How To Do Content Marketing The Right Way in 2020

Today, we are going to talk about how to do content marketing the right way for this year and beyond. Because why? Because most people suck at content marketing. Well, let's talk about this a little bit. Content marketing is basically creating content and then trying to drive interest and then eventually trying to drive leads and trying to drive sales for your business. And oftentimes, I mean, I think about a lot of the content that I create on the Leveling Up podcast, the Marketing School podcast, the YouTube channel and everything. And a lot of it is to drive top of funnel awareness. Depends on what your goals are. You can do top of the funnel, Middle of the funnel, which is you might collect an email, and then bottom of the funnel is where you try to drive some type of action. They can pay a low dollar amount or some type of sale where they're taking out their credit card and they are paying you. So, in terms of doing content marketing the right way, one of the biggest problems right now is that our attention is so split. One second I might be watching Netflix and then next second I'll take out my phone and I'll look at multiple apps. I might look at one app, switch over to another app, then I'll take out my computer. So, my attention is very ADD right now because it's just the nature of how these apps have optimized to take our attention. Which is— that's fine, that's what their incentive is. But one of the biggest things that you can do is take this omnichannel approach, meaning right now on YouTube we have this video, but it's going to go over to podcasts as well. So a video easily translates over to audio. And I— let's say I do an interview today. I'm doing an interview with someone for about 45 minutes or so. It's a video podcast. We're probably going to chop that up into 6 or 7 pieces that will be short video snippets. And then at the same time, That's also gonna go to maybe short podcast snippets as well. But think about it, short video snippets can go on IGTV, so Instagram TV. They can go onto Instagram Stories as well. They can go to Instagram posts. We can make a meme out of it. There's just a lot that we can do with it. We can make a cartoon out of it as well. So you can think about one piece, like that one 45-minute video that it takes us to do. Think about the prep time. Maybe it takes us an hour or 2 to set up and there's multiple people involved as well. There's transcriptions, there's show notes people. There's just a lot of moving parts there. We wanna be able to maximize the effort that we put in there. So, one piece of content, we call this content sprouting. One video might become multiple, might become multiple podcasts, might become multiple blog posts, might become multiple social posts. So, one piece could easily become 40 or 50 pieces, maybe even up to 100 pieces or so. And it sounds very overwhelming, but I'll tell you, even with the small team that we have putting together this content right now, We're able to do it because we have a methodical process around it. So taking this omnichannel approach, taking this content sprouting approach, that's going to allow you to go much further. I'll tell you this, recently people have been reaching out to me on LinkedIn and they're saying, hey Eric, I've been seeing your stuff, like, hey, we need help here, right? And these are super, super qualified leads and we're just constantly posting. We're just getting more reach. Right now it's just about output for us and reach. It's not even about trying to drive bottom of the funnel conversions because we're just trying to, you know, we're just trying to maximize the output that we're getting. Taking this omnichannel approach and not just, ending at one channel, that's gonna go a long way for you. That's gonna help you diversify. So if you— if anything, God forbid anything happens to you on one channel, you're gonna be protected across the board. So that's one of the things that you need to do to be able to do content marketing the right way in 2020. If I'm going omnichannel, I need to think about posting natively to the platforms. So in the past, we might take one video and not format it well. You know, maybe it's formatted well for YouTube, but it's like, it's not It's not formatted for Instagram TV. Because we don't do that, people will be like, okay, they didn't put in the work. It doesn't look right. And you don't get as much engagement from it, right? You gotta think about, just put in that little bit of the extra effort to post natively to the platforms. That's how you do content marketing the right way, 'cause you wanna post for that platform, right? The podcast is easy, 'cause we can post to Apple, we can post to Spotify, we can post to iHeartRadio, to Google Play. That's all native. But, you know, if we make an Instagram, let's say we make a YouTube video, it's 40 minutes. For Instagram TV, it's only 10 minutes. We gotta figure out how we can chop that down. It's easier said than done, but it's worth the extra effort because it shows people that you actually care about that, right? One thing I'll say is like, we haven't been doing as well on Facebook because we haven't been thinking about how we can post natively to Facebook. Facebook gets a lot of engagement. Whenever I post in there, I get a ton of engagement, right? So it's just taking that extra step. That's how you do content marketing the right way. And related to that, we use a tool called Sprout Social to track how we're doing when it comes to our social media numbers. Obviously, we use Google Analytics as well. We