TRANSCRIPT: Let’s Talk Content Marketing with Mary Garner

INTRO

 What’s at the heart of content marketing?

Why should I even do content marketing in the first place?

How do I get the best results from it?

If these are some of the questions you have, don’t take our word for it.

Let’s talk content marketing with industry professionals.

Discover, its power, and confront its challenges, so that you can stand out from your competition.

Join Ethan and Hendrik Baird of Baird Media and Let’s Talk Content Marketing.

Hendrik

 Mary Garner speaking with me here tonight on the podcast recording of Set’s Talk Content marketing.

So, you seem to be the expert.

It says content marketing executive that sounds very fancy and and important but let’s get back to the prehistory first if you don’t mind.

So how did you get, what was your journey like?

Mary

So it was very organic, very natural.

So I when I was in college I studied media with a focus on journalism, particularly print journalism and then also online.

So at the start of my career at the very beginning, when I was interning, I wrote for online and then also print.

And then when I graduated, the magazine, I was interning at hired me as a content manager.

So content management systems CMS manager but also content manager overall.

So mentored intern  8 writers, I actually did a guest lecturer at my old College where I was part of a campaign to recruit intern writers.

And I actually, I gave a few people at start, in their careers, one of them’s a comic book writer now and one’s  successful author.

So it’s really nice to be able to help people at the start of their careers.

But anyway, I digress.

So, content marketing became a very natural part of selling your content online because journalism is not so much just about reporting.

It’s an industry that supports the ad industry and magazines make money by reaching audiences, specifically target audience.

So when you reach his high if you can show with your web analytics that you get a certain amount of traffic per day, then you can sell more ads based on your website.

And so the whole objective from the start of my career was about marketing content.

And when I realized that I wasn’t going to make, you know, real money with journalism.

I just sort of focusing on content marketing and so and I’ve been doing that for almost 12 years now.

So that’s been my whole career.

Hendrik 

So marketing obviously has a very large kind of massive beast and content marketing, one aspect of that.

So what is it and how does it fit into that overall marketing east, if I can call it that.

Mary 

Content marketing is the strategic approach to gear content towards a specific targeted audience.

So, whatever that audience is.

So you create stylized content that has longevity, that has a storytelling arc, that engages users or audiences, target audiences, over a long period of time.

And what this does is that it plants the story of the brand, the conversation of the brand into the subconscious of the person and this obviously relates to the marketing principle of keeping things personable.

And this is why content marketing is so effective because it uses communication and storytelling to sell.

Hendrik 

So, what is the value of content marketing for a business?

And how does it differ from advertising or, you know, the other pillars of marketing?

Mary

Well, the value is that it forms part of the whole marketing strategy and very specifically here we’re talking about digital marketing.

And as I said, as I said before, it’s about speaking to the customer and speaking to the audience and maintaining a narrative of, you know, the classic use cases and pain points of the customer.

In business, when you focus on solving people’s problems, they come to you and they spend the money with you because they’d like to solve a particular problem.

And then content marketing supports that.

Hendrik

I read somewhere that if you’re like somebody has a nursery and you want people to come buy a plant, then you obviously have to write articles around, you know, plants and herb gardens, or all those sort of things, which as you say, solve issues for people.

So that you can then look like the expert and you become top of mind.

And then, when they need a new plant for the garden, they rush off to your nursery, because, you know, they’ve read so many of your articles and they sort of become friends with you without you having to have actually engage with them except on a content level.

Mary 

Yes, it’s natural.

It’s subtle.

And it’s a very important point that you make about being an expert.

You do have to establish yourself as an expert in your field with these attempts to strive to, because people, when they trust in you and they trust in your brand, they’re more likely to spend their money with you.

Hendrik

You also said earlier: longevity.

That’s an important word, isn’t it? You can’t just write content for today and tomorrow; it’s got to have along shelf life.

How do you do that?

Mary 

There has to be an arc to the storytelling. Everything has to link up.

So there has to be an overall message.

So, what is our brand about?

What problems are we solving?

You know, how are we helping our customers get through, whatever they need to get through?

And so, there will be a single thread that connects all of our articles.

And then each article on its own, as you mentioned, should have longevity, it should within a significant period of time remain relevant to the topic.

Obviously I’m speaking very broadly now because we’re not speaking about anything specific but I guess that is just the structure that we keep in mind when we consider what are we doing with our content marketing strategy.

The main idea has to be mapped out before any brainstorming happens, before we do any paid ads on social media, before we do any PPC ads and all those things. That only comes after we figure out what is our message.

