According to the MarketingSherpa
2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, content marketing was indicated as one of the most difficult, yet most effective, forms of marketing.
In this MarketingSherpa webinar, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, and Jessica Lorenz, Visual Storyteller, both of MECLABS, explained how MarketingExperiments, sister company to MarketingSherpa, saw a 232% increase in blog traffic.
In addition, learn from many B2C and B2B content marketing case studies to aid your own marketing efforts.
"You must deliver value. Sometimes we have this notion that, 'Well look, I'm providing content, a free e-book,' or like this webinar, for example, and you're saying, 'I don't have to sell anyone on, it’s free. They'll just want it,'" Burstein explained. "Well, as we all know, nothing in life is free, there is no free lunch. While people may not be paying with their money — there will be no monetary spend — they are paying with their time."
Key takeaways from this webinar also include:
- How an increase in blog hits affects sales inquiries
- Frequencies and lengths of blog posts and the impact on readership
- Content marketing tactics when launching a new blog or website
- When to write with a personality or twist, and when to write professionally
- And much more
Download the slides to this presentationRelated Resources
Content Marketing: Your questions on B2B online lead gen, metrics, content from SMEs and moreContent Marketing: A process for evaluating content channelsContent Marketing: Targeted persona strategy lifts sales leads 124%Content Marketing: 3 tips for how to get started%REGISTER%
Video Transcription
Burstein: Hello and welcome to a MarketingSherpa webinar and thank you for joining us today. Today, we are going to be talking about content marketing. Let me tell you specifically what we are going to be doing over the next 30 minutes so you can get the most value out of this because this is a little unique for a MarketingSherpa webinar. Joining me today is Jessica Lorenz. She is our visual storyteller. Thanks for being here, Jessica. Normally she's behind the camera but she's here today because normally, we are asking the marketers of the world, we find high-performing marketers, we bring them in, and we ask them all of your questions about how they did what they did to achieve marketing success.
Today, it's a little different. We are going to be the marketers, we’re going to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what we do, as we are also content marketers just like you. So Jessica's here to look through all of your questions, and ask your questions because this is focused on you. The way you can ask those questions is on Twitter using #SherpaWebinar. This actually is a great example of content reuse. Originally, the Jacksonville chapter of the American Marketing Association asked us to come in and talk about content marketing. We put together this presentation and then the national chapter of the American Marketing Association asked us to talk about what we do, so
we did a full hour-long presentation. We’re going to tweet that presentation through #SherpaWebinar.
Today, we're going to focus specifically on slides to answer your questions. So let’s dive into it, why are we talking about content marketing? Well, this is what you've told us, this is a MarketingSherpa research chart from some of our research and it shows that content marketing is among the most effective types of content. Some of those other types like SEO and optimization webinars that are up there are also really effective types of content. But, it's right at the top there, that top shows the difficulty is among the most difficult things marketers do. Trade shows only slightly beats it. You think of a trade show, you've got to enable Sales. You've got to find some trinket, you've got to find the right place on the trade show floor. That's pretty hard, too.
So, we want to help you learn how to do content a little better. Specifically, what type of content is most hard for you? If you look at the top, those are the easiest on this chart. At the bottom, those are the most difficult. And, you can see some of the easier things are things like social media, webpages, e-newsletters, some of the more simple straight forward types of content. Not surprisingly towards the bottom, e-books, case studies and white papers are effective types of content, but they are what marketers struggle with a little more. So, we talked about where content marketers, as well.
So what we did is we took to our own efforts. For example, this was the
MarketingExperiments Blog. And through our efforts, we were able to increase visits per month from about 5,000 to about 17,000. That's about a 232% increase in visits. So we took what we learned from, for example, from that blog from some of our other efforts. And we're combining it with case studies that we've written through MarketingSherpa for all types of marketers. Like I said, you can go to #SherpaWebinar to see some of those.
And, I think that brings us to our first question.
Lorenz: That's right. Ernest, he's a Justice of the Peace, asked, "Does an increase in blog hits translate directly to more sales inquiries?"
Burstein: That's a great question. And, it's not always a one-to-one correlation for every company. But it certainly can increase results. So in our example there, you can see from the MarketingExperiments Blog, I want to let you know about 99% of our company is based off of content marketing. There's an occasional postcard you'll see from us, and an occasional banner ad. But it's all based on our blog, things like this, like webinars delivering value to you. But here's another example because we are a B2B company.
