The Content Studio: Tommy Walker on "The State of (Dis)Content"

In this episode of Content Briefly, Tommy Walker, Founder of The Content Studio, presented his State of (Dis)Content and discussed the survey’s insights, learnings, and more.

Access the full report here: https://www.thecontentstudio.com/the-state-of-discontent/

This episode is brought to you by our friends at Shelf (https://shelf-made.com/heavyweight-b2b-content-marketers/).

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Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

03:41 The ‘why’ behind The State of (Dis)Content.

07:38 Tommy’s thoughts on the report.

09:20 Key survey information.

11:58 The good news.

15:23 The not so good news.

23:49 The really bad news.

25:38 Tommy’s most creative and fulfilling period.

28:08 The worst news of all.

29:09 Reasons for not doing market research.

41:40 What has Content Marketing discontent?

43:13 Job market sentiment.

48:37 Management and getting executives to buy in.

57:30 Q&A session.

58:01 What does it mean to be a content marketer today?

1:03:47 How to do audience research.

01:09:55 Wrapping things up.

01:11:30 Outro

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Useful Links:

• The State of (Dis)Content
• Tommy on LinkedIn
• The Content Studio

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Stay Tuned:

► Website: https://www.superpath.co/

► YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@superpath

► LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/superpath/

► Twitter: https://twitter.com/superpathco

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Creators & Guests

Host

Jimmy Daly

Co-founder/CEO at Superpath

What is Content, Briefly?

"Content, Briefly" is your go-to podcast for content marketing strategy. Each week, host Jimmy Daly interviews SaaS content leaders to understand all the nuances of their content programs—things like content org structure, KPIs, workflows, meeting agendas, and much more.

This podcast is presented by Superpath, the internet's best content marketing community.

Tommy Walker (00:00:00):
This is the part that made me kind of sad is that the majority of us are having complicated relationships with the work that we're producing. I believe that this is tied to that mostly bought in segment, right? I'm sometimes happy with the work. I'm happy with the work that maybe we got some performance, maybe we got some traffic, but was it creatively fulfilling? We kind of saw earlier, not so much.

Jimmy Daly (00:00:30):
[00:00:30] Hey folks, and thanks for tuning into another episode of Content briefly. We've got a slightly different episode for you today. So this is the audio from the recent webinar we did with Tommy Walker from the content studio. It's the presentation of his state of discontent report. Just for some quick context, if you have not been aware of this, Tommy ran a big survey over the summer, had about 550 content marketers respond. Basically trying to collect some data on a general state of malaise that he and certainly [00:01:00] others have noticed in the content industry over the last 18 to 24 months. He wanted to put some numbers behind all that, so that's what this report is all about. This webinar was the first look at that data. The full report is out now you can grab the link to that in the show notes. Obviously some of this stuff in this podcast is better on video so you can look at the slides and the charts and all that good stuff, but I wanted to put this out in case there's folks who want to get as much of this as they can, but would rather do it while they're walking the dog in the car doing dishes, which is [00:01:30] how I get a lot of my info.

(00:01:32):
So hopefully this is helpful to folks. Also, just a quick reminder that we have recently relaunched Super Path Pro. We've consolidated our two paid tiers, which was the Slack community and the former Super Path Pro. There is now just a single paid tier. You get access to all of the Slack stuff, courses, content monthly, one-on-ones monthly group calls, and some other stuff that we're working on, including some software stuff. So we're building a tap that is actually going to have some pretty cool features that will only be available to pro members. All that [00:02:00] is coming soon and I'll tease more about some of the software stuff as we get a little closer to launching it. You can get all that Super path.co right on the homepage. Okay, I'll get out of the way. Really enjoyed this conversation with Tommy Walker. So much good information and good data in this report.

(00:02:14):
So thank you Tommy. Really, you've done a great service to the content marketing industry by putting this out there. I hope all of you get a ton of value out of it and enjoy this podcast. Take care. This episode of Content briefly is brought to you by Friends at Shelf. Shelf is the go-to B2B [00:02:30] content agency For niche industries like really niche industries, take Reinhardt one of Shelf's talented writers as an example. He has a glorious beard and knows more about the US sales tax Nexus obligations than just about anyone minus the CEOs of the tax compliance companies he writes for, and even that is debatable. Strategy Words, distribution shelf takes care of everything. Use Shelf's earned experience to your advantage across these niche industries. Supply chain like freight logistics, customs compliance, three PL and four PL [00:03:00] regulations and compliance like SOC two ISO, hipaa, ESG and ITGC Cloud like DevOps, finops, DRA S, ISAs Bs and other asses and finance, revolving finance ar, AP tax and VAT compliance.

(00:03:14):
Any other business that worries no writer will ever understand you shelf will when a live demo of Shelf's refined deep research methodology. Use the link in the show notes to book a call with Shelf's founder Gila. She'll ask you so many questions your eyes will bleep. Thanks so much to shelf for supporting Super padd [00:03:30] content. Briefly is produced by our friends at Minutiae to learn more about their podcast production service as well as their other adaptive content marketing services. Check out minutia.com in the show notes. Tommy, since you kicked this off, maybe we first chatted about this spring, you brought this idea out of there's this general malaise in content marketing. Let's figure out what's going on. You had this idea to throw together a survey, publish a report, and here we are. People will get a look at the data for the very first time today.

(00:03:59):
Slides look incredible. [00:04:00] The report will be released shortly and there'll be a link to sign up to get that at the end and obviously we'll make sure that we shoot an email out with that. Also along with the recording, you had 550 or so content marketers respond to the survey, which is very telling. It's like you kind of tapped into this kind of lightning rod topic in the content marketing world right now, which is we've been riding this roller coaster for 18 months, two years, maybe two years. Content [00:04:30] marketing was just the most fun ever through the ERP era. And then it's just like chat, GPT, economic downturn, layoffs, what's going on, everybody's doing more with less, et cetera, et cetera. And now we have a bunch of data to help understand truly exactly what's going on. So we're going to get into all of that today. If there's anything else you want to say, Tommy, before we get into it about kind of the purpose, the why behind this support.

Tommy Walker (00:04:55):
Yeah, so I will be completely honest folks. I [00:05:00] do teach a cohort and I had put together a cohort earlier this year and it didn't do as well as I would've liked it to. We still had people, it was great and it was wonderful and I love everybody that was there and we had a really good time, but it didn't go quite the way that I thought it was going to. And after doing a bit of a retrospective, I said, well, damn it Tommy, you didn't actually run through your entire process because of course not. So this report came about as part of me running through my own process to get people to take the survey, [00:05:30] to get the secure the distribution before we validated the idea before we ever put the report together, I worked with my distribution partners to come up with some of the questions.

(00:05:40):
Jimmy said I had too many questions and I said, if I execute on the right way, then we'll get people. We ended up having a average of 21 minute completion time and a 41.7% completion rate, and part of that had to do with some of the micro decisions that were being made. One of the things I said to everybody was that I almost [00:06:00] want people to have a bit of an existential crisis when they're finished with the survey. Anybody who took it let me know if that was kind of the case and the way that I wanted to put it together was thinking about the little invisible decisions that had to happen to kick off a narrative in somebody's head. And as a result of that, as a result of validating the idea, first securing distribution first, really thinking about those little micro decisions that I believe is what really kicked off the narrative and helped us a little mini therapy [00:06:30] session helped us kick off that narrative in people's brains and really help you open up.

(00:06:36):
And as a result of all that, we got some very colorful answers, but I think it was a very honest response too. So just fair warning, I'll be honest, we're all content marketers here. I do want to sell something eventually, but of course I want to make sure that it's only to the right people and if you believe that this report did something for you and you like what's coming out of that, more than happy to take people behind the scenes of my process and [00:07:00] take it from there. So let's get into it because a lot of people have been waiting for this for a long time.

