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Unbound is a weekly podcast, created to help you achieve more as a leader. Join Chris DuBois as he shares his growth journey and interviews others on their path to becoming unbound. Delivered weekly on Thursdays.
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On today's episode, we talk content marketing, how to create content that resonates and the role of AI in the process. Are you a leader trying to get more from your business and life? Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois. Mr. Wilson is the CMO of dental claims support and a marketing adviser to project healthcare with over 35 years helping fast growing businesses generate leads and revenue, Pamela guides leaders to fully leverage their marketing platforms through memorable storytelling. She is the author of the books master content marketing and master content strategy focused on profit driving marketing tactics. Pamela, welcome, Ron. Ben. I
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am so happy to be here.
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All right, let's jump right into your origin story. We'll take it from there. You know,
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I started out on the visual side of marketing, I started as a graphic designer, but I loved everything about marketing. And I really wanted to do it all. So I've devoted my career to kind of learning a little bit about everything. And one of the missing pieces that I noticed was, as my career went on, I was missing, fully understanding how online marketing worked. So I moved my business online in 2010. And, and really just switched over completely from serving clients to serving an online audience. And that was when I discovered content marketing. I wasn't a writer, though I was a visual person. So one of the parts of my origin story that I think might be the most interesting is just that I did not think I could ever be a writer and I became a writer by writing content, I
1:48
became a writer by writing. Interesting concept, right? Yeah. So let's, let's get right into, like, what are some of the steps that a small business could take to build their content marketing engine, and really knowing that it's small business without having that big budget? Yeah,
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I think the first thing to do is to really start by listening because the best content serves the people that you're trying to attract to your business. So just doing something as simple as really listening when you're in a sales conversation with a prospect, figuring out what their primary objections are, so that you can deliver solutions to those objections or information that helps to smooth those objections, when you are creating your content. That is really a fantastic place to start. And it allows you to create content that you get the most bang for your buck out of right. And the other thing to keep in mind is, like I said, in my origin story, I don't think you have to start out by hiring a content marketer full time. I am a huge believer in just diving in and learning how to do this yourself, especially if your budget is super tight. One of the reasons I wrote the books that I wrote the master content series is to help people who feel like they don't have the background to do it. And they want to learn how to do it themselves. I've helped a ton of just business owners who didn't have any writing background to create content, and video and audio, right. Yeah.
3:21
That's awesome. And so. So we're starting with listening first, right? Being able to understand what what people actually need in this content. What are some of the ways now that you can craft that content in order to connect kind of emotionally right, not just with the logic of like, this is why you should listen, but like to make him actually feel like this? Is something worth paying attention to?
3:42
Yeah, that's it's such an important question. Because I think especially nowadays, where we have AI tools, and there's a lot of AI generated content that's very generic and kind of robotic sounding, it's really important to think about how you can make your content feel more human and more emotional. And so the answer to that is very easy. What you want to do is just add in a lot of customer stories to your content. So stay in touch with your customers, ask them questions, post sale, figure out how they're using your solution and what the transformation has been like for them and then get quotes from them testimonials, stories, just real world experiences, because that's the kind of thing that an AI writing tool never have access to your own customer stories. So I think, you know, keeping in mind that what you want to try to do is generate content that basically has human fingerprints all over it. That's going to be your goal so that you can create content that really gives you a competitive advantage.
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I like that the way you just describe that and create content that has human fingerprints all over it because one of the things I've been talking to people about with AI in marketing is that you? If you can write an article completely with AI, that means someone else can just get the answer right from AI. And so what are you bringing to the table that actually makes it worth reading? And so I guess Exactly, yeah, we can just go right into like, what do you see the role of AI in content marketing?
5:19
I think there is a role and I have been using it with the team that I'm managing, we use it really more as like a brainstorming partner. I do think there's a way to work with AI that helps you to get results that are less robotic. And it starts by telling it what role you want it to play, which is, at this point, kind of common knowledge that you started saying, You are a copywriter, you are an expert in this industry, you are, you know, you have knowledge about this. And you give it that role, because if you don't give it a role at the beginning, it just it it acts like a robot, because that's what it is. Right? So the writing sounds robotic, because it's just being itself, right. So you start with giving it a role. But you also don't expect it to write a final draft, I always tell my team, look, we're trying to get like a draft Zero out of this thing, something that if we had an intern working with us, and that internet had way too much coffee, and they type something out super fast. We'd look at it and say, Well, I mean, we can pull some things from this and work with it. It's a start starting point, right. But it's not anything you would go to market with. It's not anything that you would publish without, again, putting those human fingerprints all over it. Right. Right.