use Google Search Console. But we want to be able to see how we're doing over time. We use Ahrefs to kind of track backlinks for content that we're producing. But if you're not measuring what you're doing, you're not managing it. We also use a playbook called the Entrepreneur's Operating System. That's Traction. Every single Monday, we get with the content team and we figure out, we look at our scoreboard. We have very specific objectives and key results. We have a scoreboard as well. We're operating like a well-oiled machine. We're talking about our issues. We're debating it. Sometimes it might get heated in there. But if you have a team, you want to be doing something like that. Where you're actively bringing up issues, not just bringing up issues, but you're solving issues and you're putting solutions forward and you're taking accountability for it. Because a lot of people, oftentimes they'll bring up problems, but they won't bring up the solution. They won't solve it, right? You don't want to work with people like that. And you want to quickly use meetings like this to suss that out. Now I'll say this, look, if you're starting out, a lot of stuff I'm talking about might involve a team, might involve posting quite a bit. But if you're just starting out, start with what you're good at first. I used to be really good at, I used to really I love writing all the time, blogging, but now I have to focus more on, you know, um, you know, the business culture, you know, multiple things, events I'm doing, events I'm speaking at. So I like doing video. I like doing audio because it's very fast and I can, I can get it done faster. Think about this. What are you good at? Is it writing? If you're sure it's a short-form writing, if it's short-form writing, maybe you go to Twitter, right? Naval Ravikant built a brand doing that. If you're good at Quora, for example, Jason Lemkin from SaaStr built a brand that way. Um, there's just many different ways to skin a cat. Neil Patel, he built his his authority through his blog back in the days. And, you know, some people are really good at video, some people are really good at Instagram. Think about what you're good at and then you can double down on that and then you can start to expand out. So start small first and then expand and then get bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, when I think about the things we've done, I'm by no means a large influencer, but the first podcast, you know, 9 downloads a day after the first year, 30 downloads a day after the second year. And now when I look at it, we're getting up to 1.2 million downloads per month on the Marketing School Podcast, 80,000 downloads On the Leveling Up podcast, we've made a YouTube channel as well. Things are like growing. So the thing I'll say to you about, you know, starting small first is think about it. It just—it's like compounding interest. It's like an investment. You're constantly making little deposits every single day, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then from there, you're going to be able to get really strong. And that's how you do content marketing the right way. You create. You start small first. You start to go omnichannel. You optimize. You look at the numbers. You get better. And then also think about. You know, who else is in your space? Who else is in your space that's around the same size as you? Go to those people, offer to help them for free, find out what they want. Like, it's really easy nowadays to just DM someone on Instagram. That's how we got one of our collabs going with Chris Do from The Futur. Got a lot of value from him, built a great friendship that way. But a lot of times it's just DMing people and just saying, hey, look, you know, I know you're interested in this. I'm happy to put this in front of you. Do the work for them and that's gonna help you go a long way. In the early days when I was just offering to work for people for free, I did that so much and then eventually like, you know, they saw the value that I had and then yeah, you know, things kind of took off from there. But literally there's no excuse. The fact that you're watching this right now, it doesn't matter where you're watching in the world, there's no excuse for you not to make content marketing work. And if you're starting out right now and you don't have time to produce content, you don't think you have enough experience to create content, go work for someone for free. You're going to gain the experience and it gets stronger and stronger and eventually you're going to start to be able to teach people because that's literally how our world works. There's always something to teach. There's always something like, if you're learning, get to a point where you can teach and then you get stronger and then learn more and then teach more and you get stronger and stronger. That's how you do content marketing the right way. And now I think about it, you know, we're, we're, we have a book coming out called Leveling Up and that's coming out. And, but see, there's, there's a goal. Like I'm leveling up to another goal, another goal, another goal with content. And then eventually I can play at, um, you know, I could play at, you know, my, my ultimate goal, which is to level up the entire world, right? If you enjoyed this, let me know. Did I miss anything when it comes to doing content marketing the right way? Let me know in the comments. Don't forget to like and hit the subscribe and notification button, uh, if you're coming from YouTube, and don't forget to check out the next video over there, and we'll see you tomorrow. Peace.