https://soundcloud.com/newfangled-agency-marketing-matters/episode-7-the-2016-newfangled-seminar-takeaways
Mark O’Brien:
Hello and welcome to Agency Marketing Matters. This is a biweekly podcast that deals with digital marketing topics that are of interest to agencies. We’re at Newfangled. We work with agencies throughout North America to help them use these different digital marketing tools and strategies to promote their own business. I’m Mark O’Brien. I’m the CEO of Newfangled.
Lauren Siler:
I’m Lauren Siler, the Director of Marketing at Newfangled.
Chris Butler:
I’m Chris Butler. I’m the COO of Newfangled. Also Mark, you buried the lead. We do have a new name for the podcast.
Mark O’Brien:
That’s what I started with, Agency Marketing Matters.
Chris Butler:
Yeah, you didn’t say it was new. We’ve been calling it the Generic Newfangled Podcast until now. It’s big news.
Mark O’Brien:
Just today. First go at the new name. Let’s see how it goes, see if it lasts. Today we’re going to talk about our main takeaways from the Newfangled Seminar. Once a year, we put on a seminar with twenty-five people from all over North America at Fearrington, which is this wonderful Relais and Chateaux resort right outside of Chapel Hill. The whole idea is that instead of a typical event where you show up and then go and get your own hotel room in the city and have dinner wherever and break up after the event, we want to bring a very small group of agency professionals together and keep them together basically from 7:30 am until usually 11 pm at night or later depending on the night.
Just have everybody together to really benefit from being together and being able to share everything, all their experiences around primarily marketing their businesses. What always ends up happening is we get into topics that reach far, far beyond marketing, and it’s just really about what these people are struggling with and exciting by as they make their journey through this little entrepreneurial landscape they found themselves in. It was a lot of fun. It was the second year of doing it. We probably should have another podcast just about planning events and talking about whether it was a good idea or not a good idea and what we’ve learned from it.
Chris Butler:
Totally.
Mark O’Brien:
The honest short story is that I really don’t like it when we’re planning for it, and I adore it when we’re doing it. That speaks to my general interests, but this year’s event was just fantastic. It was so good to spend two, focused days with all of these agency professionals. I don’t know. Who wants to go first? Who wants to talk about what really hit them about the event?
Chris Butler:
Lauren, you want to go?
Lauren Siler:
Yeah, I can go. When I think about it, we opened up the event spending the entire first morning talking about content strategy and how to plan for your content, how to think about your content strategy, how to measure it. One of the things that was really interesting talking to these principals after we got through the formal sessions was the light bulbs that started to go off and people starting thinking about systematizing their content strategy. I think so much of the time writing is seen as this creative act, and it is. So many agencies have taken the time to try and invest in a content strategy, and it’s been a little ad hoc.
The idea that you can create a system around your content strategy, a system for thinking about your messaging in a certain way so that you’re being very intentional with your messaging, a system around evaluating how effective certain types of messaging are for personas. We introduced several tools to the group there to be thinking about that. It seemed to make it a little bit more approachable and sustainable for agencies to swallow when they’re thinking about, okay, this is a way that I can actually measure the effectiveness of what I’m actually publishing. This is a way that I can keep the momentum up month for month, and honestly quarter to quarter and year over year. It seems to be ad hoc at first when agencies are first getting going.
Chris Butler:
Yeah, I think most creative people have like a camel thing going on. They have all this creative impulse and then they make something, and then they have to go back and charge it back up. There’s these bursts of creative act. It’s really, really difficult no matter what it is, whether it’s writing or making something visual or building something. Whatever it is, to do it consistently. I think you have to go around the cycles of feast and famine a few times before you realize, oh my God. I need some other system of accountability to step in for when I’m going to be depleted and dry. There’s also another piece of that, which you talked about a lot, is you’re so much more vulnerable to that if you’re one person. Right, one person doing all the writing, which is very common.
Lauren Siler:
Yeah, right. That’s something we talked about a lot was infusing the commitment to your own agency’s marketing into the full culture of the agency. You talk to so many agencies who have tried this and they’re frustrated because they feel like they don’t have time to do it. They’ll stop everything for that RFP that comes in that’s due in four days.