6:38
Yeah, I mean, it's almost like getting a paper back. Or, like, if you were to grade a paper, and it being a C, right now. Okay, so we got to see paper, and we generally know what's wrong with it, how can we get out get it to an A, so that's what exactly
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and you're bringing your own expertise and and saying, you know, because you are an expert in your topic and your industry, you know what, it's gotten wrong? And so that's where you come in and say, Okay, well, this is I mean, it's interesting, but it's not accurate. So let's fix it, and add some customer stories and some quotes, some things that will really give it some warmth and humanity. Right.
7:15
So all right, redirecting us to a completely different path. Now, let's just talk some of the metrics around content marketing, right? Because there are, I mean, I'm sure you've heard this plenty of times, like awareness, or sessions is just a vanity metric. And so, but at the same time, that means people are seeing what you're putting out. Right. So I guess, what are what are your views on just the metrics that we should be looking at around content marketing? And I guess, what are those most important ones to actually pay attention to? Yeah,
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I think, you know, Chris, I think anyone asking that question is probably somebody who's not necessarily involved in content marketing, they might be involved in creating the budget for content marketing. And the one thing that I would want that person to know is that content marketing is a long game. And it's a long term investment. So it's not the kind of thing where you publish a blog post, you publish a single podcast episode or a single video, and it you're going to see a direct line between that piece of content and a sale. It's not to say that never happens. But it's rare, right? It's more like a long term investment, where you are establishing in the marketplace that you're an industry leader, you're a thought leader, you're a reliable source of information, and you're trustworthy. And that comes from basically just showing up consistently over time with really valuable and helpful information. So I do think the best marketing is a combination of tactics that give you sometimes immediate and very trackable results. And then other tactics that are just investments, right, and you have to have a little bit of both. If you only invest in things that give you immediate results. Your your business is not like fully anchored in the marketplace, right? But if all you ever invest in this content, you know, you may never get noticed by people. Right. So there's always got to be a mix. Does that answer your question? No,
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I think that's good. And so if we're looking at, like, building brand awareness, vers performance driven content. Now, obviously, budgets will play a little differently because generally, with brand awareness, you're looking further out versus performance driven, where it's like, we want some results now from whatever we're creating. So I guess, is there a healthy split based on how mature the company is, is there? You know, how, I guess how do you decide how much brand awareness you should be building versus performance driven content?
9:53
I think it starts by just looking to see where the company is in any given moment. So there's not really an measuring stick like we've been in the marketplace for X amount of years. The question is really, how have you been in the marketplace? Right? What do people know you for? And who knows you and you know, what, what's your potential for growth going forward and all of that you have to kind of analyze all of that and make a decision. It is a really important question, though. And it's something that is, as we speak, changing so dramatically, because privacy controls that have happened in the past even just year. And the fact that we're kind of moving into this world where we won't be able to have cookies online, the way we used to be able to really track people's behavior on our websites, the way we used to be able to do, we're moving into that space, that reminds me a lot of what things were like when I first started in the marketing world, which was mostly brand awareness, that was really kind of what you had, you had a little bit of, you know, you could do a little bit of tracking, but it was kind of minimal. You were mostly just building a brand and pushing messages out. And in the form of advertising, basically, you know, and we are, we're not moving exactly back to that space. But we're moving into a new space where I think brand awareness, and building trust is going to be more important than ever has been. Alright,
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lots of things out there. As far as flying, and actually, let's let's talk planning when you're looking at it, like a long term content strategy. Right. So what are some of the things that we should be really prioritizing right now, knowing that there's a changing market? And that we're gonna, you want to stay on top of your game? What should we be doing? Yeah,
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I think, I mean, there's a little bit of different advice depending on where you are in your content marketing journey. So if you are just starting out, I can give you some recommendations. If you have a lot of content and you've been publishing for a long time, the recommendations are a little bit different. This is something I cover in detail in my book master content strategy, I call it your website lifecycle. So basically, if you're just starting out, what you need to focus on is, is getting into a rhythm of publishing content consistently, it's going to help to establish what your business is about, it's going to tell search engines, what you deliver on the internet and what people can count on you to provide. And doing that kind of builds this content marketing muscle, I think you know, where you get into a consistent cadence of publishing. So that's important in the early years, if you're on the other end of the spectrum, and let's say you have 678 years worth of content, then you need to be looking at things like, you know, does all of this content need to be on my site? Or should some of it be retired? Is it out of date? Has my business changed? Is it getting traffic, but it needs to be updated and things like that. So I, I call people who are at that stage, they're more like, like reference librarians, right, where you're doing kind of maintenance on your content, and you are still producing new content. But you're also like taking good care of the stuff that you've published in the past and making sure that it is up to date and really working for you. And if it's not, you're unpublishing it or redirecting it to something else.