Jimmy Daly (00:07:07):
Yeah, let's do this also just quickly as we're jumping in and as Tommy's getting the slides up, please use the live chat. To me that's the most fun part about an event like this is use it and if there are really contextual questions that I can queue up for Tommy as we're looking at a slide, I will and then we'll save the rest for the end. And then also we have to pick a couple people to send Super path hoodies too. [00:07:30] So I don't really have any methodology there. I was going to do it randomly, but maybe we'll do the most active people in the chat.

Tommy Walker (00:07:35):
Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. Okay, cool. So this is a state of discontent. I want to just thank my distribution partners real quick here. Super path, of course, spark, Toro, the Juice Audience Plus and audience led. I will be doing different versions of this presentation because we have a lot of data that we're not even going to get into here. So if you want to watch across different platforms, I'll be doing different presentations on different [00:08:00] aspects of the data throughout the next coming months. Quick thing about me, I am the founder of the content studio. I am a content marketing consultant. I've worked with Fortune 1000 companies and Mid-Market me two weave SaaS startups. I mean you can read the slide. I was the first marketing hire at Shopify Plus global editor in chief of QuickBooks and have consulted with some pretty major brands and have been doing this for nearly 20 years, which is an insane thing to say.

(00:08:25):
But as a result of that, have been able to see a huge evolution in how [00:08:30] this field has grown and evolved over time, seeing what the adoption has looked like over the years. And that plays a huge role into everything that we're looking at now because this is really the first time I've seen it like it has been and anybody who's been a veteran in this space for a while, I think you've been feeling it really for the past couple of years. And I do have to state too just because I got to do my due diligence, this report, there's a slight bias to it. You would think that if it's the state of discontent, [00:09:00] it would be a lightning rod for only negativity. However, it is important to state that I believe this is actually a very well balanced argument. We see a lot of really good stuff in here too.

(00:09:11):
Now what we're going to focus on is a lot of the discontent because that's the nature of the survey, but it's not as bad as it seems. So when we asked, we have 545 respondents and we asked, what's keeping you discontent right now? You can see here we had in-house freelance agency and consultants, we had quite a few [00:09:30] of each group, which was really cool. We got a really good cross section of different people within the industry. We have different size companies that were a part of that. So the majority of our respondents were from small and medium sized companies, so anywhere between 10 to a thousand or 999 people, which gave us, again, another really good cross cross-section of what's going on in these different areas. And this was a really interesting very telling part, right? This part in particular [00:10:00] started to play a huge role in everything else.

(00:10:03):
The majority of content marketing teams are run by either zero people who are dedicated exclusively to content marketing all the way up to five people. And that's really important to think about as we start considering a number of different aspects that go into the work that we're doing, we can start looking at burnout, which comes up a little bit later on and a number of other areas and what this looks like across the board. We also looked at distribution of years of experience [00:10:30] in content marketing. So we can see here that it's actually, it's not a lot of newbies, not a lot of folks have been doing this for a short period of time. Most of you have been in this for least three years, which is nothing. You've been able to see kind of the ups and downs over the last few years. And what's really interesting is that I believe a lot of stuff changed in the last two years, maybe three years in particular.

(00:10:55):
And you've got a whole cohort of marketers now coming up in this sort of [00:11:00] era, anyone who's been doing this for 10 years plus you will have noticed a market difference in how content marketing is approached and viewed today versus how it was in the beginning and 10 years ago, 2014, it was a very different vibe and now there's been this entire generation of content marketers who have been raised with what the idea of content marketing should be, and I think that plays a huge role in everything else that we're going to talk about a little bit later. And because we had [00:11:30] different types of people for in-house and service providers, I wanted to ask slightly different questions of people who are of service providers and who are in-house because the challenges are a little bit different for each group. So we had an off ramp when we took the survey.

(00:11:45):
There was branching logic when I asked how do you best identify what kind of job does subscribe to you? You actually had a branching there, so you got an off-ramp and got something different if you were in the service provider category. So the good news is 49.24% [00:12:00] of content marketers say they are satisfied or very satisfied with their salaries, and quite a few people are also right around a quarter, people are feeling either neutral or dissatisfied so that the majority of people are rather satisfied is actually pretty good. We can see what the breakdown is here of in-house folks with their compensation satisfaction versus service providers. What I think is really interesting here is at the very top, more service providers are in that very [00:12:30] satisfied category and then also when we get to the neutral or dissatisfied or very dissatisfied, that's also where a lot of the service providers are starting to kick in.

(00:12:39):
The majority of the dissatisfaction comes from service providers and I believe that the very top end, the people who are very satisfied as service providers, you're in a much higher risk, higher reward area. So as a consultant myself, I'm very satisfied with my compensation. Makes sense. Whereas satisfied with our in-house [00:13:00] folks, health benefits are really nice and benefits packages are 4 0 1 Ks. Those are really great. So there's a lot of comfort that takes place with the in-house people and I think that that's wonderful. More good news, we are on the right side of the adoption curve for content marketing. So the majority of companies are now in this mostly bought in or extremely bought in category. I was not expecting to see that. If we were to ask this question 10 years ago, we would probably see it either indifferent [00:13:30] or skeptical. And I think anybody who's been doing this for a long time, you probably would've said the same thing.

(00:13:36):
Now what's interesting, and we'll dig into this a little bit further later, is mostly bought in actually means something a little bit different, but it's good to see that we're at least on the right side of the adoption curve for content marketing as a practice. More good news. The majority of folks say if we're looking at the in-house people, the majority of folks are saying that they have really good or extremely good collaboration efforts with people inside the companies. [00:14:00] Very positive overall. When we looked at ai, this was something that was a little bit shocking to me, but very reassuring that most of us are saying we have a pretty positive outlook on where AI is going to take us in the next five years. When we started getting into the sentiment analysis of AI's role in a handful of other areas, we actually did a linguistics analysis of all of the qualitative data.

(00:14:22):
We had 300,000 plus words of qualitative data. Some of them were very colorful words, but it was good. It was good to see that the majority [00:14:30] of people are feeling that this is positive. And we can see here too, you'll see quotes throughout the slides or quotes throughout the presentation where this person says, I think a lot of cheap tricks and shiny objects and content will fade away and AI will help us focus on real value. I believe that to be true. I genuinely feel that way. Also, the good news, it's helping content marketers increase productivity, reduce manual effort, create content faster, and removing a lot of the minor inconveniences that we've experienced in just getting stuff out [00:15:00] the door. So I thought that this was really great. Easier repurposing of content is one. That's a really cool one. We hear that and see that all the time, and I know that that takes a lot of effort to actually do, and that is speeding up a lot of those processes overall, and again, this person here says, while AI is not a complete game changer yet, it's certainly making certain processes faster and more efficient.

(00:15:21):
I think that's a really good sentiment, but the not so good news is that there is negative sentiment about AI and I think it really [00:15:30] is sentiment that should not be ignored. We see a little bit more negative sentiment across some service providers who are in a more of a shaky income situation at the moment. I do believe personally that there has been this entire cohort of service providers and content marketers in general that have been raised with this idea of SEO content specifically, but a lot of content marketing needs to be done a certain way, and AI is a real threat to those people. [00:16:00] I think this means that we also have a lot of opportunity for innovation and people who are focusing more on craft and skill over the next few years are going to be the ones that win because the pendulum will swing in the other direction.

