 Russ is a mainstay at Muscon. I first met Russ personally in 2015. Besides his obvious depth of knowledge, what stood out about him then was how prolific he was with his creative output. It's incredible to see how much that has only increased over the years. A man dubbed the Fresh Prince of SCL is always dropping lots of content marketing gems, advocating for a focus on distribution of content, and he popularized the Sherlock omboy method to content research. Russ Siemens is the founder and CEO of Foundation, a global marketing agency that provides services to organizations all over the world, ranging from some of the fastest growing startups to some of your favorite global brands. Today, he's going to talk about why marketers should think more like investors to drive content results. This should be a fun one. See you soon. It was 2008. I had just graduated from university. I've read a bunch of books. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos. I watched a handful of different podcasts and blogs, etc. And I thought now is the time. Now is the time amidst a recession to launch my very own marketing agency. I was working with a handful of small businesses of all shapes and sizes, people who were running family owned real estate companies, people who were creating their own restaurants. It was a whirlwind. And I had no idea what I was doing. Look at this chart, right? Like imagine that that's the traffic that your website was getting or a client's website was getting or the backwing profile for your business. Imagine this is the visibility of your brand in the SERP. It would be horrific, right? Like I feel you, I hear you. But now imagine for a second that this isn't your website traffic. Imagine that it's 2008. You just graduated from university. You read a bunch of books. You just studied a bunch of blogs. You watched a handful of YouTube videos. You listened to a couple podcasts and you decided now is the time. Now is the time amidst a global recession that you're going to buy your first stock, right? You're going to go all in on a stock. And that's exactly what I did. A stock called General Motors. Well, folks, this is the chart for GM. And it went bankrupt very shortly after I made a decision to buy this stock. This wasn't one of my clients, although their traffic at the time was probably relatively flat. And that's a true story. What happened was I made this investment solely based off of guessing. I didn't study enough about finance to make this decision. And I learned a very valuable lesson at this time. You see, I took a handful of my scholarships. I took all of that money and I put it into the stock and it went crashing down. Folks, I learned a valuable lesson back then in 2008 that I think can be applicable not just to investing, but also in marketing. You can't just guess. You can't just guess that GM will come back. You can't just guess that a stock will go to the moon. You need to invest your time. You need to invest in studying. You need to understand the assets that you're investing in. The same thing can be said for marketing. You have to do your homework. You have to study the game. You have to look at the content that you're competing with. You have to understand the market before you jump in because the market doesn't care about our feelings. So I push you to invest more and guess less. For years, marketers have thought of our craft as being more like an artist. We've been celebrated for coming up with abstract and confusing advertising and video ads that could show up in the theaters, etc. And they're nothing but confusing. We get awards for having these complex, beautifully designed websites that have amazing scrolling and all of this good stuff. We get awards for all of this. But recently, there has been a shift. There has recently been a shift in marketing where it's seen as less of an expense and actually more like an investment. And I think that is the opportunity that all of us need to be thinking about. And that is the mindset that all of us need to have when we're talking to leadership, when we're talking to our clients, when we're talking to with each other, and when we as an industry are going to market. At the end of the day, it's very easy still and very common to find VP's and CMO's who think that everything that you do in marketing is just an expense. But in reality, we all have a role to play in driving results for businesses. Whether you're a content creator, whether you're a technical SEO, whether you're in PPC, whether you're a blogger, PPC expert, whatever you name it, we all have a role in serving the businesses that we work with every single day. And it's not just an expense. They're investments that organizations are creating every landing page, every blog, every experiment, every tweet. These are all important. These are all investments. And better yet, they're assets. And we've all hoped that our assets will go up into the right, just like the stocks, just like the stocks are going to the moon. We've all expected that and wanted that. And I get it. We want our investments to bring return. The top chart represents the cloud stocks, the NASDAQ, the S&P 500, and the Dow Jones. And then on the bottom, you can see the traffic for one of the clients we work with at Foundation. This is what we all wake up excited to do every single day. And in 2020, we were all tested, right? In 2020, whether we're talking about personal finance or