Actionable Marketing Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

Content marketing is a highly competitive space. Every single day, nearly 60 million blog posts are published and five billion YouTube videos are watched. Are you always trying to edge out search results to be on top? Discover how to reframe your mindset when it comes to content marketing.

Today, we’re talking to Garrett Moon, CoSchedule CEO, about how to handle such competition when it comes to content marketing and his new book, 10X Marketing Formula: Your Blueprint for Creating Competition-Free Content That Stands Out and Gets Results.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Marketers are responsible for bringing in leads, sales, people - big tasks - to support core business metrics. Garrett’s book describes taking the formula, process, tips and tricks, and things that work and don’t for CoSchedule and making them available to anybody to use and implement in their business and marketing process.
• Gartner’s Hype Cycle: How new technology is adopted. When content marketing took shape a few years back, all of a sudden, everyone was adopting it and reworking their marketing teams, creating content, doing blogging, building email lists, and other tasks. Content marketing made a lot of promises to us.
• Now, Garrett believes we are entering the trough of disillusionment. We adopted content marketing, but what about those big promises that were made? What about the results? Why are you not getting the results you were promised?
• How do marketing teams provide business value? Content marketing needs to be reinvented.
• Garrett describes the "copy cat" epidemic in marketing. There is so much free content online where pieces of strategies, tactics, and other items are copied and pasted. However, it does not create an entire picture or blueprint.
• The goal is to create a framework from start to finish to find something unique to your business that only you can do and be successful with. Something that stands out and gets results.
• Creating Competition-Free Content: Not only is your business and products in competition, but your marketing is in competition with other marketing. Find a way to break past that barrier created by competitors.
• The book, Blue Ocean Strategy, refers to the Bloody Red Ocean, which is full of competition and where businesses are fighting each other to stand out - they’re at war with each other. However, the Blue Ocean is wide-open and uncontested. You're free to swim around and move about because you have successfully been able to differentiate yourself from the competition.
• To differentiate your content marketing, focus on your topics, how you create content, and how to connect that content and share it with your customers.
• 10X reference: look at what you are doing and ask if what you are doing will help your team multiply results, including increasing sales leads and the number of visitors to your Website.
• Marketing teams need to focus on 10x growth rather than increments of 10 percent improvements. Marketing teams are designed to produce results, not worry about risks.
• Agile Manifesto: focuses on how software development could be better. A powerful way to cause engineers to rethink and reframe what they’re doing.
• 10X Manifesto: focuses on how so much of marketing is about mindset when it comes to how we do and approach things.
• Results or Die: 10X marketers work in a results or die oriented business, not 10 percenters allowed. Many think of marketing as a process for things they do - marketing is the blog, social media channels, conference booth, etc. There’s all these deliverables that a marketing team creates and hands off to others, such as the sales and support teams. Marketers are not here to produce Web ads or build a Website. They’re here to help produce business results and help grow companies.
• 10X marketers understand that growth requires failure, strength is in progress, not perfection. Teams that embrace failure (fail fast) understand that it is not about failure but acknowledging imperfection.
• Marketing comes with assumptions: assume methods used to get the message out will work; assume there’s the right mix of email ads; assume messages are right; assume the timeline is correct. Ever realize how much you are guessing?
• The problem is in the marketing plan. It becomes a risk-removal tool that leads to pointing fingers and placing blame on others. Instead of a plan, start with a goal.
• To start down the 10X marketing path, list what work you did this week. Are these 10X or 10 percent activities? Do any of these activities have the ability or potential, in a short period of time, to multiply results by 10X?

Links:

• Garrett Moon
• 10X Marketing Formula
• Gartner Hype Cycle
• Blue Ocean Strategy
• Agile Manifesto
• SpaceX
• Elon Musk
• CoSchedule

Quotes by Garrett Moon:

• “Everyone was really excited about it (content marketing). There was a lot of energy. A lot of hype behind it, and a lot of big promises that content marketing made to all of us.”
• “If we’re going to really double down. If we’re really going to continue doing this, how do we really make it sing? How do we really make it pay for itself and become a true part of our results?”
• “For us (CoSchedule as a start-up), it was results or die.”
• “Once teams start looking at what they’re doing, how their processes are built, one thing they tend to find is that much of what they’re doing is based on mitigating risk vs. generating results.”

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

The success of your company depends on the marketing you do, how you choose to present the benefits of a product or service, and which audience to target. How you position a product or service can make or break your company. Stop right there. Forget everything you thought you knew about product positioning. Connecting your product or service with buyers is not a matter of following trends, selling harder, or trying to attract the widest customer base.

