[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:05.0] DC: It takes the right skills and the right innovation to design and manage meaningful print marketing solutions. Welcome to Podcasts From the Printerverse, where we explore all facets of print and marketing that creates stellar communications and sales opportunities for business success. I’m your host Deborah Corn, the Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse. Thanks for tuning in. Listen long and prosper.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:31.4] DC: Hey everybody, welcome to Podcasts From the Printerverse, this is Deborah Corn, your Intergalactic Ambassador and I am so excited to introduce you to Robert Rose. He is the chief strategy officer at The Content Advisory. The Content Advisory is a content services firm working with companies of all sizes to co-create pragmatic content strategy plans that help companies evolve the use of owned media to develop valuable customer experiences.
The website’s contentadvisory.net. Its links are in the show notes. Robert also cohosts a podcast called, This Old Marketing Podcast from part of the HubSpot podcast network. thisoldmarketing.com. Robert, thank you so much for joining us today and for an amazing presentation that you did at the thINK Ahead 2024 Conference, which is where I met you and vowed to barnacle myself to you and I have done that. So, thank you, sir, for allowing me to attach myself to you.
[0:01:43.5] RR: It is my pleasure, I became an immediate fan as soon as I met you there, and I am so glad to be here.
[0:01:51.1] DC: Can you tell everybody a little bit more about your work and you also have your own company?
[0:01:56.4] RR: Sure, happy to. So, I’ve been in marketing for almost 30 years now, which means, I’ve got a lot of gray hair and you know, I’ve really cut my teeth in the early days in the entertainment business, and so, and that’s relevant for a reason that I’ll get to in just a second but basically, following, you know, getting into the .com boom and the early days of digital, I ended up being the CMO of a software company of a software as a service cloud computing.
As we like to say, I was cloud computing before cloud was cool, and was the CMO of that company for some time, and there, what I did was, I ended up taking a new approach to marketing. Unbeknownst to me because I just – we were competing at that time with some of the biggest companies on the planet. We were competing with Hewlett Packard and IBM and Microsoft and all these huge companies that we were never going to beat from a brand perspective or from a, you know, ad spent perspective or anything like that.
And so, I started developing this idea of developing deep knowledgeable content because that’s where we could be. You know, the theory, the hypothesis was, I could be a mile deeper than any of these other companies in this particular industry, and just be valuable, and that would get us to the table. and then, of course, we would use traditional marketing efforts to actually, you know, try and win the day, and it worked.
And we grew like crazy, and basically, instead of building a traditional marketing department, I built a content department, I built a media company which I knew how to do. So, I hired designers and writers and journalists and brand people and basically, really built this idea of a machine of valuable content that ultimately, you know, helped the company grow, and then 10 years later, the company was doing great, I ended up sort of going out on my own and I met this friend of mine.
His name was Joe Pulizzi, and he and I wrote a book together about this whole process. We ended up forming a company called, The Content Marketing Institute, which then got acquired in 2016, and since 2010 really I’ve been working with brands, small companies, big companies to really help them operationalize the idea of what new digital marketing looks like in the 20s, and so that’s where I spent my time and it’s really been a fun ride ever since.
Along the way, as you were very kind to mention, I’ve hosted a podcast, I’ve written four books and yeah, it’s a weird time in marketing now, and happy to be here.
[0:04:19.8] DC: Well, links to everything to connect with Robert, check out his books, his podcast are on the show notes as I mentioned, let’s get into our conversation.
[0:04:27.7] RR: Sure.
[0:04:29.2] DC: The presentation I saw was, I’m going to title it for you, “What is modern marketing in 2024?” and I’ll add in parenthesis and beyond that, and it was framed under the servitization of the print businesses, at least, in one section. Can you explain those two concepts to everybody and then we’ll discuss the three points that you made after that?
[0:04:54.6] RR: Absolutely. So, what we have seen, and I’ve had a bit of a front-row seat to marketing across all different kinds of industries, whether it’s print, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, you know, a number of traditional industries that have completely been upended, and I think we can all agree that the printing businesses have been truly disrupted over the last 20 years.
