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Verbatim text
Lee:
Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. And on today’s show, we are talking with Chris Maher of CMA fame. Big shout out to Martin Huntbach for recommending us to to get together and to create something cool. In this episode, we are talking about, yes, the importance of creating content, but even more so the importance of marketing your content. So folks, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride! This podcast is brought to you by the agency Trailblazer Community. Is agency life stressing you out? Then? It is our mission to help you build an agency that you love. We’ve created a community which includes the Agency Reset Roadmap, that will allow you to get your agency back on the right track. We also have lots of noble, straight to the point, easy to consume workshops. We have a thriving community of other agency owners, and we all wrap up every month with a mastermind call with myself and sometimes a special guest where we unpack your questions. For more details, check out agency Trailblazer Comm.
Lee:
Welcome to a conversation with me and Mr. Chris Marr. Chris, how are you today, you wonderful Scottish man.
Chris Marr:
I am great. Thanks for asking. Yeah, it feels good. It’s springtime and I think we’re, uh. Yeah. Feeling really good about everything. Yeah. Great. Thanks for having me on.
Lee:
No worries. Contrary to rumour, I presume it’s not snowing right now in Scotland. Up there right now?
Chris Marr:
No, it’s not snowing. Just. No, no, I think we may have gotten over the worst of that. And it looks like the spring weather is starting to kick in, which is nice. And, you know, the sun, the. It just makes everyone feel so much better, you know, positive. And it’s great. We’ve been waiting a long time for it.
Lee:
No, I totally know what you mean. There. Do you suffer from that kind of. Is it seasonal affective disorder or something? Do you get that? Like, do you feel down in the winter or are you one of those people that’s always buzzing?
Chris Marr:
I think I don’t I don’t think I do suffer from it, but I think, uh, mostly in Scotland, you know, especially when it’s winter for six months, I think it affects everybody to some degree. You know, you just get a little bit tired and lethargic and we stay indoors a lot. And I don’t think that’s ever a good thing. So I think there was a time there when we were indoors for about two, two solid weeks because the weather was so bad. And I think you get the cabin fever, which is not good. You know, so, um. Yeah, it’d be good to get out and do some walking and get some fresh air. It’s always good for the, uh, for the mindset.
Lee:
Yeah. And good to get the wind through that glorious beard of yours. And if you don’t know what I mean, guys, I’ll, we’ll we’re going to be linking to your websites. You’ll be able to see that beautiful beard you’ve got rocking on there. I hope that’s still there.
Chris Marr:
Yeah I’ve still got it. Yeah. It’s not going anywhere good. I was going to say remotely a question.
Lee:
It’s your brand isn’t it? You know. Exactly.
Chris Marr:
I’m bought into this now.
Lee:
Well, it’s the same with me. I wore a cap and grew a beard whilst I was out in Florida because it was just too hot all the time and then did, um, like 30 days worth of YouTubing and realised that that had now become my brand. So now the hat never leaves my head other than when I get into bed, although sometimes I still leave it on just to see if my wife’s noticed. Yeah, and I’ve now got this kind of glorious, stubbly half beard thing going on, which looks kind of cool. So I’ve stuck with that.
Chris Marr:
Yeah. Becomes part of your image. Exactly.
Lee:
Now, I suppose. really, we should actually tell people who you are, who don’t know who you are, because we’ve already just started gassing away, and I love that. But instead of me murdering kind of what you do because I know it’s there isn’t a specific job title, I would love it if you could just describe, well, first of all, introduce yourself and also describe a little bit about what you do, what CMA is, and also CMA live.
Chris Marr:
I’d love to. My name is Chris Maher. I am 36 years old. I live on the east coast of Scotland in Dundee. Um, this is where my business is based. I work full time from home. Uh, we have four kids in our house. We just had a baby girl. Luna Rose was born six weeks ago tomorrow, and we, uh. So we’ve got a busy life. Busy work life. My partner runs her own business as well, so we have, like, a lot going on. The Content Marketing Academy really has like 4 or 5 different things that we do, but it’s all based around teaching and education on content marketing. So we’re basically I’m a teacher of adults, basically of business people and marketers. We work with entrepreneurs and in-house marketers to help them become better marketers. That’s really what it’s all about. We run a membership organisation, we run live events, I do speaking, I do workshops, I work with partners in the UK as well to kind of provide content for them.
Chris Marr:
And I’m really a content marketer at heart as well. So I kind of it’s not even about practising what I preach. I just, I think I preach what I practise, if that makes sense. So I started off with blogging and podcasting and content and all of that stuff, and it’s slowly but surely become like the really big, big part of my business, and it’s what we do. So, um, yeah, I spent a lot of time creating content, video content, blogs mainly. We have a podcast as well. So, you know, it’s all that stuff. And content has become our sales process. It’s become what we’re known for and everything just revolves around that. So the Content Marketing Academy, CMA is a content marketing organisation and we are mainly teachers. And that’s what we do is that does that make sense?