Chris Butler:
Right.
Lauren Siler:
It’s about shifting the mentality of the agency as a whole so that everyone is fully committed to the agency’s marketing and to the future growth of the company. It’s a really important investment beyond, I would argue, the sporadic RFP that comes in every once in awhile.
Mark O’Brien:
What occurs to me when you’re saying that initially Lauren, the first idea there is that I think agencies need so much more structure than they realize. We’ve seen this too in our growth and consulting agencies on this. We thought this amount of structure would be enough, then this amount, and then this amount, this amount, this amount. Where we are now, we’re being so much more specific in exactly what they need to do every single step of the way because they need an almost bullet proof system in order to reliably do this. You’d think that the system would water down their creativity, but it’s really been the opposite because the system is so locked down. All they need to do is just really show up and think. That is what really gets the creativity going. It’s different than what you’d think it would be on the surface, but yeah, it seems like they err on the side of being a little too free form and that limits their creativity.
Lauren Siler:
Yeah, it’s almost as if the systems actually eliminating the distractions that have been keeping them from being successful at this.
Chris Butler:
Right. You’ve designed it well to draw out their best thought at the right times about the right things. The other thing I think they tend to underestimate in terms of the relationship between the system and their output’s time. I think a lot of agencies think, well if I’m new at this or I need the system to get up to speed. Actually, you need the system just as much when you’re successful because then your time is even more at a premium. You’re busier doing other things, and if you haven’t built that system into your life, forget it. You’re not going to write anything ever. Yeah, that’s a good one.
Something that occurred to me that I’ve been thinking about since I guess three weeks ago or so was Blair Enns and you and David Baker were on the panel. I think the seed question was like, what’s the future of all this? What’s coming? Blair mentioned podcasting. He said something like, “Podcasting’s the future of content marketing.” That resonated with me, number one because we’ve been wanting to do this for so long. I adore podcasts. I listen to too many of them. I’ve always wanted, and since I first heard one, I’ve always wanted to do one. I think it’s just such a natural fit for so many people who do this kind of work because they have a lot to say about a lot of things, and maybe they don’t have the time to sit down and compose something in text, do it. It’s a great fit.
The other component of it that’s really propelling this forward is as people get up to speed with finding a content type that fits their engagement style, whether that’s video or audio, technology is getting really good a taking that information and making it accessible to people no matter how they’re getting at it. Now we can take a video file or an audio file and get it transcribed at Rev.com, which we do all the time, but we can’t just throw an audio file up on the internet and assume that Google can index what’s there. That is coming very soon, so natural language processing is the thing that allows Alexa to work if you use that or Siri or any of these things that you can talk to.
Dictation stuff is getting profoundly good. I would say within the next two to three years for us, we’re going to be able to index audio files, pull words out, make this stuff searchable, which is going to be huge for content marketing but also really accelerate the path from recording something like this, like we’re doing right now, and getting it into text format very, very quickly. I’m excited about that.
Mark O’Brien:
Yeah. A point on that topic right there, today Lauren and I had a conversation with an agency out of Manhattan that we just signed with today, which is exciting. One of their main challenges is that, and their position is actually based around this, is that the majority of people that’s at the agency, English is not their first language, right. That does have to do with their positioning with marketing toward a certain cultural audience. Writing is not easy. It takes an inordinate amount of work, but speaking is quite easy. They all, their speaking was really, really well. For them, they’re going to lean heavily on podcasts and webinars. We’re talking about how advantageous that can be. An hour-long webinar can easily be 10,000 words of content. A 12-minute podcast or 20-minute podcast would be, what, 3,000 words of content and change. You can create massive vibes of content in oftentimes a much easier way by speaking it instead of writing it.
Chris Butler:
It’s just more suitable to some people, the way that they want to engage. That’s huge. On the language issue or the English not being somebody’s first language, Skype, a year ago, starting beta testing a real time translation component. Imagine that. You’re talking on Skype, in real time to somebody else and getting a translation. That parallel processing component of natural language processing is getting more sophisticated. Somebody could potentially have immediately translated content, or if English is not their first language and their audience is engaging around another language, they could do that as well. The fluidity of this I think is becoming incredible.