And what we’ve seen, and this is especially true in manufacturing and I also see it in the printing business, which is something that’s called – I didn’t coin this term but it certainly, it’s certainly something I recognize, it’s called, the servitization of, fill-in-the-blank, whatever industry, and what it means is that you’re no longer selling products and services as a transactional effort. What is starting to happen is that businesses are evolving their offerings to try and develop.
You can call it a subscription model, you can call it an experience model, but basically, the idea is that you were transforming traditional transactional services or transactional product sales with the idea of creating a service, an ongoing service. It’s something, so it’s getting deeper into the experience with your customers so that you’re building a customer base that continually comes back for more and different things.
Now, there are implications to that of course, for the products that you offer, the services that you offer, and how you’re building and connecting those things together but this is the transformation that we see of what businesses are doing to try and build an ongoing relationship with customers, instead of continually in the rinse and repeat cycle of trying to get them to conduct transaction after transaction after transaction after transaction, which is trying to reinvent the wheel every time.
[0:06:41.1] DC: I speak about what you just said in a slightly different approach, which is customer convenience, focusing on customer convenience. If you look at the printing industry, it is – there are some people that are very customer friendly, user experience friendly, I can go on their site, I can understand how they can help me specifically with my business, or the customers I want to reach.
And they give me a simple way to understand what they offer to purchase it, to understand when I’m purchasing it, to purchase it, and then get information about where my job is in the process. Not unlike a Domino’s Pizza if we just want to use the simplest terms and one of the biggest issues these days I think, which actually gives printing a – I don’t want to say, an advantage.
But at least, a reason why brands and marketers and small businesses should really look at it is because it is a safe way to communicate with people versus clicking on random links and things of that nature, which are more and more difficult to move people to these days and I mentioned that because that all comes around trust. “Do you trust the businesses? Do you trust the people you’re doing business with?”
And that was actually the first point that you made, and you framed it around focusing on brand identity. Can you please elaborate on that?
[0:08:06.3] RR: Absolutely. So, it’s the idea these days, what has evolved over the last, let’s call it decade is what we used to think of as grabbing attention, right? So, the battle in marketing was, “Can I get your attention while you’re in a buying mood?” And that, you know, we all know that the web and email and social and everything made everything sort of frothy and noisy and very hard, and then of course, you’re amongst ever other thing out there, right?
So, you know, you’re competing, not even just against your competitors but you’re competing for that attention against, you know, social media posts and news and fake news and you know, all the sorts of things that are out there that are sort of putting doubt and fear and uncertainty into the consumer’s mind and so, here comes your content, right? And so, that attention becomes harder and harder and harder to grasp.
And this sort of tendency is to want to become more and more and more provocative or more and more and more discounted or whatever you can do to grab that attention in that moment so that you could try and sell somebody something and what this has evolved into is, as you mentioned, a system of trust, right? So now, it’s not, “Can I grab your attention as fast as I can?” It’s, “How fast can I develop a trusted relationship with you?” No matter how minor, right?
I mean, let’s be honest, you know, the level of trust that I need for somebody to print my, you know, stationary or I need someone to print, you know, a bunch of you know, handbills for me or whatever it is, is much less than it is for someone who I’m going to take my kid to the doctor to, right? So – but it’s a level of trust nonetheless in terms of how I can deliver value to you in the fastest way.
And so, that switch has implications on the kind of content we create, the way that we focus on our brand, right? Because what we want is when you see our logo, when you see our content, when you see our website to have built that level of trust in before they even get there, so that, they’re already precluded to trust in you to say, “Oh, this is what they offer, this is how I buy something, this is what it is that I need to do.”