Lee:
That makes perfect sense. What I’m intrigued though is did you start out with that as your mission or were you, will you say a web company or a digital company of some sort, and then found you loved content so much that that’s the track you went down?
Chris Marr:
Yeah. So in hindsight, we did start an agency. Um, we were I started off as an agency and, and consultant as well. So I did a lot of consulting and agency work. We had maybe I think we had a really small agency, dozen clients at one point, maybe at the very most all different industries and stuff like that. And then the this, this really shifted for me in that I didn’t feel like I was making a big impact at all, actually, in what I was doing. I felt like people outsourced their marketing to us to just tick boxes, and we were spreading ourselves too thin, doing loads of different types of marketing, everything from print to digital. And I just didn’t feel right to me. So over a period of time, I think it was about a year or a year and a half. It took us to really transition from agency to membership organisation, so I could feel like I was having a much greater impact on on my work, on the world, you know, on my little part of the world, wherever that is, and started teaching instead, which meant I was doing a lot of the consulting and advising I was doing was one to many now.
Chris Marr:
So it was great to make that transition. So yeah, it started off with me. I started a blog, I started doing a lot of stuff on social media. Then I started helping businesses out in my spare time, and then I started a business. And then I think in hindsight, looking back now, it makes it makes perfect sense to where I find myself now is that I’m now teaching rather than doing the marketing for people. So we don’t have we don’t have any clients. If we do take on clients, it’s typically consulting type clients we take on. So we’ll go in and advise um organisations. Usually we work with sales teams and marketing teams rather than directors. So um, yeah, that’s what we do. That’s what I do mostly now. So there’s no agency work. But that’s how it started off.
Lee:
And question here is obviously you essentially went down the track of doing the main thing that you absolutely love, which is creating that content, doing content, advising on it, teaching it, etc.. I think there’s two things, isn’t there, that you love doing. There is creating of content, which you clearly do a lot of it, but also that aspect of teaching, educating, helping as many people as you possibly can. But because you’ve got this membership site, this is something that you have to do now. Has that robbed any of the joy of creating the content or doing what you do? Because you kind of have to do it now, or is that not even a thing?
Chris Marr:
That’s a good question. The have I. So how do I feel about content marketing now as a creator?
Lee:
I guess the idea more is, is the fact that you do have this membership community. You’ve got to be putting out content regularly. It’s now expected of you, isn’t it, to be leading by example? I don’t know, I was just wondering, is there?
Chris Marr:
It’s a good question because like I actually create I feel like I create less content now than I used to. I think when I was really getting started, I wanted to like I hit it hard. I was like weekly podcasts, weekly blogs, and now I’ve kind of like really tapered that in that I’m, I tend to. I think there’s a bit of a myth, actually a little bit in the, in the, especially in the membership organisation side of things, that you need to be churning out tonnes of content. Yeah. Um, I don’t, I just, I just don’t do that. I do it that way. So I think a lot of people get value if you can help them with the problems they have. And that’s not always about creating another course or doing a webinar. Sometimes it’s just like literally being there for someone to have a 1 to 1 conversation with. So I spent a lot of time doing that. But don’t get me wrong, that informs content. Definitely.
Chris Marr:
If we were getting a series of like people asking similar questions, then that might turn into a video or a blog article or a podcast or whatever. So I think it’s kind of an iterative thing. Content. You could say that I create content on a daily basis, and a lot of it’s micro content, as in me answering questions or solving problems for people or challenges for people. So I feel like I don’t create as much content as I used to, but I’m more much more focussed on creating high quality rather than churning out like, you know, it’s that whole argument against quality versus quantity. Yeah, So I’m doing less. But I feel like the stuff we’re doing is much more impactful and valuable.
Lee:
There is something in that and people talk about it’s a bit of a cliche term, but you know, these mega blogs, etc. where they’re adding lots of value and giving lots of information within that. So something like that, that people are going to find much more valuable than just, you know, trying to think of something for the sake of it. I think I once created, created a I went in an old company, I created one blog post a day, every working day for for a whole month. And the quality of my content was just slowly going down and I was putting in big filler words and sentences and it just sounded rubbish. I ended up deleting the lot. It was a complete waste of time. Now, um, here’s a question and it seems pretty damn obvious. But there are. I think there are still a lot of misunderstandings with regards to what is content marketing, because you did also touch on the whole kind of micro content where you were talking about answering questions, and that in your understanding, what would be your, uh, Chris Marrs pocket sized dictionary answer to what is content marketing?
