EP - 015

Get Started with Content Marketing

With Guest John Egan

Content marketing isn't just about sales; it's about building lasting relationships with your audience through trust and authenticity.

The How to Sell More Podcast

September 21, 2023

In this enlightening episode of "How To Sell More," we dive deep into the power of content marketing.

Our guest, John Egan, shares that content is not just about selling—it's about building trust.

This episode brings you insights on:

How trust and authenticity can boost your sales.
The importance of planning and strategy in content marketing.
Why content marketing is a long-term game worth playing.

Join us to unpack these golden nuggets!

Meet John Egan: A former journalist turned content marketing guru, John has been at the helm of successful startups and runs Jawhawk Media. With accolades from renowned institutions and a client list including Forbes and Experian, he's a voice worth listening to. Dive in with us!

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Links to This Episode

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Key Takeaways

Content Marketing Builds Trust and Authenticity - John emphasized that in today's saturated market, customers are more discerning than ever. They look for brands they can trust. Consistent and high-quality content establishes a brand as reliable and trustworthy.
Strategic Planning is Crucial for Effective Content Marketing - John highlighted the importance of knowing your target demographic inside and out. By understanding their pain points and desires, content can be tailored to be more impactful and relevant.
Content Marketing is a Long-Term Investment - John mentioned that businesses shouldn't expect immediate ROI from content marketing. Like any other relationship, trust with the audience builds over time.

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Top 3 Reasons to Listen

Industry Expertise: Gain insights directly from John Egan, a seasoned content creator and strategist with a proven track record in the industry.

Authenticity and Trust: Learn why content marketing is essential in building genuine relationships with consumers, going beyond just making sales.

Practical Tips: Receive actionable advice and strategies that can be immediately implemented in your content marketing efforts.

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Follow John Egan on Social

Get John's bool: https://www.amazon.com/Stripped-Down-Guide-Content-Marketing-Beginners/dp/B0BHJJ2V63

Website: https://johnegan.net/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjegan

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More About Today's Guest, John Egan

Your Expert on All Things Content Marketing

For over two decades, John Egan has been an influential figure in the content marketing realm, wearing hats as a writer, editor, and chief strategist. His exceptional work has garnered attention from some of the industry's top brands, including Forbes, TheBalance.com, and Experian.

Prior to his ascent in content marketing, Egan honed his skills in journalism. He dedicated several years as a reporter and editor for numerous newspapers, with a notable seven-year tenure as the editor and managing editor at the Austin Business Journal. This journalistic foundation served as the perfect stepping stone for Egan, propelling him into content marketing where he has since established himself as a leading expert, consistently crafting top-performing content.

In recent years, John has channeled his vast expertise into enlightening others. His most significant contribution in this regard is his book, which stands as a testament to his vast knowledge and passion for the field.

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A Transcription of The Talk

Mark Drager: So John, I mean, you wrote the book, "The Stripped-Down Guide to Content Marketing." So I'm so excited to have you here because content marketing covers a massive array of different tactics and different strategies. I mean, it's like, it's its own thing. So help us understand, in your opinion, right now, what is the most effective way we should be looking at content marketing for our businesses?

John Egan: Well, I always tell people, you really need to look at where your audience or potential audience gets their information or gets their entertainment. Whatever platforms they're on, that's where you need to be. So if you've got heavy users of YouTube, then you need to be on YouTube. If you think that your content would resonate with people who love newsletters that come in the email, then go for that. The same method, the same kind of content is not going to work for every single business or organization.

Mark Drager: You mentioned that going where the people are for entertainment. But let's say I'm, you know, I'm a B2B business, or maybe a service, or I'm a product that's not quite so B2C focused. And so if my customers are on YouTube for entertainment, do they want my corporate message? I mean, are they looking for that?

John Egan: Well, by entertainment, I mean more like being amused by something, not necessarily like, I want to watch a cat video. Although if you're selling cat food, that might be a great place to start. If you're not, then cat videos might not make much sense. So it really depends on who your audience is. If it's a B2B audience, then they're probably going to be more interested in how they can make more revenue, how they can improve their processes, things like that, that can move their business forward.