So, it just has implications in terms of how and where and when we sort of use content, not to just grab and be provocative and try and grab that attention as fast as we can but rather, how can I deliver value and as quick as I can, so that that trust starts to build from the ground up.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:10:33.7] DC: Are you looking to elevate your game, take your bottom-line customer relationships, and events to the next level? Then, I want to work with you. I’m Deborah Corn, the Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse. I engage with a vast, global audience of print and marketing professionals across all stages of their careers. They are seeking topical information and resources, new ways to serve their customers and connect with them, optimize processes for their communications and operations, and they need the products and services and partnership you offer to get to their next level.
Print Media Centr offers an array of unique opportunities that amplify your message and support your mission across the Printerverse. Let’s work together, bring the right people together, and move the industry forward together. Link in the show notes. Engage long and prosper.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:11:34.6] DC: Is there a formula for building trust or maybe some advice you could offer just how people can get started thinking about it?
[0:11:45.3] RR: Sure, I mean, look, unfortunately, there’s no formula, you know? Trust is ultimately an emotion, as there’s a wonderful researcher, Rachel Botsman, who describes trust as basically, the relationship with the uncertain, right? And so, the only way to build trust is by being trustworthy, right? So, the way to get started with it is to shift how we are thinking about the content we’re producing, to start to say, “How do we become trustworthy and continue to be trustworthy?”
Consistency. Consistency is key, the reduction of doubt, the reduction of uncertainty, all of those things help us be much more trustworthy, which sounds like, “Oh, well, that sounds like a lot of like, you know, hocus pocus and esoteric. You know, you’re trying to get you know, valuable content out there and all that, what does that even mean?” Well, it means, just transforming what it is we’re doing.
Whether it’s an email newsletter, or whether it’s a blog, or whether it’s our website, or whether it’s our social media strategy, and instead of thinking about it as, “How do I get more people to buy more stuff with ads?” It’s, “How do I actually create content?” Whether or not I pay for the privilege of that ad to be out there, how do I create content that immediately goes, “That’s valuable, that’s valuable and I trust that. Let me see what’s behind that, let me see the brand that’s behind that.”
[0:13:02.3] DC: Would it be fair to say that – and I’m going to go back to my formula thing because I just think it’s the easiest way to describe it but a formula might be, “What are the major trust issues that florists have with printers?” or things like that or things like that, or printing. So, I guess, what I’m trying to say is that the trust isn’t about promoting your business as much as it is attracting the people that you want to do business with, by addressing their issues around trust. I’m assuming that’s what you meant by that?
[0:13:39.9] RR: A hundred percent, yeah, that’s a hundred percent correct, you know? And a great example of that is, you know, and I’ve worked with a couple of clients in the business on this where the marketing effort becomes teaching people how to do something that they didn’t know how to do that’s obviously related to printing, right? So, one particular business I know, they built an entire knowledge program for realtors to teach them how to market themselves using print products better.
How to write the brochure, how to create the beautiful print piece, how to do these things in a valuable way because these people don’t know how to do that, and there’s nobody out there teaching people how to do that, and then the question becomes like, “Well, how do you teach them?” Well, in some cases I’ve seen, a great email newsletter can do that. I’ve seen actually, events.
I had one business that basically started creating a weekly educational program at a church, where they would bring in local businesses and teach them how to be great marketers using print materials and it was a great valuable business for them.
[0:14:41.0] DC: I absolutely love that. I just will add this last thing, one of the ways early on and honestly, throughout my career as a print buyer from advertising agencies.
[0:14:52.0] RR: Yeah.
[0:14:53.4] DC: One of the quickest ways that I was able to establish trust with my printing vendors was when I asked them a question, and if they didn’t respond in a way that was condescending or made me feel stupid or made me feel afraid to ask another question, I felt I had a better relationship with them. Like, they – even if I didn’t – you know, even if they wanted to make fun of me, like, “How do you not know that, Deb, you know?” This is you know?
I still didn’t feel as if I was being scolded and I still felt trust that I could reach out and be in a collaborative relationship. Now, the next point you made in the presentation, I thought was really interesting, expanding what customer means. I’m just going to throw it to you to explain what that means.
