Robert is the founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for The Content Marketing Institute. Robert has worked with more than 500 companies, including 15 of the Fortune 100. He’s provided content marketing and strategy advice for global brands such as Capital One, NASA, Dell, McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Robert’s third book – Killing Marketing, with co-author Joe Pulizzi has been called the “book that rewrites the rules of marketing.” His second book – Experiences: The Seventh Era of Marketing is a top seller and has been called a “treatise, and a call to arms for marketers to lead business innovation in the 21st century.” Robert’s first book, Managing Content Marketing, spent two weeks as a top 10 marketing book on Amazon.com and is generally considered to be the “owners manual” of the content marketing process. You can follow him on Twitter @Robert_Rose.
Do you jump to conclusions?
It’s inevitable for humans.
Wait, did I just jump to a conclusion?
Psychology says cognitive biases motivate people to jump to conclusions. For example, association bias involves seeing connections in information where none exist. You reach an unwarranted conclusion based on a minimal set of data.Continue Reading
Misinformation spreads like wildfire on social media, and their parent companies have little interest in fact-checking. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once said in an interview about political speech, “I don’t think that Facebook or internet platforms, in general, should be arbiters of truth.”Continue Reading
For as long as I can remember, marketing teams have faced a thorny problem: Technology.
In the pre-internet days, I helped marketing teams wrestle their presentations onto CD-ROMs to share with their sales colleagues and manage their outbound customer email campaigns in Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets.
If only a few words in that sentence made sense to you, remember I’m a Gen Xer. Rough translation: “In my day we had to walk five miles in the snow to implement a marketing strategy.”Continue Reading
B2B marketers inevitably hear the sales team say things like this: “Yeah, we’re getting leads from all that content your team writes, but they’re all tire kickers.”
Or this golden oldie: “Your MQLs don’t match our customer profile. There’s no purchase intent.”
Then, there’s my favorite: “We don’t need more leads … We need better leads.” Continue Reading
I’m a lucky content creator.
Why? Well, for many reasons. One of the biggest involves working as part of a remarkable strategic content team that includes talented editors (content creators themselves) who improve the structure, clarity, and (on more than one occasion) my poetic words.Continue Reading
Content optimization isn’t new. It started several thousand years ago when people began to organize content for discovery in libraries.
About 2,300 years ago, the renowned Greek poet and scholar Callimachus built the first Google – a topical catalog of the Great Library of Alexandria’s holdings.
No surprise – helping people find information today requires a vastly different approach.
I’m a sucker for mnemonics.
In fact, I remember how to spell it by “Me Nomics Except M nOt N In Case Spelling.”
OK, that’s a lie. But I daresay ChatGPT could never come up with that.
Anyway, one of my favorite idea-remembering devices comes from my hero Philip Kotler. He reduces his perfect definition of marketing to CCDVTP – “Create, Communicate, Deliver the Value to the Target market at a Profit.”Continue Reading
In the wonderful movie The Magic of Belle Isle, Morgan Freeman plays a novelist who has lost his passion for writing.
On a visit to the small town of Belle Isle, he begrudgingly befriends a single mother and her three daughters. Each helps him find the inspiration to write again. When Finnegan, the middle daughter, asks him to teach her to be a writer, he repeatedly asks her, “What’s out there you don’t see?”Continue Reading
How should you measure the value of brand awareness?
I’m asked that frequently by B2B marketers, but they aren’t really asking how to measure it. That answer, of course, involves analytics.
What they want to know is how to connect brand awareness efforts to business value. (And they equate value with more revenue or lower costs.)Continue Reading
When did your marketing team stop caring?
Last week, I asked that question of a CMO at a B2B technology company. I surprised myself by asking it and quickly clarified. I didn’t mean they didn’t care about their jobs. I wanted to know when they stopped caring about the topic of their employer’s business.Continue Reading