(00:16:13):
If leadership right now is going all in and saying, oh, we only need one or two people to prompt AI and do that, the pendulum will swing in the other direction. I've seen this before, Jimmy, I know you've seen this before, where the low quality stuff will find its way out [00:16:30] and people will go, oh, okay, maybe we now need to start focusing on craft because this isn't doing what we thought it would. Some businesses are actually in that place right now. They're like, oh, we tried it, it didn't work. Let's move on. Others, we know how it goes. And yeah, this person says AI will be creating content for companies. It will take jobs away from writers. I fully do agree with that. And these are the negatives of folks, right? Big concern people are going to become too dependent on the technology, which will degrade the quality, accuracy, [00:17:00] and originality of the work being produced. I've been doing this for a long time. I consider myself a really good creator, put a lot of focus on craft and skill and definitely myself have found myself sometimes going, ah, you know what? I'm tired today. I don't really want to, right? Jimmy, you two, I see you smiling over there. Yeah,

Jimmy Daly (00:17:21):
All the time. Yeah, yeah, all the time.

Tommy Walker (00:17:24):
And if we're not focusing on the craft and the underlying principles, and this is the stuff that I teach, if [00:17:30] we're not looking at the underlying principles of what makes something effective, I don't want to say high performing, I want to say effective, because these are two very different things, then we can become too reliant, too dependent, and honestly too lazy because there's also sometimes the expectation of us isn't necessarily high. And then Lex says, are we defining content marketing as strictly writing, or would this include social webinars, video strategy, et cetera? It is defined [00:18:00] in the survey itself. It was an open-ended thing. However, what we will see a little bit later on is there is a multitude of formats that teams are managing and different companies are managing. So I believe when we were taking this survey, it wasn't just focused on writing, it was focused on this wide swath that a lot of companies are focusing on right now.

Jimmy Daly (00:18:20):
Yeah, makes sense. If it's cool time, we, I'll throw questions up like that every now and then. There's lots of 'em coming in.

Tommy Walker (00:18:25):
It's cool. I see that. I'm trying to ignore, I'm not trying to ignore folks, but I [00:18:30] just see the chat is going nuts right now. I love it.

Jimmy Daly (00:18:33):
I'll take care of it for you.

Tommy Walker (00:18:34):
Thank you. Thank you. This is the part that's really concerning to me, right? As the concern about AI is particularly valid because 60.3% of content marketers are either unsure or unconfident about how recognizable their content would be on voice and tone alone. This was surprising as a ectomy. And then we have people here saying too, they're not confident at all. It sounds like everyone else that is and is not surprising to me. [00:19:00] One of the things that we start to see a little bit later on, you'll see a little bit later on, some of the top concerns with content marketing and people's overall challenges with it. So right here, what are the biggest challenges with content creation today? Top three answers, differentiated content, creating the right content for our audience and creating quality content. This question was asked in a ranking order and this is what everybody ranked it in.

(00:19:24):
What was really surprising to me and what we dig into in the full report, I'm not going to talk about it here because I start [00:19:30] to look at different aspects of it and drill really deep into the information, but what was really interesting here was that some of the sentiment that's out there, some of the things that I've seen on social media, LinkedIn, Twitter, it's more like, oh, my boss wants me to produce a high volume of work, but it's like a lot of really crappy churn out a lot of stuff. And that's actually to see volume in here as the number four and number eight response, it's a little bit different like four or five [00:20:00] and eight. It was really interesting to see those show up not in those top three results. And what this says to me is that we really do care about the craft, but not necessarily knowing how effective our stuff can be as we put it out there, and you'll see why that is in just a minute.

(00:20:18):
Not so good news too. There's a lot of people. Everybody seems to have a more complicated relationship with their career than everybody else. I broke this out between in-house employees and service providers. [00:20:30] There was a complication. I didn't collect the proper data for the service providers. It was a yes and no answer. However, I did look at other factors like compensation. We looked at career satisfaction here. We looked at creative satisfaction across the board and then simulated this data as best we could, and we found that it all correlated pretty well with everything else. So that's really important. And what's really interesting here too, in-house employees, when we start looking at the strong yes and strong no, right, there's a bit of a gap. [00:21:00] There's less of a gap between the yes and no than there is with service providers. And I think that that also is very much with that very satisfied tier that we saw before, how service providers have a bigger, extremely satisfied.

(00:21:12):
I think this has a big part of it. Okay, so we're going to explore this a little bit further on, but when we start looking at the mostly bought in leadership, the qualitative data that we saw in here, mostly bought in is not, Hey, we're [00:21:30] doing good things. Mostly bought in becomes my leadership. And tell me, Chad, if this sounds true to you, mostly bought in is we're allowed to do content marketing to the extent that our leadership understands or defines content marketing. Does that sound true? Chat? Just curious. Yeah. Okay. Then this was one of my absolute favorite quotes. There was a ton of them. Some of them I had to, they're not fit for family, but this was one of my favorites and [00:22:00] this mostly bought in leadership area. This was really interesting to see how this started to correlate with other aspects.

(00:22:08):
And then when we start looking at how confident are you that your content would stand out in voice and tone alone, we can see here, I broke it down by the different levels of leadership buy-in in, and this is where the data starts to get really interesting when we start cross analyzing these questions with each other, and this is what the full report is really about. [00:22:30] We dig really deep into what each one of these segments is like, but we can see here the confidence in voice and tone decreases. It looks like it increases here, but it actually decreases on the level of leadership. Buy-in, right? Mostly indifferent and skeptical. They're fairly on point, but you can see here right in the middle of the somewhat on confident, that changes and it gets bigger. These [00:23:00] negative effects of confidence decreases unfortunately with the level of leadership, buy-in Curious Chat. How would you feel about that? How does that sound to you? I'm going to keep moving.

Jimmy Daly (00:23:15):
Yeah, keep going. I'll throw some messages up on the slides in a second.

Tommy Walker (00:23:19):
Awesome. The rest of the not so good news here. Top five challenges, lack of resources, not surprising, accessing subject matter experts, workflow issues, approval, aligning content [00:23:30] efforts across multiple teams and lack of strategy. These are our top five issues. Lack of strategy was actually one that kind of surprised me going into it, but after really thinking about it and seeing the rest of the qualitative data, that didn't surprise me so much, but these are our top challenges, our non creation challenges. And then this is the really bad news. This is the part that made me kind of sad is that the majority of us are having complicated relationships with the work that we're [00:24:00] producing. I believe that this is tied to that mostly bought in segment, right? I'm sometimes happy with the work, I'm happy with the work that maybe we got some performance, maybe we got some traffic, but was it creatively fulfilling?

(00:24:15):
We kind of saw earlier, not so much. Is it good? Am I happy with this kind of, so it's complicated. This is our number one relationship here. Yeah, happy with the work that we're producing. [00:24:30] And then this was what I was saying before, creatively fulfilled. Are you creatively fulfilled? No, most of us are not creatively fulfilled as somebody who does creative work. I had to take moments where I stepped away from this data when I started to look at it really deeply because I love this work and I know what a lot of people love this work, but not getting the creative fulfillment from it is really sad. Yeah, Irene, that's what the money is for. Exactly.

Jimmy Daly (00:25:00):
[00:25:00] I think that's a Don Draper line.

Tommy Walker (00:25:02):
So what does Steph say here? I don't think I would know what being 100% creatively satisfied feels like. And what we see here, when I start to break it down a little bit later, and it's not shown in this report right now, it's in the much larger report. It is creative satisfaction almost unsurprisingly goes up with the level of leadership buy-in, right? That's why we looked at these data points, not just as a whole, but to start breaking it down into different aspects of it because [00:25:30] it plays a huge, huge role. If we don't love researching and writing it, people won't love consuming it. It's a bummer. Go ahead, Jimmy.

Jimmy Daly (00:25:38):
Well, I was just going to ask you, Tommy,

Tommy Walker (00:25:40):
Could

Jimmy Daly (00:25:41):
You point to the time in your career, maybe it's today, where you have felt the most creatively fulfilled and satisfied with your work? Because for me personally, I can visualize it. In my mind, it's like 2013 to 2015 when my job was primarily writing. I had never heard of AI before, and [00:26:00] that was my gig that I spent 80% of my day writing, editing, revising, brainstorming, publishing, distributing, et cetera. It was a really fun time.

