Robert is the founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for The Content Marketing Institute. Robert has worked with more than 500 companies, including 15 of the Fortune 100. He’s provided content marketing and strategy advice for global brands such as Capital One, NASA, Dell, McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Robert’s third book – Killing Marketing, with co-author Joe Pulizzi has been called the “book that rewrites the rules of marketing.” His second book – Experiences: The Seventh Era of Marketing is a top seller and has been called a “treatise, and a call to arms for marketers to lead business innovation in the 21st century.” Robert’s first book, Managing Content Marketing, spent two weeks as a top 10 marketing book on Amazon.com and is generally considered to be the “owners manual” of the content marketing process. You can follow him on Twitter @Robert_Rose.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
How many times have you asked this? That phrase often comes out when you realize some request or suggestion you thought you conveyed wasn’t acted on.
This signal amplification bias (as psychologists call it) explains how most miscommunication happens. People routinely fail to realize how little they actually communicate to their colleagues.
In other words: People believe they said a lot more than they really said.Continue Reading
I saw a stat not long ago that said marketers spend 30% of their work week learning, implementing, or searching for new technology to make content creation and management easier and faster. I can’t find it now, so maybe I imagined it.
But even if that isn’t true, it feels true.
My experience with two content teams over the last month shows why this happens.Continue Reading
Are you inspired?
I was struck by a long article I read last weekend. In it, a content marketer lamented the state of content marketing and thought leadership.
His primary complaint? The increasing uselessness of content platforms like Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even trade publications. The author pointed to algorithmically driven content marketing as the culprit. Continue Reading
We’re exhausted.
Whether it’s one of the many side effects of the pandemic or any of the myriad choose-your-own-doomsday scenarios from the last 12 months, we can all agree on one thing: We’re tired.
Didn’t somebody say 2022 would be better?
The last two years have created a kind of fatigue that’s hard to pin down. Ask people how they’re doing, and they say, “Fine.” But it doesn’t take too many follow-up questions to get to the truth at the center: “Actually, no.”
Leading teams, guiding clients, and even working with colleagues feel challenging now. Add in the complications of acquiring new talent, and you can see why managing to higher standards feels so difficult.
Your first impulse is to manage expectations down – to let people off the hook. I think you should do the opposite.Continue Reading
“Do more with less.”
That’s a phrase most in marketing have heard like a drumbeat over the last 20 years. Interestingly, it doesn’t matter whether budgets are going up or down, the message is still “let’s do more with less.”
The only question is which word to emphasize – more or less.
How do you switch the emphasis when economic or other headwinds are present?Continue Reading
A great content strategy doesn’t apply only to what you’re going to say. It also should shape and change what you’ve said in the past.
In The 4 C’s Formula: Your Building Blocks of Growth, entrepreneur coach Dan Sullivan talks about acquiring new capabilities (one of the titular 4 C’s). He wrote that a “new capability creates confidence ahead of it, but it also rearranges everything behind it,” and any jump in capability “automatically transforms both the past and the future.”Continue Reading
“This ship is just so hard to turn.”
That phrase might sound familiar. I often hear it from clients, usually regarding some suggested change to existing processes. People lament the difficulty of doing something new because it requires changing or stopping something old.
Institutional momentum resists stopping (or changing). That’s true even when the answer to the question “Why not just stop doing the old thing?” is “I don’t know.”
Sometimes, you don’t know that you know.Continue Reading
Are brands sacrificing company growth by trying too hard to do good in the world?
Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble (P&G), raised that question at the recent VivaTech conference.
An article in the Drum last week reported some of Marc’s comments, including this: “Some companies are over-leveraging purpose marketing at the expense of brand growth.”
As evidence, the article points to an open letter from a Unilever investor who said the company had become “obsessed with publicly displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business.”
But Marc’s full remarks contain more nuance (the entire 20-minute talk is worth a watch). He made clear that P&G sees growth (meaning business growth) and good (meaning doing good things in the world) as a “virtuous circle.” They balance each other.
I agree.Continue Reading
Author David Foster Wallace addressed the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College with a speech that would become one of his most-read works.
In it, he told this parable:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
The point of the story, he explained, is that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”Continue Reading
June is the perfect time to reflect on your content and marketing strategy. What’s working? What isn’t? What needs to change going into the next season? What should we double down on?
But before you do. Take a deep breath. Pause.
Reflecting on anything in 2022 feels particularly challenging. COVID-19? Everybody’s got it. Global conflict? Almost as bad as can be. The economy? Slowing. Inflation? Rising. Ugly politics and unpopular decisions? Inevitable.Continue Reading