Mark Drager: You have this framework that really helps break down to make sure that your content is working as hard as you do. To help ensure that your content is generating leads for you, that you're able to build larger audiences and grow your audience. And then ultimately, that this is all going to lead to sales that help your bottom line. Can you break down for us the best way we should be approaching content marketing in our businesses? Because I think most of the listeners know about it, most of the listeners understand that there are blogs, and there are videos, and there's social media, and there are all these different things. But in my experience, unless you have a really great team and you're really focused on execution, it's all these sporadic things. You're never quite connecting the dots in such a way where you can actually go, "Ah, this is how I'm making money from my efforts."

John Egan: There is some trial and error. And that's where the sporadic nature might come in. But I would say that, you know, you really need to figure out what works for you and what works for your audience. So if blog posts resonate with your audience and that's something that you're easily able to do on a regular basis with a regular cadence, then go with that, you know, because it can be effective. Now, I will say that, you know, whether it's videos or audio or blog posts, whatever it may be, you really need to be consistent with it and not just do it haphazardly. You need to be committed to it. It's kind of like a marriage, you know, you need to commit to each other. So you need to commit to whatever that kind of content is. A lot of people get great traction from video these days, whether it's short form on something like TikTok or longer form on YouTube. But maybe you don't have the resources, or maybe that's just not where your audience goes to get their information. Now, if you're doing more how-to kind of stuff, that does make more sense on YouTube, especially if you're able to show something and demonstrate it, rather than just talking about it.

Mark Drager: Okay, so I hear consistency, consistency, consistency all the time. And I mean, I get it, I understand it. And yet, I know that when I put stuff out, for example, no one's waiting. No one's like, oh, it's Tuesday. And on Tuesday, Mark drops, you know, this blog post or, or, you know, if you're doing it for SEO reasons, and you're putting out a few posts per day, or you're following the thing that's like, "post on LinkedIn four times a week," like, like, I know that no one out there is like, they wake up in the morning, they get out of bed, they look at their phone, and they're like, "Today's the day that someone is dropping a piece of content." So help me understand, because it just doesn't feel that important to me, consistency. Why is consistency so important?

John Egan: Well, if you're not doing it, then you're not getting any traction, okay?

Mark Drager: So, so it's like, something is better than nothing is what you're saying.

John Egan: I mean, you need to be in the game. You know, it's like, if you're playing football and you're not on the field, then you can't score a touchdown. I mean, it's just, you know, it's basic math in terms of, you know, one plus one equals two. If you've got content and you've got an audience for it, then they can consume your content. So, it doesn't have to be rigid. You know, if you miss a week, I don't think people are going to be crying about it. But it's sort of like in the old days when you had your newspaper delivered to your house.

Mark Drager: I remember. I remember when I started my job, I actually got a newspaper delivered to my house because when I was like 22 or 23, I thought this is what grown-ups do. And then I found out, man, I'm just never reading these things.

John Egan: But if you didn't get it back in the day, you were pissed off because you didn't get it. And you were calling the newspaper saying, "Where's my newspaper?" Now, times have changed, obviously. And you can get information from all sorts of sources. But you never know when somebody might be missing your content. And there are certain emails I get every day from certain news sources and certain people that I make sure I try to open. There aren't very many. But you could be in that special category. If you do your content right, do it well, and do it consistently.

Mark Drager: And so how should we be thinking of content? Because I get overwhelmed sometimes when I go, you mentioned tip number one is to make sure that we understand which platforms our audiences are on and the types of content they like to consume. Okay, so that's step one, step two, we've got to be consistent, and we've got to play to the areas of our greatest strengths. So if you're strong on video, or you're strong on talking—I talk a lot, you know, I'm really comfortable this way—if you're better at writing, or maybe photography, or memes, or you're funny, or whatever, maybe you're gonna play to those strengths. I can think of content in terms of, like, okay, by platform breakdown, and then I've got to create all these different things. Or I could just think of content, like, I just want to make stuff that people would like to read. Or there's SEO, or there's gated stuff, which I'm hoping we can talk a little bit about. There are all these different ways to think about it. How do you prescribe that we approach this if either we're not doing it, or it's just really kind of scattershot right now?