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Or there's some, I guess, tricks or things that the the companies that are have like that reference library that they could have been doing earlier to make it easier to know where all of their contents at right to have that kind of journey mapped out so they know when to update. And what the work. Yeah,
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I'm sort of laughing over here, because you've asked the perfect question, because there's a piece of information, there's, you know, this early on, it will make this whole thing so much easier. And it's this. It's OSI. So I need people to, you know, sort of visualize this, right? So I want you to imagine a tree. And the trunk of the tree is like the main topic or the main industry, where your content is always, you know, your content will always be about that main topic, right? So I work the company I've worked for now is in the dental financial industry, they do dental revenue cycle management, it's very specific. But that's the trunk of our tree we are everything we write about is about that mean topic, right? And then if you imagine the tree has these big branches, right, it has some branches are really big, and then others are much smaller, right? So the big branches are kind of like the main categories that you'll be revisiting over and over again, you'll just always come back to create content around those main categories and they're usually 10, maybe 12 of those and They become kind of anchors to these smaller pieces of content that you create, right. So the smaller pieces of content are like those tiny branches that you see coming out of the main branches, right. So each individual content is like a tiny branch that feeds back into a main category. So let's say the company I work for one of our main branches is dental billing. Because it's something that we offer to people, we we manage their dental insurance billing. So we talk about that all the time. 10 ways to, you know, make your dental billing workflow go easier. Five Reasons Your dental insurance claims are being denied things like that. It's Dental, billing, all different aspects of dental billing, they all feed into that mean branch that's a track attached to that main trunk of the tree, right. So if you can think about your content in this way, from the very beginning, your job will be so much easier down the line. Because you'll never have a big hot mess of content that is disorganized and unrelated and disconnected. It will always be connected to this main topic, and it will always support your main topic, because you've thought about this overall structure. Does that make sense? I don't know if it translates on podcast?
16:23
No, I think it's good. And then I, I always take notes when talking to guests. And like I get now I have a nice tree that is drawn on my paper. So I can I can remember this. You know, this is great. And I think are everyone listening is probably has the picture. So yeah, man, where to go next. Break all at it that part. So let's talk how content marketers can kind of better communicate the value prop and, and like the pain points that they're solving at each stage of like the buyers journey via content.
17:00
Yeah, and we should probably talk about that buyers journey thing, because I have thoughts on that. But basically, my answer to this question, though, is is super boring. And it's to be really, really consistent. And, you know, kind of reflects back to that content topic tree, right? It's to be very consistent in how you show up in your content marketing, because we're all trying to get prospects to remember us. And they're coming across us in this very busy space where they're seeing lots of other companies are hearing lots of other voices. And if we want them to remember us, we need to really be boringly consistent about our messaging, we actually have a messaging doc that I developed is just a Google Doc. So imagine a Google Doc that has a table with three columns and three rows. So it's nine cells. And each of these cells has a message that we use in our marketing, it's like a way that we talk about our value proposition. And there are nine of them, because we have a complex company. So lots of different things we need to talk about. But we all have access to that. And if anything changes, and we need to add a new phrase to that document, we the deal is we have to take off one of the older ones that we're not using. So that we only have nine, basically nine, like nine notes that we go back to playing over and over again, in our marketing, whether it's my videographer who's creating, you know, videos for our YouTube channel, whether it's the person who's writing LinkedIn profile posts for our CEO, or it's our blog writer who's creating content or writing the customer newsletter, whatever it is, we always talk about it the same way, because we just all feed off of this one messaging document. So that's a very basic and simple solution. But it's made a huge difference in what we do. And I think when it comes to communicating your value proposition, you do need to do something like that, so that you're being really consistent with it.