You know, what are we doing for our customers, and how are we solving the problems.

And then we maintain that through it, at least for if we looking at, you know, 12 months.

So, we have a 12 month plan.

What are we doing for the first three months and how does our messaging connect from the first few months into the six into the – at 12.

And at the end of the year, we could actually do an amazing round up.

We can do a video, we can do a whole campaign, end-of-year campaign, while for our whole story comes together.

Hendrik

So you’re touching an important, something I’m very passionate about, repurposing content, because we tend to make one piece of content, and then think that’s the end of that.

And we don’t realize how much value there is in repurposing it. How do you go about that?

How do you decide which content is the best to repurpose or which mediums to, or formats to repurpose?

Mary 

So I think with the repurposing, what’s important is to keep everything consistent on each batch because different people use different platforms more often than not.

So some people are just LinkedIn, some people are just YouTube, some people are just Instagram, eels or Tik Tok.

So what we have to do is we repurpose our content for each channel.

Say we do one podcast, so we do one Expo where we have like a panel talk.

So we’ll take certain excerpts and certain, you know, text copy for LinkedIn and maybe a video for a reel.

And the most important thing, I think when it comes to repurposing, is to keep it short.

So when information is concise and digestible and it has a main point, it’s easily planted in the subconscious.

So even if a person is just scrolling past and they see something that’s like, you know, people, there’s so much going on online and everywhere, it’s very difficult to grab someone’s attention and have then just sit, but it’s much simpler and more consistent if you can continuously remind people about your brand and what you doing again and again and again and again.

And the main point is not to convince people who aren’t interested in what you have to offer.

Converting people, t’s great, that’s advertising’s problem, right?

Marketing- what we want to do is we want to reach the people who are already interested because that target market is there.

The research has been done.

You know, when we know that in industries with three billion US Dollars, we know the audience is there. What we’re trying to do is we try to find them, right?

So when we talk about the problems that they have, and when we run ads, or continuously you have a consistent campaign with our social media posts, we talk about these pain points, they will remember, and eventually they’ll come back to it. So, it is a long-form strategy.

It’s not an instant solution. And I think often with business, especially small business owners, there’s this idea that, you know, as a marketer, as a digital marketer when you’re coming, you got to solve no problems immediately.

But especially with content, it takes time to build up the narrative.

Hendrik 

Which, in your opinion, is the best kind of content to put out as your source content?

Mary 

Videos.

Hendrik 

Videos?

Mary

Absolutely, yeah.

Hendrik

Why?

Mary

With research, what I found online and it supports of my own, I guess my own bias, for the way I consume media and information.

The easiest way for me to engage with content is through video and then stats online really support this.

And if you have a video on your landing page, you have a higher engagement and we have a lower bounce rate when you have a video in your landing page and what’s really cool is that you can actually put the subscription box up in your video as well on landing page.

So people on your landing page and the video, the first thing that they say is a video that, it’s short video with a person smiling, that talks about, with the reason why they came to your site.

So if you are selling pesticides, organic pesticides, for example, for gardening. And that video speaks first about why your pesticides are effective and why organic pesticides are better for the environment and it really speaks to the person, then they’re more likely to stay there then if it’s just the static page with information and lots of text.

Especially with online.

What we see what’s happening with Tik Tok, for example, the engagement with Tik Tok is so high, because of the video’s.

They come in and they come on a loop and they showed in the entertaining and obviously with the reels as well. So, yeah, videos: the future.

Hendrik

That’s really interesting.

And you mentioning Tik Tok.

You know, for oldies like me, it’s I’ve no idea how to do that.

I’ve now started to Tik Tok and I see you can do up to 10 minutes, but it is the shorter videos, the quickies that people are more interested in because you can just browse browse browse, you know, scroll scroll, scroll down them.

Do you think business are really getting into Tik Tok?

Or is it just for influencers?

Mary

Anything new is always adapted by younger demographics at first, but I just use Tik Tok as an example, because video content has existed before Tik Tok.

So we have the short videos, we’ve always had videos on Instagram.

We’ve always had YouTube and now we’ve eels and we’ve got stories.

So video content is everywhere.

We can do it on LinkedIn, we can do it on Facebook, we can put it on our YouTube embedded and put it on our website.

It’s just that video, like our conversation now, it’s so much more impactful than if we were for example just texting each other or emailing each other back and forth.

The way it’s so easy for us to disseminate information between us on this video chat or just like you know seeing each other.