[0:15:45.1] RR: Sure. Yeah, this goes all the way back, right? So, I’m a huge fanboy of traditional marketing and business thinking and you know, going all the way back to Peter Drucker and you know, Theodore Levitt, these are all my heroes but you know, so I won’t bore the audience with that but basically, Peter Drucker said, 50 years ago, 60 years ago, he talked about the definition of a customer and this is like, the idea is that a customer is the one who exchanges wealth in exchange for value for them, right?
And then, he tags that by saying, “But it is the customer who defines what that value is.” And so, what we’ve done as businesses is define the customer as one who buys our stuff, right? That’s sort of the only wrapper that we put around it but today, we have to look at that. Because the mandate is, to develop trust as fast as we can, customers take a bit of an expanded definition. In other words, as we start delivering value early on, we might have customers that haven’t purchased anything from us yet but can add value to our business.
And I’ll give you a great example of this from my background wherein, I was the CMO of that software company. We employed a very similar strategy, which was to deliver value, and we had white papers and you know, and ebooks and all sorts of valuable things, and I had a guy who was a mad subscriber to me. He loved all of our content but he was in a business that was way too small to ever purchase anything from us.
But he referred us to more than a million dollars worth of business because he got such value out of our content. He was a customer even though he never talked to a salesperson, never talked to anybody, he was – and today, we often call that influencer marketing, or we call it, you know, using word of mouth or those sorts of things but it’s thinking about those people as customers.
Like, treating them as if they were customers because we continue to deliver value to that guy, we continue to have conversations with him, never tried to sell him anything because he told us, flat out, “I can never afford your stuff. But I love your education. So, I’m referring you to my colleagues who can.” And that’s an incredibly important way to start to think about the entirety of what we’re doing.
There are the customers that are in our, let’s call it pipeline, or let’s call it just our sphere of influence, our audience, if you will. Those are customers, there are the customers who actually purchase stuff from us, and then by the way, there are customers who have purchased stuff from us in the past that we want to continue to give that, as you called it, the convenience factor too, that sort of experience to, what do they do? They come back and buy more or buy different stuff from us again.
[0:18:26.9] DC: I’m often asked who are my clients, who are my customers, and I’m shocked by the question. I’m like, the audience. Everybody else is just a partner who helps me serve them and thinking about it that way means everybody is a customer of great information or thought leadership. I just loved it. You also mentioned in the presentation about fostering deeper relationships. So, how does that tie into what you just said? If I’m just randomly – even though I might be silently influencing you, right? So, you don’t have –
[0:19:02.2] RR: That’s right.
[0:19:02.6] DC: Potentially an opportunity to have a deeper relationship with me. So, how does that all fit together?
[0:19:07.9] RR: That’s right, and basically, it comes back and connects into that servitization idea that we talked about early on in the show. So, the idea here is that when we think about a customer, one of the things that we do is they buy something from us, and then we go, “Great.” There’s going to be this idea of “customer service” right? And as I always say, customer service is what happens when the customer experience fails.
Because customer service is the idea of, there’s an issue, there’s a challenge that the customer has after they’ve experienced whatever it is that they’ve experienced, right? So, they’re coming to us for service of that thing. Now, it may be a very pleasant experience but nonetheless, there’s some sort of issue or challenge that they’re coming back. Can we flip that on its head and expand the relationship that we have with the customer?
So, that it’s not only just problems and issues and challenges that we’re solving but it’s also helping them be better at whatever it is they’re trying to do. So, a great example of this is after a customer becomes a customer, providing them an online level of education not just how to use the product or how to you know, how to optimally do something but some other thing that’s related, right?
So, that while that they develop a special relationship with you that they can get from nowhere else. A great example of that is I worked with this financial services company, a tiny little company, seven people in the company, and basically they had you know, big, big hedge fund managers and investment managers, and there was all kinds of customers and they help them provide, you know, they had a content of product that they would ultimately –
It was a print piece, by the way, that they would send every – it was a magazine that they would send that you know, how to buy low and sell high and all that sort of stuff. One of the things that – and of course, they compete, right? They compete with the big guys, Schwab and BlackRock, and all of these big companies, and what they did was after the customer became a customer and started getting their subscription product, well then they added this thing, which was a silly little like Oprah-style book club, right?