Chris Marr:
Content marketing is really, to be honest, it’s a bit of a it’s it’s missing. You’re right. It’s misunderstood. And therefore people then mis educate themselves about it and then they get they don’t get the results they’re looking for. And then they say things like content marketing doesn’t work. But I think this just this if we go back, if we go back in time, you know, marketing has always been a big part of business. It’s always been a consistent for the most successful businesses. It’s been a consistent activity for that business as well. I don’t think it should be treated any different to any other way to go to market. Um, I think content marketing is what a lot of marketers call this content marketing, but I just feel like it’s how we have to market our businesses today. I just feel like we’re in 2018. It’s social media, it’s digital, it’s search, it’s blogs, it’s videos, it’s podcasts. It’s, you know, being found online. All of that stuff is really, really important.
Chris Marr:
And we just happen to call it content marketing. I don’t I just feel like this is misunderstood and I feel like having it called content marketing actually doesn’t help it. It doesn’t help content marketing to be understood. And a lot of people out there that have never heard of it before probably think it’s just a marketers fad or this new thing they don’t need to know about. That’s not important. But I just, I truly believe once you get really, really into it and understand how it works, um, and how it grows businesses and how it integrates heavily into a sales process, you just understand that content is how we grow our businesses today. Content marketing is how we market our businesses today. It’s how we should be communicating. And I don’t think it needs to be any more complicated than that.
Lee:
Yeah. No, that’s that’s a great answer. I mean, people would normally just say it’s blogging and I have to try and say, well, it’s not necessarily just blogging, it is creating content, but via multiple mediums and also communication. I think communication is the thing that’s missing isn’t a thing that’s missing as well. People will put content out there and expect things to happen. I guess that kind of segues into another question. Then how would you tackle this question? Because I’ve heard this a few times from clients that I’ve encouraged to adopt some sort of content marketing strategy, and they’ve heard from other people who said, well, I blogged for every week for three months and nothing happened. I got no extra sales. What would you say to someone who’s kind of saying these sorts of things?
Chris Marr:
The. Yeah. So this is a common one, isn’t it? The blogged every day, every week for three months would be a great place to start. Well, the point with that, it comes back to my earlier point, is that, well, you don’t blog every you don’t blog every week for three months. You blog once a week, every week until forever. Like that’s just like so basically that’s kind of at the end of that three months saying, you know what, we’re not going to do any marketing anymore. It’s like, that doesn’t make any sense, you know? So it’s like it’s insane to think like that. I think a lot of people, the reason that they the biggest challenges I find with organisations that say that content marketing doesn’t work is that they’re not actually doing content marketing. They think they are because they’re blogging a blog. Writing a blog doesn’t mean you’re doing content marketing. What that means is that you’re creating content, but you’re not doing content marketing. So to do content marketing needs to be strategic.
Chris Marr:
It needs to be commercially driven. So it needs to be attached and in line with your business objectives and goals. It should absolutely grow your business. So it needs to be also in line with how we get customers. So how do you get customers today? How are we acquiring customers? How do we do that and how does content play a big role in that? It also needs to be, um, it also needs to be in line with and integrated into your sales process. So how do we take a stranger and turn them into someone that trusts us, that wants to buy from us, and how do we get them to buy from us for longer? How do we get them to, you know, refer us? All of that stuff. Content marketing plays a role in all of those places. So content marketing this is like the biggest, biggest sort of misunderstanding, I think is it’s like, well, we blogged for a few weeks or a few months or even a few years sometimes.
Chris Marr:
I’ve seen people that have been blogging for years that think they’re doing content marketing, but they’re not, and they can never figure out why their traffic isn’t turning into into leads, or they can never figure out why they’re not getting any traffic in the first place is because they’re not actually doing content marketing. They’re creating content, but they’re forgetting about the strategic and commercial part, which is the marketing part of that. And I think this is like, this is a major, major problem, especially when people come to us for the first time that have got themselves into this situation where they’re like, this should be like, I’ve read enough that this should be working. Why is it not working for us? And it’s just because it’s not part of their strategy. It’s like an add on tick box, sort of. Someone said we should. Google likes fresh content, so we’ve just been creating fresh content. But I think a lot of people need to realise that there’s tens of thousands of articles published every single day online.
Chris Marr:
You need to have a strategy to help you, help your content to be found by people that have never heard of you before. You need to get an ROI on that content. In other words, you need to make sure that it’s meeting your objectives. Therefore, it needs to be part of your sales process because that’s how you get customers. And if you’re a business owner or an agency owner today, you know and you’re creating content, but you’re not entirely sure or clear on how it grows your business, then why are you doing it? You know, you really have to ask yourself that question. If you’ve got you’re putting time and effort and resource and money into something, then there has to be that that question is answered, right? How does this grow our business?
Lee:
And the big, massive, obvious question to follow that, you know, if marketing is missing from the content marketing that people are doing, how do you market your content you’ve created? I don’t know, say you’re creating regularly one video a week, and you’ve also maybe got your blog post once every couple of weeks. You’ve got content, you’ve got that down. You already know how to create the content. How do you start to market that?
