When the Team Feels Marketing is Dehumanizing…

Getting Everyone On-Board with Content Marketing

When firms first take on content marketing, it’s typically because the leadership has recognized how important it is to their future. They understand how it works and even how much work it will require of the firm to implement well. But that’s not necessarily true for everyone else — even those who will comprise the firm’s content team. When compared with the creative freedom they have in their client work, and the different pace and production schedules they’ve become accustomed to, they might even find the system behind this new content marketing initiative intimidating and uncomfortable. Maybe even dehumanising…

In this episode of Expert Marketing Matters, Chris, Mark, and Lauren discuss some of the perceptions and objections that marketing teams often share before adopting a more rigorous content marketing strategy.

You can listen to the episode using the player embedded above, or you can read a full transcript below.

This Episode, Word for Word

Speaker 1: [Music] This is Expert Marketing Matters. A podcast about generating ideal new business opportunities, and creating your future.

Chris: Welcome to Expert Marketing Matters. I’m Chris Butler.

Lauren: I’m Lauren McGaha.

Mark: And I am Mark O’Brien.

Chris: And it’s been a while because we were really good and we recorded a bunch of episodes well in advance last time, so I haven’t, we haven’t sat here.

Mark: Well you’ve sat here for your other podcast.

Lauren: Yes.

Mark: Yeah. [inaudible 00:00:45]

Lauren: Yes. I have. I’m not, I’m not great at putting them in the can, so. [Laughs]

Mark: [Laughs]

Chris: Well we’ve been decent about being a couple of weeks in advance. But you guys have been in a bunch of kick-offs, um, with new clients. And something that came up the other day, uh, with, uh, thinking about and reminiscing back over these things is that you encounter a lot of common objections that you spend good times deflating and defending and reframing and getting people to be excited about the opposite of. Um, and you thought that it would be a good idea to sort of talk about some of those. Um, because I think it’s easy to, you see them coming, but the people that you talk to probably don’t.

Mark: No they don’t. And often times the leadership may have made a decision to embrace this vein of marketing, which has a lot to do with content marketing. And therefore contact production, which is a major commitment. And they’re adopting this on behalf of the firm. And there are certain members of the firm that need to go along with it. [Laughs] Um, and it’s typical that all of them understand what they’re being signed up for. Uh, and then I think the, the leadership can be in a sensitive situation and can get quite nervous once they realize, “Oh gosh, well like, I’m philosophically part to this, or the few of us are, but, you know, the engineer who’s critical to this effort because of the expertise they have, for example, they think it might be a dehumanizing process” is the word we’ve heard recently.

Lauren: [Laughs]

Mark: Dehumanizing.

Lauren: It is a strong word. But, but I, you know, I think a part of it stems from the fact that a lot of these principles don’t understand the own journey that they’ve been on. And coming to adopt a digital marketing system like this. And coming to frame their own thoughts about the importance of marketing this way. And, and kind of, kind of get themselves ready to make that sort of commitment. And it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s something that requires a lot of education, and a lot of discussion. And so, when they are, when they’ve made that step and they’re ready to start employing tactics against that vision, um, yeah it’s difficult if the rest of the team hasn’t been given that, the rest of that education.

Chris: Right. I think some of it also probably stems from the fact that if you are talking about a team that has done some content marketing, or thinks they have, like they’ve been blogging for X number of years, blogging was sort of this thing that was not really governed by much rules or restrictions or organization until fairly recently. And content marketing is really just another way of saying a system over on top of what you thought you were doing with blogging in the past. Um, and in the past sort of, blogging was instinct. It was like, oh I have this idea. I’m excited about this thing. Gonna put it out there. We, we went through our site and purged a bunch of things that were instinct-driven in the past that weren’t relevant anymore. Including articles about National Donut Day because nobody thought that that was, that was just interesting to them at the time.

Lauren: [Laughs]

Mark: Alright.