So you might say, "Hey, I'm not a B2B company, I'm a B2C company." Here's an example of a B2C company, Zagg. Through their blog, they've noticed a 172% ROI. So that's a pretty good example of translating into results. We're going to talk today about some of the things you have to do to make those results happen, of course. So there's an example of a B2C company, but here's another B2B company, McGladrey. They're an accounting firm. If you've been on previous MarketingSherpa webinars, you've seen
Eric Webb talk about how they increased content production and results.
You can see here, they can choose what to invest in, 60% is invested in content dependent activities. And the results they've seen from that, 100% increase in Web visits per month. A 300% increase in content production. So again, it's not just B2B companies, it's not just B2C companies.
Lorenz: Hunter, a product marketing manager, wanted to know, "Even if the content that you're producing is in high demand, conversions it can be really tough for some people." So, do you have any advice for Hunter?
Burstein: This is a great example here. This is Marcus Sheridan. You might be familiar with him. He is now known as the sales lion. He just calls himself a pool guy, who's just installing pools in Virginia. He learned so much about content marketing he started teaching others as a sales line. And you can see, what he does here is not just content, but it's content that converts. So he looked at his entire sales process, and at the upper-end of his sales process, he looked at what types of things are people looking for so they can come into my funnel.
But, he didn't stop there, he said, "What decisions are they going to make throughout that complex purchase process of a pool, and how can I use content to help them make those decisions, to help inform them?" So what he did is, instead of, as you can see, the previous email was just simply, "Hey, I'm going to come out to see you on Friday, and we're going to look at and see if a pool is right for you." No, instead he included lots of different content. Lots of different information where people can learn about pools before he ever gets there.
And from doing this, by the time he gets there, he's found that what he calls his content tipping point. If they've seen 30 articles, 80% of them convert. So think about that. This is just a guy, goes out, sells a pool at your house. You know, maybe you call four or five people. So that's a 20% conversion rate. You're only going to buy a pool from one of them if you buy at all. Well, he's already sold them with his content before he ever gets out there. So one, that saves him man hours, right? He doesn't have to send all these people out to all these locations. But two, that's also a very impressive conversion rate.
So, let's break it down. What can we learn from this research? What can we learn from our own efforts here at MarketingExperiments, which is MarketingSherpa’s sister company. At MarketingSherpa, what can we learn from people like Marcus, and River Pools, and all of the case studies we do here at MarketingSherpa. That is what the rest of today's webinar is about. And it starts with this. You need to sell.
I know as a marketer you are thinking, "I already sell. I sell my products." But my point is you need to sell free content.
Lorenz: And, we have a question from David. He wrote in asking, "How do you identify content that would be viewed as value and not just self-promotional noise?"
Burstein: I like David's way of thinking. Because he is thinking, he's the president of his company, but he is thinking like a content marketer. Because that is what you must do. You must deliver value. So sometimes, we have this notion that, "Well, look, I'm providing content. I'm providing a free e-book." Or like this webinar for example. And you're saying, "I don't have to sell anyone on it. It's free. They'll just want it." Well, as we all know, nothing in life in free, and there is no free lunch. So while people may not be paying with their money, there might be no monetary spent.
They are paying, for example, with their time. And so what you see right here is something to keep in mind when people are making a decision. Again, whether they don't even have to pay any actual money for it, they're weighing the value of it against the cost. Part of that cost could be that they're just confused. That there is some anxiety they have about it. There is some friction they have to overcome. So let’s take today's webinar as an example. Thank you for tuning in, we know 30 minutes of your time is very valuable. So we know we must deliver value over and above what that 30 minutes is worth to you, even though we're not charging you a dime. And that is very much in our minds.
So from maybe you saw an email. And that's how you signed up for this webinar. From the subject line, that had to have no value for you to open email. That email had to have enough value to click through. That landing page, that registration page for the webinar had to have enough value there for you to register and then to actually not just register but to attend with us today, you had to assume that there was going to be enough value here that it would be worth 30 minutes of your time.
And, that's frankly why me and Jessica are under a lot of pressure. We have to deliver that for you today. So let's take a look at what I'm talking about there. It's the value proposition. So you probably think of the value proposition as the overall value proposition for your company. And, the overall value for your company. You might even think about it for your product. But, we want to break it down and say you also have to think about it for individual prospects. Like I said, your product. But then, the individual actions those prospects would take.