Chris Marr:
That’s a yeah. So this is this kind of follows on I guess from the ROI question. It’s like, well, you know, understanding ROI or return on investment from content is one thing. And then the next question would be, well, how do we increase the return on our investment. Right. How do we get more from what we’ve already got. So there’s like lots of ways to do this. But like the number one way and the number one thing that most people don’t do, it’s the biggest gap is to integrate that content into their sales process. How do you use video and blog articles to to help people move through the sales process faster. How do you get higher quality customers and inquiries through using content in the sales process? Those are like two fundamental, sort of the easiest ways to do it. To get more ROI from your content is to integrate it into the sales process. That’s like really, really fundamental that we do that. So that’s one way, the other, the other factor to consider here.
Chris Marr:
And I think this again comes back to misunderstanding content marketing. I really feel like if you have like if you go back to your earlier question, which is like, what’s the difference between essentially what’s the difference between content and content marketing? Well, content is that person that’s blogging doesn’t really have a strategy, isn’t really sure how it adds commercial value to her business. And then there’s someone else that understands content marketing. And what they understand is SEO and search engine optimisation and understanding how people search, how people seek, search, find, use information to help them make an educated buying decision. That’s a content marketer. A content market understands that content marketing needs SEO, it needs search engine optimisation. It’s a massive part and a massive a massive part of content marketing. Now, it’s not a separate discipline. It’s something that content marketers really need to understand better. So if you’re blogging or you’re, you know, you’re creating video for YouTube or whatever it might be, you’re creating content, you’re putting time and effort into that, and you don’t understand how people can find that and use that information to help them make a buying decision, then you’re missing out.
Chris Marr:
Essentially, you’re missing the marketing part of content marketing. And I feel really, really strongly about that more now than I ever have. That search engine optimisation is not a separate discipline for marketers anymore. It’s integrated. It’s just directly integrated into content.
Lee:
I see what you mean now. I think I kind of want to get a little bit further into this because you’re saying using content as part of your sales strategy, but I’m still not 100% sure what you mean there, other than yes, good SEO and perhaps sharing it on social. How can you make your content part of like it’s part of your sales strategy?
Chris Marr:
Sure. So SEO is great for discovery, right? So when someone’s never heard of you before, you want them to you want so you want people to be able to find you when you’ve never heard of, when they’ve never heard of you before, right? So they’ve never heard of your brand name. They’ve never heard of your name. They may never heard of your product or solution for the problem that they have. All they know is that they’ve got a question or several questions, and they’re going to start typing that into Google. We call that the zero moment of truth. On average, 70% of the buying decisions made online before someone contacts your business for the first time, right? So we have to capture that zero moment of truth. That’s discovery. So people have never heard of you before. They’re searching for information. They find your website, they read a bunch of pages on your website, maybe even your competitor’s website. And then at some point they’re taking some sort of journey, aren’t they?
Chris Marr:
They’re going from this awareness of a problem through to some sort of consideration into decision making stage. There’s some sort of buyer’s journey. So we have to think about that. How do we answer the right questions? How do we create the right content at the right time for people that are going through that sales journey? They’re going through some sort of process, right. That’s all it is. It’s like, what questions are they asking? At what time? How do we serve them the right content at the right time? Or how do we make it easy for them to either find the right content at the right time, or how do we send them the content at the right time? So a really simple way to think about this is some sort of email sequence. So say someone downloads your buyer’s guide, right? Say you are say you, um, make luxury summer houses for a living, right? That’s what you do as part as part of your your manufacturer. You make them all in your workshop.
Chris Marr:
And you, you you assemble and you deliver and you these high end luxury summer houses. And on your website, you’ve got a buyer’s guide, right, to help people choose the right summer house for their garden, regardless of what manufacturer you get them from, they’re now on your email list. Now you can start to send them content that helps to take them through the buyer’s journey. So some, you know, some of the first questions might be, well, we need to understand the price of a summer house. Like what determines the factors around pricing. So you send them an article or maybe even a video or two that helps them understand pricing. And they’re like, oh, that’s under pricing. And the next thing might be, well, what do we do? How do we maintain it? How much does it cost to maintain a summer house? Well, that’s an article and a blog. And so what you’re doing is you’re taking them through the sales process, this process proactively taking them by the hand essentially through the sales process, obviously, so that they will buy they’ll buy from us.
Chris Marr:
That’s what we really want. But we also want them just to feel confident to make a buying decision as well. So I think there’s ways that we can proactively do that, either on our websites by making sure our content is organised well, but we can also really do it very easily through things like automation sequences and email sequences as well.
Lee:
That’s good. I really like that. So it’s it’s creating the content that people need and need and want to consume that allows you to take them on specific journeys, and also serving that content at the times that they need it.
