Doug Kessler - How to Make Less Conventional Content

Doug Kessler, Creative Director & Co-Founder at Velocity, B2B Content Marketing Agency, London, New York You just came off stage. Can you give us some key takeaways from what you've just been teaching us? What I was talking about at the conference was about exposing conventions of content marketing, the invisible conventions, the kind of rules that we all follow without even thinking and to try to get those on the table and analyze them and explore ways of breaking those rules and bending those rules and playing with those rules to see if we can make better content, less conventional content, content that doesn't scream this is marketing coming at you kind of thing. So my talk was all about that, trying to pick a few conventions and seeing what happens when you break them. So how do you break those conventions and what would be your advice to marketers today? So my advice to marketers who want to break conventions is first of all do it in a safe environment. Get people on board that that's what you want to do. Create a place where you're saying we're going to try new things here and see what they look like. You don't have to commit to publish. People think you go down this road, something's going to leak out of the company that will embarrass you. It's just no. Find out and test in a safe place and a team that is trying to break some rules. So pick some rules to break. See what happens when you do. The one I talk about in the talk is why do you always have to put the best foot forward? Can you not share some of the weaknesses of your product in a constructive, helpful way? It's a really powerful thing to try to do. And so I would tell teams, look, give it a try. See what happens when you admit to the downsides of your product. Admit that there are people out there who shouldn't be buying it and see just how risky and painful that really is. And in most cases it isn't. It's quite exciting. So what's the common content marketing challenge companies face today? So the common content marketing challenges, I mean, there's a lot we see over and over again. And one of the biggest ones for us is the alignment of the people in the company that you're all doing the same thing. And I think content marketers who get really excited about this new way of marketing forget to bring people along with them. And so they get judged by the wrong yardsticks and they get attacked for things they're not even trying to do and that kind of thing. So for me it's really important to get the key stakeholders, whoever's going to be judging your work, on board with the strategy and the goals and the technique and what is content marketing and why. Or someone's going to ride out from sales and say, why didn't you even mention the product here? What's going on? You know, you need to get these people on board before you head out. So for me content marketers have to be change managers. They have to learn how to drive change in a company. And it isn't just by doing new things. It's by helping bring people along. Great. So what are your predictions for content marketing, like if you look at this in three, five years from now? What does content marketing look like? For me content marketing is changing fast. One of the ways it's changing is it's going mainstream in a big way. And content marketing used to confer advantage to anyone who did it because they were the only one in their market doing it. It was a cool thing to do. Now if everyone in your market's doing it, it still confers benefits but it doesn't really confer these extra advantages over your competitors. So what do you do in a world like that? What's content marketing going to look like? And I think what it's doing is dissolving into mainstream marketing. It's becoming core. I don't think it's a fad that's passing by any means. When will it be a bad idea to help your customers do their jobs or live their lives? It's always going to be with us. But as it goes mainstream, it gets more conventional, more typical of what marketing looks like. And the big challenge will be how do you make stuff that doesn't feel that way, that doesn't look and smell and feel like marketing? And so I mean authenticity, I think the currency of authenticity will go up and up over the next three, four, five years of doing content that comes from the heart, that is really talking about something that matters. And the kind of bullshit layers of marketing will erode away. I think content marketing will get a lot more granular specific topics, more personalized, more interactive. It'll get more digital. I think we're still stuck a bit in a print kind of mindset even when it's on screen, PDFs and things like that. So I expect more interactive dynamic experiences too. Okay. That's interesting. Could you comment with some examples of how that could work? Like if it's going to be personalized, it's going to be authentic, it's going to be interactive, engaging. What does that, how do we get there? Yeah. I mean, what does interactive content look like? I mean, it's becoming much more tech enabled, like dynamically produced. So if it's personalized, it could be done on the fly. If you know something about your audience and we are collecting more and more data, you could create a new piece of content for that person based on what you know. That could be a unique piece of content for them. I know the Content Marketing Institute in America has an intelligent content conference which is looking at this kind of thing. It's pretty exciting actually that it doesn't have to be a single monolithic piece that goes to everybody. It can be dynamically assembled. It's one example of how personalized and interactive content might work. Wow. So, sorry, I'm digging more into this. Sure. What do you think is going to be important for marketers to be able to bring that authenticity and still do marketing, like still keep some things a bit professional, you'd say? Yeah, there is kind of a tension between the professional branding and marketing that you see and that we've all grown up with, the slick and then the real. And there's a bit of a tension between the two. And I just think that the real will grow as more people come out to be spokespeople for, for instance, on social media for the company or just to talk about their own experience. And I think getting faces out from behind the logo and out front to say, I'm a person that works at this company and here's me, is quite a powerful thing. And I think it's scary for companies. What if that guy leaves? What if that woman decides to go to our biggest competitor? You know, that's a risk. But I think the risk of hiding your people is a bigger risk. Do you think that actually employee advocacy and or people is going to be more than the actual brand? Like it's going to be Jason Mill, like kind of rock stars who's going to be there? No, I do. I do think there will