So, any action from attending a webinar to reading a blog post to reading a free e-book, you have to say, "Why should my target customer take this action, read this blog post, instead of read any other blog post, or magazine, or take any other action." That's how you have to look at it. You have to have that level of value with all content you produce. That's what we're talking about in terms of selling free content. So let's get into some examples.
I told you MarketingExperiments Blog, that is our sister blog. Here is an example, if you are familiar with MarketingExperiments, we love some A/B testing. So, here is an example of how we did some testing to understand the value. Originally, our comment button simply said "Submit Comment." And then, we got this great comment from our audience. And they said, "Why are you using 'submit?'" Something we taught through MarketingExperiments is that "submit" is a bad word. There's no value in the word "submit." And so, the great thing I got to say about being able to provide content marketing and being able to provide content to an audience of marketers, is they constantly make us better.
This was an example of a marketer that made us better. He challenged us, and I'm glad he did. Because then we came up with an A/B test. We said, "O.K., lets split the traffic on our blog. Half will have a button that said 'Submit Comment.' Half will have a button that said 'Join the conversation.'" And as you can see here, we got a significant conversion increase: a 34% conversion increase by changing it to "Join the conversation." And what that really means, what we're really trying to say with this is, again, submit comment. Not that it's a bad button. People are still going to comment. But, it really didn't have any value.
It didn't respect customers’ time. We try to think a little. What is the value to the customer of a "submit comment." And that's where it came to be "Join the conversation." That is how we can provide value. They want to join a conversation with their peers. Now, as we talk about content reuses, we are going to get into a little bit more. We didn't stop here, right? So what we did is, we wrote a blog post about it, which we got 15 comments on because, again, everything you are doing is a chance for you to provide content. So, if you're finding ways to sell to your audience, that might be a way to provide content.
But, it could also be if you're a plumbing company. Perhaps improving your own plumbing in your building. That's an improvement right there. Turn that into content as well. Share that with your audience.
Lorenz: And speaking of blogs, we actually had a question from Patty. She's a creative director and she was wondering, "How do frequency and length of a post effect your readership? And how has this changed recently?"
Burstein: That's a great question, Patty. We get that question a lot. I can't say I have specific research, but from what I've seen, it's all over the place. I can't give you one right answer. So I know some bloggers, for example, who have a complex product that have told me that they have tried small, quick blog posts very frequently. And it did not work for them. If they do, say one post a week, and it's a very rich, 1,000 word plus blog post, works very well for them. Not only do they get lots of comments, lots of social sharing. But they also get clients from it. Which is what we are all looking for.
But then for some others, they found that long content simply doesn't work and they have to try bite-sized pieces for their audience, especially for simpler content for a B2C audience, perhaps, where there is not as much of a complex decision making process. So, the best I can say to Patty is as we saw in the previous example, test a few different things with your audience. See what works. Get some feedback. Ask them and try some A/B tests. But here's an example because here we are very cognizant of that, too.
So, we have for example our Lead Gen Summit coming up next month. And so, what we do when we have a Summit coming up is we share, for free, all of the case studies, all of the full sessions from the previous Summit. So we've been sharing for free, full B2B Summit sessions. Now, we feel like there is a lot of value in there. But still, they're at least 30 minutes long. So, for example, right here you have a great case study from Autodesk about gamification. Andy Mott and Dawn Wolfe from Autodesk right here. They came to B2B Summit, and they showed us how gamification has helped them capture more leads. But we thought it was a little too much to just ask someone to watch a 30-minute video.
So what we did again is we sold that free content. We sold that 30-minute video with more valuable content. What you're seeing here is a blog post written by our own Erin Hogg. And she took an excerpt. So we did a three, four, five minute excerpt from that 30-minute talk. Put it for free on YouTube. Made it available to everyone. So people found it through YouTube. The call-to-action from that excerpt was to watch the full video. Then also we had Erin write a blog post about it. And as you can see, the call-to-action on the blog post is to watch the entire free video replay.
We even have some bullet points of value there. It's not just enough to ask them. Because it's free. What's in it for them? What's some value? For example, they can learn how Autodesk implemented game mechanics into its product trial. And here, you can see the actual full video that we send people to. It's at this point we take a break. And let you know you saw Andy Mott and Dawn Wolfe on the stage at B2B Summit. And our Summits are all about you. We are looking to find great stories from marketers like you to put on the stage.