Chris Marr:
Yeah. So it’s a good point you’ve made there because I think you brought up I was going to say this was that when it when, for example, when I’m creating content now and, and our students are creating content as well. It isn’t about isn’t necessarily about how many people have read that piece of content. We’re not looking for 500,000 views or 500,000 people watching our videos or, you know, we’re not looking for that. What we’re looking for is we’re creating content that helps someone move through the sales process, which is not the same as what other people really think content marketing is. So we’re we’ve went like, we’re really peeling back the layers and we’re digging right into the, the sort of core of what content marketing is. And content marketing is about sales. It’s not about it’s not about overtly selling, because that’s not content marketing, is it? Content marketing is about education and helping. But as we integrate it into our sales process, what we’re doing is we’re we are predicting through and you could predict quite a high percentage of accuracy, what questions people ask at what stage of the journey, especially if you’ve been in business for a while, because you would have had emails, you would have had inquiries, you would have had sales conversations, sales objections.
Chris Marr:
And you have to think to yourself, well, if they’re asking these questions of me and in And private. You know, in private conversations, there’s a good chance that they’re typing these questions into Google as well. Ah, we found for those questions can are people getting information from us about that online on our website? That’s the kind of questions I would be asking. Um, business owners, I.
Lee:
Often tell people that the one of the best sources is your inbox of content. What are clients asking you? What are the briefs that you’re receiving and the problems that they have? And how can you start to answer those?
Chris Marr:
Yeah. Um, your your scent box. Yeah, definitely. Check your scent box for every question you’ve ever answered for a sales inquiry.
Lee:
Absolutely, absolutely. You mentioned earlier, earlier ROI. So return on investment. That’s something as well. That kind of puzzles my brain a little bit. I’m pretty sure it puzzles a lot of people’s brain. Obviously, you’ve said that one of the problems that we’ve got is, is that we’re just putting content out there. We’re not really doing it strategically. Um, how can we start to measure the ROI on content? I think this is going to have something to do with the fact that you’re saying we need to be creating content that actually becomes a part of the sales process and brings people in, but how can you at least track or measure the amount of leads slash conversions that you’re getting from the different types of content that you are putting out there?
Chris Marr:
Sure. So the biggest problem that people typically have with with return on investment is that they’re not measuring the right metrics for the stage that they’re at. So for example, let’s say you have been blogging, let’s say go back to your earlier scenario where maybe it’s a client you’ve encouraged to blog and they do it for three months, but they’re like measuring their activity around customer acquisition. And clearly, I mean, you buy you will all know this, right? Even people listening are like, well, it’s too early to measure customer acquisition from your three months of blogging, right? That’s just unrealistic. People don’t search, find, read phone, then buy from, you know, a dozen articles that you’ve read. It’d be nice. It doesn’t work like that, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not working either, though. So we have to look at stage one. Well, what stage one. What are the metrics that we should be measuring at the first step? Well we’re going to do some blogs.
Chris Marr:
How do we know the blogs are working? How do we know people care about our content? So we’re looking at traffic. We’re looking at shares. We’re looking at conversations. We’re looking at engagement. Right. That’s the stuff we want to see early on in the journey, because there’s nothing worse than doing all of that and then going, you know what? This didn’t work. And the only reason you think it doesn’t work is because you’re measuring the wrong metrics at the wrong time. And I think that’s true for anything that we do in life, for example, going to the gym and getting healthy, you don’t go to the gym for a week and on and on. At the end of the week, look in the mirror and you say, you know what? This gym thing isn’t working because my body hasn’t changed. You know, you’re looking at six months, you’re looking at 12 months for significant change, right? It’s that compounding of frustrating.
Lee:
That, isn’t it, though I really want it to be that quick like a week.
Chris Marr:
Nothing, nothing worth doing in our lives is going to change it like dramatically. Yeah. And in a short space of time. And I think we all need to kind of and this is one of the other myths. So a lot of people say content marketing takes a long time. It doesn’t. You can get really quick results if you’re measuring the right metrics. So, for example, we’ve seen people blog continually for three months, for example, once a week for three months, and they’ve exploded their website traffic by ten. Right? Ten x right. That’s an amazing first signal that this is going to work really well if we continue to improve and, and, uh, you know, get more strategic about our content. But that’s a good first signal, right? If you go, you know what? Our, um, our web traffic ten x in the last three months. That’s amazing. Right now we need to work on how do we turn that traffic into leads. Right. So now we’re looking at buyer’s guides or downloadable content that we can turn these people into some kind of lead and then into a prospect through some kind of email sequences.
Chris Marr:
Right. Then we start to look at things like, well, how much of our traffic is downloading our stuff? And then we’re looking at the conversion from lead into prospects. So we’re looking at email, open rates, replies, appointment bookings, you know, all of that stuff. It’s just you got to be measuring the right numbers, the right metrics at the right stage of the journey that you’re on. You can’t go from three months of blogging to customer acquisition just like that. It needs to be part of the sales process, as we said before. What’s step one of the sales process? How do we know that that’s successful and it’s working well? Here’s the numbers that we measure at this stage. Stage two the numbers we measure at this stage. Stage three so on and so forth to conversion, to repeat business, to referrals to the lifetime value of a customer and so on and so forth.