we're talking about the opportunities that came together as it relates to marketing, we were all tested amidst the pandemic. Many budgets were slashed, many marketing teams are broken up. And some companies even put content creation SEO and developing content that ultimately serves a need on pause, hashtag mistake. And the reason why is this, even during that great recession back in 2008, people continued to look for content. When you look at Google Trends data and you are studying what happens, even amidst a pandemic, a recession, etc., one thing stays consistent. People's desire for information. People's desire for content. People see value in information. So we as marketers, as creators, we should be thinking about how we too can serve them that content, how we can give them the content that they are looking for. And every single thing that you create needs to be viewed, not just as a marketing effort, it needs to be viewed as an asset. Assets are economic resources controlled by a business entity. Assets must have that future economic benefit. And when you press publish on that blog post, when you press publish on a landing page, when you roll out a handful of new case studies, a new book, a white paper, whatever, the goal is simple. You want to generate an economic benefit to the organization that you represent in the future. In this presentation, I'm going to be talking about how and why these assets are important. I'm going to talk about the different asset classes, and I'm going to talk about how you can start to think about frameworks that can be leveraged to better utilize content assets to drive better returns for your business. I'm also going to share with you frameworks. I'm going to share with you some examples of companies that have leveraged content and have viewed it as an investment and have been able to unlock amazing returns. And this isn't going to be a talk about hypotheticals. We're going to look at companies just like wise.com, an organization that has been able to create a multi-million dollar market cap on the back of creating great content or at least their valuation is such. But I have a belief that in the future, we can see them probably being publicly traded to, right? On a monthly basis, they're generating 7.8 monthly visits with a traffic value of over $11 million, meaning you would have to spend and invest $11 million to generate the amount of traffic that they're receiving, right? That's a lot of value on the back of content. You can't argue and deny that this is not a benefit for an organization's bottom line. There was a slide that was given by their head of growth a few years back where they were talking about how every single time they press publish on a new piece of content, it was generating for them the ability to essentially grow. It was directly related to their KPIs. It was directly related to their North Star metrics surrounding revenue, traffic, new users, et cetera. Every single page that they published had a direct relationship with their ability to not only rank in the Googlebot loving it, but also for them to serve their customers. Content presents a massive opportunity. Tons of companies, both media and SaaS driven companies over the last few years have started to realize and see the money printing capabilities that can come off of the back of content. When you look at the various media sites and you start to cross-reference what's happening with a lot of brands, you can quickly see that brands like Adobe, HubSpot, Shopify, Salesforce, Stripe, et cetera, are starting to realize that actually acting like a media company and producing content like a media company, like the organizations such as Investopedia, Mayo Clinic, The Balance, et cetera, they have an opportunity to increase their valuation. It's time for us as marketers to shake the imposter syndrome that we have had for so long of whether or not we actually deserve a seat at the table. Not only do we deserve a seat at the table, we have an opportunity to help our organizations to help companies last longer. With this though comes a lot of responsibility. With that responsibility comes a realization that not all assets are created equally. Some assets are going to go to the moon, but some assets are going to fall flat. An investment in crypto is very different from an investment in real estate. An investment in a blog post is very different from an investment in a dynamic landing page. Now, I'm not saying that one is better than the other, but you have to recognize as a creator, as a marketer, as an organization that every asset is going to have its own risk profile and it has its own chance of returns. So how do you do that? You think about it the same way that you would view your personal finance investment portfolio. Every one when you look at your personal finance portfolio, you are typically going to be told by finance professional that you need to diversify your stock investments. You have to have a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of Google, a little bit of Facebook, a little bit of Disney, a little bit of this, that, and the other thing, AMC, et cetera. This is important. It's important to hear that, it's important to know that diversification is important, but what's also as important is to recognize the way that you diversify your portfolio is going to be different from the person sitting next to you, the person that, then myself, it could be very