The Transcript

6 Steps to Building an Audience That Builds a Business

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Brian Clark: Hey there, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Rainmaker. I’m your host, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media.

Today, we have yet another very special guest, Joe Pulizzi, or as I refer to him, the guy who I can’t outrank for the term ‘content marketing.’ I’ve been trying, Joe. You know I’ve been trying. Did you make up that word? Did you make up the term ‘content marketing?’ Was you it?

Joe Pulizzi: And I love you. It excites me that you tried so hard to get down first. I really dig that about you, actually.

Brian Clark: I do have a competitive streak. I can’t help it.

Joe Pulizzi: Did I make up the term? I started using it when I was running custom media at Penton Media in 2001. Actually, the backstory about that is, we were in the custom publishing industry, and we were called Penton Custom Media, two very boring terms. You go with custom publishing at Custom Media, nobody wants to buy anything from you.

So I was like, How can I get these chief marketing officers at least interested in what I’m talking about? I tried everything. I tried branded content, custom content, and I’m throwing it all at them, and then I started using content marketing in the pitch, and I could see the reaction change. Like they were, “Oh, hey. I’m a marketer. We do content-y type stuff. Maybe that’s what we’re doing.”

If you’re targeting marketers in every way — and you know this, because you and I both work with a lot of marketers — they’re very simple people. You have to keep things simple, and things resonate with them around the term marketing. I saw that, and I said, “Hey, look. This thing that we’re doing, this building audiences thing through relevant, valuable content on a consistent basis — we better call it something like content marketing because that’s what’s resonating with these folks.”

Yeah. I can’t prove it. I can’t prove that I was the first one, probably as much as you were responsible for popularizing it, because you didn’t like the term, but then you started using it. I said, “Thank Jesus for that.” It helped us.

Brian Clark: Well, maybe I just didn’t like it because I didn’t come up with it. I don’t know. So yeah, I talk about now, In 1999, I started doing this thing we now call content marketing, and then in 2006, I started a blog talking about this thing we now call content marketing.

But it was you who convinced me, and grudgingly, I guess, and I don’t know what my issue was with it. I don’t even think it occurred to me that it needed to be called something. But for those of you who don’t know who Joe is — you probably do — he is the founder of Content Marketing Institute, the world’s leading enterprise solution provider. No, I’m trying to come up with a tagline for you.

Joe Pulizzi: Leading training and education company for enterprise marketers, something like that.

Brian Clark: Exactly. According to Google.

Joe Pulizzi: Hey. If Google said it, it must be true.

Brian Clark: It must be true.

Joe Pulizzi: Absolutely.

Brian Clark: Also, more impressively, is that Content Marketing World, without doubt, is the largest and the finest content marketing conference out there. It s something I’ve been involved with every year since the beginning.

Joe Pulizzi: Every year, that’s right.

Brian Clark: It’s so aimed at the enterprise. Why am I there every year?

Joe Pulizzi: Because everybody aspires to be a big company. It’s interesting. You know this, because I think we’ve had some conversations on when you target the enterprise, you can’t target the mid market. You actually have to say enterprise, and you get the mid market.

Then you get small companies that actually want to aspire to be big, so then we got a lot of really high-growth small businesses. That’s what we target. So you get mostly marketers at large businesses, and because of that you get the mid market, and then you get the small businesses that want to be big.

It’s just interesting. That’s why you fit in. You probably target what, the growing small business, mid-market audience? Would you say that that’s your target?

Brian Clark: I think a lot of our customers fall into the biggest group of the small business market, which is the very small business, but it does move up from there.

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah.

Brian Clark: I think, again, a lot of the work you have done has made what we talk about relevant to even larger companies. I think our hearts are with the small companies, because that’s our affinity. But the information percolates all over the place, which is fascinating to me.

Let’s get to the issue here, because historically, an enterprise-focused institute and conference, and now you’ve written Content Inc., which is squarely aimed at the startup and small business world, the whole audience-first theme that we’ve been talking about for years. I was fortunate enough that you allowed me to write the foreword to the book. As long as I get in somewhere.

Joe Pulizzi: Allowed is a good way to put it. It defaulted to you. You had to write that because it’s your story. Thank you for that, by the way.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It’s a great book. It’s going to be out in just a few weeks here. It’s available for pre-order, called Content Inc. There’s also an excellent podcast that Joe’s been running called Content Inc. also.

How do you like that? Let’s talk about podcasting. Everyone is doing podcasting now. You’ve taken to it. I love your show with Robert, This Old Marketing. How has it been reaching out to this new audience with a podcast? Because it seems like that’s your primary engine.

Joe Pulizzi: This is all a big experiment. Actually, everything is, even writing the book to this audience. Because as you said, we’ve never targeted the small business, startup, entrepreneurial audience, so to start with that was completely selfish on my part, because I wanted to write this book.

I literally said, This book needs to be written. What we’ve done at CMI, what Brian’s done at Copyblogger Media, and dozens and dozens of other examples, they need to be told, because we have to get away from this idea that you have to be a big company to do this thing called content marketing.

I think there’s actually a better way to launch a business, and it’s the way that you and I launched the business. I said, Okay, I’m going to do this book, but I’m not going to make it about me. We’re going to talk about some examples, but let’s talk about what all these companies did and how they went audience-first and then built products and services on the back of that. I said, Okay, well, what’s the best way to do this?