Lee:
Man, that was good.
Chris Marr:
This has just got to break it down. I’m like, that’s my the way my brain works is logic. So it’s like I’ve got to break it all down. We can’t we cannot cross our fingers and say, you know, let’s, you know, let’s just blog and see what happens. I think that’s dangerous. I think we do need to kind of think, well, if we’re going to do this first, and I’ve said if someone was like listening to this and like, I’m going to do it for three months, I’d say do it for six, actually. So let’s, you know, go ahead and do it for six, but do it consistently for six months. Make sure you’ve got the you what you’re doing is going to be sustainable for six months as well. Unlike, you know what you said earlier, Lee, about you blogging every day for 30 days is not sustainable in terms of quality, etc. so what we want to do is something that actually we can, we can test and measure.
Chris Marr:
That’s like it’s a good measurement, right? So six months can consistently would give you some idea of what you can expect going forward. But what we find as well is that people, you know, they blog like say for example, a blog consistently for a year. Let’s say they get um, 20,000 extra page views. Sake of argument, right? Or 50,000 extra page views. What might happen in year two from consistently blogging is that they get 500,000 page views in the second year. It’s not double because they did twice as much. It’s actually multiplied by 5 or 10 because all the old content doesn’t disappear. It stays there, it continues to drive traffic, and people stay on your website. So if you’ve got ten pages on your website, you can’t expect people to read 20, right? So you get 20 pages on your website, you get 40 pages on your website, you get 100 pages of pages on your website, you get 200 pages on your website. And all of a sudden you’ve got people staying for longer, reading more, coming back more often, sharing your content, downloading all your stuff, you know.
Chris Marr:
So you’ve got you have got to see that the best results are going to come from the long term commitment to this. But it isn’t all you aren’t. You don’t have to wait that long to get some results either.
Lee:
No, that’s really good, mate. Now, one other kind of objection that I see a lot of the time when it comes to content marketing, is that age old imposter syndrome feeling like you don’t know enough or, you know, who am I to be putting content out there and telling people stuff? Can you just, uh, blast that myth out of the water for us?
Chris Marr:
You’re setting them up, and I’m knocking them down here, are we right? So this is a good one.
Lee:
This is an encourager. This is what I mean. I mean, a lot of people have this, you know, I’m not clever enough. I can’t be putting who am I and all that stuff. Or look at him over there. He’s got loads of followers. Just give us some encouragement to help those people who are dragging their heels.
Chris Marr:
So the whole comparison thing you need to that needs to be dropped immediately. Never praise someone for something that can be taken away from them. Right. This is a really big, big lesson that I’ve learned over the years as well. Is that comparing yourself against your competitors, trying to do what they’re doing, trying to almost appease your competitors as well, that your competitors don’t pay your bills. Right? So why be informed by them? Why do anything remotely to that that is affected by them? Don’t do that. I think we need to lead rather than be led as well. So this this isn’t about even being famous or trying to be a thought leader or anything like that. Just, you know, get into this mode where you want to. And I think, I think every single one of us, the people that are listening, will be thinking, you know, they’ve got a great product or a great service and they want to make a better impact on the world. Content marketing is a solution to that.
Chris Marr:
You want to reach more people. You want to have a greater impact. You want to help more people with the thing that you do, then content marketing is certainly one way to do that. So thinking to yourself, well, how could we be the most helpful company or the most helpful brand or the most helpful person in our industry? Content is the solution to that. I think that people do need to understand that their ideas and their words, they do matter. They matter a lot more than you think they do. And a lot of the people that have trusted in you already, that have bought from you, that’s like one major signal of trust that they’ve bought from you. They do want to hear from you. They do want to know what you’ve got to say on a specific subject or topic. They want to hear. They want you to use your expertise and knowledge to help them too. So as long as it doesn’t become egotistical and it does become arrogant, you know, there’s nothing worse than reading someone’s content that has a chip on their shoulder, right?
Chris Marr:
That doesn’t inspire people to realise that you’ve got a small audience out there of people that do want to hear from you. It’s not about having hundreds of thousands of followers or whatever. Who cares about that? It’s like, how can we run a sustainable, successful business and also use this channel, these channels and this methodology, whatever you want to call it, this content marketing to reach more people so we can have a greater impact on the world. That’s that’s really where we want where we want to get to. You’ve got knowledge, you’ve got expertise, you’ve got an opinion. You’ve got something to say. Say it.
Lee:
I like it nice and succinct at the end. Have you got something to say? Say it. Although it does sound like my dad telling me off when I’m mumbling under my breath. And then he’s like, you got something to say?
