Latest / Content, Briefly / The Content Studio: Tommy Walker on "The State of (Dis)Content"

Transcript

The Content Studio: Tommy Walker on "The State of (Dis)Content" · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  This is the part that made me kind of sad, is that the majority of us are having complicated relationships with the work that we're producing. Um, I believe that this is tied to that mostly bought in, uh, segment, right?
• 0:17
  I'm sometimes happy with the work. I'm happy with the work that, you know, maybe we got some performance, maybe we got some traffic, but was it creatively fulfilling? We kind of saw earlier, not so much.
• 0:29
  [upbeat music] Hey, folks, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. We've got a slightly different episode for you today.
• 0:37
  So this is the audio from the recent webinar we did with Tommy Walker from The Content Studio. It's the presentation of his State of Discontent report.
• 0:46
  Just for some quick context, if you have not been aware of this, Tommy ran a big survey over the summer, had about five hundred and fifty content marketers respond, basically trying to collect some data on a general state of malaise that he and certainly others have noticed in the content industry over the last eighteen to twenty-four months.
• 1:04
  He wanted to put some numbers behind all that, and so that's what this report is all about. This webinar was the first look at that data. The full report is out now. You can grab the link to that in the show notes.
• 1:14
  Obviously, some of this stuff in this podcast is better on video, so you can look at the slides and the charts and all that good stuff.
• 1:21
  But I wanted to put this out in case there's folks who want to get as much of this as they can, but would rather do it while they're, you know, walking the dog, in the car, doing dishes, which is how I get a lot of my info.
• 1:32
  So hopefully this is helpful to folks. Also, just a quick reminder that we have recently relaunched Superpath Pro. We've consolidated our two paid tiers, which was the Slack community and the former Superpath Pro.
• 1:44
  There is now just a single paid tier. You get access to all of the Slack stuff, courses, content, monthly one-on-ones, monthly group calls, and some other stuff that we're working on, including some software stuff.
• 1:54
  So we're building an app that is actually gonna have some pretty cool features that will only be available to Pro members.
• 1:59
  All that is coming soon, and I'll tease more about some of the software stuff as we get a little closer to launching it. You can get all that at superpath.co right on the homepage. Okay, I'll get out of the way.
• 2:10
  Really enjoyed this conversation with Tommy Walker. So much good information and good data in this report, so thank you, Tommy.
• 2:15
  Really, you've done a great service to the content marketing industry by putting this out there. I hope all of you get a ton of value out of it and enjoy this podcast. Take care.
• 2:25
  This episode of Content Briefly is brought to you by our friends at Shelf. Shelf is the go-to B2B content agency for niche industries, like really niche industries.
• 2:34
  Take Reinhardt, one of Shelf's talented writers, as an example.
• 2:37
  He has a glorious beard and knows more about the US sales tax nexus obligations than just about anyone, minus the CEOs of the tax compliance companies he writes for, and even that is debatable.
• 2:48
  Strategy, words, distribution. Shelf takes care of everything. Use Shelf's earned experience to your advantage across these niche industries.
• 2:56
  Supply chain, like freight, logistics, customs compliance, three PL and four PL. Regulations and compliance, like SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA, ESG, and ITGC. Cloud, like DevOps, FinOps, DRAS, IaaS, BaaS, and otheraaSs.
• 3:10
  [chuckles] And finance, revolving finance, AR, AP, tax, and VAT compliance. Any other business that worries no writer will ever understand you, Shelf will. Want a live demo of Shelf's refined deep research methodology?
• 3:22
  Use the link in the show notes to book a call with Shelf's founder, Hila. She'll ask you so many questions, your eyes will bleed. Thanks so much to Shelf for supporting Superpath.
• 3:31
  Content Briefly is produced by our friends at Minutia. To learn more about their podcast production service, as well as their other adaptive content marketing services, check out minutia.com in the show notes.
• 3:41
  Tommy, since you kicked this off, maybe we first chatted about this spring. Yeah. You kind of brought this idea out of, like, there's this general malaise in content marketing. Let's figure out what's going on.
• 3:53
  You had this idea to throw together a survey, publish a report, and here we are. Yeah. People will get a look at the data for the very first time today. Slides look incredible.
• 4:00
  The report will be released shortly, and there'll be a link to sign up to get that at the end. Obviously, we'll make sure that we shoot an email out with that also, along with the recording.
• 4:09
  You had five hundred and fifty or so content marketers- Yeah... respond to the survey, which is very telling.
• 4:17
  It's like you kind of tapped into this kind of like lightning rod topic in the content marketing world right now, which is- Yeah... you know, we've been riding this roller coaster for eighteen months, maybe. Two years.
• 4:28
  Yeah. Two years. About two years. Yeah, it's like, you know, content marketing was just the most fun ever through the, the SERP era, and then it was just like ChatGPT, economic downturn, layoffs, like what's going on?
• 4:39
  Everybody's like doing more with less, et cetera, et cetera. And now we have a bunch of data to help understand- Yeah... truly exactly what's going on. So we're gonna get into all of that today.
• 4:50
  If there's anything else you want to say, Tommy, before we get into it about kind of the purpose, the why behind this report. Yeah. Yeah. So I will be completely honest, folks.
• 4:59
  This is-- I, I do teach a cohort, and I had put together a cohort earlier this year, and it didn't do as well as I would've liked it to.
• 5:07
  We still had people, it was great, and it was wonderful, and I love everybody that was there, and we had a really good time, but it didn't go quite the way that I thought it was going to.
• 5:15
  And after doing a bit of a retrospective, I said, "Well, damn it, Tommy, you didn't actually run through your entire process," because of course not.
• 5:23
  So this report came about as part of me running through my own process to get people to take the survey, to get the-- secure the distribution before we ever va-- we validated the idea before we ever put the report together.
• 5:37
  I worked with my distribution partners to come up with some of the questions. Jimmy said I had too many questions, and I said, "If I execute on the right way, then we'll get people."
• 5:45
  We en-ended up having a average of twenty-one minute completion time and a forty-one point seven percent completion rate. And part of that had to do with some of the micro decisions that were being made.
• 5:57
  One of the things I said to everybody was that I almost want people to have a bit of an existential crisis when they're finished with the survey. Anybody who took it, let me know if that was kind of the case.
• 6:07
  And the way that I wanted to put it together was thinking about the little invisible decisions that had to happen to kick off a narrative in somebody's head.And as a result of that, as a result of validating the idea first, securing distribution first, really thinking about those little micro decisions, that I believe is what really kicked off the narrative and helped us [chuckles] yeah, a little mini therapy session.
• 6:30
  Yeah. Helped us kick off that narrative in people's brains and really help you open up. And as a result of all that, we got some very colorful answers, but I think it was a very honest response too.
• 6:43
  So just fair warning, I'll be honest, we're all content marketers here.
• 6:46
  I do wanna sell something eventually, but of course, I wanna make sure that it's only to the right people, and if you believe that this report did something for you, and you like what's coming out of that, more than happy to take people behind the scenes of my process and take it from there.
• 7:01
  Okay. So let's get into it because a lot of people have been waiting for this for a long time. Yeah, let's do this. Uh.
• 7:08
  Also, just quickly as we're jumping in and as Tommy's getting the slides up, please use the live chat.
• 7:13
  To me, that's the most fun part about an event like this is use it, and if there are really contextual questions that I can queue up for Tommy as we're looking at a slide, I will, and then we'll save the rest for the end.
• 7:25
  And then also, we have to pick a couple people to send Superpath hoodies to, so I don't really like have any methodology there. I was gonna do it randomly, but maybe we'll do the most active people in the chat. Yeah.
• 7:36
  I like that. I like that a lot. Okay, cool. So this is a state of discontent. I wanna just thank my distribution partners real quick here, Superpath, of course. SparkToro, The Juice, Audiense Plus, and Audiense Led.
• 7:47
  I will be doing different versions of this presentation because we have a lot of data that we're not even gonna get into here.
• 7:55
  So if you wanna watch across different platforms, I'll be doing different presentations on different aspects of the data throughout the next coming months. Quick thing about me, I am the founder of The Content Studio.
• 8:07
  I am a content marketing consultant. I've worked with Fortune One Thousand companies and mid-market B2B SaaS startups. I mean, you can read the slide, right?
• 8:14
  I was the first marketing hire at Shopify Plus, global editor-in-chief at QuickBooks, and have consulted with some pretty major brands and have been doing this for nearly twenty years, which is an insane thing to say.