Today, my guest is April Dunford, who has launched more than a dozen products and shares some of the biggest mistakes that startups, marketers, and entrepreneurs make with product positioning. Also, she’s the author of Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It. April’s book describes her point of view on positioning and offers a step-by-step process to perfectly position your product or service.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Career Change: Fake it til you figure it out. How hard can it be?
• Do it right, and the company grows quickly, gets acquired; you get bored and do another startup
• Definition of Positioning: How to win at doing something that a well-defined market cares about
• Perfect marketing execution won’t save you from weak positioning; marketing execution and results are only as good as positioning that feeds into them
• Who should decide the positioning for your product? Everybody
• Siebel Story: Too small to buy out beyond a billion dollars
• Positioning Pitfalls: People don’t do positioning deliberately; and when they try to fix it, they don’t follow a process but wing it or write a “Positioning Statement”
• Positioning Statement Components:
  • Who’s your competitive alternatives?
  • What are the unique capabilities or features that your product has?
  • What’s the value that those features can enable for customers?
  • Who’s my target customer?
  • Is this a market that I’m going to win?
• Signs of weak positioning include:
  • How a customer reacts to your product/service
  • They compare you to a non-competitor; not in the right market
  • Customer knows what you do, but not the value or why they should care

Links:

• April Dunford
• Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It
• CoSchedule

Quotes by April Dunford:

• “Not only is positioning a thing I should figure out, it's potentially a super powerful thing.”
• “Two years after graduating from engineering, I'm running this great big marketing team. It's global. I’ve got this giant budget...even though I was completely unqualified for it.”
• “I focus on positioning, mainly because I think people do a really terrible job at positioning. There's not many people that know how to do it right.”
• “A shift in positioning can totally result in a shift in the product roadmap, a shift in your pricing, a shift in a way you sell, a shift in your channels.”
• "You see signs of weak positioning across your entire sales marketing funnel, but often the place where it’s most obvious is looking at how a customer reacts when they first encounter your product or your offering."

Content distribution is important, but most marketers struggle to understand how to distribute content effectively and efficiently. They create, publish, and push content out only to move onto the next piece before promoting and distributing the last one.  

Today’s guest is Sarah Colley, a content marketer. She shares how to get started with distributing content or improve your current content distribution practice. It's time to start making distribution a real part of content strategy from the beginning.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• What is content distribution and what works with content distribution right now?
• Repurposing: Seems to be everybody's standard definition of content distribution
• Sarah’s Definition: Creating the right content and giving it to the right people
• Content Distribution: If you don't have distribution, you don't get your content out
• Underinvestment: Creating tons of content, but not taking time to distribute it
• Follow Formula: Put article in a core distribution channel and places that share it
• Build Better Relationships: Get to know new people who can spread your content

Links:

• Sarah Colley on LinkedIn
• Write Destination Agency
• Help A Reporter (HARO)
• Fiverr
• HubSpot
• Google Analytics
• Bitly
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Sarah Colley:

“It's about building conversations around content. It looks a lot different. It's harder to implement, but when you do it right, it really works.”

“A lot of people focus on distribution in terms of traffic and getting seen by as many people as possible. I totally disagree.”

“You can do a lot of distribution for free, completely free, but it just comes down to time.”

“My best strategy is just developing relationships with people that have audiences and people that don't, people that may eventually have an audience.”

Today’s guest is Georgios Chasiotis, Managing Director of MINUTTIA, about what to focus on with SEO in 2022. He shares insight into what SEO tactics should be used or are overused, especially when it comes to software as a service (SaaS).

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Past, Present, and Future: SEO and SaaS marketing trends and tactics
• Where are things at right now? Not multi-dimensional or complex
• Alternative/Comparison Pages: Not aligned with website identity, but abused
• Organic Search: Find more ways to be creative and bold about things
• 2021: What separated top SEO performers from struggling SaaS companies?
• More/Better Experience: Google rewards websites that are trustworthy
• Vanity Metrics: Not only way to measure success based on user experience
• COVID Impact: Were there any behavior changes? Higher expectations
• Future SEO Tactics: Which will become less important or effective in 2022?
• Guest Blogging: Is it effective for reciprocal linking? Georgios advises against it
• Content and Links: What most brands and websites compete against

Links:

• Georgios Chasiotis on LinkedIn
• MINUTTIA
• CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Georgios Chasiotis:

“Unfortunately, what I see is pretty much all websites are doing what every other website is doing.”

“Try new things, experiment, and fail a lot of times in the process of discovering new ways of generating interest and demand for our websites.”

“SaaS companies have struggled when it comes to organic search.”

“Everyone can play the content and backlinks game. Not everyone can build a brand and not everyone can create a wow moment for their website visitors.”

When was the last time you saw an awesome online or social video ad? Did it impress you so much that you thought about buying the product or recommend it to someone? These days, a list of truly memorable video ads are few and far between.