Tommy Walker (00:26:08):
I mean, for me now I'm getting to do really fun, creative, fulfilling work. I've gotten to do this report. This is something that if I wanted to do it when I was in different working relationships or different working situations, I might not have been able to do this because being able to approach it the way that I wanted to approach it, I'd have to go through seven or eight different [00:26:30] levels of buy-in and do we have the time or the money or the resources to do that? Maybe there'd be an organization restructure by the time I could get something out the door. So I feel like right now I'm the most creatively fulfilled. But then the other part of time, the other side of that was when I was at Shopify, I was the first marketing hire over there, which meant I was a big part of building the foundations of what the communication strategy were and looking at how the market was using my research process.

(00:26:59):
By the way, this [00:27:00] is my little plug for my program. I have an eight layer market research process that I go through. And being able to do that stuff really with autonomy was when I felt like I was doing real creative work and being able to match that with performance and say, I did this thing and it did the thing I expected it to do, and I did it based on the talents that I've developed over the years and now I can get paid to do the thing that I really love. That changes in different types of companies. [00:27:30] That shows up in the data a little bit later on that does show the creative fulfillment, does have some relationship or some correlation with size of company, levels of leadership, leadership, buy-in all of that. And I think the thing is that we put a lot of heart and soul into the work that we do, and if there's doubt, if there's skepticism or if we're not able to do it the way that we kind of expect it to and it doesn't perform the way that we expect it to, it's kind of like feeling like we're getting beat down autonomy.

(00:27:59):
Yes, [00:28:00] that's exactly. So that's when I felt the most creatively fulfilled is when I've had more autonomy in the work. Here's the thing, here's the big thing. This is the worst news of all. The majority of people who took this survey reported that they were not doing their audience research nearly enough. I cannot begin to stress how much of a negative effect this has across every other vector of this survey. [00:28:30] Every single vector of this survey, we see decreased buy-in, we see decreased career satisfaction, decreased compensation satisfaction create fulfillment goes down. And that is really kind of upsetting, especially because whenever I read B2B blog posts, Jimmy and you probably have the same thing, and everybody here says, and everybody here has read it, and I guarantee you the majority of us have said it too. Header number one [00:29:00] is you want to do this thing, step one, do your audience research.

(00:29:03):
Now, I think that there are a handful of issues that go into this. I think there are a number of reasons why this number is the way that it is. Here's my hypothesis. Hypothesis one, there is not enough time. I was saying before, the average content team is made up of one or one to five people, and the average content team across the [00:29:30] board is managing at least five formats, right around five formats. And what I don't have here is that this team size is also consistent across every layer of every company size. So you are almost as likely to have zero to five people dedicated to content marketing in a one to five person, which makes sense, all the way up to a thousand plus people.

Jimmy Daly (00:30:00):
[00:30:00] Of all the things, all the data surfaced in this survey. That was one that I was like, I just couldn't believe that a thousand person company on average doesn't have a larger content marketing team than a 10 person company. That's crazy.

Tommy Walker (00:30:13):
Yeah, across the board, across the board, every team has that. So I think that there's not enough time when I started to drill into this a little bit more in the different team sizes, creating content consistently, consistently and [00:30:30] creating enough content to keep up with internal demand where the top creation issues for people in the smaller team sizes. Average content team, like I said, is managing five formats and there's just too much pressure on a lot of teams to be able to do the things that we want to be able to do to do the audience research. And we can see here too, we've got a quote, we are not using it enough. What we have, we do not use effectively.

(00:30:57):
Hypothesis number two on my part right [00:31:00] now, according to the data, many who report not doing their audience research nearly enough say it's either not part of their job, not a priority from their leadership or they are unsure of the value. And we can see this in the qualitative data here too. We're not using it enough. What we have, we don't use effectively. I feel like we basically don't know. Most of the insights are not distributed internally or reflected in content. Solo content marketing manager at a 4K company. It's crazy. And then attempts to do audience [00:31:30] research consistently blocked in one way or another. I worked at a very large organization, I wanted to do my audience research and I was told that I had to go through an entirely different team that would conduct the audience research, put together a panel of people, and what I had to do was put my questions down ahead of time.

(00:31:50):
And what that does for us as content marketers, we're the bridge between the company and the reader. And one of the people who took the survey here, they said, and I'm paraphrasing, it's not [00:32:00] in the deck here, but they said, we serve the reader, but the reader is not the one that pays the bills. Something along those lines, but as a content marketer is somebody who serves as the bridge between the company and the reader. If I don't have the ability to talk to the customer and be able to have a back and forth conversation and go off script, I'm not going to get the insights that I need from that person to get the little nuance. Yeah, Ronnie, the friction to research or fuel content [00:32:30] is too real. I fought tooth and nail to get research done everywhere I've worked, and there's this fear.

(00:32:35):
There's this fear that I've found from different organizations to, and this is just my experience to get you actually talking to the customer. So it's not a priority. That's hypothesis two. Now that being said, content marketers, my hypothesis number three, you're not going to hypothesis three, is that there's not a lot of proper training, [00:33:00] audience research. What the hell does that even mean? Right? It's this big amorphous term and every time I've gone to look it up, see what's showing up in Google right now, how to do audience research, what I'll find out there even from really well-known reputable brands, is they're saying, what is audience research? And then they're like, oh, qualitative studies or do a survey or something like that. But there's not a lot of stuff that talks about practical application of that research. And the majority of us did [00:33:30] not train for this.

(00:33:32):
Let's be real. Nobody woke up when they were a kid and said, I want to be a content marketer when I grow up. I came from an acting background. I know a lot of journalists, I know a lot of English majors who got into this. The thing is that level of market research that means so many different things to so many different people, and there's no real defined processes that make it so even if we do the research, and I've seen this when I was in-house, we do customer surveys on our [00:34:00] blog or look at the comments and whether readers or when we were looking at videos or see the stuff that goes out on podcasts and what people are saying, translating research over to how do we apply this? That's a whole different thing. You might have a voice of the customer survey that goes out, but how do you translate that?

(00:34:21):
What do you do? Jimmy, you and I met in the Growth Hackers forum years ago, and I think that that was one of the first [00:34:30] times I felt like people were getting the sense of how to apply the things that were being said in those forums to the content that they were creating. But for the most part, there's not a lot of frameworks out there, or at least from what I found, not a lot of stuff that says, how do we tie all of these things together? How do we take this and then turn it into that and then turn it into this next thing? That's one of the things I teach. Again, not to pitch, but no, I'm pitching, right? We're content marketers here. [00:35:00] That's the job. But that's one of the things where I found that there's a huge gap and we can see here, right? Huh? I wonder what having research metrics would do for us. Somebody's research method is their intuition, and honestly, I've built a general understanding over time, but it's not formal. So I mean, folks, what do you think? Right? What's your definition of audience research? That was one of the questions that was asked, and it was all over the place, right?

Jimmy Daly (00:35:26):
Yeah. I'm curious what folks have to say. In my personal experience, [00:35:30] my content marketing training was seeing what other companies did that seemed to work well, and then replicating that with my own tweaks on it for the business, the brand, et cetera.

Tommy Walker (00:35:43):
Well, and that's really good if you are able to take the stuff that you feel like works and then you do that, I mean, that's the case, but sometimes also that's the blind leading the blind, right?

Jimmy Daly (00:35:56):
Definitely. Because you don't really know if it works, like if it's flashy, cool content [00:36:00] marketing that you want to replicate, that's probably really fun to do. But yeah, you don't really know if it's done well, meaning supporting the business.