• 8:25
  But as a result of that, I have been able to see a huge evolution in how this field has grown and evolved over time, seeing what the adoption has looked like over the years, and that plays a huge role into everything that we're looking at now because this is really the first time I've seen it like it has been.
• 8:45
  And anybody who's been a veteran in the space for a while, I think you've been feeling it really for the past couple years.
• 8:50
  And I do have to state too, just because I gotta do my due diligence, this report, there's a slight bias to it. You would think that if it's the state of discontent, it would be a lightning rod for only negativity.
• 9:02
  However, it is important to state that I believe this is actually a very well-balanced argument. We see a lot of really good stuff in here too.
• 9:11
  Now what we're gonna focus on is a lot of the discontent because that's the nature of the survey, but it's not as bad as it seems.
• 9:18
  So when we asked, we have five hundred and forty-five respondents, and we asked, you know, "What's keeping you discontent right now?" You can see here we had in-house, freelance, agency, and consultants.
• 9:29
  We had quite a few of each group, which was really cool. We got a really good cross-section of different people within the industry. We have different size companies that were a part of that.
• 9:40
  So the majority of our respondents were from small and medium-sized companies, so anywhere between ten to a thousand or nine hundred and ninety-nine people, which gave us, again, another really good cross-section of what's going on in these different areas.
• 9:54
  And this was a really interesting, very telling part, right? This part in particular started to play a huge role in everything else.
• 10:03
  The majority of content marketing teams are run by either zero people who are dedicated exclusively to content marketing all the way up to five people.
• 10:12
  And that's really important to think about as we start considering a number of different aspects that go into the work that we're doing.
• 10:19
  We can start looking at burnout, which comes up a little bit later on in a number of other areas and what this looks like across the board.
• 10:27
  We also looked at distribution of years of experience in content marketing, right? So we can see here that it's actually not a lot. It's not a lot of newbies.
• 10:35
  Not a lot of folks have been doing this for a short period of time. Most of you have been in this for at least three years, which is nothing.
• 10:43
  You've been able to see kind of the ups and downs over the last few years, and what's really interesting is that I believe a lot of stuff changed in the last two years, maybe three years in particular, and you've got a whole cohort of marketers now coming up in this sort of era, right?
• 11:01
  Anyone who's been doing this for ten years plus, you will have noticed a marked difference in how content marketing is approached and viewed today versus how it was in the beginning.
• 11:12
  And, you know, ten years ago, twenty fourteen, it was a very different vibe.
• 11:16
  And now there's been this entire generation of content marketers who have been raised with what the idea of content marketing should be, and I think that plays a huge role in everything else that we're gonna talk about a little bit later.
• 11:28
  And because we had different types of people for in-house and service providers, I wanted to ask slightly different questions of people who are of service providers and who are in-house because the challenges are a little bit different for each group.
• 11:41
  So we had an off-ramp when we took the survey. There was branching logic when I asked, you know, "What's your... How do you m-most identify? What kind of job best describes you?"
• 11:51
  You actually had a branching logic there, so you got an off-ramp and got something different if you were in the service provider category.
• 11:57
  Uh, so the good news is, right, forty-nine point two four percent of content marketers say they are satisfied or very satisfied with their salaries.
• 12:05
  And quite a few people are also, you know, right around a quarter of people are feeling either neutral or dissatisfied.
• 12:12
  So that the majority of people are rather satisfied is actually pretty good.We can see what the breakdown is here of in-house folks with their compensation satisfaction versus service providers.
• 12:24
  What I think is really interesting here is at the very top, more service providers are in that very satisfied category, and then also we start to-- when we get to the neutral or dissatisfied or very dissatisfied, that's also where a lot of the service providers are starting to kick in.
• 12:39
  The majority of the dissatisfaction comes from service providers. And I believe at the very top end, the people who are very satisfied as service providers, you're in a much higher risk, higher reward area, right?
• 12:51
  So as a consultant myself, I'm very satisfied with my compensation, right? Makes sense.
• 12:57
  Whereas satisfied with our in-house folks, you know, health benefits are really nice and benefits packages are, you know, four oh one Ks, those are really great.
• 13:06
  So there's a lot of comfort that takes place with the in-house people, and I think that that's wonderful. More good news, we are on the right side of the adoption curve for content marketing.
• 13:18
  So the majority of companies are now in this mostly bought-in or extremely bought-in category. I was not expecting to see that.
• 13:25
  If we were to ask this question ten years ago, we'd probably see a either indifferent or skeptical, and I think anybody who's been doing this for a long time, you probably would have said the same thing.
• 13:36
  Now, what's interesting, and we'll dig into this a little bit further later, is mostly bought in actually means something a little bit different, but it's good to see that we're at least on the right side of the adoption curve for content marketing as a practice.
• 13:49
  More good news, the majority of folks say if we're looking at the in-house people, the majority of folks are saying that they have really good or extremely good collaboration efforts with people inside the companies.
• 14:00
  Very positive overall.
• 14:02
  When we looked at AI, this was something that was a little bit shocking to me, but very reassuring that most of us are saying we have a pretty positive outlook on where AI is gonna take us in the next five years.
• 14:13
  When we started getting into the sentiment analysis of AI's role in a handful of other areas, we actually did a linguistics analysis of all of the qualitative data.
• 14:22
  We had three hundred thousand plus words of qualitative data. Some of them were very colorful words, but it was good. It was good to see that the majority of people are feeling that this is positive.
• 14:32
  And we can see here too, you'll see quotes throughout the slides or quotes throughout the presentation, where this person says, "I think a lot of cheap tricks and shiny objects in content will fade away, and AI will help us focus on real value."
• 14:44
  I believe that to be true. I genuinely feel that way.
• 14:47
  Also, the good news, it's helping content marketers increase their productivity, reduce manual effort, create content faster, and removing a lot of the minor inconveniences that we've experienced in just getting stuff out the door.
• 15:01
  So I thought that this was really great.
• 15:03
  Easier repurposing of content is one that's a really cool one 'cause we hear that and see that all the time, and I know that that takes a lot of effort to actually do, and that is speeding up a lot of those processes overall.
• 15:13
  And again, this person here says, "While AI is not a complete game changer yet, it's certainly making certain processes faster and more efficient." Right? I think that's a really good sentiment.
• 15:23
  But the not so good news is, is that there is negative sentiment about AI, and I think it really is sentiment that should not be ignored, right?
• 15:32
  We see a little bit more negative sentiment across some service providers who are in a more of a shaky income situation at the moment.
• 15:40
  I do believe personally that there has been this entire cohort of service providers and content marketers in general, uh, that have been raised with this idea of SEO content specifically, but a lot of content marketing needs to be done a certain way, and AI is a real threat to those people.
• 16:00
  I think this means that we also have a lot of opportunity for innovation, and people who are focusing more on craft and skill over the next few years are gonna be the ones that win because the pendulum will swing in the other direction if leadership right now is going all in and saying, "Oh, we only need one or two people to prompt AI and do that," the pendulum will swing in the other direction.
• 16:22
  I've seen this before.
• 16:24
  Jimmy, you-- I know you've seen this before, where the low-quality stuff will find its way out and people will go, "Oh, okay, maybe we now need to start focusing on craft because this isn't doing what we thought it would."
• 16:35
  Some businesses are actually in that place right now. They're like, "Oh, we tried it, it didn't work. Let's move on." Others, we know how it goes. And yeah, this person says AI will be creating content for companies.
• 16:47
  It will take jobs away from writers. I fully do agree with that. And these are the negatives of folks, right?
• 16:55
  Big concern, people are gonna become too dependent on the technology, which will degrade the quality, accuracy, and originality of the work being produced. I've been doing this for a long time.
• 17:04
  I consider myself a really good creator. I put a lot of focus on craft and skill, and definitely myself have found myself sometimes going, "Ah, you know what? I'm tired today. I don't really wanna, hmm." Right?
• 17:18
  Jimmy, you too? I see you smiling over there. Yeah. All the time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All the time. Yeah.
• 17:24
  And if we're not focusing on the craft and the underlying principles, and this is the stuff that I teach, if we're not looking at the underlying principles of what makes something effective, I don't wanna say high-performing, I wanna say effective, because these are two very different things, then we can become too reliant, too dependent, and honestly, too lazy, because there's also sometimes the expectation of us isn't necessarily high, right?