Chris Marr:
You know, I think the other the other factors as well, though, is that content marketing goes beyond traffic, leads sales. It goes way beyond this. I’ve seen I see this in I’ve been doing this for, I’ve been teaching it properly, you know, for five years or so. And this is what gets me so excited about content marketing is that yes, we talk about sales and leads and traffic and all. That’s great stuff for building businesses. But I’ll tell you something as well, is that once you’ve started, you’ve been doing blogs or video or at least putting content into the world for a period of time and some sort of rich source of content. So videos, blogs, podcasts, something chunky, not social media specifically you. You find that your confidence is your confidence increases. So you start to you start to know more about your topic, right? And you start to be confident. Like for example, this is you could everybody that’s listening could probably clearly hear that these are not the first times that I’ve answered these questions right.
Chris Marr:
I’ve written blogs, I’ve talked about it. This is stuff that I love talking about, but it’s so, um, what’s the word? It’s just it flows, right? I know my topic really, really well. And that’s important, right? It increases your confidence. There’s nothing better than when you’re a consumer to to see confidence in the person you’re buying from. Not arrogance or ego, but confidence. But there’s also nothing worse than when you want to buy from someone and they don’t. They’re not. They don’t come across confident. It makes it feel weak. And you’re like, actually, I don’t really want to buy from this person anymore. So confidence is amazing from, uh, helps your prospects and your customers to believe in you. Right. But confidence also shown in some sort of consistent activity as well. It shows that you believe in what you do as well. And it shows that you have a determination to achieve. And people don’t want to buy from people that they think are going to disappear in six months.
Chris Marr:
It just shows that you are committed, that you’re confident, that you’re determined. And I think if we were to go beyond just this, the sales strategies and business growth strategies, I think content marketing really brings it brings in this other element of trust that is that nobody talks about and it’s missing. I think, um, in the discussions we have about content marketing. Yeah, it’s.
Lee:
Definitely, definitely a good trust builder. And what I found as well with creating content is, is that I’ve actually become more confident over time. And I’ve actually learned as I create the content, I’ve learned not necessarily learned new things. I’ve actually learned what I have deep down inside of my brain because we don’t realise what we know already. We’ve. We’re constantly doing stuff all the time and putting, you know, it’s all become second nature and you don’t realise what you already know until you start putting the content out there and still until you start looking at your scent, like you said, and seeing what questions you’ve answered and then unpacking those in a blog post. You’re a speaker. I’ve done speaking as well. Sometimes when I’m stood up, a new idea will come to me and I’ll just follow that through. And it’ll all come from experiences that I’ve had and I’m like, oh crap, where did that come from? I didn’t realise, I knew that this is amazing, and each time you do that, it just boosts your confidence and builds you up.
Lee:
Now you’ve got something exciting coming in a couple of months time. It’s CMA live. Tell us all about that and how can we get some more information.
Chris Marr:
Yeah, so we’re really kind of in the thick of it now. It’s uh, I don’t even know is it’s seven weeks away or something like that now. So it’s coming up close. Kind of sneaked up on us a little bit. We had, like I said, I had we had a baby six weeks ago. So, you know, we’ve been dealing with that. And I think business is definitely we’ve dialled back dialled back on business for a good couple of months, and now it’s back into CMA live mode. So we’ve just published the schedule. We’ve just booked. We’ve booked all of our speakers. Um, it’s ready to go. It’s amazing. So it’s a content marketing event. Um, but we talk about more than content marketing. I think this is clear in the podcast. It’s really about business growth and personal development, which leads to professional development as well. So we do all of that. We’ve got Chris Brogan, Anne Handley, Brian Fanzo speaking this year. We’ve had other similar speakers over the years as well.
Chris Marr:
Mostly our keynotes are sort of international keynote speakers. Um, and we have a whole bunch of other speakers as well, from entrepreneurs to people who have been doing content marketing, like in the trenches as well. So we’re not you know, one of the things with, with CMA live was making sure that we didn’t lose sight of what it was all about, which is if you’re I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like this, when you’re in the audience and you’re looking up at the stage and you’re thinking, this is just way too detached from me, I’m over here running a business. This person’s like some sort of guru who’s been doing it for, like, you know, it’s been in fact hasn’t done it for 15 years and it’s too detached. We want to make sure that we keep that really close. Right. So we’ve got people on the stage that are still practitioners and can really relate to the people on the stages, which is really, really important for us. So we we booked speakers that we feel align with that philosophy.
Chris Marr:
And like Anne Hanley, for example, you know, she’s one of the best marketers that I know. I’ve learned a lot from her. She’s a great mentor. Chris Brogan is still trying stuff, you know, and he’s one of the first people that wrote about content marketing and trust agents. And, um, and Brian Fanzo was like, I’ve never met anyone that he doesn’t sleep. Know exactly. He’s like the, uh, practitioners practitioner. You know, he’s on it constantly trying new things. So we want to that’s.