John Egan: You need to have a plan. And it doesn't need to be set in stone. You need to figure out, okay, we're going to aim for two blog posts a week or, you know, whatever kind of content you're talking about. Map it out and figure out, now, what kinds of questions, what kinds of concerns do people in our audience have? I write a lot of content for clients about how to get a mortgage, or how to get a car loan, or, you know, things like that. So you're answering questions, you're addressing a need they have. And you want to make sure you're in there somewhere. Now, you know, it can be a little more soft, and maybe you're enlightening people. And it's more thought leadership rather than answering a question. But you need to give them something to grab onto and say, "This is worth my time to consume." There are times when you really do need to do trial and error. It's like, okay, blog posts, they're working great. Video not so much. Then why keep doing video? Why keep spinning your wheels? Don't do video if that's not where you're getting traction, or maybe try a different format. But don't just, you know, one of the things I talk about in my book is failing quickly. And that's something I learned from one of the startups I worked at. You don't just have to keep beating yourself over the head, trying to figure out, "Why isn't this working? Why isn't this working?" At some point, you just got to let go.

Mark Drager: So you mentioned blog posts working, YouTube not working. I know that each channel and each type of content is going to have its own kind of key performance indicator, that the measurement you're going to use to make sure it's working or not. What are you looking at to know whether a blog post is working or not? I mean, I start there because I write a lot of blog posts. And I've been in marketing for over 15 years. And I consider myself a pretty smart person. But still, sometimes I look at it and I'm like, I don't know, am I looking at average page time? Am I looking at bounce rate? Like there's a lot of numbers and the more you get into it, the more you're like, I don't know if I know what I'm doing.

John Egan: Well, I try to let the SEO people do the minutia as far as looking at those statistics. And I try to focus more on, are people sharing it? Are people discussing it? Are people giving feedback about it? There are all sorts of ways to measure that without being really hardcore numeric about it. Now, it is important to look at how much traffic we're getting. Are people spending time on our website? Are they sharing it? All sorts of things that you can measure very, very well with Google Analytics and a whole bunch of other tools. But that's not the only way you should look at it. And sometimes you just don't know when a blog post or a video or a meme or something is going to take off. That's again, why you should be trying and being consistent so that you can score those wins, and you can figure out what works well, and rinse and repeat that, rather than being like, "Okay, well, that was great. What do we need to do now?" Well, once you look at what you just did that did really well, let's see if you can replicate that in some other form.

Mark Drager: It's great to me that you actually went to engagement because I think when we're starting off or we're trying to fix things, often we can get lost in the numbers. And if you don't have a great SEO team, or if you don't have someone who has set up all of the really weird filtering and details that GA (Google Analytics) can have and all of these other things—that's Google Analytics—then sometimes you can just look at numbers and you don't know how to read it. So engagement's interesting to me. Now, if you're in a lower engagement field or industry or something, and you get like four comments on something, and then you do something else, and you get zero comments, is that enough of an indicator to you, like, "Hey, this is pretty good because it got something?"

John Egan: If you're in a niche market, you may not have a gigantic pool of people. I was just on a plane the other day and somebody had a bag about a blood disorders conference. Well, that's a very small pool of people who are interested in going to a conference about blood disorders. But if you're capturing a healthy percentage of the people who might be interested in that conference, then you've done your job. It doesn't necessarily have to be, "Oh, we got 1000 shares on that." If you get 50, that may be good enough as a percentage of your total pool of people.