different from somebody else that you connect with online. The way that you invest your stock portfolio is going to be different based off of a lot of different things, whether it's timeline, whether it's goals, whether it's your personal risk tolerance, all of those different things are going to contribute. And the same thing happens with businesses. When you think about your own content mix within your organization, yes, you should be diversifying it. You should be thinking about how to diversify your content investments across growth SEO, validated SEO, thought leadership content, backlink driven content, et cetera, social content, all of these things are important. And that foundation when we work with clients, these are the things that we work with them to figure out like what type of content asset allocation model should you be embracing within your org. And I would encourage you to be thinking the exact same way. If you're an organization that has already unlocked a significant amount of value in the market, maybe you lean more heavily towards a conservative diversification of your content investments, where 50% of all of the content you create is going to go into validated SEO channels, meaning these are channels that you know are going to work. The keyword volume is there. The opportunity is there. You know that if you generate a handful of backlinks, this content is going to rank. It's going to be easy for you to win in the SERP and capture that value. You go after validated SEO. 20% is going to be sales enablement content content that's going to help your sales team push the needle forward. And then 10% is going to be backlink content content that's going to generate some backlinks. And then 5% spread out across growth, social thought leadership and culture content. With an investment like this, there's no question that no, your content is not going to go to the moon, but you are very likely going to have the ability to maintain and sustain your growth trajectory. That's what a conservative model can happen, can look like. But if you are a company that is in fact trying to go to the moon, you might have a completely different approach. You might overly invest in growth SEO. You might overly invest in thought leadership, over invest in backlink content. You might scrap culture content entirely because what you're trying to do is different from an organization that is in that conservative mode. You're trying to truly go to the moon. So you're trying to invest in things that have that opportunity. And again, I'll dive into a few of these different asset classes and what they mean shortly, but you need to recognize that every single asset has its own risk and return portfolio. Whether it's influencer marketing, whether it's sales enablement, whether it's resources, whether it's a podcast, long form content, memes, you name it, every single type of content that you create is going to have a different level of risk and a different level of return. Let's dive into one of my favorite types of content, but one that gets sleep on a lot, which is memes. Memes are, without question, one of the most culturally important asset classes in content today. That's right. I said it. It's one of the most important. And some people are like, whoa, what are you saying, Russ? It's memes. They're a joke. They are not just a joke. They are a great reflection of culture and they are a great way to get a message across. When you look at brands like Kerology, who are leveraging memes in their content today, when you look at companies like Telegram, who are using memes as a part of their content strategy today, this is an insight for you to think about can your brand leverage memes to tell a story, right? The average price to develop a meme, really low. The average reach though could be mid to high. The average life cycle, relatively short. Once that piece has kind of had that 24 hour, 48 hour life cycle, it typically falls flat and it is no longer even associated with your brand. The repurpose value is limited. Potential brand risk can be very high. As you can see when Telegram sent out this meme, kind of throwing shade towards WhatsApp and Facebook, WhatsApp came back with another meme talking about their end to end encryption that is actually kind of a little bit faulty. Like those are the things that you can run a risk of playing with when you start to embrace memes. The standard allocation that we see across most companies is between zero and 15%. Not a lot of organizations go all in on this. And the rate of return can be anywhere from low where you are met with crickets to high where again, the meme goes to the moon, right? Every asset is going to be different. There's other assets that have a much higher price point such as interactive tools. When you look at organizations like Shopify, they've done an amazing job at creating tools that people actually are able to find use case and value from. This is a massive arbitrage opportunity where you create a free tool like an HVAC load calculator and you offer that to your market. People fill in the details and they are met with an answer to their problem or you create a flyer tool where people can actually go to this tool, type in some information about their business and within seconds make a flyer. This is an arbitrage on things that were once an actual pay to use solution and then brands are rolling them up for free. Now the average price is going to