Lee:
On multiple social media accounts as well. It’s not just Twitter, but it’s he’s owning everything. He even owned periscope when it was a thing. Exactly. He’s he’s absolutely.
Chris Marr:
Crazy. So we want to, you know, bring people the whole concept here is that it’s in Scotland, right? There’s nothing like this in Scotland. We want to put Scotland on the map and make it, you know, make people realise that we’re over here and we’re trying to do something special and obviously want to provide value for people as well, so they don’t have to travel to America for these types of events. So it’s a two day event. It’s on the sixth and 7th of June 2018. This will be our fifth annual event. It’s a kind of it’s kind of like our flagship event. I would say it’s about £500 for a ticket. The prices will be on the website CMA live. Co.Uk. We still have some tickets available. If you’re listening to this before the sixth and 7th of June. If not, the CMA live 2019 will also be published and ready to go as well. So if you want to pre-book tickets for the following year, you can do that as well.
Chris Marr:
But go ahead and snoop around, check us out, see what we’re up to.
Lee:
Awesome. That’s CMA live.co.uk. Chris, thank you so, so much for all of your time and for educating us about the bit that most of us are missing in content marketing, which is the latter half of that phrase marketing. And it seems totally obvious. But, you know, I was trying to allude to it right at the very beginning. People are saying, I created all these blogs for three months and nothing has happened. But that’s because we’re, you know, we’re often and I admitted to this just the other day, I was in a meeting and people were saying, well, actually, no, I was being interviewed on a podcast. That was it. And someone had asked me, you know, what’s what’s your biggest digital marketing mistake? And I said, well, it’s been the, um, creating tonnes and tonnes of content, but not actually marketing that. So with these podcasts, I get a bit lazy, and sometimes I’ll go through a few weeks where I’ve got my strategy in place and we’re we’re sharing it in the places that it needs to be shared.
Lee:
And we’re creating very specific content because we want to attract certain types of people. And then it kind of all falls apart and I get lazy and that. So that’s definitely something I struggle with very often. It’s not, you know, not being, uh, not thinking things through before the fact and also not putting in the, you know, the necessary sharing, automation and all that sort of stuff that could go along.
Chris Marr:
That’s really tough. I think this is good to kind of be honest about that, that I struggle with that as well. And it’s hard when you’ve got so many great ideas and things you want to do. But I think the further you go down this road, you realise just how important it is to your audience that you’re committed to at least one thing. They can see that you’re turning up consistently in a place. That’s the podcast every time.
Lee:
Yeah, I bloody love it. Yeah, well, there you go.
Chris Marr:
That’s it. And I think was that my first where.
Lee:
Oh no. I’m gonna have to put an E on this or beep that out.
Chris Marr:
I was careful not to swear I was careful.
Lee:
I was very, very kind of you, especially being Scottish. Yeah.
Chris Marr:
Yeah. We’ve got a stereotype to live up to, you know.
Lee:
Yeah, exactly. And he doesn’t have red hair either, by the way.
Chris Marr:
I don’t wear a kilt and I don’t play the bagpipes.
Lee:
But you do play the guitar.
Chris Marr:
I do play the guitar. Yes. Which causes it gets.
Lee:
Yeah, yeah. Proper geek.
Chris Marr:
I like it.
Lee:
Guys. Remember that is CMA live.co.uk. And also you have another website that is the Content Marketing Academy isn’t it.
Chris Marr:
Yeah. The content Marketing academy okay.
Lee:
Memory.
Chris Marr:
There you go. Yeah. Blogs, podcasts. That’s like our main our main website. CMA live websites just for the event. But yeah, if you want to check out, um, what I’m up to and what we’re doing and things like that, then, you know, you can always follow me on Twitter at Chris Ma 101 as well. That’s kind of my main platform or Instagram and just get involved, pick my brain, ask me questions. Whatever door is always open, and.
Lee:
If you want to ask him a question, there is this little question box that pops up on his website as well. So things like, how do you get your beard looking so good? Maybe not. Don’t don’t spam the poor guy. Be nice. All right, Chris, thanks so much for your time. Have a great day.
Chris Marr:
You’re welcome. So good to be here. Thanks.
Lee:
Cheers. And that wraps up today’s episode. Shout out to Larissa, who absolutely loved editing this podcast simply because she absolutely adored Chris’s Scottish accent. And I’m pretty sure there are a lot of you around the world that maybe didn’t even listen to what he was saying, but just enjoyed the musical tones of that gorgeous Scottish accent. So don’t forget to follow Chris. Don’t forget to connect with him. And if you are not in our Facebook group, head on over to agencytrailblazer.com/group, where we are full of crazy people sharing gifts but more importantly, supporting each other in agency life. It’s a great place to be, so I really recommend that you come and meet us all inside of there. We will see you in the next episode.