19:15
Have you heard the term time on brand? For I think it's somewhat newer,
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but I would love to hear how you define it.
19:24
So the idea that people are going to spend a certain amount of time with you before they actually engage, right? So I think a lot of like advertising used to be like what they need to see, you know, nine times or whatever it is before they click on that next ad. But this kind of reframes it where you can look at how much content people have consumed before becoming a lead or a customer and stuff and kind of figure out how much time they spent. So if you have YouTube videos, right, okay, they watched three five minute videos, they read to seven minute blog posts, they saw social posts, and you can kind of tally up and get it average for how long someone has been with your brand. So it might take an hour of content consumption in order for that to happen, right. But the I think what people miss is, if you're not consistent with your messaging and everything else that time on brand doesn't matter, because they're hearing a new message, and they have to like restart that whole cycle. And so, yeah, I think it's consistency is like the driving message. Like, let's, please. Yeah, so let's talk. For this perfect for a follow up for the time on brand. Let's talk about the different types of content like different forms of content that we could be using. Are there? I mean, obviously, the changes per industry, but do you have like recommendations for where certain brands should be starting? stuff they should be looking at? Is there like, if you start with a blog, it's really easy to move through a podcast or a YouTube channel? Like, do you have any kind of flow for recommendations? Or how someone could even figure out what the best channel and platform is for them?
21:03
Yeah, I think I think it's, that's the question we need to answer is, how can someone figure out what's the best channel for them? Because I don't think that there's any magic to certain types of media, in certain points in the buyers journey. Like, I don't think, you know, if you want to push someone over the finish line, you show them a video, I don't, I don't believe that I just don't, I just don't buy it. I don't think I don't think humans are that simple in the buyers journey is not that simple. And you can't simplify it in that way. It would be nice, but I don't think it works that way. So the way to figure out what content to create is to kind of look at two things, first and foremost, for sure. You want to be thinking about the people you want to reach. And you want to think deeply about the kind of content that they will consume and kind of where they gather so that you can reach them where they are, right. So if if you happen to know that, let's say your target market has, they commute, or they spend a lot of times in there, a lot of time in their vehicles, a podcast might be perfect for that audience a YouTube channel, maybe not maybe not so much, because they're watching the road and not not listening, right? If you happen to know that you're reaching an audience of people who, who need a lot of data and they need, you know, kind of written data, then then a blog is going to be good. So you look at those kinds of things, make your best educated guess. But then the other thing you need to consider is who is going to create this content as a you as someone on your team, because you do you have to be able to actually make it and keep at it consistently because it is a long game, as we've said, right. So if you happen to bring somebody onto your team, who has a lot of experience creating podcasts, and you know for sure that your audience will consume podcasts, and it is a match made in heaven, you should definitely create a podcast and that should be your content framework. The the idea of starting with a certain kind of content, because it's easier to turn this kind of content into that kind of content was more of an issue before because back in the day, we used to say the most repurpose edible content is a blog post because it's already words. And then you can turn those words into a video, you can turn those words into a podcast. But that's not the time we live in right now. Right now we live in a time where it is super easy to get a transcript made of anything. So you can just as easily start with a podcast, turn it into a blog post. So getting audio or video turned into words is no big deal at all. So I would say just start with what your audience will respond to what your prospects will respond to how you can best serve them. And then just also look at who do I have on my team? Or if it's me personally doing it? What am I comfortable doing? That I can do consistently over time? And it's kind of that sweet spot between those two?
24:15
So let's actually go back for one step. If you so looking at who's actually creating the content, how do you go about you bring on some new team members, right? They're not necessarily subject matter experts in your space? What are some of the ways that you've worked with with the content creators to be able to actually bring the insights that you get to bring from your company as a whole to that even if they don't have a ton of experience in the space? Yeah,
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I mean, a perfect example is the content manager on my team right now. She had no experience in the dental industry at all. And she started out meeting with subject matter experts in the company on a regular basis. says to just go over the kind of questions they were hearing from customers, the kinds of objections. Some of them had come from dental offices. So they could speak from their own personal experience about some of the struggles. And we now call it the content influencer meeting. And she meets with them. And they gave her all sorts of amazing ideas. And then I mean, really more ideas than she can she can create content for. And so then she goes to search engine, keyword research tools and start looking starts looking to see, you know, what angle could we use for this content that would answer the question, but also help us to rank. And that combination has proved to be dynamite for us. I mean, it's worked really, really well. And she she's written on this topic for almost three years now and still manages to keep it fresh. I don't know how.