be mid to high, the average reach mid to high, the average life cycle can last forever, much different from a meme. But again, because of that cost and the complexity that goes into these, the actual standard allocation amongst a brand is zero to 10%. Not a lot of brands are investing in these types of assets, but they can unlock mid to high returns. So something that at Foundation we like to do is embrace this idea of reverse engineering the success that other people are doing and using that to inform the content we should create in the future. So how do you figure out what investments, what assets you should actually chase? I believe that one of the best ways to do it is to reverse engineer some of the past successes. So you did go to spreadsheet, you look at things like in marketing, we took a handful of different assets that have been published by organizations like Moz, HubSpot, Backlinko, etc. And we reverse engineered what content they were publishing that generated the most traction. And we looked at this and what we found was that tools without question were the most linkable content assets in the world of marketing, right? People loved linking to free tools. So if you want to generate results, there's a great opportunity to do that if you launch tools. But there's a high cost associated with that. Now there's other things that you can do as well. You create and create definition pages where you're defining things like what is SEO. You can also create collections of stat posts where you're just writing up a handful of stats related to different topics and subjects. These things are more low cost. And with that low cost comes a better risk versus reward matrix, right? If you are creating something that has relatively low risk and has high reward, then you have the opportunity to generate a significant ROI on the back of that asset, on the back of that investment. We know that people want tools. So you go into your industry and you start to think how many people are looking for a privacy policy generator and should I create that? We see that there's 135,000 people looking for a business plan tentatively. Can we create a tool around that? Again, you have to recognize that the cost to create these things might be higher than something else. But once you recognize that and you understand the difference between the risk and the reward, you have the opportunity to start thinking like an investor and start creating content assets that are going to drive results for your business. Now we took this same insight and we said, all right, we recognize that tools are expensive. Let's run a test and start creating more stat driven posts. So we started to create posts like 48 eye opening LinkedIn stats, Reddit stats, Instagram stats, Quora stats, YouTube stats, you name it. We created all of these pieces. And at one point we actually ranked number one on LinkedIn. I mean, for the word LinkedIn in the SERP, all based off of the fact that we created this piece. Now here's where the opportunity lies, folks. This is a low cost investment. We were able to create it based off of the research. We studied the game and it made us able to generate a handful of backlinks. To this day, this post is generating tons and tons of backlinks to the site and it is unlocked a significant amount of opportunity. And you can do the same thing by reverse engineering the successful content in your industry and then investing more and guessing less. Another organization that does this ridiculously well is Shopify. Shopify has invested consistently in creating a handful of tools and those tools are generating links. They're generating tons and tons of traffic and they are putting their money where their multis when they recognize that tools can unlock significant returns for their business. Shopify is a multi-billion dollar market cap company and they've been able to create what I would call a competitive advantage or a competitive mode on the back of SEO. What do I mean by that? Well, a few years ago they acquired a tool called Oberlo. Oberlo for $15 million was an acquisition at the time that people thought was ridiculous, that it was overpriced. You fast forward in that site that was generating less than 5 million visits per year at that time is now generating over 20 million visits every single year because they took an asset, they invested in it and they were able to generate significant results, invest more and guess less. That's the opportunity. Now you might be saying, Ross, I don't have the Shopify budget to go out and drop 15 million on an asset. I hear you, I 100% feel you and I'll share with you some tips and techniques that you can use that might be more cost efficient but first let's talk about high growth SEO opportunities. Now what is a high growth SEO opportunity? We were to rewind back into time. Let's say, I don't know, 20 months ago and you launched a website about remote work, you launched a website about face masks, you launched a website that was about sub-stack, you launched a website that was about TikTok ads. Today, you would be able to reap the benefits of creating something prior to it taking off and that is what a high growth SEO opportunity is. It's when you start to create content assets that you believe are going to move up and to the right in terms of the demand for those phrases and the competitors, the industry at large has yet to realize that this is a trend that is going to take