Chris: And, um…

Mark: I remember then at the time it seemed, okay, that’s fine, that makes sense. You know? [Laughs]

Chris: Well yeah, National Donut Day article on a, on a website about digital marketing doesn’t make sense. But there were other articles that I think were peripherally related to things that were of interest or of relevance to us professionally that we realized, okay, it doesn’t really fit. And I think that’s part of this, is that there are probably people who are creatively driven or instinctively driven who are excited about the idea of continuing to express themselves on the internet.

Lauren: Right.

Chris: And all of a sudden it’s like, well there’s a system, and maybe I shouldn’t be doing that. And maybe there’s actually a different purpose here.

Mark: The, well the other force bearing down on this is that often times these firms are embracing positioning for the first time as well.

Chris: Right, right.

Mark: And so we’ve got this new structure with the content strategy, but then it’s also, and it’s also just gonna be for this, this one audience. And there too, maybe the leadership hasn’t embraced the idea and they’ve gotta, they’ve built up the courage to say, “Yes, we’re going to do this”, which is hard for them to do. Uh, but again, because they don’t understand the overall context and the vision for the, for the change, sometimes the key employees just aren’t on board.

Chris: Right. Well let’s actually talk about positioning for a second. Because I think there’s two ways of looking at that objection right. There’s the, the basic objection that we don’t wanna position at all. Um, we like being generalists. We’re afraid of missing out on opportunity. Um.

Mark: Right but we’re getting boring.

Chris: Right, we’re, yes, very much so. Especially on the creative side. It’s like, the, the, width, or the, the breadth of their past experiences is sort of, it maps to what they’re interested in at the time. It’s like, oh I can do this, and that, and this.

Lauren: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Mark: Well you know, what’s so interesting about that, uh, now that we’re working with a broader field of experts, not just people in the marketing channel. Ah, we had kick-off recently with a firm that comprised mostly of data scientists. And they had the exact same fears and concerns as we’ve seen from creative directors voiced in almost the exact same way. Completely different people with different educations, different skill sets, different interests, same fears.

Chris: Although it makes perfect sense given, like, what a data scientist is interested in doing. Which is, observe, gather information, and connect dots. Make connections and like, that as a discipline, can be applied anywhere. You could be doing that in the soil. You could be doing that in the library, you know. And it’s probably interesting to think about applying a variety of different contexts. Um, so, so resistance to positioning, I think is, you know, in general is an issue. But then there’s also the secondary resistance, which is, “Well what if, what if you remain a generalist as far as the public’s concerned, but from your, the position of your marketing program and plan, you’re not?” We’re focusing in, on something very specific, a very specific audience, a very specific kind of work. And there are objections to that too.

Mark: Yeah. And the, the word dehumanizing, I wanna, wanna stick with for a little bit because I think that, uh, is an extreme version of voicing what a lot of people get concerned about inside of firms when this comes up. And it, it is still with a positioning angle in mind. Um, so I think what they feel is that, um, that they have to conform to something other. They have to become something different than what they are to fit a certain voice. And that’s really opposite of the truth. Good positioning and good marketing is simply reflecting a truth that already exists. And the reason this person inside the firm’s being asked to contribute is because of their knowledge. And the more accurately they’re expressing their knowledge the way they normally would, the more effective it’s going to be. But they feel like because of all this, they have to, you know, put on a different face. And that’s, that’s exactly wrong.

Lauren: Well I also think that’s reflective of, of a really kind of scary shift in an internal culture. I mean, a lot of the people who’ve been, say contributing to the blog with no, no strategic parameters applied to it are still being praised for doing so. Cuz they’re doing things that other people aren’t making the time to do. And now all of a sudden, it’s like, okay, well you’re gonna be contributing in this way, but, but we have some restr- kind of, as they say, restrictions, ri- we’ve got some rules around it. Now we’re point our, our market focus in this direction. And the, the blog now doesn’t have as, as they say, as much creative freedom because it’s got these strategic goals that feel more formulaic.

Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative). There’s also something to be said for if you’ve got somebody that’s been actively blogging or doing anything public. You know, whether it’s public speaking, podcast, whatever. And building their own personal brand around something. All of a sudden, that may not necessarily jive very well with the new system. And then the question becomes, well what’s, what’s the preference here? For instance, if someone has built a really big, important personal brand, there, there might be some ways that we’d need to adjust the system to account for that. Or they might actually need to adjust to account for the system because, hey, we need to prefer what’s good for the firm here, not what’s good for the individual. And of course that’s going to depend on who that individual is, what, who the firm is, what their role is in the firm, the nature of their brand, etc. But that’s a big issue, too. And you can just file that under ego, I guess, to some degree. Um, although, to be fair in some cases those personal brands really do have a value.

Mark: Oh sure. Sure, sure. Some of those were hired because of those brands.

Chris: Right.

Mark: Um, another thing that came up recently that is under this umbrella, uh, that is back on the creative firm side, is the objection to text, right. This was a firm, uh, again, speaking of the principles, and they were dealing with a bit of a potential mutiny on the kind of, on the employee side. That might be a little bit of a strong word.

Lauren: [Laughs]

Mark: But there’s, but they, there, the, the employees in this case actually kind of banded together and…

Lauren: They were very thoughtful about it.

Mark: Very thoughtful. Yeah, it was actually…

Chris: In objecting to the plan.

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark: Yes. Yes. And the, and the principles shared the emails with us, and the first thing I said is like, “Wow, this is a really well-written email, and they’re not being jerks about it. They’re not just, you know, they’re not just being an obstacle, right”.

Lauren: It comes from love of the business.

Mark: Right, there’s real care there.

Lauren: Yeah they have the shared value of, you know, we want the future of this business to succeed. And I think that’s an important thing to point out.

Chris: So what was the nature of their objection?

Mark: The nat- well, what, it was, it was, varied, but one them in the complaint was that there’s too much text. We’re, we’re a creative industry, we do a lot of video specifically, um. This is too text heavy. And what was interesting there was that the, we’re looking at it as zero sum. Right? So the presence of text means that any non-text somehow doesn’t exist.

Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Mark: But it did. And they could have, and I wanted to explain to them, was, well, the more text you create, the more freedom you have on the non-text elements just go for it. Have the portfolio, the videos, whatever they be. Be what they need to be in and of themselves to represent that work properly.

Chris: Yeah.

Mark: And not worry about like, optimizing portfolio for SEO or anything like that because of the text. Um.

Chris: Although, you know, I’ve had lots of, um, opportunity to consult agencies who have a similar fear, and that fear trickles down to how they handle case studies. Um, and so you know, our recommendation being a certain form of case study that’s results driven. And their fear being like, “well how are they going to be convinced that we’re create enough”, you know? We need to show the work. And I will usually point out, like, I, you know, I would propose that there are three rules to case studies. Number one, that there are results forward, meaning that you actually describing how you hold yourself accountable to results. The result isn’t the thing you made, it’s the difference made by the thing you made. And the second being that they represent future work, right? So, you know, if you’ve got a really beautiful portfolio piece that you did ten years ago for a client that actually isn’t what you’re selling at all, it needs to go. It doesn’t matter how beautiful it is. And the third…

Mark: [inaudible 00:10:50]

Chris: Right. And the third being that they’re pruned on a regular basis. But within that you have plenty of freedom visually. But I always point out, people’s desire for a certain level of, uh, creative standard is a verification aspect of their purchase decision. It’s not a, it’s not an initial requirement [inaudible 00:11:08]. Buying the result first, or buying the promise of the result, and then at that point they say, “But it also needs to be to this brand standard. Needs to be to this level of visual quality.” And so it doesn’t mean you don’t show that stuff…

Mark: Right.

Chris: But you still need to lead with the text.