To share the stage with some of our keynotes from
MarketingSherpa Email Summit like Flint McGlaughlin, Dan Ariely and Dr. Noah Goldstein of UCLA. So you can go to MECLABS.com/EmailAwards. You have until September 8 to share your email case study. And we are going to pick a few winners. And the Best in Show will be flown out to Las Vegas, to the Aria Hotel. We will be interviewing you on stage and giving you an Email Award. So I highly recommend it. MECLABS.com/EmailAwards. Tell us your story.
We're also looking to fill our own building. If you're looking for a position, go to
MECLABS.com/Careers. I think we have about 14 positions open right now in Jacksonville Beach. I know I'm looking for a marketing events specialist. So go to MECLABS.com/careers. Especially if you want to be a marketing events specialist. So let’s take another look at another example. This was actually through one of our Research Partners at MECLABS. This is a free trial. So again, another form of content. Free trials. And as you can see, didn't really have a lot of value. Struggling a little.
So we tested a few things. One, just simply orienting the visitor better. Create online registration forms with RegOnline. It's free, but it shows them some value right there. We added "Cut your workload up to 64%," showing a quantifier, why they should sign up. Also, made the sign-up a little easier. And you can see, as we talk about more value in that button, "Set up your free account." "Get free access now." What we saw was a 548% increase in conversion.
So again, keep these thoughts in mind. These are a few specific examples. But think, how are you selling your free content? It's not enough to just offer it out there for free, because it's not really free. So let’s take a look at the second thing we've learned from our own work. We've learned from our case studies. You have to tell your story. Obviously, that's what content is about. Sometimes people struggle with this. I believe we had a question about this.
Lorenz: Yes, we did. We have a question from Devon, who's a social media coordinator. He was wondering, "Do you have any advice for companies that are launching a new blog or a website focusing on content marketing?"
Burstein: Marketers can definitely struggle with "O.K., I know I should do content marketing. But how? I'm not a journalist, I'm not a writer. I don’t know what content I should create." So when I hear that, I always challenge them because your company is probably producing a great amount of content right now, you're just not sharing it. So, for example, customer service. If customer service is answering questions that your customers have. That's content right there. Product development. What interesting things they're cooking up.
That's content right there. So, one thing I would recommend is get, I know this is going to sound crazy, because we all get too much email, get copied on more emails. Get copied on more internal emails. See what Sales is doing. See what customer service, product development, your IT department is doing because a lot of those internal emails hold some really rich content. Also, something else that I recommend, anything you have to teach new employees, or anything you have to teach employees into your own organization. Don't just teach them once. Turn that into a blog post. So for example, we had someone in our company was asking me about what are some tips for creating a high-performing blog. So we went over, we had a 30-minute meeting.
And I broke down for eight different areas that you should look for in blogs to optimize, to improve your blogs. So of course, I took that meeting, and
I turned it into a blog post. But, it really comes down to these two things. And, that's very high level. Every company, I would argue, every company is only doing one of two things. You're either accentuating the positive, or you are eliminating the negative. So, look at what you do with your product for your customer. How are you making their lives better by either helping them achieve a goal, or by helping them overcome a pain point. So from there, you have to decide, "What can I give away for free short of that? What can I give away for free that's not the actual product but that will help them achieve those goals?" So, let’s take a look at a few examples.
Lorenz: But before we do, we just had a question come in from Emily who is in the health care industry. And she's, I think that this goes really well, because she's really interested about a blog they just launched and ways to make it better because their product is different from the normal product. They are not trying to sell your average product online, they're a health care company. So, how [can a blog] tell her story?
Burstein: In fact, about a few months ago I was talking to a health care company that had several clinics. And they were asking the same question. One, I would advise you look at the Mayo Clinic. They're a very good example. But health care is a great field because that is, usually someone is trying to overcome a pain point, right? Someone is literally sometimes in pain, their back in hurting, they have a headache, whatever, and they just want to know how to overcome that.
So that's a great example to create content to help them identify the problem they have. How can they help themselves? Obviously, you know, you have to be careful with your legal department. You don’t want to offer health advice where you could get sued or anything. But, how can they help themselves? Whether it's just, for example, icing their back or whatever. And then, at some point, how can they determine where they need to actually interact with a professional, or they have to buy a specific product? So, I think health care is a very good example of how you can see what pain people are in, and how can you serve them free information.
Now the other challenge you might find, because the company I was talking to felt like "Well the Mayo Clinic is already doing this so well, are we just adding more noise? The Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit, we're just adding more noise into the Internet." So you also don’t have to just solve their problems, but look at your value. How can you better serve that customer or the patient better than any of your competition? So, for example, for them the answer was the Mayo Clinic serves people very, very well.