off. Like you can imagine if you bought the domain SEO.com back in 1998 and you own that and you create a content since 1998 on SEO, you would probably doing a very good job. You would be doing okay for your website, for your traffic. The same can be said for phrases like backyard offices. If we believe that remote work is going to stay, if we believe that remote work is going to last, you can leverage a site like Exploding Topics to look and see, okay, there's a trend happening around this backyard office thing. What does that mean? It means you have the opportunity to unlock some arbitrage opportunity by doing some keyword research around the things that people are looking for today like home office ideas. You do an analysis of the things that people are looking for as it relates to their home office and you apply it to their backyard office. For example, if you are seeing that these are the types of things that people are looking for today and they're generating thousands of searches per month, maybe you start creating pieces like how to design your backyard office. The best monitors for backyard offices, backyard office tax deductions, what you should know are 55 backyard offices for planning inspiration. If we believe that backyard offices in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years are going to generate results and are going to be in demand, you can stay ahead of the trends by creating this content now and reaping the benefits in the future. You want to get ahead of these trends folks. If you were one of the people who were running a blog on sourdough bread, if you were running a blog on virtual field trips or virtual museum tours amidst the pandemic, you were able to generate a significant amount of returns and we can all do this by leveraging data to project and identify things that are going to happen in the future and then create content for those demand and for that demand today. Invest more, guess less. One of my favorite strategies is acquisition. I love acquisitions. I think they're a low hanging fruit and often underutilized opportunity in the world of content marketing and SEO, but I think there's a massive play. HubSpot is an example of an organization that recently pulled off what I believe is one of the most influential and important business acquisitions in B2B history. They acquired a website newsletter subscription platform called the Hustle. And what they did was they didn't just buy this because they thought it would be an interesting cool play and it would have an immediate impact on their bottom line. They were able to unlock what I believe is attention arbitrage. You can see in this chart that HubSpot's traffic actually slowly started to take a dip towards the end of 2020 or early 2020 and they made this decision to acquire the hustle, which ultimately put them right back on track to hit 10 million visitors because they acquired their website, they acquired their entire team and they've been able to reap the benefits on the back of that because if you dive deeper, you can see that the hustle was actually generating a significant amount of their traffic from a site called Hacker News. And it turns out that the HubSpot team is actually investing a lot of time as they roll out products that go outside of just marketing, but also into sales and operations that they're not just going after marketers anymore, they're going after a broader market. So by acquiring a company like the hustle, who happens to have their finger on the pulse around what's going on in this space, they were able to capture a significant amount of value. They not only were able to unlock a significant amount of value, but they're also able to shortcut and understand what type of content they can create on a regular basis that is going to generate a ton, a ton of traction. So they're able to bring in a team of creators who understand the code to creating viral content and content that's going to generate engagement in the communities that they're going after. But you again, don't need to have a HubSpot budget to do these types of things. You can go to sites like Flippa.com and you can actually find a handful of different sites that are actually listed for a reasonable price. You can go to Flippa.com and you can find pure blogs, websites on loans, et cetera, any topic you can think of where people are selling these various assets and you can acquire them. You can go to a site like MicroAquire and there are a handful of different businesses and founders who are selling their businesses on a regular basis. You can also go into various Slack communities like Traffic Think Tank and they'll actually have dedicated Slack channels for people who are selling their blogs. You can see this message up above where they're selling their SEO blog, which has 89 linking root domains, et cetera. They've got links from Buzzstream, Moz, Neopetal, et cetera, and they're looking to sell it. You have the opportunity to take advantage of things just like this. Invest more and guess less. Another example of an organization that has done an amazing job with investing in content is Airbnb. When you look at Airbnb, they have created a handful of templated pages that go after a search intent and a search behavior surrounding people looking for stays in location. When you go to Google and you type in stays in Miami, stays in Chicago, stays in Orlando, they have created templated landing pages with a