Lauren: Well, and I think people can buy into that. But I think what we’re, what we’re touching on here is again this pattern of, I mean especially, you know, we, we’ve done this, we’ve applied this for so many firms at this point that when we are coaching the principles, we lead with the vision of their marketing and we talk about how this is gonna be specifically tailored to their business reality. But by the time that message gets funneled down through to the people who are gonna be applying the tactical vision, that something gets lost in translation and all they’re hearing is the formula. They’re hearing 3,000 words of text on a page…

Mark: Right.

Lauren: And the case studies need to have these four elements on them. And you need to have these two side bar CTA’s, etc. And what we’re skipping is that big vision.

Mark: Inspiration.

Lauren: Exactly.

Chris: Yeah. And they’re probably saying, “Hey, we’ve been successful to this point based on our instincts, our creativity, our individual drive”

Lauren: Right, what’s the problem?

Chris: Yeah, and now what’s the room for that?

Lauren: Yeah.

Chris: Um, we need to take a break. When we come back, though, I wanna hear what the response to that email was.

Speaker 1: [Music] You’re listening to Expert Marketing Matters, a podcast about generating ideal new business opportunities by creating and nurturing digital marketing systems and habits that have a measurable impact on your bottom line. This podcast is brought to you by Newfangled, a digital marketing consultancy focused on empowering experts to do better digital marketing. You can learn more about NewFangled’s digital marketing method, at Newfangled.com. [Music]

Chris: Welcome back. So, prior to the break, you were talking about, um, a group of employees that had banded together to email the principle saying hey, you know, we’re not really into this text stuff. Um, we’re creative individuals, there’s not enough of that here. So I’m curious, what was the response?

Mark: Yeah, and I think it would be helpful that the second half of this to really focus on what can principles or interested in, in doing this do to maybe cut some of this thing, these ditches off of the pass.

Chris: Yeah, right. Right.

Mark: Um, before even making a higher decision or, you know, making a positioning decision. Uh, and I do think that is part of it. Buy in, early buy in, pre-purchase buy in could make a lot of sense.

Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Mark: I’ll get to answer your question, but while I’m on that train of thought, ah, we’re speaking with another firm out of, uh, Massachusetts now, and it’s interesting to see how the principle there is doing that. He’s bringing the, uh, most outspoken critics of these principles into the business meetings. The sales meetings.

Chris: That’s smart.

Mark: It, it’s very smart. And it’s good for us, it’s good for him. It’s good for them. It’s much, much better to hear the objections. And, and they’re raising excellent points.

Lauren: Yeah. And it changes the trajectory of the project, right. Because those objections are gonna be raised at some point by those people along the way.

Chris: Yes, right

Mark: I was about to say the exact same thing.

Lauren: And I’d much rather have that conversation in the sales process then once we’ve already mapped out a schedule and suddenly we’re kind of duplicating the sales process.

Chris: Yeah, that’s a great point.

Mark: And for those people psychologically, they feel like, yeah, I was heard, and we worked through this, and it’s done. Instead of this, like, anxious being built and built and built and built and built. [Laughs]

Lauren: Right. Well, and this directive from on high, like okay well we made this decision and now you will adhere to it rather, rather than that. It’s a collaborate decision internally to make this investment in the value, the future value of the firm.

Mark: Yep. So this firm that’s on the email, uh, basically my message to them was these people want care, they’ve voicing great concern. This specific issue about wanting to be more creative in their content, I said, well yeah. Let them be more creative in the content. Let them and, band together and let their contribution be creative in nature. Their interested in video. This is what they do. Let them create video and that’ll be their contribution to the content strategy.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: And just meet them at their point of interest.

Chris: [Laughs]

Mark: And that is right in line with the truth of the firm, and the new positioning, and everything else. It’s a win, win, win, win, win. And because all we’re really trying to get at is the truth of the situation, it’s going to work out.

Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Right.

Lauren: Yeah.