• 17:50
  And then Lex says, "Are we defining content marketing as strictly writing, or would this include social, webinars, video strategy, et cetera?" It is defined in the survey itself it was an open-ended thing.
• 18:03
  However, what we will see a little bit later on is there is a multitude of formats that teams are managing and different companies are managing.
• 18:11
  So I believe when we were taking the survey, it wasn't just focused on writing, it was focused on this wide swath that a lot of companies are focusing on right now. Yeah. Makes sense.
• 18:21
  If it's cool, Tommy, I'll throw questions up like that every now and then. Yeah. There's lots of them coming in.It's cool. I see that.
• 18:26
  I'm, like, trying to ignore- [laughing] Like, I'm not trying to ignore folks, but I just see the chat is going nuts right now. I love it. I'll take care of it for you. Thank you. Thank you.
• 18:35
  This is the part that's really concerning to me, right?
• 18:38
  As the concern about AI is particularly valid because sixty point three percent of content marketers are either unsure or unconfident about how recognizable their content would be on voice and tone alone.
• 18:50
  This was surprising as heck to me, and then we have people here saying too, they're not confident at all. It sounds like everyone else. That is and is not surprising to me.
• 19:00
  One of the things that we start to see a little bit later on, you'll see a little bit later on some of the top concerns with content marketing and people's overall challenges with it. So right here, right?
• 19:11
  What are the biggest challenges with content creation today? Top three answers, differentiated content, creating the right content for our audience, and creating quality content.
• 19:19
  This question was asked in a ranking order, and this is what everybody ranked it in.
• 19:24
  What was really surprising to me and what we dig into in the full report, I'm not gonna talk about it here because I start to look at different aspects of it and drill really deep into the information.
• 19:33
  But what was really interesting here was that some of the sentiment that's out there, right?
• 19:38
  Some of the things that I've seen on social media, LinkedIn, Twitter, it's more like, "Oh, my boss wants me to produce a high volume of work," but it's like a lot of really crappy churning, you know, churn out a lot of stuff.
• 19:49
  And that's actually to see volume in here as like the number four and number eight response, it's a little bit different, right? Like four, five, and eight.
• 20:00
  It was really interesting to see those show up, not in those top three results. And what this says to me is that we really do care about the craft,
• 20:09
  but not necessarily knowing how effective our stuff can be as we put it out there. And you'll see why that is in just a minute, right? Not so good news too.
• 20:20
  There's a lot of people, everybody seems to have a more complicated relationship with their career than everybody else. I broke this out between in-house employees and service providers. There was a complication.
• 20:32
  I didn't collect the proper data for the service providers. It was a yes and no answer. However, I did look at other factors like compensation. We looked at career satisfaction here.
• 20:43
  We looked at creative satisfaction across the board and then simulated this data as best we could, and we found that it all correlated pretty well with everything else. So that's really important.
• 20:53
  And what's really interesting here too, in-house employees, when we start looking at the strong yes and strong no, right? There's a bit of a gap.
• 21:00
  There's less of a gap between the yes and no than there is with service providers, and I think that that also is very much with that very satisfied tier that we saw before, how service providers have a bigger extremely satisfied.
• 21:12
  I think this has a big part of it.
• 21:15
  Okay, so we're gonna explore this a little bit further on, but when we start looking at the mostly bought-in leadership, the qualitative data that we saw in here, mostly bought in is not, "Hey, we're doing good things."
• 21:31
  Mostly bought in becomes my leadership, and tell me, chat, if this sounds true to you. Mostly bought in is we're allowed to do content marketing to the extent that our leadership understands or defines content marketing.
• 21:47
  Does that sound true? Chat? Just curious. Yeah. Okay. And this was one of my absolute favorite quotes. We-- There was a ton of them. Some of them I had to... We...
• 21:56
  They're not fit for family, but this was one of my favorites, and this mostly bought-in leadership area. This was really interesting to see how this started to correlate with other aspects.
• 22:08
  And then when we start looking at how confident are you that your content would stand out in voice and tone alone, we can see here I broke it down by the different levels of leadership buy-in, right?
• 22:21
  And this is where the data starts to get really interesting when we start cross-analyzing these questions with each other, and this is what the full report is really about.
• 22:30
  We dig really deep into what each one of these segments is like, but we can see here the confidence in voice and tone decreases, right? It looks like it increases here, but it actually decreases
• 22:46
  on the level of leadership buy-in, right? Mostly indifferent and skeptical. They're fairly on point, but you can see here right in the middle, the somewhat unconfident, that changes, right? And it gets bigger.
• 22:59
  These negative effects of confidence decreases, unfortunately, with the level of leadership buy-in. Curious, chat, how would you feel about that? How does that sound to you? I'm gonna keep moving. Yeah, keep going.
• 23:16
  I'll throw some messages up on the slides in a second. Awesome. The rest of the not-so-good news here. Top five challenges, lack of resources, not surprising.
• 23:26
  Accessing subject matter experts, workflow issues approval, aligning content efforts across multiple teams, and lack of strategy. These are our top five issues. Lack of strategy was actually one that kind of surprised me
• 23:37
  going into it, but after really thinking about it and seeing the rest of the qualitative data, that didn't surprise me so much. But these are our top challenges, our non-creation challenges.
• 23:48
  And then this is the really bad news, right? This is the part that made me kind of sad, is that the majority of us are having complicated relationships with the work that we're producing.
• 24:01
  I believe that this is tied to that mostly bought in segment, right? I'm sometimes happy with the work.
• 24:09
  I'm happy with the work that, you know, maybe we got some performance, maybe we got some traffic, but was it creatively fulfilling? We kind of saw earlier, not so much. Is it good? Am I happy with this?
• 24:22
  Eh, kind of, right? So it's complicated. This is our number one relationship here. Yeah, happy with the work that we're producing. And then this was what I was saying before, right? Creatively fulfilled.
• 24:33
  Are you creatively fulfilled? No.Most of us are not creatively fulfilled.
• 24:39
  As somebody who does creative work, like I had to take moments where I stepped away from this data when I started to look at it really deeply because I love this work, and I know what a lot of people love this work, but not getting the creative fulfillment from it is really sad.
• 24:57
  Yeah, Irene, that's what the money is for. Exactly. I think that's a Don Draper line. So, and what does Steph say here? I don't think I would know what being one hundred percent creatively satisfied feels like. Yeah.
• 25:09
  And what we see here when I start to break it down a little bit later, and that's not shown in this report right now, it's in the much larger report, is creative satisfaction
• 25:18
  almost unsurprisingly goes up with the level of leadership buy-in, right?
• 25:23
  That's why we looked at these data points not just as a whole, but to start breaking it down into different aspects of it because it plays a huge, huge role. Yeah.
• 25:33
  If we don't love researching and writing it, people won't love consuming it. It's a bummer. Go ahead, Jimmy. Well, I was just gonna ask you, Tommy. Yeah.
• 25:40
  Could you point to the time in your career, maybe it's today, where you had felt the most creatively fulfilled and satisfied with your work? Be- because- Yeah... for me personally, it's-- I can visualize it in my mind.
• 25:51
  It's like twenty-thirteen to twenty-fifteen when my job was- Mm-hmm... primarily writing. I had never heard of AI before, and [laughs] that was my gig that I spent, like, eighty percent- Yeah...
• 26:02
  of my day writing, editing, revising, brainstorming, publishing, distributing, et cetera. It was a really fun time. Yeah. I mean, it was-- for me, it's now, right?
• 26:10
  Now I'm getting to do really fun, creative, fulfilling work. Like, you know, I've gotten to do this report.
• 26:16
  This is something that if I wanted to do it when I was in different working relationships or different working situations, I might not have been able to do this because b-being able to approach it the way that I wanted to approach it, I'd have to go through seven or eight different levels of buy-in and, you know, do we have the time or the money or the resources to do that?
• 26:34
  Maybe there'd be an organization restructure by the time I could get something out the door, right? So I feel like right now I'm the most creatively fulfilled.
• 26:42
  But then the other part of time, like the other side of that was when I was at Shopify.
• 26:47
  I was the first marketing hire over there, which meant I was a big part of building the foundations of what the communication strategy were and looking at how the market was using my research process, 'cause, uh, by the way, this is my little plug for my program.
• 27:02
  I have an eight-layer market research process that I go through.
• 27:05
  And being able to do that stuff really with autonomy was when I felt like I was doing really creative work and being able to match that with performance and say, you know, I did this thing and it did the thing I expected it to do, and I did it based on the talents that I've developed over the years, and now I can get paid to do the thing that I really love.