Tommy Walker (00:36:08):
I saw something on LinkedIn earlier where it was talking about everybody in this field talks about how awesome liquid death is as a water company, but what was really interesting is they said it completely underperforms every other water in the category and it lags Fiji by brand recognition by 15% or something like that, maybe right around there. And it's like [00:36:30] we as marketers want to do these really cool things and we're looking at it like, yeah, that's awesome, but it's not always effective, right? Things got head over heels when content strategy became SEO. Yeah, exactly. So let's rank as high as we can. Who cares about audiences at that point? Jimmy, you and I were there right around the same time. I'm bold enough to say at this point, what we did at Conversion XL at the time was a little bit different. We were supporting a lot of our central arguments with behavioral psychology.

(00:36:58):
We supported everything with a case study [00:37:00] or an expert quote or something like that, and we tried to make meaning of the data that we're putting out there. And what I've seen over the years is that approach has now been, let's insert a study just to have it inserted a study, and there's no meaning. It's not supporting any sort of central thesis, but that's what an entire generation of content marketers have been raised on, and that's what content marketing looks like as it relates to blog posts. And we're not making meaning of a lot of stuff, right? Yeah. Let's just say the same buzzwords over and over again until we die. That's [00:37:30] the Sisyphus quote. We're going to reoptimize the same blog post forever and ever because we hear that it works. So we're going to continue to do that. But what that's done is it's created this area.

(00:37:41):
No wonder we're not satisfied creatively. And no wonder we have complicated relationships with our work because we're not encouraged, we're not incentivized in a lot of cases, in a lot of what we see in that mostly bought in segment. What that really turns into is we're not incentivized to do bigger [00:38:00] things. And again, it's content marketing so far as what my leadership believes content marketing should be and coloring outside the lines a little bit, trying something new, doing something a little bit different that's not encouraged. But then the other side of that, and this is where I want to hold a mirror up to content marketers in general, is if we're not doing our audience research nearly enough, then when we go to make our case to do something else, we're doing it on a trust me bro type basis. [00:38:30] And because we're not able to do the things that we want to do, we can't get that practice.

(00:38:35):
Sometimes there's a big gap between the taste that we want to do and our actual skill. And that's a hard pill to swallow. That is the toughest pill to swallow is like, I want to do video, and then you go to do video, and it actually kind of sucks. And we've all been there. I've been there. And as leaders change, it happens frequently. Yeah, exactly. [00:39:00] So there's this kind of double-edged sword there, right? We're not doing our audience research nearly enough, and because of that, we're not able to get the buy-in that we need to do the creative, cool, creative thing. But if we do get the buy-in to do the cool creative thing, and we haven't had the opportunity to do it before, and we're doing it on limited resources, we're having to be put in this position of do more with less. Sometimes I'm putting stuff out or I've had to put stuff out where I'm like, this isn't my expertise.

(00:39:26):
I need to hire somebody to do this part because [00:39:30] if I execute the wrong way, then it's not going to make a difference. And I think part of that comes down to my whole thesis right now for the platform in which I'm trying to build for my own business, is understanding those underlying principles of what makes something good, what makes something effective? How do you dissect taste? How do you develop taste based on what you've seen little pieces here and there. So yeah, it's a tough pill to swallow, but it's kind [00:40:00] of a double-edged sword, right? We're not doing audience research nearly enough so we're not able to make our case well, and sometimes if we are making our case and we get that buy-in, it kind of sucks. So why are they going to give us freedom to do the next thing the next time, right? Yeah. That's why it sucks. SEO suddenly doesn't work as well.

Jimmy Daly (00:40:18):
That totally resonates. Yeah. SEO used to give us cover in a way that it doesn't anymore. They would pay the bills that would buy us a little time and resources to try something else

Tommy Walker (00:40:29):
And that doesn't [00:40:30] work. And now it's like, well, what are you doing? And now we can't have a seat at the table and there's this huge downstream effect, but again, I have to stress the whole audience research aspect. Again, it has negative consequences across the board, and I think part of that has to do that. We're not able to apply it, and sometimes we aren't able to bridge the gap between what we see and how we execute. And that's a big, big deal. Jimmy, how many times have you put something out there where you're like, this is not [00:41:00] what I expected it to be. You tried really hard.

Jimmy Daly (00:41:05):
Yeah, definitely. More often than not, I actually got let go from a job that I really liked for basically that exact reason for playing content instead of building a content program to really support the business. And that was a pretty painful lesson. And I mean, I carry that lesson with me today, 10 years later.

Tommy Walker (00:41:27):
Yeah, I mean you get [00:41:30] what you want to do and you get that autonomy and then it's like, do I actually, that's a hard one. That's a hard one to admit, but it's there. It happens. Alright, let's move on folks. So what has content marketers discontent, right? We've talked all about this so far, but really has us discontent. So we did the linguistics analysis of over 452,000 words. I said 300,000 earlier. I lied. It was to that many more to ask [00:42:00] this and what it really broke down to, there's a lot of different subcategories in here, but what it really broke down to was these three areas, economy, our relationship with management and the business and our relationship with our career. So we actually have three different layers of conflict here, which is really interesting. I teach that and when we start looking at this, right, we're going to look at only one of this area.

(00:42:20):
We're only going to look at the economic aspect of it. The full report is like 170 something pages long, and we're not going through all that here. But the economic downturn, we can see here from [00:42:30] the quote, economic upheaval, uncertainty, layoffs, general anxiety, know many people in the industry keep talking about the weirdness of marketing these days. Payments dropped are on hold way, overdue payments, the economic downturn, just the big aspect of everything, kind of going down the tubes right now plays a huge role. Budget cuts, that's a huge one. This person says, my contracts would go on for years, but with the unexpected budget cuts, marketing, re-strategizing [00:43:00] and sudden layoffs, it's utterly chaotic frequent layoffs. I think what content marketers are not clear about is what the future looks like. Job security opportunities, growth opportunities. I don't think there's a clear cut structure for them to follow.

(00:43:13):
And then job markets, seeing the competition for gigs play out in LinkedIn, slack communities is brutal. All the posts with hundreds of comments, the calls for applications that don't receive responses. I've seen this. We've heard reports of this, someone putting in a hundred, 200 applications getting nowhere, no responses. It's [00:43:30] very clear to everyone that there's work out there, but they aren't getting it. What I saw, what we saw in the, and I'm not talking about this fully right now or digging into it, but one of the things that we started to see is people saying, I'm satisfied. My pay is okay, but I'm not satisfied with the work that I'm doing, but I'm afraid to leave because there's nowhere else to go. So there's also [00:44:00] this general sense of trapped for some of the folks who are in here who took the survey. And that's really sad because it's one of those things where it starts to fester.

(00:44:11):
And some people, when we asked the creative fulfillment question, the follow up to that was like, I don't feel connected to the work at all. And if we're doing things like writing or creating video or doing these things that are supposed to be creative, fun, engaging, exciting work, but we're going into these formats [00:44:30] with no connection to the work. How are our customers, prospects, people who are reading this stuff or watching the videos or listening to the podcast, how are they ever supposed to connect to it? That's really hard and we see it in B2B when everybody says right now, oh, B2B content sucks. That to me, I think is the biggest underlying source of it. We're disconnected from the work. We're putting out stuff that nobody likes. It's not really [00:45:00] doing what we want to, in a lot of cases, we can't get attribution for the work that we're trying to do. We can't even explain attribution. Skylar Reeves, I don't know if you know Skyler, but when he was in my cohort, he said There's a difference between attribution and contribution. And I was like, that is really cool. A lot of people who are doing really well with that are coming up with contribution models, but having to explain that when people are already feeling indifferent or skeptical or even just mostly bought in, it's really [00:45:30] hard to justify your existence and then you can't go anywhere and you're living on this knife's edge, right?