Mark: Right. If you have someone on staff who’s just gonna be an obstacle [inaudible 00:15:43] to all I wanna do, well, of course not. But that, that would be an issue no matter what. But, if these people are coming from a good place, which the employees at this firm absolutely were, they, they want the same thing. They’re just using different language for it.

Lauren: I think your word truth is really important here. We’re not trying to manufacture a new reality for that, that particular firm or other firms going through it, you know. It’s really about illuminating what’s already there. And in most cases, firms are going through a new positioning exercise. That’s really true. They’re looking at their, their, kind of spectrum of work that they’re really, really good at and well suited to do. And their making a marketing decision at the very least to focus in that direction.

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lauren: But it’s not about creating something out of thin air that isn’t, isn’t true to the business.

Mark: Yeah, that’s very rare.

Chris: Yeah, something I think we’ve all learned from David Baker, who talks about this at length, is that there’s sort of a, a spectrum of maturity for someone who sells expertise. And it begins with experience and it ends with confidence. And those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. But they’re different in the sense that he talks a lot about like, especially creative individuals. And they get into their, into the professional scheme first. They just want wide experience. They want to be able to apply their creativity to a lot of different types of problems and figure out what they can do and learn more, right? And they end up getting caught into that as a perpetual way of working because it’s exciting. There’s a lot of novelty. Um, it’s challenging, right. And he says well no, where you need to move and maturity isn’t gaining competence and you can’t gain competence when you’re a generalist. Um, and so ultimately he’ll say people will buy into positioning when they realize that competence is more valuable, more satisfying, than what you’ve experienced in the past.
Um, but it’s also interesting that he talks about the value of content marketing for an individual in terms of, as writing as a discipline makes you smarter.

Mark: [inaudible 00:17:26]

Chris: Um, and it’s funny because I was talking to a client yesterday who said, “Hey, next time you talk to David, would you ask him how his opinion on that applies to non-written forms”. You know, because we’ve been talking about text and the objection there was text. And, um.

Lauren: I think he’s gone on the record about that.

Chris: He has. And so I, I tweeted at him yesterday and said, “Hey, we’ve got a client asking how does your opinion, uh, here, in so far as, uh, writing and intelligence, apply to non-text.” And he replied and said, “Well it counts some. 60%? But writing doesn’t accommodate the intellectual flop that can sneak into the other mediums.” I asked about podcasting and webinars. So, um, you know, we’re in the midst of an intellectual flop here but I think that, I think I actually disagree with David, and I would love to have a debate about this or a conversation about it in that I think that that is a characterization of it not being done well. And um the systems that, uh, Lauren, you and your team share with our clients enable them to do those non-writing things as well as possible. With a level of rigor that they wouldn’t otherwise.

Lauren: Yeah, I think it depends on who you’re talking about, right. But the people who are most likely gonna be inclined to pursue other channels outside of text are going to be people who are well-suited to do it.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. So the objections, kind of, they’re easy to deflate when you think of the big picture. Like, what is competence? You know, why wouldn’t you want competence?

Mark: But the themes are involve the individuals, the key individuals.

Chris: Gain consensus.

Mark: Yeah, and play to the truths and the strengths of the organization.

Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Mark: If you do those two things, you’re, you’re gonna be most of the way there.

Chris: Yeah, that’s really smart. Anything else to share about this? If you’re listening and you have other objections that we haven’t talked about, we would love to use those as seeds for future episodes, you know. Objections are probably, they’re probably way more than we’ve identified.

Lauren: Yeah, I mean, one, one, I don’t think we talked about very specifically has to do with the objection of time and focus and commitment. I mean that comes up pretty much every single time that we…

Chris: You mean that you’re asking us to do more than we could possibly sustain. Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah like we, we, we don’t have time to do this.

Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Mark: And it’s firm-wide, this is not just the employees. Everyone’s worried about that.

Lauren: Yeah, that comes up in every kick-off that we do.

Mark: The entire firm.

