Robert Rose is the author of “Content Marketing Strategy,” October’s Bigeye Book Club selection. In this episode, Robert explains why coordinated communication and well-managed operations are key to establishing a successful content marketing strategy. We discuss the value of thinking like a media company, team structure, and outsourcing. Listeners receive a 25 percent discount on “Content Marketing Strategy” at KoganPage.com by using the promo code BIGEYE25 at checkout.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS: 

Robert Rose: When we go into businesses, the experiences that they have ideas to create or the creativity of the idea that they want to manage, those are all usually amazing. There’s no shortage of creative people in businesses. What the shortage is is the collaboration and communication to take all that amazing creativity and actually make something useful out of it.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello. I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Over the past decade, content marketing has undergone a transformative evolution, shifting from a peripheral tactic to a central strategy for businesses across industries. In the early 2010s, most digital content marketing was limited to blog posts and social media updates, primarily aimed at driving short-term engagement and boosting SEO. But brands began to recognize the value of delivering high-quality content across multiple platforms, and in 2014, The Lego Movie debuted, making it the first example of a feature-length major studio film that doubles as branded content marketing. Of course, this year, Barbie broke box office records and is currently the highest-grossing film of 2023 in America. Our Bigeye Book Club selection for October is “Content Marketing Strategy: Harness The Power Of Your Brand’s Voice.” Drawing from real-world examples from leading brands like Salesforce and Amazon, the book offers a practical guide to streamlining content marketing. It covers everything from assembling a team and goal setting to developing content and measuring the business outcomes. The book’s author is Robert Rose, a consultant, keynote speaker, and one of the world’s most recognized experts in content strategy and marketing. He’s the Chief strategy advisor for the Content Marketing Institute and the founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, a consulting firm that helps businesses design a pragmatic approach to creating, managing, and measuring enterprise content. Robert has advised hundreds of enterprises, including McDonald’s, SAP, NASA, Hilton, CVS Health, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and has co-written three best-selling books on the topic of content marketing. To discuss his new book, “Content Marketing Strategy,” I’m delighted that Robert is joining us today from Los Angeles, California. Robert, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS! 

Robert Rose: Oh, thank you so much for having me – what a delight.

Adrian Tennant: Well, Robert, let’s start with definitions. What is content marketing strategy? 

Robert Rose: Well, thank you for asking. I mean, what a great place to start. You know, definitions are always sort of… at heart, too formal, but we did indeed attempt to write one for the book. So it’s a marketing discipline – it is a discipline within the practice of marketing more broadly, but the key is that it’s a sum of all of the activities. So content marketing strategy is a discipline, a sum of all of the things that we do, the activities that enable a business to consistently communicate in a way that creates tangible value for target audiences. It’s basically what enables a brand to have not just a voice but actually something worth listening to.

Adrian Tennant: In 2011, you co-wrote one of the first books on content marketing entitled “Managing Content Marketing.” Well, it’s been 12 years since its publication. What prompted you to write “Content Marketing Strategy”? 

Robert Rose: Yeah, 2011 – I mean, feels forever ago, of course, and when Joe and I – Joe Pulizzi, my colleague and my good friend for so many years – when we wrote that book, we wanted to write then the owner’s manual, it were, of content marketing, the approach, the process of content marketing, because at that point we realized that there was something going on in the world of digital and how social media and search were truly changing things that started to really disrupt the entire industry of marketing. And over the last decade, what I’ve noticed is that, you know, in all the work that we’ve done for so many brands across the planet and so many different workshops and trainings and events that we’ve had, there’s been no shortage of books on content marketing. Let’s just be clear: There’s a lot of really good work, a lot of really good books that have been written, but most of them, if not all of them, have been written either about the first two words: so either “content” or “marketing.” So the books were really how to get good at content, how to write better, how to create better videos, how to create more engaging, more compelling content, how to create better customer experiences, or marketing, which was about measurement, of course, the process of marketing, how to interact with content and marketing and make it all work together in a broader strategy. But what hasn’t been written, really, since Joe and I attempted to do it so many years ago was a book on strategy, a book on the activities, the things that teams and individuals need to do in order to make content marketing actually work for their business, whether it’s a business of two or whether it’s a business of, you know, 10,000. And so that’s what I really wanted to do. I wanted to create sort of an orientation or a view on all of the different activities that I’ve observed over the last 10 years that businesses do when they’re successful and actually make content marketing work. So that was the real impetus for the book. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, you and I have something in common. We both started our careers working in TV. you started in marketing at Showtime Networks, and in your book, you write about marketing teams needing to think more like media companies but also reflect that this advice is often misinterpreted. Why is that, do you think?