Jimmy Daly (00:45:36):
Anecdotally, Tommy, I totally resonates. Occasionally we get pretty senior level jobs on the job board, like director, VP level content roles, and what I hear back from the hiring managers at those companies that they get a lot of applicants but don't, they're surprised that they don't get as many really qualified applicants. And then just in chatting with folks who are definitely qualified for those roles, the director and [00:46:00] VP level folks, a lot of them have kind of the devil mentality. It's like, I'm not thrilled at my job, but like you said, the pay is okay. There's so much uncertainty out there right now. Two years ago, yeah, I would've jumped for a raise, but today I think I'm going to just sit tight and just kind of see what happens.

Tommy Walker (00:46:18):
Yeah, it's unfortunate. It's really sad. This is what I started going through this stuff in particular. This is what I had to start taking a break because I'm like, I love this field, I love this work. It's done excellent stuff for me [00:46:30] personally. And to see so many people feeling that way, it was very depressing. But that's just where we're at right now. But there is hope, right? This person says, even though there are challenges, I think we're at a point where content marketing can really evolve. Many companies are realizing the content isn't just about churning articles, it's about building relationships, driving meaningful engagement, and contributing to long-term business goals with better tools to measure success and aligned with business [00:47:00] metrics. Content marketers who can show their value are going to be in high demand. I think the pendulum, and I've seen this before, we talked about this a little bit earlier, the pendulum with AI and businesses leadership going, let's go all in on AI because it's cheaper.

(00:47:14):
The unit economics make way too much sense for somebody making those decisions. 20 bucks a month versus a thousand dollars in an article, totally, but the pendulum will swing in the other direction and craft will be valued a lot more once we that, Hey, [00:47:30] this garbage that we're producing right now, it's not really doing anything. And it's totally not. Some of it's not on us. Some of it is to be clear, some of it is, but some of it's not. I think that if we're able to really focus on craft and upskill over the next few years, we're going to be in a much better position. I realize we're coming close to time here, but I would love to answer some more questions as we go through. Yeah, we've got the relationship with management. Do you want to go through this, Jimmy, or do you want to cut it off here?

Jimmy Daly (00:48:00):
[00:48:00] We, there's so much going on in the live chat, it's great. Most of it is not questions you tell me. Yeah. Send us questions and maybe Tommy, you want to go through another slide or two while we queue those up for you

Tommy Walker (00:48:14):
Chat. You tell me if you want to go a little bit longer, this is your time. I want to make sure that we are being respectful of that, but I'm also super happy to talk about this forever buy in stuff management. So management leadership. This is the same graph that we had before. It's mostly bought in. [00:48:30] This is the level of leadership. Buy-in. This means to the extent that content marketing fits within their definition, when we start to break this down, this is what it looks like across different company sizes. So buy-in decreases, understandably so, as the company gets bigger, smaller companies, a lot lives and dies by content marketing in some cases with smaller companies in particular, content marketing is marketing because the perception is that it's cheaper. [00:49:00] We're not having to spend as much money on ads. There's a lot longer shelf life to the stuff that's being created.

(00:49:06):
So that's the buy-in level. But as the company gets bigger, there's more red tape to go through. I've definitely experienced this. We see a lot more skepticism for the thousand plus companies. A lot of those larger, more established organizations, they're used to the spend $5, get $10 from paid ads, and that's just kind of how that goes. Medium sized companies, they have higher levels of indifference and much lower [00:49:30] levels of extremely bought in. So we can kind of see the difference here. Large companies too, the highest level of don't see the point at all. Anybody here who works for a large company, does that resonate? I know it has for me at points in time. Yeah. When leadership buy-in disappears. So do I. Exactly. Is that Robin showers, by the way? I can't wait to see you. If it is.

Jimmy Daly (00:49:53):
I think it is. Yeah.

Tommy Walker (00:49:55):
Yeah. Compensation. It is. Yeah.

Jimmy Daly (00:49:57):
She confirms.

Tommy Walker (00:49:58):
Yeah. Yeah. Zach can't wait to see you with [00:50:00] Spark together. It's going to be awesome. Robin and I are in a group text together. It's great. So compensation across buy-in leadership levels, you can see here, extremely bought in people. They're way more satisfied with their compensation as the scale goes down, the dissatisfaction goes up when content marketers, when leaders don't see the point at all, that's the most dissatisfied group. Totally makes sense. And yeah, I mean what's really interesting to me is this curve. [00:50:30] Anytime we look at any of the metrics that we're going against to see the curve that happens across the board, super interesting and very, very telling on what the person's day-to-Day work looks like, and how it's affected by their leadership career satisfaction across buy-in levels, extremely bought in. People are way more satisfied career satisfaction. But this was something that was super interesting to me, Jimmy, was that the majority of folks [00:51:00] still had complicated relationships with their career. And I am curious to know what that's really about. I have some ideas, but that's one of those ones that I think people will have to infer for themselves, especially if you are one of those people who are having complicated relationships.

Jimmy Daly (00:51:18):
That is interesting. Is it just the existential crisis of what is content? What will content be in five years?

Tommy Walker (00:51:25):
I think so. I think so. I'll have to look at that. The cross analyze that with the people who [00:51:30] are the qualitative data. That one's one of those ones that's really hard to pin down, but I do think it's an existential thing Michael says, I think the complication comes from feeling like a creative, but working within a business. Yeah, I mean that's definitely part of it. Does buy-in affect creative fulfillment. Yep. What was really interesting here was to see the see point at all in how that went up. The reason for that though, the people who responded that way, they were like, I don't get my creative fulfillment from work. I was good [00:52:00] for you. But yeah, I mean you can see right here everybody's a no until you get to extremely bought in and then it's proportional across the board, which is wild AI's impact on output, right?

(00:52:14):
Because we start to look at what this looks like. Everybody across the board, across all levels of leadership and leadership, everybody has increased expectations across the board. There are some people, plenty have no expectations, it's no change, which is great. Mostly [00:52:30] bought in and don't see the point at all, have decreased their output. Part of that I think has to do with the indifference and almost the team's refusal to do more as a result. In fact, they're probably checking out a little bit more, so they're not increasing their output as a result of that. And what's interesting, when I started looking at the qualitative data on this, when we looked at mostly bought in and skeptical, both of them have similar levels of increase in expectations. [00:53:00] And what we found was that mostly bought in was primarily because they were trying to lead the pack in terms of output and information that's out there.

(00:53:13):
Whereas Skeptical was trying to keep up because there's a level of skepticism in the mostly bought in, right? It's just slightly different sides of the same pendulum or same seesaw I guess. I don't really know what metaphor I'm going for here, but [00:53:30] yeah, mostly bought in is trying to lead a little bit further, whereas Skeptical is trying to keep up and extremely bought in. They actually have the biggest no change because the challenges that we see, and this is and the full report, the challenges that we'll see with extremely bought in, it's not about output, it's not about a lot of things. What they're really more concerned about now is the strategy aspect of things. Not necessarily any of these other things that we would consider meaningful in some of the other segments. And then again, [00:54:00] this is audience research by leadership, buy-in, we're looking at all the bands now. We can see here extremely bought in. They have the highest level of daily audience research and they have the lowest level of, not nearly enough. And this is that double-edged sword that I was talking about earlier. Skeptical. I mean look at this. Skeptical has the highest level of mostly bought in or not nearly enough. And then on here that don't see the point at all. Jimmy, they [00:54:30] don't even show up on the graph because it was 100%.