Chris: And I imagine your answer would be that if you build the system into the way you work, it saves you from having to do a massive effort later on when you have no business.

Lauren: Well I think that’s part of it. I think part of it too is it’s almost like um, well to be frank kind of suck it up to a certain extent, right. Like, [stutter] and what I mean by that is that, you, it is going to be hard. And you are gonna have to change the culture in that you’re gonna be dedicating time that you haven’t been spending to your digital marketing. And, and that’s kind of the nature of the beast. Now there are more efficient ways to do that, and a big part of what we do is help firms discover inside of their, inside of their four walls specifically, what is the most effective and efficient way that they can build a marketing plan that they can sustain. But it’s not as if there’s some magic want that’s gonna ma- like, create more hours in the day.

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and this gets right to the heart of it, is why are they doing this. Why would they even consider doing something so difficult and expensive in terms of energy, time, money, their own internal resources, everything else. Well, why? It’s because they want to change the business. They’re looking for a rebirth inside the business.

Lauren: Yeah. And that’s a tall order.

Mark: That’s all order, right, and it’s gonna take a lot of effort. And our perspective’s always been the effective solution no matter how difficult it is, is much easier than the sum of all the ineffective solutions. And most firms have tried many, many, many, many, many ineffective solutions. And they’re sick of it. And that was a lot of work too. Was really difficult for them to go through all of that. And so people who decide to really commit to this kind of marketing and look at it as true multidisciplinary effort, they know they’re in for a lot of work and it’s our job to make that work as focused and streamlined as possible. So that they’re not exerting any extra effort than what they need to. More than the bare minimum.

Chris: And to tie it back to something you said earlier, I think it’s also, from a methodology standpoint, truest to the nature of the expertise that they’re trying to share in the first place. In the sense that, you know, one could buy advertising or do some kind of traditional, paper-driven outbound campaign, or cold calling, or any of the stuff that people did twenty years ago. Um, and, that, there might be a room for that for someone listening. But, it’s not really true to what it is you’re actually trying to get someone to adopt, right. You’re selling expertise, you’re selling information, you’re selling methodology, you’re selling perspective, point of view. All of that is in the nature of the type of marketing that we’re advocating that you do. As opposed to all the other stuff which is completely contrary to that nature. You’re repackaging it in something that is alien to the recipient. So why, why would that seem preferable. Um, it’s more distant, maybe that’s why, but.

Mark: Right, it’s, when it’s, when it’s based in true education, true sharing of expertise, it’s honorable. And it builds true relationships. This firm out of Massachusetts, we first spoke with them in 2006 I think? A long, long time ago. And, um, when we were doing web development they got in touch with us about doing a site for their client, right? And we’ve changed a lot since then, they’ve changed a lot since then. But they’ve been receiving our thoughts, uh, on a regular basis. And just, they’ve been kind of keeping up with us though that and twelve years later said, “Okay, you know, we really need what you guys are doing now.” Um, and if we had been, yeah. He said, he said this exact thing yesterday. He said, “If you just had been calling me, and asking for a conversation, he’s like I never would have answered that call. Would have never done it. But you didn’t call once. You just put a bunch of smart ideas in front of me…

Chris: Yeah.

Mark: Regularly, and when it was time to, for me to call you I did.”

Chris: Yeah.

Mark: And that’s how it works. And he said, “This is what we want to be true for our firm.”

Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Lauren: Yeah.

Mark: Right. Um, but it’s honorable because of the effort, and we see this, the effort that we put in to create real valu- objectively valuable content. And if we didn’t do that, the game would be up. And this is all we’re asking our clients to do. And all our clients are asking their key staff members to do.

Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Lauren: And it’s not, it’s not coming from a place of, of arrogance, which I think is another kind of, um objection that we’ve heard from creative teams of like, well selling this expertise thing, it sounds really haughty, it sounds, it sounds like that’s not us. We wanna be, we wanna be approachable. We’re friendly, and we’re cool, and creative, you know. We’re not trying to like stick our noses up in the air and tell everyone that we’re the best.