Because what they realized was their customer was these busy hedge fund managers who didn’t have any idea about what they should be reading or plays they should be seeing or movies they should be seeing and so they said, “We can give these people a cool value at really minimal effort for us of the books that they should read.” And not books on buying or investing but rather, books on science fiction and what they should be reading in non-fiction.
And all these different genres and then they set up a little LinkedIn group where they could go talk about the books, etcetera. That was a relationship, an expanded relationship that they weren’t going to get from Schwab or BlackRock or these big competitors. So, they sort of took it to another level about what kind of relationship we can have with our customers to deliver more value than would be normally available for us just with a simple transaction.
That created the most loyal customer base, it was their number-one loyalty play for many, many years.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:22:07.6] DC: News from the Printerverse delivers topical sales and marketing insight along with plenty of printspiration one time a month to inboxes everywhere. Our contributors cover the industry and the future of print media and marketing with strategy for strengthening your customer relationships, better targeting of your prospects, and practical advice for helping your business grow. Printspiration is just a click away. Subscribe to News from the Printerverse at printmediacentr.com. Print long and prosper.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:22:42.8] DC: For many years, I’ve been defining a sale as when a need and a relationship meet, which I think –
[0:22:50.6] RR: Oh, that’s cool. I like that.
[0:22:51.8] DC: We’re saying this with saying the same thing along that way. If you don’t mind, I want to stay on this subject.
[0:22:57.6] RR: Sure.
[0:22:57.8] DC: For one more second, and you had an amazing example for a printing company that created a local magazine and the results that were generated from that including a more than 10,000 member email list. Can you please just expand on that for a minute?
[0:23:16.0] RR: Sure. So, one of the easiest things for this company to do was print something, right? So, it was basically really simple for them to make a short-level magazine and so what they ended up doing was printing this little magazine and developing a sort of starting out by sending it to the customers of course, which was easy enough but then they started sending it out to just local businesses, right?
Just local businesses all around the area where they serve, it was basically on marketing. It was basically an educational like, “What’s going on and how to do local small business marketing.” It was sort of an educational magazine that did that and then they tied all of that to email, right? So, they tied all of that to you could go subscribe to an email from this little print magazine. Well, they’ve built up tens of thousands of subscribers to this simple tiny little magazine.
And the email that went along with it and just occasionally, they were able to say, “Hey, by the way, you know, here’s a special we’re having, or here’s a thing that you might want to try, or here’s this case, this used case of this person who did this thing with a postcard or this person who did this thing with a mailer.” And it worked out brilliantly because it became their number one new business lead generator introducing all of these local businesses to their business, which they would have never been able to find before unless they were searching for it, right?
So, it was sort of proactively driving awareness that we exist and we’re doing really interesting and cool things without you having to do anything. Like, you don’t have to search Google or you don’t have to go search Yelp only when you have a print problem. Basically, you can use us for really interesting things that you might not have even thought of.
[0:24:55.9] DC: I’m glad that you mentioned lead generator. One of my favorite parts of your presentation were when you started discussing like what is the value of that lead. Like is there really a value to it if everyone is only looking at it as did it lead to a sale and then decide that it didn’t there for this person isn’t valuable anymore, and that whole model needing to be revised, which is part of the whole what is modern marketing in 2024.
But that only leads me to the customer experience and I mention this because I’m not even a customer in the fact sense that I don’t buy printing equipment. I don’t buy services from people, I you know, help them share about it and you know, provide benefits and have conversations about you know, people’s businesses and things of that nature but I can tell you that I get these follow-up emails from tradeshows and things like that, and it’s just like I’m a data point. That’s all that I am, I feel no love.
[0:25:56.5] RR: Exactly.