complete dynamic functionality where it's essentially shifting from location to location but with the same structure, same layout. They've done this across every state, pretty much every continent, and they've been able to unlock a significant amount of traffic volume on the back of it. But what's interesting is that when you dive deeper into the actual traffic associated with these pieces, you realize that 12% of all of their landing pages make up more than 50% of their total traffic. They have a handful of landing pages between 15 to 20 of them though that focus on San Diego, Chicago, Miami, Myrtle Beach, et cetera, and they're generating nearly 30 to 40% of all of the traffic alone. This is what it means to kind of find out one stock and that one asset that just goes to the moon and you by creating tons and tons of content, by creating tons and tons of landing pages will increase your likelihood of being able to capture that value. This is the equivalent of what in the stock world they call a hundred bagger. A hundred bagger is essentially this idea that a stock has a hundred X returns. There's only been about 365 of them between 1962 and 2014. Companies like McDonald's and Monster are great examples of this, but what we want to find sometimes as marketers are these 100 baggers. And when you are investing in content, you are giving yourself more shots to actually achieve that success, you're going to be more likely to actually unlock it. So you want to create more content, you want to invest in more content. And you can take inspiration from the Airbnb model and apply it to pretty much any industry. If you are able to at scale, let's say for example, you're an email marketing solution, you can take inspiration from Airbnb and say, I'm going to create a handful of landing pages that are going to also be dynamic and they're going to go from email rather than saying vacation rentals in a place, you're going to have copy on that page that says email marketing for niche. And then you're going to have that word niche just change time and time again. It's going to say hotels, it's going to say doctors, small business, realtors, et cetera. You do this at scale with the hope of finding that 100 bagger for your industry as well. Invest more and guess less. Now another organization that I think has done an amazing job with their investments is Salesforce. Now you understand, I'm sure that the word CRM back in 1992 was probably not that valuable. It probably didn't have a lot of value associated to ranking for the word CRM. But over time as the CRM industry, customer relationship management tools at large started to generate results, they're started or started to take off, you started to see an opportunity here. And Salesforce recognized that and they embraced what we call the holding continue to optimize strategy. So back in 2016, when this piece went live, they didn't just press publish and walk away from it. They continued to hold it. They continue to optimize it. They held on for dear life. And that's what you need to do as well. You invest in this content. You want to update it. You want to make sure that it's fresh. You want to update it with new data, new stats, et cetera. You want to hold and continue to optimize because as we talked about earlier, the demand for the content that you are creating, especially if it's a high growth, that's CEO term is going to continue to give you returns in the future. So you want to keep that content updated. You want to make sure that it's staying up to date so you can benefit from that trend. Because one thing we can say for certain is that the same way that the stock market for decades has continued to go up into the right, the desire and the need for content is going to also follow that trajectory and go up into the right. The demand for information has never been higher. And the demand for information is going to continue. So when you're thinking about your investments, you need to be thinking about how you can manage your risk and how you can invest in content assets that will give you and your organization return as well. So think about it from an investment to risk ratio and start to consider whether or not you want to take a more balanced approach. And a simple balanced approach would be what you're looking at here. Having the majority of your investment in validated SEO, growth SEO, and little bits in thought leadership and little bits in sales enablement. But you have to figure out what's best for you because everything is going to be a risk. Everything is an investment. So you have to invest more and guess less. Now, some of you might be looking at this and thinking, okay, Ross, that's a lot of information. Where do I start? Here's what I challenge you to do. I challenge you to invest in creating in-depth resources for just three months. I challenge you to invest in best-in-class YouTube videos for three months. I challenge you to invest in best-in-class Twitter threads for three months, high intent landing pages for three months, go on a podcast tour for three months, or invest in personalized outreach for three months. And if you do that, something tells me that by shifting your mindset and investing more and guessing less, your returns are going to be better than mine were on GM. Don't worry, I ended up getting into Tesla as well. I appreciate all of you. Thank you so much for your time. I'm cheering for you and I hope to see you online.