Today’s guest is Matt Johnston with Guide Social, an agency that creates ads for all kinds of brands and products. Using and understanding the HERO System makes for memorable video ads that resonate.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Common Causes: Why most video ads fall flat or underperform
• HERO System: Content checklist for social video ads to gain traction
  • Hook
  • Empathy
  • Response
  • Over-deliver
• 4 Rs Process: Helps people work through video script to mirror customer journey
  • Relate
  • Rile
  • Reveal
  • Release
• Offer Opportunities: All businesses exist to solve problems
• Results: Warm leads and increased conversion rates create affinity/PR affect
• Social Video Ads: Brands that nailed it include Harmon Brothers, William Painter

Links:

• Guide Social
• Producing Empathy by Matt Johnston
• HERO System by Matt Johnston
• Matt Johnston on LinkedIn
• Hydroviv
• Shark Tank
• Harmon Brothers
• William Painter
• ClickFunnels by Russell Brunson
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Matt Johnston:

“The biggest mistake that people make is that they focus way too much on features and their product and things like that rather than focusing on the avatar and empathy and trying to connect with that person and tying it back to their pain.”

“The reason that someone will buy something from you or sign up to be a lead in your company is - it has everything to do with their own selfish needs and desires.”

“If you want to move them to act, you need to emotionally resonate with them.”

“Nobody cares about what you sell. They care about opportunities that are available to them to solve their problems.”

Who do you believe more? A marketer, your best friend, or complete stranger who bought your product or service and offers an honest opinion? Good or bad—what customers say matters.

Today’s guest is Denise Blasevick from The S3 Agency. Denise explains how to generate more positive reviews and how to handle negative reviews (or if you should deal with them at all).

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• 4- vs. 5-Star Reviews: Set expectations to humanize real customers’ opinions
• Consumer Behavior Impact: More and more people read and trust reviews
• No Comparison: Brand sites with positive reviews get others to buy from you
• Negative Reviews: Unrealistic for companies to get none; acceptable for some
• 1-Star Reviews: Determine whether it’s worth trying to mollify bad review
• Legitimate Review: Try to do something about your product/service if you can
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Contact biggest fans to review and recommend
• Don’t Nag or Beg: Mistakes made when marketers try to get more reviews
• Review Acquisition: Find natural points, cultivate journey, and reward randomly
• Authentic Incentives: Give people guidelines to personalize focus of reviews
• Metrics: Quantify and measure growth of impact with reviews of actual sales

Links:

• Denise Blasevick on LinkedIn
• Denise Blasevick on Twitter
• The S3 Agency
• Mike Michalowicz
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Denise Blasevick:

“Some people aren’t worth mollifying.”

“If they have a legitimate point, try to do something about it in terms of the way you deliver your product or service, if you can.”

“The volume has to be right. The kinds of reviews have to be right, and the stars have to be right.”

“Your sixth sense online is reviews.”

Market consultants sometimes struggle to consistently meet expectations. Maybe it’s because they offer too many services in too many areas of expertise. The lack of focus leads to less differentiation in the crowded market and inability to set premium prices.

Today’s guest is Max Traylor, author of the Agency Survival Guide. Max talks about how consultants and agencies can avoid pitfalls by productizing their services. Get paid on perceived value.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Productized Consulting Services: Powerful way to package and sell services
• Productization: Means doing things in steps for marketing and sales consulting
• Consultants and Agencies: Consistency is not their middle name
• Results: Quality of work, mental health, business impact, price premiums suffer
• Strategy Over Implementation Services: Charge whatever, as much as you want
• Sans Management: Make more money with less effort via strategic focus
• Why productized approach? People experience two different sides of a business
• Limiting Belief: Doing of things out of fear and hunger gets marketers paid
• Imposter Syndrome: Are you good enough to sell your knowledge and process?
• Get Started: Charge for proposals to accelerate experience charging for strategy
• Advice: You can sell everything to anyone if you try 5 times; no need to be good
• Ideal Client: Who are you talking to and will pay most for what you’re good at
• Fulfillment: Limit sacrifices, simplify business by selling less, contributing more

Links:

• Max Traylor - Productized Consulting Services
• Max Traylor’s Agency Survival Guide
• BEERS with Max Podcast and Blog
• HubSpot
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Max Traylor:

“You use the same things and you go through the same steps so that you can set and meet expectations every time.”

“If there’s no consistency in what you do, you don’t experience price premiums. You’re never known for that one thing.”

“We spend a lot of time developing self-worth and an attachment to the thing that we’re doing.”

“Fill your calendar with conversations with people that will pay you the most for the thing that you are uniquely good at.”

Freelance writers know that getting paid can be difficult, and managers of freelance writers know why processing those payments is difficult to get paid on time or at all. Some companies don’t have simple invoicing systems or solutions for fixing what’s wrong with their invoicing processes.

