A Content Capitalist Shares a Story that Will Make You Rethink Your Approach to Content Marketing

Eric Eden : 0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Michael Becker. He is a experienced marketer with over a decade in marketing, and he has a new book coming out called the Content Capitalist. Welcome to the show. Thanks, eric. Appreciate you making time for us today, so let's jump right in. I think you have a story about some of the best marketing ever done. Let's start with that.

Michael Becker: 1:26

I got to spend five years with a company called E-Marcess from 2017 to 2023. And I got to be a big part of kind of building the American commercial operations for that all of the company and to have the acquisition to SAP. I learned so much throughout that process, but I think the biggest thing, eric, is getting to really see and spearhead this move from A stagnant marketing operation or organizational structure and then I'd been part of prior to when I joined on A-Marcess, I really tried to inject a new flavor of I don't want to say decentralized completely, but almost a distributed publishing house where I started bringing in influencers, collaborators, partners, clients and especially SMEs within the company to help release unique insights that only they could have and that we as a content team, as good of writers, if we won't believe that we work, we never could have about the depth of insight that a lot of these people were able to bring. And so I did this through two main formats or mediums that we got ongoing and I talk about the value of serialized or episodic content within my book and so we started two series. One was a series for clients where we had our solutions team Just do interviews and have discussions in a fireside manner with one another and talk about campaign execution in a bit of a more bottom fall fashion. That a lot of what we were prior. And then we started a brand new podcast called Market Post Machine and kind of a cheesy name but also catchy but we were really able to leverage those two initiatives in tandem to ultimately account for about two thirds of our web traffic for the company, and not to mention the alternate benefits we were able to gain from a partner and client marketing perspective. It was just huge.

Eric Eden : 3:42

That's amazing Two thirds of the web traffic from your content strategy. I think one of the biggest questions that executives and leadership have as a company when you're investing in content marketing. I've worked with companies where we were spending a million dollars a year on our content strategy. That's when you start to get questions of what's the result of this right. How much business did we win from that exactly? It's a bit hard to track the business back from it for a lot of companies because people need for example, I think the stat is to see eight pieces of content before they'll engage in a buying process. So then how do you attribute which of those eight pieces of content caused people to get in touch with the sales team? But, more broadly, I think what you're saying is that it was a super majority driver for people engaging with you. Were you able to measure it further than that?

Michael Becker: 4:46

That was one of the biggest things that we had so many internal discussions around. We weren't and I think, quite frankly, there was a gap between what we were trying to execute on and what the C-suite was wanting to see. They ultimately discontinued the podcast for that reason and, candidly, that frustrated me prior to me moving on from that role. But no, it's hard to quantify a podcast in particular. But the momentum and the intangible, non-quantifiable benefits that I alluded to from a client and partner marketing perspective, not to mention the traffic component and the way that you can leverage a tool like that to just bring the whole organization together you have to almost trust and believe that, committed for a long enough time, you're going to reap benefits regardless from a brand awareness perspective and admittedly, that's something very difficult, especially for a lot of legacy-minded marketing executives to do- being fingerprints on the weapon is very hard in content marketing, almost like CSI marketing right, the crime scene investigation of does it really generate the sales is hard to do.

Eric Eden : 6:07

But I think it was a mistake to discontinue it because a lot of things like podcasts and content marketing probably fall under the category of what some people have called dark social, in the sense of it's just not exactly easy to trace things back exactly, but when I've talked to people the companies that have had a great podcast, for example customers would say oh, I listen to the podcast all the time, and potential employees you hire say I listen to the podcast and I loved it. So how do you quantify? It is really the question, and I think that's probably one of the hardest things about content marketing. One of the ways that I've thought about this and in my previous lives as a CMO has been ideally, can we get, if we're doing thought leadership, like an ebook is an example, if we get a thousand downloads of it, could we get something like five percent of the people who downloaded to eventually get to a sales meeting after a period of 90 days and that might involve them consuming other content during that 90 days. But that's an interesting way that I've been able to get another level of detail on it, and it requires, like, giving it enough time to be right and thinking about the dimensions, that you're going to have multiple touches, particularly in B2B, and if you're doing an enterprise sales process, you might need to have a lot of touches before someone even engages with sales and then even more during the sales process. So that's just been a way that I've been able to engage it, but have you done something similar to that or you have different ways of thinking about that?