Mark Drager: Now, the person who's organizing and leading the blood disorder conference, I just imagine this, that, you know, there are themes and there's all this stuff, but I can infer that it's probably a health professional. They're in the health industry or what have you. Now, they're probably super passionate about this. And if I were an entrepreneur in this space, I would go, like, it's not enough that the people in our industry are coming to our blood disorder conference. Like, I need everyone to know about this. I need Middle America to know about it, and I need all of these people to know about it. We get so caught up, I guess, in our passion and evangelizing what we want to talk about. Is it realistic that content marketing can help us take this? Let's use this example of the blood disorder conference. Can it take it far and wide? Or is it always better to go, like, listen, it's such a niche thing. It's such a small population. Let's just go as deep as we can within our niche as possible, as opposed to trying to now take on, like, the other things that are health-related when this is such a specific topic?

John Egan: Why would you want to go to all those other people? Because I want to win? What are they going to get out of it? Are they going to come to the conference? Are they going to talk about what you're doing? Probably not. I asked one of the people who attended this conference. I said, "It sounds like a lot of fun," being sarcastic. And he goes, "Actually..." or actually, it was a woman I talked to who also had been at the conference that basically said the same thing, that it was a really good community that was a strong community to be a part of. That's what you need to look for. You need to tap into that passion, you need to figure out who your community is. And you don't need to go outside your community. It's like if a news website in St. Louis tried to cater to people in Chicago. That's a mismatch. When you put it that way, it's actually so clear. Don't focus on Chicago, focus on St. Louis, because that's what your market is. Like that, you don't have to be everything to everybody.

Mark Drager: The reason I bring up these questions is that, in my experience as an agency owner, and I spend a lot of time working with business owners and different groups, we keep bumping into the same thing. Everybody wants to take over the world. And what would you say? Like, hey, if you're not in Chicago, why are you focused on the Chicago market? It makes total sense. You know, I can recall an entrepreneur who wanted to work with us once, who had come up with a whole toy set. And they named each character of the toy set after a different chronic ailment. And I said, "Oh, unless if you're going after... Because we have to target parents to buy the toys. And so you need the parents to buy into it, and they've got to buy it for their kids. And then their kids have to be into it. So really, you're going after parents who are really into this whole thing." It's so niche. They're like, "I don't think so." And I won't name the toy, but it had to do with cholesterol. So imagine a girl doll where the first name starts with something that would then work with cholesterol, like, and this doll and I'm like, "I'm just not sure what parents would want to go to the store in between all the different things they can buy, they're going to purposefully buy this doll named after this thing, so their kid will play with it. So they can normalize the fact that cholesterol is something." I'm like, "It's just too niche. I don't think anyone will do that." And they got so offended. They got so offended with me because I said, "Go so deep, go so deep with the health groups where some people will, but don't try to get the person in like, you know, Cincinnati who's never thought about health before, whatever. I'm being general now, but, you know, like, don't go after the group who's never thought about health and hope that somehow because it's a toy, you're gonna win."

John Egan: Yeah, you can go too broad. That can get you into trouble because you really need to keep your eyes on the prize. And that is your community, your audience. You know, I worked in PR and I would invariably have somebody say, "Oh, we want to get in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And it's like, whoa, wait a minute. Why can't we just focus on something that's winnable first? That's kind of like the grand prize. But if we get coverage in, let's say, your market is Texas, if you get in all the business journals in Texas, that's a huge win. And you don't necessarily need the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, and you may get buried in all the other coverage they have, whereas you might get more zeroed-in, better coverage from that more localized news outlet.

Mark Drager: Such good advice. Now, before we jumped on the recording, you were talking about gated content. Now, I mean, I've known about this, and we've done this with clients for years and years. So it's nothing new, but it still seems like something that people struggle with. So how can we leverage gated content? What is this? But how can we leverage it in such a way to generate leads for our businesses?

