barely old enough to drive. They're not old enough to vote in our us elections. They're not old enough to drink alcohol They're not old enough for my younger one to even necessarily cross the street by himself and yet These relatively young technologies have had a dramatic impact on the world that we're living in So the disruptions that we're seeing this year from the pandemic and from all the things that are happening around the world Those kinds of disruptions had already been in motion had already been in place And so we're seeing this acceleration We're seeing the things that are changing now. We're already happening long before Working from home always made good sense telemedicine always made good sense digital transformation And remote collaboration with teams across the world always made good sense But those kinds of things are now being accelerated Bill Gates just the other day said that maybe 50 percent of global business travel is going to disappear after the pandemic And i'm not sure that's true But I think we're all going to think twice about whether we jump in a plane for a couple of days For a one-hour business meeting and so the changes that were happening before had already been in place And they're just accelerating the changes that we're seeing today Now this picture from facebook a couple of years ago Is somewhat famous, but it it really demonstrates. I think how today we're all connected to each other We're all now the most important source of news and information for each other We don't look as much as we used to to news outlets politicians or even executives inside companies the the kinds of sort of You know bastions of of expertise and news and entertainment that we used to look to We now look to each other for some of those things if not more of those things Now let's talk about marketing If you ask CEOs, this was a harvard business review Study an article done a couple of years ago where they asked CEOs How do you feel about your cmo your cfo your coo your cio? And how satisfied are you with the job that they are doing and unfortunately? 80 percent of CEOs said that they were not satisfied with the job that their cmo was doing and they were Four times more likely to say that they were unsatisfied with marketing Then they were with the rest of the c-suite So why do we see this disconnect between the marketing function and the functions in the rest of the business? That disruption started that disconnect started 20 25 years ago with the launch First with the internet and then obviously with social digital mobile technologies If you ask CEOs what it is that they want from marketing They'll tell you it's things that we all heard of leads Revenue return on investment the kinds of things they expect from investments in other functional areas of the business now What do CEOs ask marketing to do in order to achieve those goals? Well, they sometimes say that we should put the company logo on the side of a sports stadium Or they'll tell us we need to change our logo from blue to yellow And so they're asking us to do the kinds of things that don't necessarily Tie measurably back to leads revenue and return on investment. So this is really the challenge This is the the rock in a hard place. If you will that marketers are facing Behind every bad idea I love to say is an executive who asked for it And it's these same executives that are expecting us to show the results from the bad ideas that they ask us to execute Now I think it's easy for marketers and I'm speaking to marketing leaders Inside organizations and and the agencies out there that support marketers We need to start to push back. We need to start to have a conversation With executives that are not in marketing to explain the role of marketing the strategic value the asset that marketing can be So it's not their fault for asking us to do stuff. They think it's the right thing to do It's our job to show them what marketing really can accomplish Now executives are people too And they're going to starbucks and looking for hello, michael customer like experiences or they're going to amazon and looking for you Might also like ai driven personalization Or they're going to netflix and looking for the kinds of content that you might netflix and chill or binge watch with over the weekend They're looking for us to create immersive ar experiences like mustang for did with their mustang launch Earlier this year or virtual reality or or maybe you're talking about voice marketing Now all of these are really shiny objects That CEOs might ask us to do because they want us to make the brand look better in the eyes of the consumer Let's look to the world's most Recognizable brand and their CEO that said that they were going to slam the brakes on advertising spend because there's limited effectiveness To brand marketing now in fairness to the brand marketers out there The context of this quote was In the middle of a pandemic the CEO coca-cola didn't feel like advertising was appropriate necessarily But the comment about the effectiveness of brand marketing. I think is is really sort of Meant for a broader a broader conversation And so this is why I believe we're seeing a future of marketing That's going to focus less on ads less on building the brand with marketing tactics that everyone has an opinion on And more on just creating customer focused content that people actually want And so in order to move forward We need to stop doing the kinds of marketing promotion And propaganda that we're getting asked to do and don't worry holly survived this terrible ordeal She's fine and we're going to be fine too. And so The first thing I think we need to start to say the conversation needs to change To marketing isn't just a function of people who do stuff marketing agencies in support of brands aren't just people who do stuff We are supporting a mission critical function a mission critical function that delivers Quantifiable measurable leads and sales for the organizations that we're working with According to internet live stats and you all know this during the course of the last few months We've seen people working from home And what are we doing? We're jumping onto the internet and we're searching for more stuff We're consuming more content. We're engaging more online. In fact, according to internet live stats two to three times more Now in a b2b context This has a significant impact and we've always seen The role of content and digital digital experiences growing in importance in the buying process But just in the last few months We're seeing that online interactions have become two to three times more important than sales interactions And so the the the website The company's website the most important asset that we have With the marketing content that we publish there has become two to three times more important than a personal interaction With your buyer and a salesperson So that provides us with a tremendous opportunity to take this trend of us searching more online And the trend of sales