With Epic Content Marketing, which I wrote in 2013 and is squarely for enterprises, I started to release blog posts ahead of time. That was the thing: “Okay. I want to tease it out. We’re going to give pieces of the book out ahead of time.” I said, “Let’s do something different with Content Inc.,” and I said “Whoa. Let’s just share everything ahead of time but do it in a podcast form.”

So far, it s seemed to work. Every week, we get more subscribers, more listeners to the show. People have started to talk about it more, and honestly, we haven’t really marketed that much at all. It’s just sort of there. It just sort of happened, and we’re letting people know about it. I like the fact that it’s almost like we had the blog-to-book idea. I would say “Hey, if I’m going to write a book, do a blog-the-book. Just plan out six months of content, write your chapter outline, start blogging, and then in six months, you’ve got 80 percent of a book, and you’re done.

I started to do the same thing with podcasting. So I started to write episodes of the podcast, which became chapters of the book. I started to release those, edited them down, and then we’ve got part of the book done. As I’ve been going through and doing this podcasts — two a week, and they’re really short, like five to seven minutes long — then okay, I’ve got more content for the book.

It seemed to have worked out well, and it just takes a lot of the burden off me from a content production standpoint. At the same time, I can build an audience. I think that that’s a smarter thing to do than everybody just saying, “Wait. We’re not going to send any content out. Here comes the book, and now it’s ready.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi: I think you just give it all out as much as possible. Build some anticipation over it. Build your audience so that when you release the book, it’s already there. The audience is basically your customer list for buying the book or the audio book. It’s all ready to go.

Brian Clark: You’re demonstrating the principle of the book in a way that you’re building an audience to sell the book. I like that. You’re getting very meta, Joe. That’s been our thing for years.

Joe Pulizzi: My life is meta.

Brian Clark: Exactly, right.

Joe Pulizzi: We’ll see if it works out. So far, it looks like We’ll know right away. September 8th, the book comes out. It comes out at Content Marketing World. I think we’ll know within the first two weeks if that strategy has paid off. Fingers crossed, it looks like it will work.

Brian Clark: Well, I m certainly going to help, because again, my foreword cannot be unseen. I mean, I must have spent 20 or 30 minutes on that Joe, and you had to write the whole rest of the book.

Joe Pulizzi: It could go down as the greatest foreword in business history.

Why Startups Are More Innovative Than Large Companies at Content

Brian Clark: Let me ask you this: I had your partner in crime, Robert Rose, on last week. We were kind of dancing around this thing, but I’m not sure we ever just came right out and said it, but I almost came out and said, “Don’t you think the real innovation in content marketing really comes from the startups who build the audience first and all that?

I never came out and said it, and then right after I asked you to be on the show, I see you’ve written an article saying Why Startups Basically Beat the Pants off the Enterprise at Content Marketing. I mean, the headline was something to that effect. Tell me what you think about that.

Joe Pulizzi: I totally agree with that. It’s the premise of the book. I’ve spent too long — 16 years now — working with these large companies. There are so many politics, red tape, fiefdoms that you have to deal with, meeting after meeting to get something done.

Culture change has to happen of some nature, or you have to have a content champion that’s so strong that it s actually willing to risk their job, at least doing it the way that it’s been done, to make some of these decisions to say, “Look, we’re not going to market the way we’ve always marketed. We’re going to go out and build an audience that knows, likes, and trusts us, and if we do that, we believe in our heart of hearts that it’s going to help our business, and here’s how. Basically, that’s the approach.

There are very, very few large businesses that can do that, because they’re so set in, We have these products to sell. That’s what marketing’s for. Get the darn brochure done, set it, and make sure the sales people have what they need. Marketing, get out of my way, and I’ll sell. Especially in large B2B companies.

Now what we notice is, if you have a belief structure around the practice of content marketing, that you really believe that this is the way that you can go to market, you have one person that could make that decision. And you have such other focus on a content niche, which is also another issue with large companies. They want to target every one of their buyer personas, audience personas, and in a B2B company, that could be seven to nine people, and then their content becomes so irrelevant, it doesn’t do anything.

But if you’re a startup, you’re focusing on that audience — building that audience, focusing on that person and that audience that you’re building — that becomes your future customer database.

It takes time, and it takes patience. Large companies have no patience. Large companies — usually the ones that we work with — are public companies. They’re on some kind of a quarterly fiscal financial release schedule. Nobody has patience for anything.

If you go in to a chief marketer’s office and say, “Hey. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to target this audience, which is not a large audience but it’s a particular audience that we could be the leading informational expert for, and we’re going to distribute content to them. We’re going to build them. They’re going to know us more, like us. It’s going to lead to this. We’re going to build subscribers. We think this is going to happen — that’s the hypothesis, but we don’t know for sure. We might have to change it. And I need 15 to 17 months to make that happen.

The next two words are — with a contraction in there — “You’re fired.” That s basically what it is. Get out of here. Let’s do some advertising. Let’s drop some demand right now.

Brian Clark: It’s amazing, the short-term thinking at the largest institutions on the planet, because it’s this quarterly mentality. I know there’s so much money at the enterprise level, but I’ve never wanted to deal with what you described, that mire of entrenched silos and infighting and the inability to move quickly.

That’s also why I refer to myself as unemployable. Could you imagine me in that environment? I’m on the evening news at some point.

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. I wouldn t even start to imagine that crisis. I don’t think any large company would imagine that. “Let’s go and get that Brian Clark. He’s going to really disrupt

Brian Clark: No one’s in the history of the world have ever said,