John Egan: I think one of the important things to remember about gated content is you need to provide something of value. I download a lot of gated content, and usually, I'm looking for data and insights. If you have proprietary data and insights that aren't secretive, that aren't going to get you in trouble, and your competitors gotta know, oh, that's what they're doing. You've got gold, there's gold there that you can share. As long as it's presented in an attractive, easy to understand format, then you've got a winner there. So you post it on your website, or LinkedIn or wherever, and then somebody downloads it. But in order to download it, they must provide their name, their email, address, their title, their company, maybe their phone number, and then you've got some leads that you've generated. It's really hard sometimes and content marketing to attach leads to the content. Gated contents are a great way to be able to attach those to. It's even harder to attach the revenue to the content because you can't always say Apples to Apples like, well, we got this amount of revenue from this piece of content, it doesn't work that way. You really need to look at your brand, reach your brand authority, your domain authority on your website. Are you getting more traction, more subscribers, more members, whatever it may be on a platform or your newsletter, something like that. If you see things going in the right direction, you're doing the right thing.

Mark Drager: That's such a good point. You know, we have a client who is in a really niche industry, and it's in the retail sector, really, really niche. And so I have to stay up to date on what's happening within retail, but not just retail, retail operations. Not just retail operations, retail operations, and environment design and merchandising. I kind of stay up to date with this stuff. But I'm often downloading these like, you know, the future of retail, the future of frictionless retail 2023 trends, you know, what's happening with the technology and all this stuff that my client doesn't touch. And that frankly, I don't need to know, but, but it's important that I know. And what I find is, large organizations are often putting out these types of pieces, these white papers, these downloads, these industry reports, they're really dense, they're really boring, and in my opinion, not very well done. And yet, smaller businesses don't do any of this stuff. And I think it's because the large organizations hire like a market research firm and conduct their research and do all of this stuff. But the opportunity I see for all of us is just to become curators, you know, if you go to an art gallery, often the person who's in charge of the art gallery is not making the art. They're curating the art. And if you come to a really great publication, or even this podcast, right, I'm interviewing all of you to try and pick your brains for stuff, but I am curating the guests. And I am curating the topic, but it's not my work. I'm stealing all of your work, John Egan. So I always wonder why smaller and medium-sized businesses. And even some larger businesses don't spend more time just collecting third-party data or other people's stuff or things that they see or, you know, they come up with a new process, that's a checklist where they found a way to do it in-house simpler and like there's all these things that we just do. And then we don't ever share, we don't ever package we don't ever put out there and they're super high value. And then even if we did this, more people would just give us their email address, they would give us their name, we could call them up or email them. And then on top of that, we want to get really advanced, we could drop them in a remarketing campaign. And then because we know that they've already engaged with us, we can then start to remarket with them to give them more things into more offers, and just give them more and more and more. Why do you think people aren't doing this?

John Egan: Part of it is fear of the unknown, fear of not performing well, or doing well. And resources? I mean, if you're talking about small to midsize businesses, the types of reports that I often download, are much like what you were talking about, like Deloitte and McKinsey, and, you know, big huge consulting companies or big National Association of Realtors, for instance, puts out a lot of data. But you can still do that, especially if you're in a niche market. And one of the best things I think you can do is be a storehouse of data. And you were mentioning this too about curated content, putting together data about stuff that matters to your industry. And, you know, for instance, it could be like 28 cool facts about coffee and you are a coffee distributor. You may get a lot of traction out of that, because nobody else is doing it quite like that. Or maybe, you know, I worked in a self-storage marketplace, a startup, and we did a round of self-storage statistics. And eventually, major media outlets were citing our data because they didn't want to find it themselves. So they would say bla bla, bla, bla bla, according to the name of the company. And that was great for us. Because usually, we got to link back to our content, we got more traffic, we looked good. It gave us more brand authority, it gave us clout. And those are some of the things you want with your content, you want to be able to build stature.

Mark Drager: It's such an interesting conversation. And I hate the fact that we keep this podcast so tight and short, because I feel like I could talk to you all day. So I do have one more question, though. For you. What is your number one tip, your number one strategy, your number one piece of advice for anyone listening in terms of selling more?