Robert Rose: You know, content marketing was something that was going on and has been going on organically as well as by design. what we’ve noticed is that there are companies out there that sort of consciously do content marketing, you know, they read the books, they look at the thought leaders, they look at the best practices, they look at their competitors, and they actually design something purposely. And then there are, of course, companies that don’t, right? There are companies that just sort of fall into it. and if you ask them, they would say, “Oh, we just need to find better ways to engage audiences because it makes our business better.” So they’re unconsciously doing content marketing. Both of them are correct. Both of them are actually practicing the practice, but where companies fail, the biggest sort of pothole that companies fall into is when they look at content marketing, like “We’re going to market ourselves like a media company. In other words, we’re going to adopt some of the same processes that media companies, you know, whether it’s television or publishing, et cetera, are adopting as part of their marketing strategy.” And that’s the wrong way to look at it. What the goal really is is to operate as a media company. In other words, to treat content as the strategic asset and to engage with audiences and look at them as the customers that they are. It’s a different viewpoint for the entire business, not just optimizing one campaign with great content and marketing ourselves like a movie or marketing ourselves like a TV show, but rather how do we build in the infrastructure and the operation of a media company into our business? That’s where you see real success happening.

Adrian Tennant: Do you have an example of a brand that you think is getting it right in this regard?

Robert Rose: The brand that comes leaping to mind for me of one that gets it completely right in this space, and we talk a little bit about them in the book, is Cleveland Clinic, the hospital network here in the US, and based in, of course, Cleveland. But they’re not just a Cleveland hospital, they’re a complete medical network with hospitals and medical centers all over the country. And what they’ve done is they’ve actually built an entire media company, it’s almost a division of the entire business. At this point, Amanda Todorovic runs that program, you know, she started out with three people and the social media team, and they were literally just trying to get social media up and running. But now she’s just north of a hundred people, and that includes everything from data scientists to designers, to writers, to journalists, to subject matter experts, to a complete staff of people who operate their main content properties, which for them is their giant digital publication called Health Essentials, and then they also maintain an expertise site, called their Health Library, where you can go look up diseases and challenges and those sorts of things. They even have an ad sales team. I mean, they are monetizing both of those properties to the extent that they’re selling advertising. And so they are really truly a marketing department that operates like a media company, and, by the way, creates a marketing department that operates at a profit because they get revenue from the things that they do, but more importantly, they still do all the marketing for the hospital. They still do the signs in the hospital, and they update the website, and they send out emails, and they do all the things for marketing, but they also have this operation that actually creates value for the business.

Adrian Tennant: In “Content Marketing Strategy,” you write, and I quote, “Most businesses think about how they can change content to fit marketing’s purpose, instead of how they might change marketing to fit content’s purpose,” end quote. Robert, can you unpack this for us? 

Robert Rose: I can. You know, it gets right to what we were just talking about, right? Which is not acting like a media company but actually becoming a media company with your marketing. And, if there is a through line or a theme or an underlying foundational idea of the entire book, it is that what I have observed over the last 10 years is that marketing itself, you know, we used to say that, “Well, at some point content marketing just gets subsumed into the marketing strategy and then it just sort of becomes a thing within marketing.” And I actually now, perhaps because my ambitions are a little bigger, but also because of what we’ve just seen over the last, you know, five, seven, 10 years, Is that it’s actually the other way around. It’s actually it looks very much like marketing itself is getting fundamentally changed into what we would call content marketing. So what I observe out there is that the businesses that struggle with this are basically saying, “Well, how do we actually continually focus on the content to fit our new marketing, you know, strategy,” right? So we’re going to launch a blog, or we’re going to launch this thing or social media or whatever we’re going to do instead of saying, “Hey, how do we make content a strategic function in our business? How do we make ourselves the best content producer, the best media operation in our industry, and use that to change how the business operates?” And that’s basically changing marketing to fit a new content purpose. And that’s the real shift that we start to see for those companies that are actually succeeding with this. It’s making content a strategic function in the business, much like you would marketing or sales or legal or comms or really any other part of the business. Content is probably the thing that every single …  it’s the biggest expense. It’s the biggest activity that any business does. And it’s the one activity that we don’t have a real functional strategy around.

Adrian Tennant: Yes, I think you note in your introduction to the book that we don’t really see content marketing mentioned in the pages of Ad Age or Adweek.

Robert Rose: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. I mean, you do, of course, you see their whole Creativity, I think they call it, the section, is basically a Hollywood-style credits of the last ad campaign that, you know, such and such brand did, or other brand did. And it’s lovely, and it’s wonderful that they note that, but it’s basically, what’s the best TV advert that’s running online right now. And instead what you don’t see is how is a brand like Lego or Nike or Cleveland Clinic, or really any of the other ones, how are they using content across multi-channel strategies to create a media brand for themselves. And there are plenty of brands out there doing it, but it just doesn’t get highlighted very often because it feels so overwhelming and big and complicated, and it feels sort of like, “Well, isn’t that the entirety of marketing?” Yeah, it kind of is these days!