• 27:26
  That changes in different types of companies, right? That shows up in the data little bit later on.
• 27:33
  That does show the creative fulfillment does have some relationship or some correlation with size of company, levels of leadership, leadership buy-in, all of that.
• 27:44
  And I think the thing is that we put a lot of heart and soul into the work that we do, and if there's doubt, if there's skepticism, or if we're not able to do it the way that we kind of expect it to, and it doesn't perform the way that we expect it to, it's kind of like feeling like we're getting beat down, right?
• 27:58
  Autonomy. Yes. That's exactly, right? So that's when I felt the most creatively fulfilled, is when I've had more autonomy in the work, right? Here's the thing. Here's the big thing. This is the worst news of all.
• 28:12
  The majority of people who took this survey reported that they were not doing their audience research nearly enough.
• 28:21
  I cannot begin to stress how much of a negative effect this has across every other vector of this survey.
• 28:30
  Every single vector of this survey, we see decreased buy-in, we see decreased career satisfaction, decreased compensation satisfaction, creative fulfillment goes down. And that is really
• 28:45
  kind of upsetting, especially because whenever I read B2B blog posts, Jimmy, and you probably have the same thing, and everybody here says, and everybody here has read it, and I guarantee you the majority of us have said it, too.
• 28:58
  Header number one, right? Is you wanna do this thing, step one, do your audience research. Now, I think that there are a handful of issues that go into this. I think
• 29:08
  there are a number of reasons why this number is the way that it is. Here's my hypothesis. Hypothesis one: There is not enough time, right?
• 29:18
  I was saying before, the average content team is made up of one to or one to five people, right? And the average content team across the board is managing at least five formats. Right around five formats.
• 29:35
  And what I don't have here is that this team size is also consistent across every layer of every company size.
• 29:48
  So you are almost as likely to have zero to five people dedicated to content marketing in a one to five person micro company, which makes sense, all the way up to a thousand plus people.
• 30:00
  Of all the things, all the data surfaced in this survey, that was one that I was like, I, I just couldn't believe that a thousand person company on average doesn't have a larger content marketing team than a ten person- Yeah...
• 30:11
  company. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Across the board. Like, across the board, every team has that. So I think that there's not enough time, right?
• 30:21
  When I started to drill into this a little bit more, um, in the different team sizes, creating content consistency-- consistently and, uh, keeping-- creating enough content to keep up with internal demand were the top creation issues for people in the smaller team sizes.Average content team, like I said, is aver-- uh, managing five formats, and there's just too much pressure on a lot of teams to be able to do the things that we want to be able to do, to do the audience research.
• 30:49
  And we can see here too, we've got a quote, "We are not using it enough. What we have, we do not use effectively." Right? Hypothesis number two on my part right now.
• 31:00
  According to the data, many who report not doing their audience research nearly enough say it's either not part of their job, not a priority from their leadership, or they are unsure of the value. Right?
• 31:12
  And we can see this in the qualitative data here too, right? We're not using it enough. What we have, we don't use effectively. I feel like we basically don't know.
• 31:20
  Most of the insights are not distributed internally or reflected in content. Yeah, solo content marketing manager at a four K company. It's crazy, right?
• 31:28
  And then attempts to do audience research are consistently blocked in one way or another. I worked at a very large organization.
• 31:35
  I wanted to do my audience research, and I was told that I had to go through an entirely different team that would conduct the audience research, put together a panel of people, and what I had to do was put my questions down ahead of time.
• 31:50
  And what that does for us as content marketers, we're the bridge between the company and the reader, right?
• 31:56
  And one of the people who took the survey here, they said, and I'm paraphrasing, it's not in the deck here, but they said, you know, "We serve the reader, but the reader is not the one that pays the bills." Right?
• 32:06
  Something along those lines.
• 32:07
  But as a content marketer, as somebody who serves as the bridge between the company and the reader, if I don't have the ability to talk to the customer and be able to, like, have a back and forth conversation and go off script, I'm not gonna get the insights that I need from that person to, like, get the little nuance.
• 32:27
  Yeah. Ronnie. The friction to research or fuel content is too real. I fought tooth and nail to get research done everywhere I've worked. And there's this, like, fear, right?
• 32:34
  There's this fear that I've found from different organizations to, and this is just my experience, to get you actually talking to the customer. So it's not a priority. That's hypothesis two. Now,
• 32:50
  that being said, content marketers, my hypothesis number three, you're not gonna like. Hypothesis three is that there's not a lot of proper training. Audience research. What the hell does that even mean? Right?
• 33:04
  It's this big amorphous term, and every time I've gone to look it up, you know, see what's showing up in Google right now, how to do audience research, what I'll find out there, even from really well-known reputable brands, is they're saying, you know, "What is audience research?"
• 33:19
  And then they're like, "Oh, qualitative studies," or, "Do a survey," or something like that.
• 33:23
  But there's not a lot of stuff that talks about practical application of that research, and the majority of us did not train for this. Right? Like, let's be real.
• 33:33
  Nobody woke up when they were a kid and said, "I wanna be a content marketer when I grow up." I came from an acting background, right? I know a lot of journalists.
• 33:40
  I know a lot of, you know, English majors who got into this.
• 33:43
  And the thing is, that level of market research, that means so many different things to so many different people, and there's no real defined processes that make it so even if we do the research, right, and I've seen this when I was in house, we'd do customer surveys, you know, customer surveys on our blog, right?
• 34:01
  Or look at the comments or whether readers or, you know, when we were looking at videos or see the stuff that goes out on podcasts and what people are saying.
• 34:08
  Translating research over to how do we apply this, that's a whole different thing, right? You might have a voice of the customer survey that goes out, but how do you translate that? What do you do, right?
• 34:23
  Jimmy, you and I met in the Growth Hackers forum years ago. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that was one of the first times I felt like
• 34:32
  people were getting the sense of how to apply the things that were being said in those forums, right, to the content that they were creating.
• 34:41
  But for the most part, there's not a lot of frameworks out there, or at least from what I've found, not a lot of stuff that says, "How do we tie all of these things together?
• 34:50
  How do we take this and then turn it into that and then turn it into this next thing?" Right? That's one of the things I teach. Again, not to pitch, but, like, no, I'm pitching. Right? We're content marketers here.
• 34:59
  That's the job. But that's one of the things where I found that there's a huge gap. And we can see here, right? "Huh, I wonder what having research metrics would do for us."
• 35:08
  Somebody's research method is their intuition, and honestly, I've built a general understanding over time, but it's not formal. So I mean, folks, what do you think, right? What's your definition of audience research?
• 35:21
  That was one of the questions that was asked, and it was all over the place, right? Yeah. I'm curious what folks have to say.
• 35:28
  Like, in my personal experience, my content marketing training was seeing what other companies did that seemed to work well and then replicating that with my own tweaks on it for the business, the brand, et cetera.
• 35:43
  Well, a-and this is like... That's really good. If you are able to take the stuff that you feel like works and then you do that, I mean, that's the case, right?
• 35:52
  But sometimes also that's the blind leading the blind, right? Definitely. Because you don't really know if it works. Like, if it's flashy- Right...
• 35:59
  cool content marketing that you wanna replicate, that's probably really fun to do. But yeah, you don't really know if it's done well. Done well meaning supporting the business.
• 36:08
  I, I saw something on LinkedIn earlier where it was talking about everybody in this field talks about how awesome Liquid Death is as a water company, right?
• 36:15
  But what was really interesting is they said it completely underperforms every other water in the category, and it lags Fiji by brand recognition by, like, fifteen percent or something like that, maybe they...
• 36:28
  right around there. And it's like we as marketers wanna do these really cool things, and we're like looking at it like, yeah, that's awesome, but it's not always effective, right?
• 36:37
  Things got head over heels when content strategy became SEO. Yeah, exactly. So let's rank as high as we can. Who cares about audiences at that point? Jimmy, you and I were there right around the same time.
• 36:49
  I'm bold enough to say at this point what we did at Conversion XL at the timeWas a little bit different.
• 36:54
  We were supporting a lot of our central arguments with behavioral psychology, we supported everything with a case study or an expert quote or something like that, and we tried to make meaning of the data that we were putting out there.
• 37:05
  And what I've seen over the years is that approach has now been, let's insert a study just to have it inserted with study. And there's no meaning. It's not supporting any sort of central thesis.