But the Mayo Clinic only has three locations. One of them is here in Jacksonville for example. So if I'm not in Jacksonville, let's say I'm in New York, this company had hundreds of clinics around the country, and so their chance was to really localize it and to really show what can you do in New York to solve this specific health care problem. So, find your unique value there. That's a great question. And lets dive into some other example. So health care is an example. Here and again, we have full case studies on MarketingSherpa.com about all of these examples. You can go to #SherpaWebinar on Twitter. We are tweeting all of this out. We're probably doing too much tweeting. We want to give you as much value as possible. So here's an example.
Beautylish, a company who sold beauty products. On Facebook, they're not going to give the beauty products away for free. That's where it becomes a sale. That's where they are trying to collect actual revenue. But what they can do for free is obviously give some different beauty advice. Facebook was a great avenue for them because it's very visual. And so they were, for example, give your eyes some razzle-dazzle. To the previous question, for a beauty product, sometimes it's a very simple, short piece of content. Like a photo. Here's another example. They offered meditation and these sorts of things. So you can actually go there and you can meditate and you can learn some of these transcendental practices better.
But from Facebook, they can offer an e-book. They can offer some quick tips. And, this is a perfectly viable model in content marketing. Maybe 90 or 99% will never go to center point and become a customer. And they'll just love the content they put out. But that is going to generate some brand awareness and some word of mouth for center point for the people that actually do. Here's another example, a fun example, the Calgary Flames are an NHL team. So again, they're serving their customers with excitement and following the team with learning more about hockey. And so, they were able to do that as well.
The paid product, of course, is going to the game, is buying a jersey or what not. But, they were also able to serve the customers with a mobile app and engaged email subscribers that way so they could learn more about the team. So let’s talk about downsides, when people are in pain. Here's one that's really close to home for many marketers. If you are engaged in email marketing at all, how do you find the marketing technology you need? For example, how do you find the right email service provider? So this is a tool, and sometimes people think of content very literally. Has to be a video. Has to be an e-book. Has to be a white paper. Has to be a case study. But here's an example. This is content. This is a tool.
This helps someone overcome a pain point. There are many, many ESPs out there. Not each ESP is right for each company. So it helps to narrow down and say, "In my unique situation, this email service provider is best for me." You can think about that for your own company. I'm sure you have lots of competition. Tell your customers when is your product is best for them. When is maybe another product best for them. Because you're doing no one any service if you're trying to sell people who you are not going to serve better than in other company.
Lorenz: We have a question here from Madis, who is a manager. He wants to know, "How do you write with a twist? Or with a personality?"
Burstein: That's a great question. First, I would challenge him make sure that's right for your brand voice. So for example, if you sell insurance or if you sell financial products let's say, even health care. Your audience might not want that twist or personality. They might want trust. That might be the most important thing. They might want you to seem stodgy. That's not always the case. We see the GEICO Gecko. That appeals to some people as well. So make sure that your brand voice is right. The second, again, I'd say it's drilling down to that positive or negative. And here's an example. This is a product called Orabrush.
It's a small company. When we did the case study, this was the second biggest channel on YouTube. And, what they did is, they really just tapped into peoples fear of that bad breath. And, they had a little fun with it so you can check out the Orabrush videos on YouTube. They've a great example. We also have another case study I could think of with a cement company. Which sounds very boring, but they've found what are the interesting things about cement and they really tapped into that with some videos, too.
So, find whatever that core aspect of the positive or negative is with your brand, but make sure it's right for your brand. Give you another negative example. This is a company called Commtouch and they're dealing with Internet security. There are a lot of pain points around that. And so, their core customer, they have to keep up with a constantly changing Internet security threats. So, what they did is they created quarterly trend reports. They work with their subject matter experts who knew this information anyway. Interviewed them, put out the free quarterly trend reports on Facebook, on Twitter, they even did some press with it. And they saw some impressive gains.
Lorenz: We have a question from Vincent. He's a CEO. He started from zero. He has nothing. And he wants to know what's the quickest to build up his mailing list, inexpensively, of course.
Burstein: I would challenge that Vincent, for one thing, how do you know the mailing list is right? And we're going to talk about finding the right medium in a second. So first, make sure that the mailing list is right for you. So if you found out that O.K., this is a customer that really wants to learn. I'm assuming when you are saying mailing list it's actually email. This is a customer that wants to be communicated with through email. And email is going to be effective for us. Then I would say, one, it starts with creating that content that has value. Right? Why does that content have value for that audience?