Adrian Tennant: In “Content Marketing Strategy,” you trace the origins of what we now know as the marketing mix and the four P’s – namely Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. And you know that today, most marketers are concerned primarily with that fourth P – Promotion. Robert, why is that, do you think? And what does it mean for how brands approach content marketing strategy?

Robert Rose: Yeah, so I am a marketing geek going way back. You know, I’ve been doing this for 30 years now, and I am a student of marketing. I am a fanboy of marketing. I really cut my teeth on some of the basics, going all the way back to the Forties and Fifties and really learning about the origins of the practice of the marketing idea. And, of course, the four P’s were a core component of that. And it used to be all the way up really until digital, I would argue, that marketing and especially the practice of marketing in most larger businesses really took on the role of product, price, place, and promotion. They really determined what the product features, benefits, and the things that would make up the product would be. And they figured out what the distribution strategy was going to be. And they figured out where the pricing should be for a particular product, whether that’s retail or wholesale or distributors-based or whatever it is. And promotion was really, at that point, the packaging and making sure that you were putting in the right television ad, radio ad, print ad strategy, the paid media strategy because that was kind of it. And that was the idea of promotion. What happened was, digital really fundamentally shifted all of that. Product, place, and price really started to get enveloped into other parts of the business. You know, the whole idea of product marketing versus product management really took a big disruptive shift. There’s a whole book that could be written on that, just alone. But really, what happened was, because of so many channels with digital, and because marketing teams became responsible for the entirety of the customer’s journey from awareness all the way through to loyalty, and upsell, and cross-sell, and back around again. Well, the idea of promotion became just huge. It just became a big job. And so that has really fundamentally become the job of marketing these days. And as a result of that, content becomes the center of the universe for those marketers, right? Because everything about promotion is about, “How do I communicate my value in a way that engages audiences to become buyers?”

Adrian Tennant: You provide readers with several practical frameworks in “Content Marketing Strategy,” so let’s explore one of them: the three pillars. Robert, can you explain what this is and how it describes the strategy of content marketing? 

Robert Rose: Yeah. Ultimately, the idea here is that, like the four P’s, I wanted a way to sort of categorize the broader activities that we have to account for when we think about a content marketing strategy. So very much like the four P’s categorize the activities of what marketers did for years and years, these three pillars, I think, are a way to start to think about how do we categorize the content marketing strategy that we need to create for our business. Again, if you’re a business of… Three people, or if you’re a business of, you know, 10,000 people. And so the first one is all about content as communication, right? It is coordination. It is the communication and how we do that. Ninety percent of content strategy has nothing to do with content; it is everything about how we communicate and collaborate together. So coordinated communication for how we organize ourselves: Team charters, the governance structures, workflow, all those kinds of things is a core pillar of that. Then all the way on the other side, the third pillar, if you will, would be the experiences themselves, right? The containers of content, whether that’s websites, emails, PDF files, videos, television, whatever those containers are, those experiences are something that we have to account for and manage much like we do products. These days, our website, our blog, and our email newsletter are every bit as important as the products we put into the marketplace. And so those experiences have to have a set of activities around them as well. And then bridging those two, the sort of pillar in the middle, if you will, that bridges the idea of coordinated communication and the experiences that we create is something I call operations, which is how do you create the new operations with technology, with the idea of the skill sets, the workflows, the things, the processes that move fluidly content through an organization so that it can be managed effectively? And so there are five core activities that make up the other categories of activities within those three pillars. But getting those three things right is really the core of any great content marketing strategy. And then, not surprisingly, maybe is that that’s how we organize the book. The book is organized across that idea so that each one of those things can be used as pressure points. So you can say, “Ah, we’re strong here. We’re weak here. We need to shore up this. We do this really great. So we don’t want to break that,” those kinds of things.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message. 

Robert Rose: Hello, everybody, I’m Robert Rose, the author of “Content Marketing Strategy: Harness the power of your brand’s voice.” I draw from real-world examples from leading brands like Salesforce and Amazon, and my new book offers a practical guide to streamlining your content marketing. I cover everything from assembling a team to goal-setting to content creation, measuring business outcomes: the whole gamut of content marketing strategy. And as an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, well, you get 25 percent off on a print or electronic version of “Content Marketing Strategy” by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25, that’s BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all products and pre-orders, and when you order directly from the publisher, shipping is always free – because they’re kind that way – to the US and the UK. So, to order your copy of “Content Marketing Strategy,” head on over to the publisher’s website – the wonderful folks at KoganPage.com. That’s Kogan – K O G A N – Page.com. Thank you so much.