Jimmy Daly (00:54:34):
Oh yeah. Makes sense. I

Tommy Walker (00:54:35):
Guess of the people who report their leadership does not care or they don't see the point. 100% of them said they don't do their research nearly enough. Not surprising, but also, come on folks, what role do we play in this, right? When I teach this stuff, right, I think of it in two different directions. One, we need to do the research as creators. When we [00:55:00] think about this from a creative point, we need to do the research so we can create effective content on the one side. So our readers and our listeners and our viewers and all of those people will actually resonate with this stuff and it does what we want them to do, but we also need to do that research so we can communicate effectively what it is that we're trying to do to our leadership. We need to be able to lay out plans and make it very simple. A lot of content marketers will say, leadership doesn't get it, leadership doesn't get it, they don't get content marketing. [00:55:30] But my question is, do we get leadership?

Jimmy Daly (00:55:33):
That's a great question.

Tommy Walker (00:55:35):
The buy-in aspect of that, I know a lot of content marketers, I've been that content marketer who said they don't get it and I just don't get to put the stuff out there that I want to do and then I go to present my stuff. And as somebody who's now having to have been pitched ideas to get that approval, I'm like, you're really trying to pitch me on a trust me bro, right now you need to make a better case. And sometimes there's a lot of ego [00:56:00] involved with that too. So there are a couple of things that I think we need to do in that case. One, I think we need to apply more pressure to our ideas. Two, we need to validate them more before we start to present them to leadership and make it crystal clear on where are we going to put this thing?

(00:56:15):
Are people bought into the idea before we go to pitch it? Here's how much it's going to cost and here's how much we're going to see out of it most likely. And make that very clear, very cut and dry. Don't necessarily get into the creative aspect of it, the artsy part, [00:56:30] they don't care. In a lot of cases they don't care. Once we start, you dig into it a little bit further, you actually do see that extremely bought in. Leadership cares a lot about content quality, but in a lot of cases it's just a dollars and cents thing for folks. And I think that's important that we're able to take that audience research and apply it in both directions. We need to be able to say, how do we create effective content by deconstructing what's working out there right now and being able to pull those pieces in.

(00:56:57):
What's working out there, what's not working [00:57:00] and what do we have the resources to put out there? But then on the other side of that going, really being able to present the case in the way that leadership understands because it's not their job to understand what we do and we're never going to do the things that we want to do if we can't get them to understand. So that being said, that's everything. Where do we go from here? We talked a lot about that. We are at 2 0 3, but folks, if you want to go a little bit longer, I've got no problems with that.

Jimmy Daly (00:57:28):
Cool. Quite [00:57:30] a few people said they have to jump, they want the recording, et cetera. There's so many questions, many, many questions. If you want, maybe I can grab them all from the transcript and we can go through them in a Loom video or a Slack group or LinkedIn or something. There's so many. If you're up for answering one important one, Tommy, there was one. Mackenzie

Tommy Walker (00:57:47):
Says, keep going Mackenzie and Maria and Grace, they say, oh, they all keep going. Ronnie says he's not going anywhere. They're all in. I'm in too.

Jimmy Daly (00:57:55):
Alright, well, can I queue up one question that a bunch of people plus one that they want to [00:58:00] do do?

Tommy Walker (00:58:00):
It's

Jimmy Daly (00:58:00):
Do it from Sarah. Sarah says, what do you see as the content marketing career path now? What does it even mean to be a content leader? If everything is content, how do we justify craft quality creativity to executives and their shareholders? And I feel like that's a big question, but that really,

Tommy Walker (00:58:17):
That's a huge question,

Jimmy Daly (00:58:18):
Captures so much of what people are feeling right now. What is content? Where should I continue doing this? Where is all of this heading?

Tommy Walker (00:58:26):
Yeah, that's a good question. So I think the biggest [00:58:30] thing is I, what's the definition of content? The conversations I've had with leadership in a lot of different cases is we'll start with the buy-in aspect of it and really try to build the foundation from there. So I will ask leadership, have you ever bought something after reading a blog post one time? Like no, of course not. So what makes you think that our readers or our customers are going to do anything a little bit different? And that starts to [00:59:00] spark a little bit of a thought, right? And then I'll ask them, do you watch the Office? Jimmy? Have you ever watched the Office? Definitely. I think everybody definitely, yeah, everybody watches the office definitely. How many times have you rewatched the office?

Jimmy Daly (00:59:12):
Probably two or three times.

Tommy Walker (00:59:13):
Okay. When you rewatched the office, did you start with season one or did you go straight to season two?

Jimmy Daly (00:59:18):
No, no. Yeah, I started season two or season three because, well, in the case of TV shows you can see character developments already happened. The show hits its stride,

Tommy Walker (00:59:28):
Right? Well, and that's the thing that I try [00:59:30] to, anybody who I've talked to about that, they're like, no, I skipped season one because it's trying to find its way, but it's not really necessary. And when I talk to leadership about that, that's the type of question that will come up and I'll say, okay, now if you were a super fan of the office, do you think you would buy the T-shirts or the games or the little memorabilia? What are shows that you've gotten memorabilia to and then how long did it take for you to do that? As a content [01:00:00] person, we have to understand that every video that we put out there, every podcast, every blog post, all of that is content and depending on what you want to do as part of your career, the career path is really about defining what content is for folks because it's still, I mean we're on the right side of the adoption curve mostly, but still a lot of people say, what is content They don't understand.

(01:00:27):
When I was at QuickBooks, we asked what is content? [01:00:30] And the ads team would say that what they do is content. Whereas what we would say is what we do is content, whereas it started to spiral out, the product team would say that what they do is content, right? Ads are content. And what I encourage folks to make the case for, and it is, I'm going to give that phrase that everybody wants to say or everybody has to say, is it depends depending on the size of the company, a content person in my mind needs to try and move up to a, overseeing [01:01:00] what content is, role overseeing all of it and having a narrative consistency across the board at QuickBooks, one of the things that I had done, I wasn't a full official leader, but I had coordinated multiple people across multiple markets, across multiple marketing disciplines to say, Hey, these are the initiatives that we're doing.

(01:01:23):
Hey, email, can we get insights from you? Hey social, can we get insights from you? Can we trade this stuff back and forth and build [01:01:30] those official and unofficial relationships that get the information exchange? When I work with large companies, this is the thing that I do first, get the information exchange, get everybody seeing visibility into everything, and then at a certain point going like, okay, here's everything that's going on from a global level, here are all the disconnects, these are the things that we could be doing better. Once you make that make sense, in retrospect, it always makes sense to go, we need to have somebody or a team to oversee [01:02:00] the stuff that we're putting out. So there is a narrative consistency across the board and we don't have disparate messaging happening through different channels. That makes sense. But if we're not doing that research, go back to the audience research aspect.

(01:02:13):
If we're not doing that audience research and we're not doing the internal research to make that case, then it just like a power grab, right? Of course you want to oversee everything because there's a Game of Thrones aspect to every type of business. I fight with myself and I'm a one person business about what takes priority, [01:02:30] but I think that that's the career path. What's the ultimate goal is to become the chief content officer. But you have to make that make sense to everybody else because nobody else is going to get it. A lot of people have different definitions of content. So what's that mean? How many CCOs are there in the world? I've seen some, not a ton, but some.

Jimmy Daly (01:02:49):
Is there anything else? There's CCO at most companies, even if that's not their title, there's somebody steering the

Tommy Walker (01:02:54):
Shit. Yeah,

Jimmy Daly (01:02:56):
Some

Tommy Walker (01:02:56):
People will call it brand.

Jimmy Daly (01:02:58):
Yeah, totally. You guys, if there's [01:03:00] smart questions, yes, there are so many, it's actually hard to keep track of

Tommy Walker (01:03:07):
Whoever ask the next three questions. That's what we're going to

Jimmy Daly (01:03:09):
Get. All right, cool.

Tommy Walker (01:03:10):
That's next three questions you got to ask them. Now we're going to see 'em in the chat. Those are a little last ones. Musk get going. Great webinar. Thank you, Blair.