Then two, if you are starting from scratch, it's probably finding the right partners, finding the right people to interview. Find others in your industry that you can highlight that will then want to share that content with their audiences, and you can start organically growing through there. That's probably the most inexpensive. But make sure it has value. Once you start building that list a little more. You can do like we saw. Some of the A/B testing to decide, "O.K., what is really going to help with opening subject lines?" What is going to help with sharing? But it all starts with that core value in your content and then finding the right partners in your industry to work with to interview, to feature. And they're only going to want to work with you if you have that quality of content. But it gets to that bigger question. Where, I see all the time, we want to have a great Facebook page, or we want to have a great Twitter account.
There is always some other great social media platform coming out and you have to realize that you can’t focus on just getting on that new social media platform, you have to determine if it's right for you. So it starts with value. Communicating value, and then deciding what channels you're going to communicate it through. Because Brian Carroll, our colleague, he said it best, "Focus on being interested rather than being interesting."
Focus on being interested in your customers in your unique customers. Asking them how they want to be communicated with. Testing a few avenues, looking in forms or looking on different social media platforms and finding out where they are already interacting. And so, this gets pretty complex. I tweeted through #SherpaWebinar. There's a whole blog post that gets into this more deeply. But at a high level, as we talked about, you want to determine that value of your brand. And then, determine the value of your products. From there, you want to conduct some primary research into where your customers are.
You can talk to customer service. Talk to Sales. What they've heard from customers. Where customers are finding you. Talk to customers directly. Use surveys or get in some of these forums or social media platforms that you think they're using and actually look and see what else they're using. So once you've determined those ideal channels to communicate, then you want to create a draft content infrastructure because what we are ultimately looking for, while I keep talking about value, we want to convert those customers, that is our end goal.
So, in converting those customers, you have to look at how can you create an infrastructure that's going to drive them to ultimate conversion. Sometimes, on a landing page. So, you know for example, Facebook, Twitter, some of these channels are interested in. Then it guides them to that actual point of conversion. Never work in a vacuum. Because it's very easy to create that perfect and to think it's the right thing. Send it around in your organization. Send it to Sales. Send it to product development. Send it to IT.
Get them involved if they are going to create some of the landing pages. Get some other input, get some other buy-in. See what you may be overlooking. And with that, let’s get the final point we wanted to make. We want to inspire you to stop at nothing. So what we've talked about today is not easy. This is kind of my "Braveheart" speech. I want to motivate you and say if you are going to do true content marketing, you have to really focus on the value of a customer. It comes down to these three challenges you have to overcome, that you cannot let stop you. We don't have time to produce quality content. We hear that over and over.
That's where it comes to content reuse, for example. And that's where it comes to, like I said, get copied in lots of emails. Understand the content your company is already creating and how you can get it out there and how you can put it into different channels. This webinar is an example to remind you, the Jacksonville AMA asked us to come and speak about the content marketing we do. We spoke there. Then, the national AMA asked us to speak at a webinar. I'm putting that webinar through #SherpaWebinar. You can see that replay to see more info.
We spoke there. And then we turned this into, hopefully, focused on answering your questions. We've got a lot of questions from you. Thank you. So see how you can repurpose. We don't want to give our content away for free. This is sometimes an objection we see. People are investing a lot in their content. They think, "Oh, we are just giving it away for free." You always have to realize you're not. With paid media, you're paying a newspaper to get in front of customers. With content marketing, you are creating value, and that gives you permission to talk to those customers. And lastly, we don’t want to give away our secrets. We hear this all the time, too.
You'll get copied on those emails. You'll find some great things you want to share, and then it will be like, "No, no, no, it's too secret!" So, just want to leave you with one last image in your mind. Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, [Chelsea] Manning. I would say, if the most powerful organization in the world, the United States government, cannot keep secrets, your company likely can’t, either. So obviously, you want to be a little careful. Certain things are intellectual property. There are certain contracts you have with your customers.
But lean out. Lean out. To rip off Charles Sandburg in a way, lean towards sharing more because in the end, your customers are going to look at you as a valued place for content, as a valued place for knowledge about your industry. And at the end, they are going to turn to you and look to you for a solution if you can show them that value. If you can show them you provide lots of value through content, then they'll assume you can provide lots of value for your product or service. So unfortunately, we're all out of time today. Sorry we couldn't get to all of your questions, but thank you for joining in.