[0:25:57.0] DC: And I bring that because the point that you spent a lot of time on, which everybody should be focusing on is the actual customer experience and that is, you defined it and I’ll paraphrase loosely, as managing the relationships and the journey, right? Which is all touchpoints. So, can you please elaborate on that?
[0:26:21.9] RR: Sure. It’s all about knowing the context of where and who you’re reaching, right? It’s basically are you reaching someone who doesn’t know anything about you, who knows a little bit about you, who knows a lot about you and has used you before, and messaging and telling the story in a contextual way. In other words, just exactly to your point, how many emails do you get or postcards do you get or whatever from a company that you’ve bought something from, and they’re telling you about all these new things that you should buy?
And you’re like, “I just literally bought this product from you and now you’re telling me that I should buy it.” And technology can help with some of that of course, but the biggest part of it is just being – having self-awareness. Having self-awareness about your customer and their journey and what they’re going to go through as they go through the journey of becoming aware of your product or service, becoming interested in it.
Then, becoming engaged with it, purchasing it, and then ultimately, using it and becoming more loyal to it, and then back around again to awareness of other things that you might provide for them and that’s sort of if you think about sort of a figure eight journey that sort of repeats on itself that idea and having real clarity around that and where you’re delivering content because people will come in and out of it at varying parts of it, right?
You might have someone who bought something from you years ago that you’re just making them real aware that the fact that you actually, “Oh right, they actually exist and I forgot about that.” And being super clear of when you message and target those people that you’re doing so based on where they are in their particular journey and not making you know, just sort of the easy sort of check the box sort of things, right?
It’s one of the more difficult things to do because you actually have to really pay attention to the details and you have to actually know your audience. You have to really know your audience, which a lot of businesses just don’t. They just don’t know their audience. They might have an email address but they don’t know, is that a customer, is that not, is that somebody who just signed up for something, is that somebody we gave a squishy ball to an event? And you know, they don’t really know anything about them. That knowledge is the key piece.
[0:28:30.9] DC: I think that in many ways, these customer relationship management platforms have been misused or misunderstood that that is not where the experience comes from, right? It’s not the fact that “I’m going to send an email to Deborah and then in three weeks, I’m going to follow up,” and then when I don’t hear back, I’m going to say, “Hey, this is your last chance to contact me about something that has nothing to do with you or your world or your business.”
“And I would really love to hear from you and if you want to opt out, no problem but it’s going to take seven days and you still might get our emails.” Or whatever that might be. To your point and going back to everything you said, where is the trust in that, right? How can the idea of them understanding what I am to them and a customer for, to your most excellent point, maybe I am the influencer that they have been looking for, and therefore, they should be communicating with me on that level?
So, it’s the content that is actually creating the experience in this case, right? With these automated tools but do you think that and I am a fan of technology but I am actually caught in, “Is automation killing creativity and customer experience these days?”
[0:29:56.3] RR: It’s a crutch in many cases, it becomes a crutch, and what I find is that this is, you know, so, I’ve had – I can’t tell you how many CEOs of businesses that I’ve – so, I’m a marketing fanboy. I’ve always been a marketing fanboy and I believe, it’s a – as I say, it’s the easiest thing to understand and it takes a lifetime to master, and it’s a complex practice but, having said that, so many business owners and CEOs where I’ve talked to, they look at marketing like a tax, right?
And so, very much like taxes, it’s like, “How do I cheat, how do I minimize my cost, how do I?” you know, that’s – it’s a constantly inefficiency play, right? It’s constantly like, “How do I do this as cheaply as possible so that I can get whatever result I get?” And the focus then is on the cheat part, right? It’s on the inexpensive part. So, so many sort of tasks that need a little care and feeding, a little planning, a little thought, a little slower motion, is not there.
Because, what ends up happening is this just like, “Eh, it’s just easier to take that CRM database and send them all an email.” And “Yeah, some people will get it and it will be you know, but we’ll deal with that, right?” And then they go, “Uh.” And then they complain that only 2% of the people they sent that email to actually did anything. Well, it’s because you didn’t take the time to see who those people were or where they were.