Jimmy Daly (01:03:17):
Oh yeah, Sarah, I like that idea. State of the content career path. That's a good one.

Tommy Walker (01:03:22):
Jimmy, I'm going to leave that one up to you. That's the next one.

Jimmy Daly (01:03:26):
Yeah, there's a lot of data to be collected there. [01:03:30] Blair, where do I send my address for that hoodie? Send me a dm, send me a DM in Slack, Blair and I will hook you up. So you definitely, I think I'm going to do a chat GPT analysis of the live chat transcript, but I'm pretty sure you were the most active

Tommy Walker (01:03:46):
Audience research. How do you do it?

Jimmy Daly (01:03:48):
How do you do it? Yeah, it's a good one.

Tommy Walker (01:03:50):
And how do you build it into your process? Okay, so this is the pitch, right? This is part of the pitch. So I have an eight layer market research process that I teach in very deep detail. It's about a five hour [01:04:00] day in a five day summit, but I'll give you the high level overview. So on the very first level eight layer market research level, one is you, it's your business, and there are different narratives that you're ultimately trying to get out of the company, and these narratives give you a really solid opportunity to build out internal networks. So depending on the size of your company, this is what's going to be different. So the first narrative, and I got this from Kevin Lee and Shannon [01:04:30] Deep, so I can't take full credit for it. This is just my application of their framework, but the first narrative is your category narrative.

(01:04:38):
What's your colleagues' take on the category that you exist in? What's the category going to look like in the next five years? Where do you sit within the category? What do you get right that everybody else gets wrong? Category. Next one, product. Everybody knows product narrative. What's your product good at? What's your product bad at? How does your product do something totally different than everybody else? And [01:05:00] why not there? Third one persona, what are your customers? Who are your customers? What do they value? What do they like? What do they not like? How are they different from the other customers? What makes them smart? What makes them awesome? And how are you able to repel the wrong people and attract the right ones? And then the fourth one is your culture narrative. Now, the way that Shannon and Kevin define that is where do you want to be within the culture of the ecosystem in which you're in?

(01:05:27):
I think that's great. The way that I like to think about it is what is your internal [01:05:30] culture? What do you like about the company? What don't you like about the company? What makes it cool to work for these four areas? And then maybe a fifth one depends on the company, is the founding narrative. So for me, I talk about my founding narrative all the time, which was I started my business in a boarding house with a broken laptop. If you've followed my work, you've heard me say this, but these 4, 2, 5 things together are what make up brand, right? So that's level one [01:06:00] you, level two, your customers. When I look at my customers, I'm asking what do they value? What do they fear and what they and how do they achieve success? When we start to answer those questions in full, we can actually start to get at the Jungian psychology of the archetypes.

(01:06:19):
A lot of people forget that brand archetypes are not actually from brands. They come from real conversations with real people. And what we're able to do once we are able to find what that 70 30% of [01:06:30] those brand archetypes are, what's the primary archetype and the secondary archetype? Once we find that and we start to find the reflection between the brand, like what we hear internally and what we hear with our actual customers, or if we don't have customers, we're pre customers. What we hear in our cold dms in outreach, once we find that sweet spot, that's where we start to develop a brand voice layer three, right? This is the eight layer process, so I'm going to do my best to be as fast as possible. Layer three is your competitors, [01:07:00] right? What's everybody saying? What's nobody saying and how are you able to do that?

(01:07:04):
I look at logos, pathos, ethos. I deconstruct different brands, seeing how they appeal to authority, logic and emotions. The way that I like to think about this too, if one brand has all these awesome companies, all these awesome logos that they're putting out there, and another brand has the same thing. If you have McDonald's, Delta and American Airlines as your customers and I have Burger King and JetBlue and [01:07:30] I don't know some other brand, those things cancel each other out. From a customer's perspective, what are they blind to? What's missing? When we start looking at all of that, when we start to look at how we build messaging around that, we're trying to fill in those gaps. Layer four search competitors, I could say do keyword research and do content gaps and all of that stuff. A lot of us will know that, but what I like to do is I actually like to take a look at the topics that they're covering.

(01:07:56):
I actually have a whole AI prompt that I put this through and I think about [01:08:00] narratively, how do these pieces all fit together? They're topics and then where are the gaps in the topics that they're putting out there? That's one to figure out how we get that ground cover, but the second part of that is not all search competitors are actual Ronnie, yeah, Tommy Aristotle marketing or not all of our search competitors are actual competitors, which gives us a really solid opportunity to build out a distribution network if we're going after the same customer, but we're not actually competing for the same part, that's [01:08:30] joint webinars, that's getting on their podcast, that's getting really starting to algorithm proof. A lot of your distribution layer above that industry adjacent, this usually means like app partners and agencies. How do we start to work with them? Same idea distribution partners.

(01:08:45):
How do we build out that group layer above that news? What news outlets are people watching above that? Influencers, again, now we're starting to look at our distribution network, and then I have an eighth layer, which is Pulse, which is a series of automations that allow us to keep track [01:09:00] of all of this stuff in real time, bring it into a Slack channel. So 10, 15 minutes a day, you're able to see what's going on within your industry and if you, my whole little marketery catchphrase there is, if you are able to understand, if you can understand where the tide is turning, you can ride that wave and if you understand how the weather works, you can control the weather. Something like that. I forgot. That's the eight layer market research process, and then I start to look at how do we apply these insights over to creative development, and then how do we [01:09:30] start to apply that actually on the ground, and then how do we actually do change management? It is a completely different way of thinking about this stuff. That's the market research process. I hope that answers the question. That was a very long,

Jimmy Daly (01:09:42):
That was a robust answer. That was really good.

Tommy Walker (01:09:45):
Thank you. Thank you. I put a lot, this has been a two years worth of development on this stuff.

Jimmy Daly (01:09:50):
You didn't just come in with that on the spot.

Tommy Walker (01:09:52):
No.

Jimmy Daly (01:09:56):
Yeah, that was awesome. I think the drop off is happening in our,

(01:10:00):
[01:10:00] So I feel like we probably should sign off. I will send out the recording obviously, if it's okay with you, Tommy, we'll send out slides. I think I'll send out the transcript. I've never done that, but there's just so much good stuff in the chat. I feel like we should send that out maybe just to attendees, but I guess Tommy, let me, on behalf of all of us in the content marketing world, say thank you for recognizing this, for putting in the time and effort and money. This has been a huge effort on your part to bring this survey and now report to life. You can just see [01:10:30] from all people's comments how much it's resonating. Folks are saying, I've been looking for the right words for this. I don't feel so alone anymore. It's been affirming, et cetera, et cetera. So seriously, thank you. You've done a great service to the content marketing world, and this is really just the beginning. The full report isn't even launched yet, so we'll of course be updating folks with that and yeah, wow, my expectations were high and that totally over-delivered.

Tommy Walker (01:10:55):
Can I give one more plug?

Jimmy Daly (01:10:56):
Yeah, of course.

Tommy Walker (01:10:57):
Okay, so two more plugs. So one, [01:11:00] yeah, the report comes out next Friday. We're working diligently to get the final finishing touches on it, so we'll do that. But two, I'm going to be doing a paid webinar through the content studio. That will be a deep dive analysis of all of the data that we've gone through, because there's a lot to cover there. I think I'm only going to do it for 10 bucks, so if you want to show up to that 10 bucks and yeah, we'll do a deep dive of everything that's going on. I don't know how long it's going to last, but it's going to last a while I imagine.

Jimmy Daly (01:11:28):
Awesome, awesome. [01:11:30] Cool. Thank you. Thank you everybody too for coming, for keeping a live chat. So lively. That was awesome, and we'll see everybody in the Slack group, LinkedIn, everywhere else. Take care everybody.

Tommy Walker (01:11:41):
Thanks everybody.