Today’s guest is Matt Saincome, Co-Founder and CEO of OutVoice and The Hard Times. OutVoice is a freelancer/writer invoicing platform that pays them with one click. Matt explains how to fix invoicing issues and get freelance writers paid on time.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Payment Problem: There has got to be a better way, and now there is one
• Publisher Problems: Tough business to make money, ad landscape has changed
• Revenue-based Solutions: People don’t update/upgrade their tools elsewhere
• Results: Businesses with inefficient tools, resources become rusted in place
• Clicks and Revenue: Relies on effectively paying and retaining freelance writers
• Mission: Waiting for check to pay rent? OutVoice positively impacts people’s lives
• Paid or not on purpose? Reason is ancient, not automated/tiered invoice systems

Links:

• OutVoice
• The Hard Times
• Matt Saincome’s Email
• Matt Saincome on Twitter
• Matt Saincome on LinkedIn
• Mailchimp
• Bill.com
• DoNotPay
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Matt Saincome:

“The problem is very clear. It’s the way that content creators are paid for freelance work is stone-age-level bullshit. It’s nonsense. It shouldn’t be done this way.”

“People don’t get around to upgrading their tools elsewhere, and there’s these really intense inefficiencies that fester in their businesses.”

“OutVoice uses automation, CMS integration, and a more purpose-built invoicing solution.”

“If you have better tools, you’re going to like your co-workers a little bit more. You’re going to like your job a little bit more.”

Does your business have a presence on YouTube? Maybe it does not show much value or potential for it. YouTube may not be the best fit for the products and services that your business sells. How can you create content on YouTube to not miss opportunities to reach potential customers? 

Today’s guest is Adrian Lurie from Dragonfruit Media, a video marketing agency that specializes in working with businesses and creators specifically on YouTube. He explains why your business should be on YouTube and how to drive measurable business growth from it. 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• YouTube Marketing: How to drive real, meaningful business growth
• Still skeptical? Video content marketing proof:
  • 50% of Internet users look for videos on product/service before visiting store
  • Video is 50 times more likely to get organic page ranks than plain text
  • Landing pages with embedded videos have 20-30% higher conversion rates
• YouTube Statistics:
  • Second most visited web site (#1 is Google)
  • Third most visited search engine
  • Second largest social media site (#1 is Facebook)
• Roadblocks: Slow down, establish trust to drive measurable growth, make impact
• 3 Content Categories: Discoverable, community focused, conversion focused
• Engagement/Impression Metrics: Profitable action on YouTube to make purchase
• Why be on YouTube? To align video content with business goals from the start
• 4-step audience-focused content process:
  • Take persona view
  • Develop value proposition
  • Create content categories
  • Come up with video concept

Links:

• Dragonfruit Media
• Dragonfruit Media Email
• TubeBuddy
• BidIQ
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Adrian Lurie:

“Video is clearly a centerpiece of all online content and is becoming only more and more of such.”

“The nature of video is highly emotional and it engages more sensory perception than any other media.”

“Search your competitors on YouTube. At least one of them probably has a successful YouTube channel. They’re doing it and you’re not. They’re beating you.”

“Anyone can grow on YouTube. You have a million content marketers or SEO experts who all have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and they are all saying the same exact thing.”

Marketers are creative people that tend to have a lot of ideas. So why is coming up with ideas when content creators, marketers, and problem solvers need them most is so difficult? There are a lot of reasons, but also a lot of simple solutions. 

Today’s guest is Melanie Deziel, Director of Content at Foundation Inc. and author of The Content Fuel Framework. Melanie breaks down flawed assumptions about creativity in content and marketing and shares practical tips and processes to replace those assumptions to think more creatively and create better content.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Content Fuel Framework: System helps come up with creative content ideas
• Ideation: Why is it difficult for marketers to resolve problems, lack processes
• Creativity Constraints: Systems, guardrails, processes enable genius moments
• Step 1: Stop thinking of content idea as single thing that is completely undefined
• Step 2: Bring focus and format (i.e., article, video) to life and more organized
• Outcomes: Content ideas become renewable resource, not limited supply

Links:

• Melanie Deziel on Twitter
• Melanie Deziel on LinkedIn
• Storyfuel
• Foundation Inc.
• The Content Fuel Framework
• The Organized Mind
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Melanie Deziel:

“The Content Fuel Framework is essentially a system that you can use to tap into your creativity when you need to come up with content ideas.”

“We are much more creative, much more productive, and much more efficient when we have some level of organization around the way we approach coming up with content ideas.”

“Stop thinking of content idea as a single thing that is completely undefined. It has parameters.”

“Creativity just seems so inherently unstructured that it’s like sacrilege to suggest that we put some limitations on it to help us get there.”