It’s a lot more effective,  its a lot more powerful and it sits in the subconscious a lot stronger than just copy.

Hendrik

What tips or tricks or suggestions do you have for a listener who’s maybe a small business and is really struggling to get into the content marketing?

You know, posting things regularly or writing blog articles.

What advice do you have?

Mary 

Start with a plan.

Start with a content plan.

So that’s the main idea, but then also an actual plan, like a schedule.

You can use an application like Loomly, which is really great for scheduling.

It gives you a great overview of the whole month.

If you’re posting to Instagram, you can do a future grid first, so you can actually see how the tiles are laid out and how the content will be laid out.

And you can start to create patterns for your social media, and then again, with the scheduling what you have is consistency.

So if you’re looking to engage audiences, what audiences really enjoy, what humans enjoy, is routine. S

ay is every Monday, they know they get a certain kind of post from you, they will check in and they will appreciate that every Monday you do maybe a mentoring Monday post.

They know that they okay, on a Monday, they get to see that and if they can rely on that from you, then they’ll keep coming.

But if you are thinking of doing social media for example, or getting content out or blog articles, and very sporadically you write one article here and one article where it’s, yeah, you’re not going to see any results, and you won’t see increased engagement with that.

Hendrik

 And at what point do you call in the services of a professional like yourself?

Mary 

At the very start.

At the very start.

The marketing budget is often the one that is left behind, and it’s because it’s like, you know, it’s hard to tell if I’ll be getting a value for money.

A good way to tell what’s happening with your marketing budget is to look at the analytics.

So if you are hiring a content person/social media person or you’re hiring an agency, make sure that you always ask them for the analytics, so that you can see what the rate is for acquiring new customers.

So, if you have a certain, like ad spend, you know, this is speaking very broadly, like, how much are you spending and then using the analytics compare.

How much you spend against how much traffic you’re actually getting to your site, so that’s Google ads for example. But yeah, you need you need professional help from the beginning and if you start off, I think, without pros, you’re going to get a lot of stumbling blocks and eventually, like down the line, you will hire someone and then they’re going to have to work with like the scraps of sort of like what you’ve done.

So it’s better to start off proper.

It’s much more expensive to hire your own digital marketing team, but the easiest way is to go by referral for agencies.

So, I would definitely recommend an agency if you are a smaller company.

And then also put them on sort of a contract basis or a review basis to see what they do in three months.

And then also educate yourself because there’s no way you can ask the right questions of an agency and find out if they’re actually doing what they’re supposed to be doing if you don’t know what’s happening.

So you gotta educate yourself if you small business owner, you know. 

Large companies, they have whole teams to run those things but yeah.

Hendrik 

That’s really good advice. One of the big stumbling blocks for a small start-up is budget. You know?

Like that’s why people tend to try and do everything themselves and then as you say, stumble very quickly.

How expensive or how cheaply, how affordably, can you do this or do you start slow and build up?

Or do you go the whole hog?

What is your advice?

Mary 

Definitely start slow and then build up.

So whatever your budget is, whatever you can spare, you give it faithful in most regards.

You know, the less you spend, the less you’re going to get.

And if you’re spending less, you need to lower your expectations.

If you’re hiring someone who’s just finished their college degree and they intern somewhere for something like six weeks, they can’t give you the results that someone who’s been doing it for 10rs can.

So you negotiate, you speak to agencies and you say okay, I’ve got R 5000  a month.

What can you do for me for R5000 a month?

What results can I see from R5000 a month? How can I compare that?

How often can I view analytics?

Can you explain these analytics to me?

And if they can’t answer those questions for you, then you know.

Okay, so you’ve got if you want to shop around.

The first agency you find is very specifically might be good for a certain field but not good for yours.

So you got to have a look around and the base is referral and LinkedIn is amazing for that.

Hendrik

Mary, it has been great chatting to you.

Thank you so much for joining me here today on Let’s Talk Content Marketing and you can find Mary on LinkedIn, Mary Garner.

If you want to find out a little bit more about how to repurpose specifically a podcast, I wrote a book about that it’s called “Purposefully Repurposed for Profit” and it’s how to start with a podcast and turn that into a ton of content and that is of course available on Amazon.com. And look out for the new book, “Become a Podmaster: Everything you need to know to master the art of podcasting” coming out in early 2023 also on Amazon. If you want to join the conversation, find Ethan and Hendrik on LinkedIn.

Also visit the Baird Media website to look at the range of content services we provide.

You will find all the links in the podcast description.