What kind of message would be really appropriate for those people and if you just took the extra time to measure twice before you cut once, well, you would actually be more efficient over time. You’d probably be moving a little slower and the idea is that you’re maximizing your value, and so that becomes the calculus of good marketing in 2024 is, yes, in the old days, it was spray and pray, right?
It was just spray your messaging out and hopefully, some people that had attention would give attention, right? You put that out into a billboard, you put it on a bus sign, you put it in a TV commercial, or you put it on a radio ad, you put it in a magazine, and you just hope some people are going to come. Now, it’s much more targeted, and because it’s much more targeted, the expectation from the consumer is much higher.
And so, if you’re going to penetrate all the noise that we’re dealing with, whether it’s social media, whether it’s television, whether it’s streaming networks, but you know, all of the things that are competing for the consumer’s attention these days, you better be good. You better be good and you better be valuable and you better do it quickly because that’s the key, and the only way you do that is if you actually take the time to be relevant, and that’s the only secret to actually getting marketing that really works.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
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[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:33:13.4] DC: I want to be mindful of your time, I know that you have to go to another meeting. The last thing I want to ask you to elaborate on is something that you said was very important to in the presentation, which was the quote, or the mantra, so to speak, market where you’re going, not where you are.
[0:33:34.2] RR: Oh, that’s my favorite.
[0:33:35.3] DC: Why don’t we leave everybody with what you mean by that?
[0:33:38.0] RR: Sure. So, what I mean by that is that it’s very easy for us to slip into what today’s business looks like rather than where we’re going tomorrow, and what I mean by that is just that, we can look at where we are and the status quo of where we are and we can say, “This is what we have to sell today and so, this is where we make our money today.” And so, we get wrapped up in this sort of vision of saying, “All the marketing that we’re doing basically keeps all the constraints of where we are today.”
Rather than saying, “You know what? We’ve got incredible new capabilities coming, we’re pivoting our business, we’re moving into different products and services and focusing our marketing there.” Because – and I’ll give you a very straight-up example of this, when I was getting onto my own and offering up, putting up my own shingle, when it came to marketing, I was doing things like SEO work.
I was doing email copywriting, I was doing web copywriting, I was designing websites, doing all these kinds of things, and I wanted, where I was going was, I wanted to be a marketing strategist. I wanted to put teams together, I wanted to help them acquire agencies, I wanted to help them, you know, get into the operations of building a marketing department, and so my website, all my marketing said that because people knew me, they would call me for the copywriting.
They would call me for their website design, they would – you know that kept the lights on for sure but all my marketing was where I was headed. I wanted to brand myself and market myself in my future self, and ultimately, what happens is that more and more people come to trust you for that thing and then you just keep that pulling forward. It’s that, you know, you remember the great Matthew McConaughey Oscar speech where he said, “My hero is me 10 years from now.” It’s that, that’s the idea. Your hero should be you and your business 10 years from now.
[0:35:34.0] DC: I love it. Thank you so much. I want to thank the thINK Ahead Conference for having you as a speaker. If you are a member of thINK, you can watch Robert’s presentation, they have the replays posted there. You do have to be a member of thINK to access that. Otherwise, look up Robert in any of the links below, check out his podcast, and sir, if I might be so bold, I am not done with you.
I will find you again and hopefully, we can continue this conversation on a deeper level, and I just want to thank you again so much for your time and your knowledge sharing. You have created a fan and a customer for your information, for life. Thank you, sir.
[0:36:15.9] RR: I thank you so much for having me and I’m going to hold you to it. This is a friendship that I’m very much in gratitude for.
[0:36:21.9] DC: Thank you, sir. Until next time everybody, Market long and prosper.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:36:28.2] DC: Thanks for listening to Podcasts From the Printerverse. Please subscribe, click some stars, and leave us a review. Connect with us through printmediacentr.com, we’d love to hear your feedback on our shows and topics that are of interest for future broadcasts. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Print long, and prosper.
[END]