• 37:15
  But that's what an entire generation of content marketers have been raised on, and that's what content marketing looks like as it relates to blog posts, and we're not making meaning of a lot of stuff, right?
• 37:26
  Yeah, let's just say the same buzzwords over and over again until we die. That's the Sisyphus quote, right?
• 37:32
  We're gonna re-optimize the same blog post forever and ever because we hear that it works, so we're gonna continue to do that.
• 37:38
  But what that's done is it's, it's created this area, no wonder we're not satisfied creatively, and no wonder we have complicated relationships with our work because we're not encouraged, we're not incentivized in a lot of cases, in a lot of what, what we see in that mostly bought-in segment, what that really turns into is we're not incentivized to do bigger things.
• 38:00
  And again, it's content marketing so far as what my leadership believes content marketing should be.
• 38:06
  And coloring outside the lines a little bit, trying something new, doing something a little bit different, that's not encouraged.
• 38:11
  But then the other side of that, right, and this is where I wanna hold a mirror up to content marketers in general,
• 38:19
  is if we're not doing our audience research nearly enough, then when we go to make our case to do something else, we're doing it on a trust me bro type basis, right?
• 38:30
  And because we're not able to do the things that we want to do, we can't get that practice in. Sometimes there's a big gap between the taste that we wanna do and our actual skill, right?
• 38:42
  And that's a hard pill to swallow. That is the toughest pill to swallow is like, I wanna do video, and then you go to do video, and it actually kind of sucks, right? And we've all been there. I've been there. Yeah.
• 38:57
  And as leaders change, it happens frequentl-- Yeah, exactly. So there's this kind of double-edged sword there, right?
• 39:02
  We're not doing our audience research nearly enough, and because of that, we're not able to get the buy-in that we need to do the creative, cool, creative thing.
• 39:10
  But if we do get the buy-in to do the cool creative thing, and we haven't had the opportunity to do it before, and we're doing it on limited resources, right? We're having to be put in this position of do more with less.
• 39:21
  Sometimes I'm putting stuff out, or I've had to put stuff out where I'm like, "This isn't my expertise. I need to hire somebody to do this part,
• 39:29
  because if I execute the wrong way, then it's not gonna make a difference," right? And I think part of that comes down to, like, my whole thesis right now for the platform in which I'm trying to build for my own business
• 39:42
  is understanding those underlying principles of what makes something good, what makes something effective. How do you dissect taste? How do you develop taste based on what you've seen little pieces here and there?
• 39:57
  So yeah, it's a tough pill to swallow, but it's kind of a double-edged sword, right?
• 40:01
  We're not doing audience research nearly enough, so we're not able to make our case well, and sometimes if we are making our case and we get that buy-in, it kind of sucks.
• 40:09
  So like, why are they gonna give us freedom to do the next thing the next time, right? Yeah. That's why it sucks. SEO suddenly doesn't work as well. Um- That totally resonates, yeah.
• 40:20
  SEO used to give us cover in a way that it doesn't anymore. Yeah. It would pay the bills that would buy us a little time and resources to try something else, you know? Yeah.
• 40:29
  And that doesn't work, and now it's like, well, what are you doing? And now we can't have a seat at the table, and like there's this huge downstream effect.
• 40:36
  But like, again, I have to stress the whole audience research aspect.
• 40:41
  Again, it has negative consequences across the board, and I think part of that has to do that we're not able to apply it, and sometimes we aren't able to bridge the gap between what we see and how we execute, and that's a big- Mm...
• 40:56
  big deal. Jimmy, how many times have you put something out there where you're like, "This is not what I expected it to be"? Uh- Like, you tried really hard. Yeah, definitely more often than not.
• 41:07
  I actually got let go from a job that I really liked for basically that exact reason. For- Yeah... for playing content instead of [laughing] building a content program to really- Yeah... support the business.
• 41:20
  And that was a pretty painful lesson. And, uh, I mean, I carry that, I carry that lesson with me today, ten years later. Yeah. Yeah.
• 41:27
  I mean, y- like you get that what you, what you wanna do, and you get that autonomy, and then it's like- Yeah... do I actually suck? [laughs] Like- Right... it's-- that's a hard one.
• 41:37
  That's a hard one to admit, but it's there. It happens. All right. Let's move on, folks. So what has content marketers discontent, right? We've talked all about this so far, but what really has us discontent?
• 41:49
  So we did linguistics analysis of over four hundred and fifty-two thousand words. I said three hundred thousand earlier. I lied. It was two... that many more to ask this.
• 42:00
  And what it really broke down to, there's a lot of different subcategories in here, but what it really broke down to was these three areas: economy, our relationship with management in the business, and our relationship with our career.
• 42:10
  So we actually have three different layers of conflict here, which is really interesting 'cause I teach that. And when we start looking at this, right, we're gonna look at only one of this area.
• 42:19
  We're only gonna look at the economic aspect of it. The full report is like a hundred and seventy something pages long, and we're not going through all that here. But the economic downturn, right?
• 42:29
  We can see here from the quote, "Economic upheaval, uncertainty, layoffs, general anxiety. Know many people in the industry keep talking about the weirdness of marketing these days.
• 42:39
  Payments dropped or on hold, way overdue payments," right? The economic downturn, just the, the big aspect of everything kinda going down the tubes right now plays a huge role. Budget cuts, right?
• 42:52
  That's a huge one.This person says, "My contracts would go on for years, but with the unexpected budget cuts, marketing re-strategizing, and sudden layoffs, it's utterly chaotic. Frequent layoffs.
• 43:03
  I think what content marketers are not clear about is what the future looks like, job security, opportunities, growth opportunities. I don't think there's a clear-cut structure for them to follow." Right?
• 43:13
  And then job market. "Seeing the competition for gigs play out in LinkedIn, Slack communities is brutal. All the posts with hundreds of comments, the calls for applications that don't receive responses." I've seen this.
• 43:23
  We've heard reports of this, someone putting in a hundred, two hundred applications, getting nowhere, no responses. It's very clear to everyone that there's work out there, but they aren't getting it.
• 43:34
  What I saw, what we saw in the, you know, and I'm not talking about this fully right now or digging into it, but one of the things that we started to see is people saying, "I'm really s-- like, I'm satisfied.
• 43:47
  My pay is okay, but I'm not satisfied with the work that I'm doing, but I'm afraid to leave because there's nowhere else to go." Right?
• 43:58
  So there's also this general sense of trapped for some of the folks who are in here who took the survey, and that's really sad because it's one of those things where it starts to fester, right?
• 44:11
  And some people, when we ask the creative fulfillment question, the follow-up to that was like, "I don't feel connected to the work at all."
• 44:20
  And if we're doing things like writing or creating video or doing these things that are supposed to be creative, fun, engaging, exciting work, but we're going into these formats with no connection to the work, how are our customers, prospects, people who are reading this stuff or watching the videos or listening to the podcast, right?
• 44:41
  How are they ever supposed to connect to it? Like, that's really hard. And we see it in B2B. When everybody says right now, like, "Oh, B2B content sucks," that to me, I think is the biggest underlying source of it.
• 44:55
  We're disconnected from the work. We're putting out stuff that nobody likes. It's not really doing what we want to. In a lot of cases, we can't get attribution for the work that we're trying to do.
• 45:04
  We can't even explain attribution, right? Skyler Reeves, I don't know if you know Skyler, but when he was in my cohort, he said, you know, there's a difference between attribution and contribution.
• 45:14
  And I was like, that is really cool. Like, a lot of people who are doing really well with that are coming up with contribution models.
• 45:21
  But having to explain that when people are already feeling, you know, indifferent or skeptical or even just mostly bought in, it's really hard to justify your existence.
• 45:31
  And then you can't go anywhere, and you're living on this knife's edge, right? Anecdotally, Tommy, I totally- Yeah. -resonate.
• 45:38
  It's like ev-- you know, occasionally we get pretty senior-level jobs on the job board, like director- Mm-hmm. VP-level content roles.
• 45:45
  And what I hear back from the hiring managers at those companies that they get a lot of applicants, but they don't get-- they're surprised that, that they don't get as many really qualified applicants.
• 45:54
  And then just in chatting with folks who are definitely qualified for those roles, the director and VP-level folks, a lot of them have a kind of the devil you know mentality. Yeah.
• 46:05
  It's like, I'm not thrilled at my job, but like you said, the pay is okay. Ah, there's so much uncertainty out there right now.