25:57
All right, I like that concept of the content influencer meeting. And I think that would be something I'm going to explore. So what skills would you say are the most important for marketers focus on content creation? If I'm looking to hire if I'm looking to even just get better at concentration myself? Right? What should I be focused on?
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I think, today, especially, I think we need to look for balance. So you're kind of balancing between having creative ideas that help your content to stand out. But then also basing those ideas on data that you can get about what people are looking for, when they come to your website, questions that you may see being asked out on the web, what posts that you may already have on your site that are getting a lot of traffic. So you're, you're combining creativity and data and balancing those two things. And then I also think balancing the ability to listen to your customers listen to your subject matter experts. And, and like hitting tight workflows that require you to do things at by a certain date, so that your content will be published at a, you know, at a cadence that is regular and trustworthy, right? So it's that combination of spending time listening, but also like respecting the deadline and getting it done, right. And then also, I think the big thing now is balancing using AI writing tools, in a way that balances what they contribute to the process with the human voice, like we talked about at the beginning, the human voice, the human fingerprint, and how you can kind of blend the best of both of those worlds. I think, you know, one of the reasons I know I mentioned this to you, but I rewrote my master content books, and I'm about to publish second editions. And I felt like I had to do that, because so much changed around content creation, once those AI writing tools came online, and I felt very strongly from the very beginning that there was no reason to be afraid of them. I saw a place where they could be super helpful. And we've managed to incorporate it in the work that we do at DCS. And it it is really helped our work to get produced faster. And I think at a higher quality, but we're doing it in a very specific way, right? It's not, you know, we're not just having it run with whatever idea we plug into it and just taking what it gives us in using it.
28:35
Where are your books available?
28:37
They're available everywhere right now actually,
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everywhere.
28:41
I mean, yeah. I don't know if your local library will have one. Master content marketing master content strategy. Wherever you like buying books, you should be able to find them. They're
28:53
awesome. All right, I want to move into our rapid fire round here. With first question separate from your own book, since everybody knows where to grab this. What book do you recommend everyone should read?
29:04
This one is going to be a little bit mad by two friends of mine wrote a book called Read to lead Jeff Brown and Jeff. Jesse was news Kadena that book. Yeah,
29:15
I think I got it somewhere. I have, like
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a meta answer to this question, because it's a book about reading books, right? But what it helps you to do is to read very strategically so the books you read help you to reach your goals. And that doesn't mean you only read nonfiction. You can you know, fiction helps you to reach your goal. You read fiction, but it's just about being a little bit strategic about your reading. If you are a reader, I highly recommend it. It will just help you to see reading as kind of something you do that's active rather than passive. I've always thought of reading as something I do like to relax and it's almost like it's not even alien activity is flight, reading and sleeping, they feel about as active as each other, right. But I've been looking at it differently since I read that book. It feels like something you're doing by choice to actively achieve something. It's pretty cool. Yeah.
30:16
I like that you compared reading and sleeping, because those are probably the two most important things you could be doing. Awesome, what is next for you professionally?
30:30
I know that there's another book in my future, I'm actually planning to co author a book. I'm not gonna say much about her because I'm actually having a conversation with my future co author tomorrow. So we're going to be doing initial plans. But there's, there's a book that needs to be written. So there's another book coming. It'll be a shorter book and very targeted about a very specific topic I want to talk about kind of the How to experiment your way to profitability is something I'm very passionate about. So and my co author is as well. So that's what it'll be about. And I'll fill you in once it's ready. Yeah,
31:12
no, that's awesome. Last question, Where can people find you?
31:17
I actually own my name on the internet so they can find me at Pamela wilson.com.
31:23
All right. That is rare.
31:28
I couldn't believe it.
31:29
Awesome. Okay, Pamela, thank you for joining me. This has been awesome. I'm
31:33
so glad to have the chance to talk to you and we talked about one of my favorite things. So thanks for the opportunity.
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If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love a rating and review on your favorite podcast player. And for more information on how to build effective and efficient teams through your leadership visit leading for effect.com As always deserve it
Transcribed by https://otter.ai