Michael Becker: 7:56

So look at it like this is how I would always talk about and try to teach internally around content as a function. You want to look at your investment in any ongoing content platform or media house that you are committed to running like an investment in the stock market. You wouldn't unless you're a day trader. You wouldn't make an investment and then expect to return in one week or two weeks. No, you make investments in the market for the yield of 10 to 15 plus years down the line. Now, I'm not asking anybody to wait that long to see ROMI from a guest or from a blog, but there's something you've got to be patient with for 12 to 16 to 24 months and it's going to take time and it's going to take effort and this shouldn't be the only thing that we do Like you shouldn't just do a podcast and wait and rely on that, or a lead on the back end and sit on Hopium wishing that it would. You shouldn't be doing your other things around that. But what I believe is having that as core and for multiple lines of business value to the point you are making, eric, where, if a prospect comes in or somebody from your outbound sales motion comes in and looks at your brand. What do you want them to see when they land on your website? You want them to be able to find real value, and a podcast or a great blog can serve their purpose.

Eric Eden : 9:33

I agree 100%. So the different content pieces in your library are almost like instruments and the marketing orchestra that are delivering the ultimate Fire experience. Right, I think that is the right way to think about it. I also agree that content marketing is an investment. It shouldn't be thought about as spend or traditional media. That's controversial where you're talking about politics or other things that are controversial like that. So I do think people need to give it a time horizon along the lines of what you said to get a realistic measure of the impact. So that's awesome. Let me ask you you've been working on content marketing for a decade and your book is a combination of that work. Tell us what are a couple of the things that you learned by spending 10 years in content marketing.

Michael Becker: 10:38

The old way is broken. We were just talking about it. The quicker that you wake up to that and look how the new direct buyers and the new content ecosystem works, then the better off you're going to be. The premise of the book is that every single business can and should run on content as the fuel at the core, not necessarily the product. Product should be, it needs to be, you need to have a great product, but you're never going to cut through in this new marketplace without even better content and for the most part, at least, in the most of the products are commoditized these days. There are nuances and there's features that differ from company, of course, and there's niches and you might have your focus. But to break through and really capture the attention of your buyers requires a completely different approach than even 10 years ago when I first began, and it requires a degree of patience and marketers need to become comfortable with that and understanding that unless you're truly providing unbiased, real value in a non-pushy way and fully triggering people to want to engage, want to learn and listen, serving as that evangelist, educating your entire C-suite as evangelists for the company, without selling, without pushing, this is a new muscle for so many people, but this is the way that the market is evolving.

Eric Eden : 12:11

What is a part of content marketing that, personally, you like the best and that you think has been the most effective? Because it's broad. There's a lot of things you can do podcasts, blogs, ebooks. There's a lot of different things you can do. What part of it, if you had to say, do you like the most?

Michael Becker: 12:31

Yeah, I was able to take a lot of the learnings from my W2 work. I went and created my own brand following a personal passion project on the side and actually built that to 60,000 followers and sold it last year. I really just send around self-help type content with Instagram as my core panel and seeing that community flourish and just serving as didn't view it as like my account or my brand. I just viewed it as I was the one kind of spearheading, the cultivation of that community and seeing people's lives change, even in a small way from what they would tell me, from what I was sharing. That's the first time I really got to see the impact content can have in connecting with people one on one who look to you as their leader, and I think that's the mentality we need to have as marketers.

Eric Eden : 13:31

Congratulations on that man. That's really great. So your book is available now on pre-order, right? Yep, we're on pre-order.

Michael Becker: 13:40

Right now you can go to my website just mobile backer, and we'll see it plastered over there, all right.

Eric Eden : 13:50

I will link to that in the show episode notes so everyone can get to it easily. Thank you for being on with us today, Michael. Thank you for sharing your story and these insights about content marketing. Everybody should share this episode with their friends so people can learn all about content marketing and how to be a content capitalist. Thanks, Michael, for being with us today. We appreciate it.