interactions being more important when they're online versus with a salesperson That puts marketing in the driver seat We can now deliver on those mission critical leads and sales that executives are looking for Okay Now here's my simple definition. I think everything in life can be explained with a bend diagram So here's my attempt at explaining content marketing in a bend diagram It's marketing that attracts a buyer and it's different from what most people think marketing is If you were to ask your mom your mother what marketing is She probably thinks it's ads from companies telling you how great they are And if you ask executives what marketing is they'll often think that's what marketing should be It's the natural instinct of the business to want to tell everybody how great it is And yet if we look at what consumers are engaging with It's pictures of babies and kittens and puppies And i'm not suggesting marketing should create that because that doesn't really serve the business So content marketing is sort of this overlap. It's not the overlap between what we want to say It's the overlap with what we know the overlap with our experience and our passion from the people inside our organization Connected to the buyer needs the customer needs that we see in the marketplace That means we have to resist that natural tendency and we need to use empathy Now empathy is something that not a lot of business executives have So how do you explain the importance of empathy to executives who don't have any? And the answer is we have to show them the money Our websites as I mentioned our digital assets with real value and that value is measurable and that value grows over time This is a conversation marketers need to have with cfo's Our website is a marketing asset with a value that grows over time So this is just a quick Sort of chart that goes up and to the right every presentation should have one where i'm taking all of our clients We have a couple of dozen clients That are seeing 138 percent year over year increases in the traffic and leads that they're getting From the content they publish online. They're seeing a seven dollar return for every dollar Invested and what we see is that from the first year to the second year those results don't go up linearly They go up exponentially and so this is the compounding return that a cfo wants to see from an investment A consistent investment over time Produces an accelerating rate of return. This is a good investment for the cfo and the ceo to want to make in marketing How do we do that? Well, very simply and i'm going to run through a couple of quick tips. I know we don't have too much time Um, but just a quick example. So this is g e health care now g e health care sells MRI machines magnetic resonance Machines that help you to see inside the body and they want to sell those machines to hospitals and radiologists And they want to talk about the fun functions and the features and the amazing ai that they've built in to their new m r machines But radiologists who they're trying to sell to they're very busy And they're also trying to understand are we making enough money? Do we live in the right city? Do we need more education? And so instead of talking about the features and functions of their MRI machine We helped g e to create a salary guide for radiologists and radiologist right radiology technologists The most popular most successful piece of content They've ever created not because of anything special that we did except focusing more on buyer interests Almost to the exclusion of what g e sells. This is a very uncomfortable thing. It's a it's a bridge That many marketers and executives need to walk across in order to be successful And so we need to learn how to sell the business case for this new kind of marketing And as I mentioned if you remember that facebook image that I showed where we're all connected Um, imagine all of those connection points is digital It's digital information that we can use to understand how to reach engage convert and retain Buyers and customers we would have never reached if all we did was create ads that tell people how great we are The kinds of things that we ignore as consumers We can reach them using the keywords that they use as something that we can all understand No matter what kind of business we're in No matter what industry you serve we can understand the content that audiences are consuming And we just need to start to create and publish more of that customer focused content If we do that we can convert new buyers to our business and that same content can even drive The lifetime value the retention rate the upsell and the cross-sell opportunities as we look at the customers that we are acquiring We need to learn how to sell the business case First for doing this new kind of marketing Now I want to show you just a quick example At marketing insider group we help brands create content that converts. I'm not here to talk about myself But i'm a i'm a company of two people. I have a marketing budget of zero We create two to four articles every single week That serve our customer interest and because of that using some rush you can see that we rank for more than 20 000 keywords But I want to show you one specific example So we rank for things like marketing and what is marketing and and probably most relevant to our business What is thought leadership? Now that's an important keyword It's also something that there are brands out there that want to advertise against And so here you can see Accenture a global brand a brand that spends millions of dollars a year on Sponsorships at golf tournaments and sporting events Um, they're spending 80 000 a month to show an ad for the search term What is thought leadership that I actually show up for for free in a number one position that gets a higher click-through rate And so this is the financial sort of example that I wanted to show you to show you how organic search results Have real value and we can relate that value to the equivalent media spend from a large company like Accenture There's no good reason why Accenture doesn't rank number one for what is thought leadership a global brand with millions of dollars in marketing With thousands of smart Super educated employees who could all start sharing their thought leadership about the importance of thought leadership Now a second thing that we see is is something often missing in the marketing plans of our clients Is this content planning by pillar and what I mean by that is we need to think about the pillar foundations Of our brand What are the challenges the main three or four challenges that we solve for with the companies that we're trying to reach And when we publish content consistently Against those four pillars we start to hold the house up. We hold the foundation together We can start to build the value that executives are looking for And so again for me, it's content marketing strategy event marketing and employee activation or thought leadership Those are the four pillars