Mark O’Brien:
Yeah, people talk about how content strategy’s dying and the whole game of this is over. It’s not and never will be. It’s just that it’s changing, but sharing knowledge is never going to die.
Chris Butler:
Right. Is talking to a person dying?
Mark O’Brien:
Right.
Chris Butler:
That’s what we do.
Lauren Siler:
Right. No, it’s evolving, right. I think that this is something that’s really exciting for most agencies because we talk to, it’s an issue with almost every agency that we talk to, the idea of putting pen to paper regularly is a challenge that they all face. It’s an exciting thing that this type of platform and this type of communication is growing and growing and becoming more accessible. It makes content marketing, the possibilities of it grow more and more as more agencies want to get into it.
Chris Butler:
That’s right. What was your takeaway, Mark?
Mark O’Brien:
My takeaway, I’ve just had a really good idea speaking of takeaways that I need to remember. Remember to remind me about a podcast package.
Chris Butler:
Mark is writing with a purple pen on a red post-it note pad.
Mark O’Brien:
I’m not going to tell you what it says on the pen. I had a lot of takeaways. Again, just being in a room with all those minds, I’m just so charged up the entire time. That’s when I’m really in my element. I feel like I could just do it forever. One of the things that David Baker brought up in our panel was the idea of marketing automation being a misnomer. It really is unfortunate that that’s the term that the industry ended up settling on because it creates a misperception. Agencies assume that automation, it’s cold, it’s impersonal on one side, or they think it does more than it actually does. “Well, I do this, and then I don’t have to do any marketing again.” Neither are true, and the fact is that the automation part of this is really a relatively minor part of marketing automation.
Automated programs are great and really powerful and really cool. They’re probably at most, what, 10%, 15% of this suite of tools that really comprise automation we’ve got, lead scoring, and A/B testing, and your entire email system, like for blasts and everything else. You’ve got revenue attribution. You’ve got all sorts of landing pages. You’ve got whole, usually SEO tools that are built in there as well, all kinds of analytics and reports, and anonymously tracking, identifiably tracking, and all this stuff that’s so critical that has nothing to do with automation at all, but that’s the term we’re stuck with. We’re not going to change that term. We’re not going to spend any amount of effort changing that term, but I think agencies don’t understand that it is a misnomer and to not really think of it as automation.
Lauren Siler:
I think it’s more about it’s a sophisticated marketing engine that’s all about increasing the efficiency of your marketing resources and your marketing time. You’ve got access to all of this better data because it’s all connected through the automation system, which allows you to prioritize where you’re putting your more manual efforts rather than just stabbing in the dark at everything that comes across the bow.
Mark O’Brien:
It’s also probably the case that these words will eventually normalize. It’s like what you really described right there is digital marketing. The problem is you can’t really say that because then it’s like, well I thought that’s what websites were. Is that social media? What’s social media? Social media and email are basically the same thing. It’s just one has more faces on it than the other. I think these words will go away and take a backseat to what can be done in those context. Hopefully we won’t have to be talking about automation so much moving forward in terms of what people think it is.
Chris Butler:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Mark O’Brien:
We’re about out of time. Also, we’re drinking beer. I’m drinking something that tastes like Miller Lite, and Miller Lite is the official beer of the Agency Marketing Matters podcast.
Lauren Siler:
This is officially the last podcast you’ll hear me on.
Mark O’Brien:
It’s not Miller Lite. It’s some fancy beer that tastes like Miller Lite.
Chris Butler:
It is in a gold can. It’s in a gold can.
Mark O’Brien:
Yeah, they’re going for Miller Lite, like across the board. Anyway, this was a lot of fun, and I think we’ll keep the title Agency Marketing Matters.
Chris Butler:
Yeah, it sounds good.
Mark O’Brien:
It worked.
Chris Butler:
You can find more of these podcasts or more of any of our writing at newfangled.com, which we encourage you guys to visit sometime soon. You can catch us on the next episode.