• 46:11
  Two years ago, yeah, I would have jumped for a raise, but today I think I'm gonna just sit tight and just- Yep. -kinda see what happens. Yep. It's unfortunate. It's really sad.
• 46:20
  This is-- When I started going through this stuff in particular, this is when I had to start taking a break because I'm like, [inhales] I love this field. I love this work. It's done excellent stuff for me personally.
• 46:30
  Like, and, uh, to see so many people feeling that way, it was very depressing. And, you know, but that's just where we're at right now. But there is hope, right?
• 46:42
  This person says, "Even though there are challenges, I think we're at a point where content marketing can really evolve.
• 46:48
  Many companies are realizing that content isn't just about churning articles, it's about building relationships, driving meaningful engagement, and contributing to long-term business goals.
• 46:56
  With better tools to measure success and align with business metrics, content marketers who can show their value are going to be in high demand."
• 47:05
  I think the pendulum, and I've seen this before, we talked about this a little bit earlier, the pendulum with AI and businesses, you know, leadership going, let's go all in on AI because it's cheaper.
• 47:14
  The unit economics make way too much sense for, you know, somebody making those decisions. Twenty bucks a month versus, you know, a thousand dollars an article. Totally.
• 47:23
  But the pendulum will swing in the other direction, and craft will be valued a lot more once we find that, hey, this garbage that we're producing right now, it's not really doing anything, and it's totally not-- like, some of it's not on us.
• 47:36
  Some of it is. To be clear, some of it is, but some of it's not. And I think that if we're able to really focus on craft and upskill over the next few years, we're gonna be in a much better position.
• 47:47
  I realize we're, like, coming close to time here, but I would love to, like, answer some more questions as we go through. Yeah, we've got the relationship with management.
• 47:56
  Do you wanna go through this, Jimmy, or do you wanna cut it off here? Um, why don't... We have a lot of-- We have-- There's so much going on in the live chat. It's great. Most of it- Chat... is not questions.
• 48:06
  You, you tell me. So yeah, send it, send us, send us questions, and maybe tell me you wanna go through another slide or two. I'll- Yeah. We queue those up for you.
• 48:14
  Chat, chat, you tell me if you wanna go a little bit longer. This is your time. I wanna make sure that we are being respectful of that, but I'm also super happy to talk about this forever. Buy-in stuff, management. Okay.
• 48:24
  So management, leadership buy-in. This is the same graph that we had before, right? It's mostly bought in. This is the level of leadership buy-in.
• 48:32
  This means to the extent that content marketing is-- fits within their definition. When we start to break this down, right? This is what it looks like across different company sizes.
• 48:42
  So buy-in decreases, understandably so, as the company gets bigger, right? Smaller companies, a lot lives and dies by content marketing.
• 48:52
  In some cases, with smaller companies in particular, content marketing is marketing.Because the perception is that it's cheaper. We're not having to spend as much money on ads.
• 49:02
  There's a lot longer shelf life to the stuff that's being created. So that's the buy-in level. But as the company gets bigger, there's more red tape to go through. I've definitely experienced this.
• 49:13
  We see a lot more skepticism from the thousand-plus companies.
• 49:16
  A lot of those larger, more established organizations, they're used to the, you know, spend five dollars, get ten dollars from paid ads, and that's just kinda how that goes.
• 49:25
  Medium-sized companies, they have higher levels of indifference, right, and much lower levels of extremely bought in. So we can kinda see the difference here, right?
• 49:35
  And large companies too, the highest level of don't see the point at all. Anybody here who, uh, works for a large company, does that resonate? I know it has for me at points in time. Yeah.
• 49:46
  When leadership buy-in disappears, so do I. Exactly. Is that Robin Showers, by the way? I can't wait to see you if it is. I think it is, yeah. Yeah. Compensation. It is, yeah. [chuckles] She confirms. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 49:59
  I can't wait to see you at Spark together. It's gonna be awesome. Robin and I are in a group text together. It's great. So, uh, compensation across buy-in leadership levels, you can see here, right?
• 50:09
  Extremely bought in people, they're way more satisfied with their compensation. As the scale goes down, the dissatisfaction goes up.
• 50:17
  When content marketers, when leaders don't see the point at all, that's the most dissatisfied group. Totally makes sense. And yeah, I mean, what's really interesting to me, right, is this curve.
• 50:28
  Anytime we look at this, anytime we look at any of the metrics that we're going against, to see the curve that happens across the board,
• 50:37
  super interesting and very, very telling on what the person's day-to-day work looks like and how it's affected by their leadership. Career satisfaction across buy-in levels.
• 50:48
  Extremely bought in, people are way more, way more, you know, satisfied, right? Career satisfaction.
• 50:55
  But this was something that was super interesting to me, Jimmy, was that the majority of folks still had complicated relationships with their career, right? I'm curious to know what that's really about.
• 51:07
  I have some ideas, but that's one of those ones that I, that I think people will have to infer for themselves, especially- Yeah... if you are one of those people who are having complicated relationships.
• 51:18
  Yeah, that is interesting. Is it just the existential crisis of like what is content? What will content be- I think-... in five years? I think so. I think so.
• 51:26
  I'll have to look at that, the cross-analyze that with the people who are, you know, the qualitative data. It-- That one's one of those ones that's really hard to pin down, but I do think it's an existential thing.
• 51:37
  Michael says, "I think the complication comes from feeling like a creative but working within a business." Yeah. I mean, that's definitely part of it. Does buy-in affect creative fulfillment? Yep.
• 51:47
  What was really interesting here was to see the don't see the point at all and how that went up.
• 51:53
  The reason for that, though, the people who responded that way, they were like, "I don't get my creative fulfillment from work." I was like, [chuckles] "Good for you."
• 52:01
  But yeah, I mean, you can see like right here, everybody's a no until you get to extremely bought in, and then it's like proportional across the board, which is wild. AI's impact on output, right?
• 52:14
  Because we start to look at what this looks like. Everybody across the board, across all levels of leadership and leadership buy-in, everybody has increased expectations across the board.
• 52:24
  There are some people, plenty have no expectations, no, it's no change, which is great. Mostly bought in and don't see the point at all have decreased their output.
• 52:35
  Part of that, I think, has to do with the indifference and almost the team's refusal to do more as a result.
• 52:42
  In fact, they're probably checking out a little bit more, so they're not increasing their output as a result of that.
• 52:49
  And what's interesting, when I started looking at the qualitative data on this, when we looked at mostly bought in and skeptical, right? Both of them have similar levels of increase in expectations.
• 53:00
  And what we found was that mostly bought in was primarily because they were trying to lead the pack in terms of like output and like information that's out there, whereas skeptical was trying to keep up, right?
• 53:17
  Because there's a level of skepticism in the mostly bought in, right? It's just slightly different sides of the same pendulum, right? Or same seesaw, I guess. Don't really know what metaphor I'm going for here.
• 53:29
  But yeah, mostly bought in is trying to lead a little bit further, whereas skeptical is trying to keep up.
• 53:34
  And extremely bought in, they actually have the biggest no change because the challenges that we see, and this is, you know, in the full report, the challenges that we'll see with extremely bought in, it's not about output.
• 53:45
  It's not about a lot of things.
• 53:47
  What they're really more concerned about now is the strategy aspect of things, not necessarily any of these other things that we would consider meaningful [chuckles] in some of the other segments.
• 53:58
  And then again, this is audience research by leadership buy-in, right? This is we're looking at all the bands now.
• 54:06
  We can see here extremely bought in, they have the highest level of daily audience research, and they have the lowest level of not nearly enough, right?
• 54:15
  And this is that double-edged sword that I was talking about earlier, you know. Skeptical, I mean, look at this. Skeptical has the highest level of mostly bought in or not nearly enough.
• 54:26
  And then on here, the don't see the point at all, Jimmy. They don't even show up on the graph because it was one hundred percent. Oh, wow. Yeah, makes sense, I guess.
• 54:35
  [chuckles] Of the people who report their leadership does not care, they don't see the point. One hundred percent of them said they don't do their n- research nearly enough. Not surprising, but also like, come on, folks.
• 54:48
  [chuckles] Like, what role, what role do we play in this, right? Like, when I teach this stuff, right, I think of it in two different directions. One, we need to do the research as creators.
• 54:59
  When we think about this from a creative point, we need to do the research so we canCreate effective content on the one side, so our readers and our listeners and our viewers and, like, all of those people will actually resonate with this stuff, and it does what we want them to do.