that we publish Every single week against we look at the search terms where we're ranking the opportunities that we have against our competition We use buzz sumo to understand what content is being engaged with on those topics And then we create a content calendar that allows us to create a consistent cadence against those content pillars And so we create that for an annual basis for our clients We revisit that each month and each quarter to make sure it's still making sense Now these are things that every one of you can do you can use google autofill We're a content marketing strategy agency When I use google autofill and I type in content marketing strategy It tells me that I should be creating content about content marketing strategy Templates and content marketing examples and the content marketing definition all search terms That we rank on the first or second page for because we create consistent content around it We use google trends to understand which is more important for our audience Is it content marketing or social media or email marketing? Well, it looks like digital marketing is actually something that's taking on not just more importance overall But it's trending up something that's probably not surprising for most of you We use buzz sumo to understand what content is engaging on each of these keywords And then we use answer the public to understand a totally free tool using any keyword We can understand all of the who what when where why and how questions that our audiences might be asking And so we do this for our clients, but they could do this for themselves. They could build their own Editorial calendar you can see this visualization from answer the public This mind map visualization is like an editorial plan for any brand if you understand the right keywords to use So we need to understand how to build the business case how to create content map to the buyer Questions or keywords we need to answer those questions with the content on a consistent basis We also need to map content to the buyer journey So it's not enough to create a couple of articles each week We also need to understand how do we build them down the buyer journey We have to understand from a funnel perspective The funnel exists just simply to show us there are more people in the early stages And we need to nurture them down through the middle the how do we solve this problem sort of stage with deeper thought leadership content That yet is still not talking about our product We need to get them to the point where they're looking for a solution with events and newsletters and Customer or partner profiles that are still not yet about the product that we sell Only then can we earn the right to bring our audience to the conversations that we might have on our website Or with salespeople that talk about the product that we sell and why it's better and how much it costs Okay, my simple tip for anyone out there if you're talking to if we're talking to a brand marketer or an agency Is just to simply look at your highest content Or highest volume pages on your website and tie them to your highest percentage conversion pages on your website This is the simplest poor person if you will Approach at improving your digital experience to drive more conversions Take the things that your audience is most engaged with And present them or tie it to the things that your audience is most converting with and vice versa And when you provide these internal links on your own website, you can start to bring traffic to value and value to traffic One of the simplest things that we've learned in the course of this pandemic Is the value of our own media or our own website and the ability to convert the traffic And then my final point and this is really to me the future of marketing I know the previous speaker talked about ugc I get really specific when I talk about Most companies are missing the opportunity to take their most valuable asset And that's the employees that live and work inside your company And using the passion and expertise of those employees to acquire and retain The most important asset to your company and that's your customers. And so We talk about the future of marketing as activating your employees passions and expertise To create content tell stories and share those stories online In order to acquire new customers We know that 74 percent or more certainly a significant majority of people find posts from other people More persuasive than posts from brands Our employees networks when we look at the the connections that our employees have It's often on average 20 times larger than the connections that our brand has The relationship that the sum total of the relationships of our employees is significantly larger than the relationship that our brand Has with individuals online Not only that But when our employees create and share content, it's 10 times more likely to get clicked on So higher click-through rates from content that's created and shared from employees And so we know that the world is changing and it's been changing for quite a while We've seen this acceleration and we're seeing a point where the things that we're seeing today They're never going to go away. They're going to continue to change Our audiences are always going to look to brands more for stories than to promotion or propaganda And our executives are looking for value And so the best way for us to do that just in summary is we need to learn how to sell the business case We need to plan content around the pillars that create the foundation of thought leadership for our organizations We need to make sure that our customers not our products or brand are the hero of the stories that we tell We need to map that content to the buyer journey and then ultimately and again I really believe that in 10 years the only thing we're going to be talking about Are the successful companies and agencies that are activating employees to be the marketing channel to be the marketing arm To create the content that engages real people and brings value back to our business Now before I go, I just have one quick gift if if I have a minute I did write a book as as as you heard it's called the content formula It gives you all the math that you need in order to demonstrate the value for doing content effectively Unfortunately when I present that to a lot of executives, it's math And so they're like, ah, I'm not sure that I need that and because of that I created and wrote this book mean people suck because of course they do But also to show that culture really matters and culture Culture of empathy allows us to create real value and return on investment That our companies are looking for And so here's my free gift for you for listening to me for the last 20 minutes or so Feel free to download my book for free the content formula. Um, you can see it here on this bitly link The content formula. Uh, it's a free pdf. I'd ask you not to share it But feel free to download that and read it. All right. And with that, thank you so much