Chris: I think all three of us were in a meeting where, so, one of our clients said, “I would never call myself an expert.” And you know.

Lauren: [Laughs]

Mark: That could mean anything.

Chris: I get that. Because [stutter] for that person that, that word has a very specific connotation. But, but what that word means…

Lauren: Well, right.

Chris: Well, yeah I think you would, actually.

Lauren: Yeah, it’s defining what that, exactly. It’s defining what that means in the context of that business. And if you have that conversation with your team really early on before you actually sign on the dotted in, and invest in a digital marketing program like this, I think people are bought into it. I think they understand…

Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Lauren: Much earlier. Because, because they’re not, um, they’re not being told, again it’s this like direct from on high. They’re not being told after the fact that like, you are an expert, and you will, uh you know, adhere to this sort of mold in this way.

Mark: In both cases, in terms of the, of the Firm of Virginia you just mentioned Chris, and the firm you’re talking about, are, which is, actually many firms. They don’t need to say they’re an expert. They just need to act like an expert.

Chris: Right. You don’t have to have the word expert on your site, selling expertise does not require that as a label.

Lauren: And it doesn’t require you to be snobby.

Chris: Correct, yeah. Yeah.

Mark: [Laughs]

Chris: Yeah, I think in fact, actually, uh, and this has been a theme many, many podcasts in the past, empathy is at the center of all this. If you don’t care about the experience your prospects are having with the problems that you are extensively there to solve, then you’re not gonna be an expert, right? And that’s more central to your ability to define yourself as an expert, I think, than even knowledge, in the end, because you have to be able to perceive the nature of the problem, perceive the experience of the person suffering from it, and prescribe the right solution, so. Let’s wrap with that.

Mark: Yeah.

Lauren: Sounds good.

Chris: Um, it’s amazing though, I, I’ve come up in my head with, like, five more episode ideas based on these conversations.

Mark: [inaudible 00:25:13]

Chris: Well especially around the psychological, uh, sort of dynamic between the person doing the marketing and the person receiving it and why something like calling, like in the, in the anecdote you mentioned, would never work. But twelve years of passive receipt of expertise does, right?

Mark: That’s the long game.

Lauren: Just that, and you’re there.

Chris: Anyone listening twelve years from now, it’s gonna be great.

Mark: Well one thing I should mention before we do wrap is the webinar we did last week.

Chris: Mmm, yeah.

Mark: Uh, because we, we had three agency guests, one who had just started, uh, this process. One who was about a year in, and one who’s three years in. And they were speaking to their perspective today. And it was great because your perspective changes and you forget what you were thinking a year ago, three years ago. And you’re not sure what you’re going to be thinking in a year or three years from now. And they were all three, the principles from three different firms, three different areas, three different areas of expertise, uh, different size firms, uh, they were all so candid about where they are today. And what they’re excited about, what they’re glad they’re never going to have to do again. What they’re concerned about. All of it. It was really excellent. But, um, I think that webinar would be worth listening to for people curious about this topic because it’s them talking through their growth through all these different stages.

Chris: And the title of the webinar was?

Mark: Uh, what was it?

Lauren: I knew he was going to follow with that! It was, Round Table Discussion…

Mark: Right the…[Laughs]

Lauren: [Laughs]

Chris: Well, uh, today’s date is the 26th of, of uh, of April, of 2018, so if you go to our website, uh maybe this is five years from now you’re listening, just find the most recent one.

Mark: Good point [Laughs]

Chris: Uh, to this, to this episode and you’ll find it. But um, it’s one of the two that [inaudible 00:26:51]

Mark: It’s the three stages of marketing.

Chris: It’s got the word Round Table in it. So if you just google Round Table [inaudible 00:26:55] will find it, so. Um, yeah, great point. Listen to that webinar. It’s a great follow up to this podcast. And we’ll see you next time.

Lauren: Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1: [Music]