• 55:14
  But we also need to do that research so we can communicate effectively what it is that we're trying to do to our leadership. We need to be able to lay out plans and make it very simple.
• 55:25
  A lot of content marketers will say, "Leadership doesn't get it, leadership doesn't get it. They don't get content marketing." But my question is, is do we get leadership? That's a great question. Right?
• 55:35
  Like the buy-in aspect of that, I know a lot of content marketers. I've been that content marketer who said, "They don't get it, and I just don't get to put the stuff out there that I wanna do."
• 55:45
  And then I go to present my stuff, and as somebody who's now having to have been pitched ideas to get that approval, I'm like, "You're really trying to pitch me on a trust me, bro, right now.
• 55:56
  Like, you need to make a better case," right? And sometimes there's a lot of ego involved with that too. So there are a couple things that I think we need to do in that case.
• 56:04
  One, I think we need to apply more pressure to our ideas. Two, we need to validate them more before we start to present them to leadership and make it crystal clear on where are we gonna put this thing?
• 56:15
  Are people bought into the idea before we go to pitch it? Here's how much it's gonna cost, and here's how much we're gonna see out of it most likely. You know, and make that very clear, very cut and dry.
• 56:26
  Don't necessarily get into the creative aspect of it, the artsy part. They don't care. In a lot of cases, they don't care.
• 56:33
  Once we start, you dig into it a little bit further, you actually do see that extremely bought in leadership cares a lot about content quality. But in a lot of cases, it's just a dollars and cents thing for folks.
• 56:44
  And I think that's important that we're able to take that audience research and apply it in both directions, right?
• 56:49
  We need to be able to say, how do we create effective content by deconstructing what's working out there right now and, like, being able to pull those pieces in.
• 56:57
  What's working out there, what's not working, and what do we have the resources to, like, put out there.
• 57:03
  But then on the other side of that, going like, you know, really being able to present the case in the way that leadership understands, because it's not their job to understand what we do, and we're never gonna do the things that we wanna do if we can't get them to understand.
• 57:18
  So that being said, that's everything. Where do we go from here? We talked a lot about that. We are at two oh three, but folks, if you wanna go a little bit longer, I've got no problems with that. Cool.
• 57:28
  A bunch of-- Quite a few people said they have to jump, they want the recording, et cetera. Yeah. There's so many questions. Many, many questions.
• 57:35
  If you want, maybe I can grab them all from the transcript, and we can go through them in a Loom video or a Slack group or LinkedIn or something. There's so many.
• 57:44
  There is-- If you're up for answering one important one, Tommy, there was one- McKenzie says, "Keep going." McKenzie and Maria and Grace, they say, oh, they all say, "Keep going." Ronnie says he's not going anywhere.
• 57:53
  They're all in. I'm in too. All right. Well, let me- The, the- Can I queue up one question that a bunch of people- Yes... plus one that they wanna do from- Let's do it. Let's do it... from Sarah.
• 58:02
  Sarah says, "What do you see as the content marketing career path now? What does it even mean to be a content leader?
• 58:09
  If everything is content, how do we justify craft, quality, creativity to executives and their shareholders?" And I feel like that's a big question, but that really- That's a huge question... captures
• 58:19
  so much of what people are feeling right now. Like, what is content? Where should I continue doing this? Where is all of this heading? Yeah, that's a good question.
• 58:28
  So I think the biggest thing is what's the definition of content?
• 58:33
  Like, the conversations I've had with leadership in a lot of different cases is we'll start with the buy-in aspect of it and really try to build the foundation from there.
• 58:42
  So I will ask leadership, "Have you ever bought something after reading a blog post one time?" Like, no, of course not.
• 58:51
  Like, so what makes you think that our readers or our customers are gonna do anything a little bit different, right? And that becomes like, that starts to spark a little bit of a thought, right?
• 59:02
  And then I'll ask them, "Do you watch The Office? Jimmy, have you ever watched The Office?" Oh, yeah. I think everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Everybody watches The Office.
• 59:09
  How many times have you re-watched The Office? Probably two or three times. Okay. When you re-watched The Office, did you start with season one, or did you go straight to season two? No, no.
• 59:19
  I, yeah, I started season two or season three because, well, in the, in the case of TV shows, you can see character development's already happened. Like, the show hits its stride, you know? Right.
• 59:28
  Well, and that's the thing that I try to, you know, anybody who I've talked to about that, they're like, "No, I skip season one because it's, you know, it's trying to find its way, but it's not really necessary," right?
• 59:38
  And when I talk to leadership about that, that's the type of question that will come up, and I'll say, "Okay.
• 59:43
  Now, if you were a super fan of The Office, do you think you would buy the T-shirts or the games or the, the little memorabilia?" Right? What are shows that you've gotten memorabilia to?
• 59:55
  And then how long did it take for you to do that, right? As a content person, we have to understand that every video that we put out there, every podcast, every blog post, all of that is content.
• 1:00:07
  And depending on what you want to do as part of your career, the career path is really about defining what content is for folks, because it's still... I mean, we're on the right side of the adoption curve
• 1:00:23
  mostly, but still a lot of people say, "What is content?" Like, they don't understand. I w- when I was at QuickBooks, we asked, you know, what is content?
• 1:00:30
  And the ads team would say that what they do is content, whereas what we would say is what we do is content, whereas da, da, da. Like it started to spiral out.
• 1:00:39
  The product team would say that what they do is content, right? Ads are content. And
• 1:00:44
  what I encourage folks to make the case for, and it is, you know, I'm gonna give that phrase that everybody wants to say or everybody has to say is it depends.
• 1:00:53
  Depending on the size of the company, a content person, in my mind, needs to try and move up to a overseeing what content is role, overseeing all of it.And having a narrative consistency across the board.
• 1:01:09
  At QuickBooks, one of the things that I had done, I wasn't, like, a full official leader, but I had coordinated multiple people across multiple markets, across multiple marketing disciplines to say, "Hey, these are the initiatives that we're doing.
• 1:01:23
  Hey, email, can we get insights from you? Hey, social, can we get insights from you? Can we trade this stuff back and forth and build those official and unofficial relationships that get the information exchange?"
• 1:01:33
  When I work with large companies, this is the thing that I do first, right?
• 1:01:37
  Get the information exchange, get everybody seeing visibility into everything, and then at a certain point going like, "Okay, here's everything that's going on from a global level. Here are all the disconnects.
• 1:01:49
  These are the things that we could be doing better." Right?
• 1:01:53
  Once you make that make sense, in retrospect, it always makes sense to go, we need to have somebody or a team to oversee the stuff that we're putting out so there is a narrative consistency across the board, and we don't have disparate messaging happening through different channels.
• 1:02:08
  That makes sense. But if we're not doing that research, right? Go back to the audience research aspect.
• 1:02:13
  If we're not doing that audience research, and we're not doing the internal research to make that case, then it just looks like a power grab, right?
• 1:02:20
  Of course, you want to oversee everything, like, 'cause there's a Game of Thrones aspect to every type of biz. I fight with myself, and I'm a one-person business about [chuckles] what takes priority, right?
• 1:02:30
  But I think that that's the career path. What's the ultimate goal is to become the chief content officer, right? But you have to make that make sense to everybody else because nobody else is gonna get it.
• 1:02:39
  A lot of people have different definitions of content. So what's that mean? How many CCOs are there in the world? I've seen some. Not a ton, but some. Okay. Was there anything else, Jimmy?
• 1:02:50
  There's a version of a CCO at most companies. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Even if that's not their title, there's somebody steering the ship. Yeah. Um- Some people call it brand. Yeah. Totally. You asked if there's more questions.
• 1:03:00
  Yes, there are so many. It's actually hard to keep track of. Um. [laughs] Um, but this one is- Whoever asks the next three questions, that's, that's what we're gonna get. All right, cool. That's a great call.
• 1:03:10
  Next three questions, you gotta ask them now. We're gonna see them in the chat. Those are the last ones. Let's get going. Great webinar. Thank you, Blair. Ooh, yeah, Sarah. I like that idea.
• 1:03:19
  State of the content career path. That's a good one. Jimmy, I'm gonna leave that one up to you. That's a nice one. Yeah. We're gonna have to... We-- There's a lot of data to be collected there.
• 1:03:30
  [laughs] Blair- It's Sarah... where do I send my address for that hoodie? Uh, send me a DM. [laughs] Send me a DM in Slack, Blair, and I will hook you up.