be more and more rock stars coming out of companies. I think Jamie Pham of LinkedIn just gave a great talk here about employee advocacy and employee featured content, employee created content and employee shared content, which is a great talk. And she really showed the multiplying power. Everyone talks about paid media, earned media and owned media. No one talks about employed media. And that's what Jamie from LinkedIn was talking about, is the people who work for you are a vector for sharing. And also creating content is pretty exciting. And when you think about the multiplier effect that that would unleash if people are doing it well, it's pretty powerful stuff. Awesome. And do you have any favorite content marketing tools in your luggage? I'm pretty old school when it comes to the tools of content marketing. I mean, we love the analytics. So Google Analytics or whatever analytics package we use, Google, is hugely important. I'm linking that up to a marketing automation so that you can watch whole journeys is super important. These are kind of the core. So CRM, marketing automation and analytics are the big, the whole trinity of the tech stack for any content marketer. So all of those are just part of our life. For me, when it's creating content, I use Evernote for keeping my ideas in order or disorder and just try to capture ideas as they come, dump them in there, develop them over time. And I just feel safe that there's an idea in the cloud somewhere that I can come back to. I'm not going to leave it on a train like I leave my briefcase on the train all the time. So I love Evernote. I love that kind of tool. But otherwise I'm kind of old school about pen and paper and stuff like that. So do you have any secret content marketing techniques in your arsenal? Secret content marketing techniques. There's one, the worst kept secret of all is the power of voice in marketing. Great brands have great voices and everyone knows this, but every company or so many under invest in trying to get a great voice. And for me it's a multiplier of your budget. You're crazy if you don't spend a lot of time and energy getting it right. So it's a not really secret secret, but there it is. I think it's a big one. Yeah, so for me voice is this kind of, it's more like elephant in the room. Why aren't people spending more time on this? What do you mean by voice? I'm just, voice as in... For me voice is kind of the user experience of content. It's kind of the UX. It's how you say what you say. So we spend a lot of time about what we're saying. We don't spend nearly as much time on how are we saying it. Are we saying it in a way that is distinctive, compelling, fun, smart, entertaining, funny maybe? I mean all these things are at our disposal. When we're in front of somebody we have gesture and we have facial expression. We have tone of voice and all these things we can play with. 10 or 20 different ways to signal things. In content you'd have a few and tone of voice of your content is the main one. It's the big one. It's how you signal not the thing, the content, but you're signaling things about the sender of the message, right? And that's why it's so important. So while I'm listening to what you're saying, I'm listening to things about who you are and that's what tone of voice does for you. It signals, it's almost like parallel channel about who you are as a company and brand and it should be paid attention to. So let's move into, in your talk you were also mentioning Moss and Rand Fishkin and his use of Whiteboard Friday and how they also used data or they didn't use the data unfortunately and if not they would have probably stopped doing Whiteboard Friday. The use of video. More and more people are talking about video and how that's increasing conversion, engagement, etc. Where do you see video going? So video is hugely important in content marketing and only getting more so especially with live video but not just. For me it's one of the most versatile media you could ever use. I hear people say, oh video is great for top of the funnel blah blah blah explainers or oh it's great for case studies at the bottom. It's great for anything you do with it. You can do anything with video as long as you use it appropriately for that goal, right? So I love video as the go to. It's also a great masterpiece of content because if you have videoed me and as you are now, you've got audio, you've got video, you've got text if you want it, you've got stills, it's all there so packed into the medium. So for me it's a great one and also it can be shoot from the hip. It doesn't have to be these huge production values, right? I think that kept people away when every shoot was a six figure shoot or a 50 grand shoot. That limits what you can do and want to do with it. But when you can grab a piece of mobile kit, a SLR like you guys have and an iPhone on the side, you can do anything. Awesome. And when that ties into, because you're touching upon also the need for personalized content authenticity that you actually reach that specific person and also with the use of marketing automation, how do you see that future going when it comes to marketing automation and video? Marketing automation and video coming together is interesting because it's a harder one to personalize. You can do it and we have done it where you might just get the person on camera to say the name of the person 10 times or 15 times. If it's account based marketing, you can do that. You can do a video for each of your high value prospects. But it's not the easiest thing to automate or personalize within the medium. But you can still personalize a program for somebody. We have these 50 videos on our shelf, we're going to pick the ones for this person and promote them to them. So there's plenty of scope for using marketing automation to build and enhance nurture flows using video as really high value communication. You might not have an answer for this, but do you have anyone that you would say does this well? Does, so who uses? So we have a client called Informatica, they're a data management company and they use video in interesting ways. They use it top of funnel for explainers or evangelizing a problem solution kind of thing. They use it for whiteboard chalk talk type things like the SEO Moz or Rand Fishkin ones. They use it for case studies, they use it for deep tech and they use it for almost where content marketing meets training like some heavy duty tech stuff, almost like a university of data management. And video is used all throughout that whole stack. And so if you look at a journey of a prospect to a customer, and they do, they track everything, of course they would, they're a data company. You see where video pops up, you can see the contribution video makes all along that journey. Awesome. Thank you so much. I'll run it up here because you probably want to go in and see it. Thank you. That's great.