• 1:03:37
  [chuckles] So you definitely-- I think you-- I'm gonna do a ChatGPT analysis of the live chat transcript, but I'm pretty sure you were the most active. [laughs] Probably. Audience research. How do you do it?
• 1:03:48
  How do you do it? Yeah, it's a good one. And how do you build it into your process? Okay, so this is the pitch, right? This is part of the pitch.
• 1:03:55
  So I have an eight-layer market research process that I teach in very deep detail. It's about a five-hour day in a five-day summit, right? But I'll give you the high-level overview.
• 1:04:06
  So on the very first level, right, eight-layer market research, level one is you, right? It's your business, and there are different narratives that you're ultimately trying to get out of the company, right?
• 1:04:19
  And these narratives give you a really solid opportunity to build out internal networks, right? So this is, depending on the size of your company, this is what's gonna be different.
• 1:04:26
  So the first narrative, and I got this from Kevin Lee and Shannon Diep, so I can't take full credit for it. This is just my application of their framework. But the first narrative is your category narrative, right?
• 1:04:37
  What's your take? What's your colleague's take on the category that you exist in? What's the category gonna look like in the next five years? Where do you sit within the category?
• 1:04:46
  What do you get right that everybody else gets wrong? Right? Category. Next one, product. Everybody knows product narrative. What's your product good at? What's your product bad at?
• 1:04:56
  How does your product do something totally different than everybody else and whatnot there? [chuckles] Third one, persona. What are your customers? Who are your customers? What do they value? What do they like?
• 1:05:06
  What do they not like? How are they different from the other customers? What makes them smart? What makes them awesome? And how are you able to repel the right-- wrong people and attract the right ones, right?
• 1:05:16
  And then the fourth one is your culture narrative. Now, the way that Shannon and Kevin define that is, where do you wanna be within the culture of the ecosystem in which you're in? Uh, I think that's great.
• 1:05:28
  The way that I like to think about it is what is your internal culture like? You know, what do you like about the company? What don't you like about the company? What makes it cool to work for?
• 1:05:36
  These four areas, and then maybe a fifth one, depends on the company, is, uh, the founding narrative, right?
• 1:05:42
  So for me, I talk about my founding narrative all the time, which was I started my business in a boarding house with a broken laptop. If you've followed my work, you've heard me say this.
• 1:05:52
  But these four to five things together are what make up brand, right? So that's level one, you. Level two, your customers.
• 1:06:02
  When I look at my customers, I'm asking what do they value, what do they fear, and what do they, and how do they achieve success, right?
• 1:06:10
  When we start to answer those questions in full, we can actually start to get at the Jungian psychology of the archetypes, right? A lot of people forget that brand archetypes are not actually from brands.
• 1:06:22
  They come from real conversations with real people.
• 1:06:25
  And what we're able to do once we are able to find what that seventy, thirty percent of those brand archetypes are, what's the primary archetype and the secondary archetype.
• 1:06:34
  Once we find that, and we start to find the reflection between the brand, like what we hear internally and what we hear with our actual customers, or if we don't have customers, we're pre-customers, what we hear in our cold DMs in outreach.
• 1:06:47
  Once we find that sweet spot, that's where we start to develop a brand voice. Layer three, right? This is a eight-layer process, so I'm, I'm gonna do my best to be as fast with it as possible.
• 1:06:58
  Layer three is your competitors, right? What's everybody saying? What's nobody saying? And how are you able to do that?
• 1:07:04
  I look at logos, pathos, ethos, and I deconstruct different brands, seeing how they appeal to authority, logic, and emotions, right?And the way that I like to think about this too, if one brand has all these awesome, you know, companies, the-- all these awesome logos that they're putting out there, and another brand has the same thing, if you have McDonald's, Delta, and, uh, American Airlines as your customers, and I have Burger King and JetBlue and, I don't know, some other brand, those things cancel each other out from a customer's perspective, right?
• 1:07:35
  What are they blind to? What's missing when we start looking at all of that? When we start to look at how we build messaging around that, we're trying to fill in those gaps. Layer four, search competitors, right?
• 1:07:47
  I could say do keyword research and do content gaps and all of that stuff. A lot of us will know that, but what I like to do is I actually like to take a look at the topics that they're covering.
• 1:07:56
  I actually have a whole AI prompt that I put this through, and I think about narratively, how do these pieces all fit together, right? Their topics.
• 1:08:04
  And then where are the gaps in the topics that they're putting out there? That's one to figure out how we get that ground cover. But the second part of that is, um, not all search competitors are actual competitors.
• 1:08:15
  Ronnie, yeah, tell me about [laughs] Aristotle marketing. Or not all of our search competitors are actual competitors, which gives us a really solid opportunity to build out a distribution network.
• 1:08:24
  If we're going after the same customer, but we're not actually competing for the same, like, part, like, that's joint webinars, that's getting on their podcast, that's getting a, like, really starting to algorithm proof a lot of your distribution.
• 1:08:37
  Layer above that, industry adjacent. This usually means, like, app partners and agencies, right? How do we start to work with them? Same idea. Distribution partners. How do we build out that group?
• 1:08:48
  Layer above that, news. What news outlets are people watching? Above that, influencers.
• 1:08:52
  Again, now we're starting to look at our distribution network, and then I have an eighth layer, which is pulse, which is a series of automations that allow us to keep track of all of this stuff in real time, bring it into a Slack channel, so ten, fifteen minutes a day, you're able to see what's going on within your industry.
• 1:09:08
  And if you-- my whole, like, little marketry catchphrase there is, if you are able to understand, if you can understand where the tide is turning, you can ride that wave, and if you understand how the weather works, you can control the weather.
• 1:09:21
  Something like that. I forgot. That's the eight-layer market research process, and then I start to look at, how do we apply these insights over to creative development?
• 1:09:29
  And then how do we start to apply that, like, actually on the ground, and then how do we actually do change management? 'Cause it is a completely different way of thinking about this stuff.
• 1:09:39
  That's the market research process. I hope that answers the question. That was very long. That was a robust answer. That was really good. Thank you. Thank you.
• 1:09:46
  Um- I put a lot-- There's been, like, two years' worth of development on this stuff, so. You didn't just come up [chuckles] with that on the spot? No. [both laughing] Um, yeah, that was awesome.
• 1:09:56
  I think we are-- the drop-off is happening in our- All right. All right. -attendees. I feel like we probably should sign off. I will send out the recording, obviously. If it's okay with you, Tommy, we'll send out slides.
• 1:10:06
  I think I'll send out the transcript. I've never done that, but there's just so much good stuff in the, in the chat. I feel like we should send that out maybe just to, to attendees.
• 1:10:13
  But I, I guess, Tommy, let me, uh, you know, on behalf of all of us in the content marketing world, say thank you for recognizing this, for putting in the, the time and effort and money.
• 1:10:23
  Like, this has been a huge effort on your part to bring this survey and now report to life. You can just see from all people's comments how much it's resonating.
• 1:10:32
  Folks are saying, like, "This is, you know, I've been looking for the right words for this. I don't feel so alone anymore. It's been affirming," et cetera, et cetera. So seriously, thank you.
• 1:10:40
  Like, you've done a great service to the content marketing world, and this is really just the beginning. There's-- The full report isn't even launched yet. So we'll of course- That's right.
• 1:10:47
  -be updating folks with that and, um, yeah, wow. That-- I-- My expectations were high, and that totally over-delivered. Can I give one more plug? Yeah, of course. Okay, so well, two more plugs.
• 1:10:59
  So one, yeah, the report comes out next Friday. Uh, we're working diligently to get the final finishing touches on it, so we'll do that.
• 1:11:06
  But two, I'm gonna be doing a paid webinar through the content studio that will be a deep dive analysis of all of the data that we've gone through because there's a lot to cover there.
• 1:11:17
  I think I'm only gonna do it for, like, ten bucks. So if you wanna show up to that- Awesome. Ten bucks and, uh, yeah, we'll do a deep dive of everything that's going on.
• 1:11:24
  I don't know how long it's gonna last, but it's gonna last a while, I imagine. Awesome. Awesome. So. Cool. Thank you. Thank you, everybody, too, for coming, for keeping the live chat so lively. That was awesome.
• 1:11:36
  And, uh, we'll see everybody in the Slack group, LinkedIn, everywhere else. Take care, everybody. Thanks, everybody. [upbeat music]