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Robert Rose, the founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory and the author of October’s Bigeye Book Club selection, “Content Marketing Strategy: Harness the power of your brand’s voice.” At The Content Advisory, you and your team consult with companies and brands on optimizing their content marketing, helping them with everything from creative ideation to technology selection. What is the single biggest challenge clients typically face, would you say? 

Robert Rose: In most businesses, content is everybody’s job and nobody’s strategy. Content for most businesses simply just kind of happens, right? If you go ask anybody, any senior leader in any business, you go, “How do you get content done?” They go, “I don’t know. I give it to John or Mary, and then they just kind of get it done.” It’s just sort of a magic black box that ideas go into, and somehow, some way, content gets out the other side of it. And so it’s that coordinated process, it’s actually making it a strategic operation in the business that is the biggest challenge that we solve for companies. It’s not that people aren’t creative. When we go into businesses, the experiences that they have ideas to create or the creativity of the idea that they want to manage, those are all usually amazing. There’s no shortage of creative people in businesses. What the shortage is, is the collaboration and communication to take all that amazing creativity and actually make something useful out of it.

Adrian Tennant: In “Content Marketing Strategy,” you provide links to several resources, including an organizational self-assessment and a sample team purpose charter. Were these resources developed in response to the kinds of questions clients typically ask you during consulting engagements?

Robert Rose: Yes, some of them were. I’ve created a website called contentmarketingstrategy.com, so funny how that works out, and paid a lot of money for that URL, by the way, so I hope it’s useful! And basically, what I wanted to do was do two things. One was to do exactly what you just said, which was to take the questions that we were getting from clients and some of the deliverables that we would feed back to them, for how to organize their ideas in sort of a worksheet or a template or a sample that they could actually see it in context. and so that’s one thing. And then the second thing was, I am a big fan of writing it down. As I like to say, “There’s always magic in the telling.” And so, when you write things down, and you categorize ideas, you get them out of your head, and big jobs seem less overwhelming. And so thinking through some worksheets or simply just frameworks where we can start to draw on the wall helps us really get ourselves organized. So much of this is about working together, and so much of it is about organizing communication, which is just not visual by definition, so trying to put some level of visualization to that was really my main goal, which was to give something useful to help people organize their thoughts and creativity in a way that helped them figure this stuff out.

Adrian Tennant: I love the inclusion of the frameworks in the book. And in the fourth chapter of “Content Marketing Strategy,” you introduce readers to one that you’ve dubbed the Content Marketing Operating Model, also stating that a content marketing team’s job is not to be good at content, but to help the business be good at content. So could you explain a little bit about how that operating model supports this?

Robert Rose: Sure, you know, it gets back to what we were talking about earlier in the show, which is this idea that communication and coordinating our communication is the biggest challenge for most organizations. So many times when a company says, “Okay, we’re going to start doing content marketing, we’re going to start doing that, right? We’re going to get a team together, and they’re going to start doing that.” Well, what ends up happening is, is that the team gets together, and the business goes great. “You’re now our internal agency. You’re now our internal team to support the content production idea.” And they go, “Yay!” And everybody cheers, and everybody goes … And then all of a sudden, it just goes to hell in a handbasket. Because the entire business starts throwing requests in, all of their requests are considered valid. The content team has an incredibly hard time keeping up so much so that they can’t even do their own ideas that they want, you know, that then the CEO is saying, “Well, why don’t we have a blog yet?” And the team is saying, “Well, because we’re too busy creating sales enablement assets for the sales team. And the demand generation team is demanding all these other kinds of things from us. And we can’t keep up with it.” That’s madness. And so we said the key here is getting a purpose and an operational charter for the team from the very beginning so that you understand how that team is going to be measured and managed to what their expectations of production will be so that we ensure that we have the right skill sets and the right people doing the job. And so that we don’t neglect another process somewhere else. And so I created this four-quadrant idea to say, okay, given two axes, right? One is, are you internally focused or externally focused? In other words, are you creating content that will be shopped internally for their own nefarious purposes, like sales enablement or demand generation? And they’ll feed that content out. Or are you externally focused and where you’re focused on building an audience through a blog or a magazine or an email newsletter or a podcast or something like that, where you’re building content directly for audiences? And then the other axis, which is at the bottom, is are you providing one single service, like literally just content creation and production and design, or are you offering multiple services to the business? Everything from SEO to persona development to translation and localization, you know, what parts of the content process are you responsible for? And then plotting yourself against those two axes. Are you all the way in the lower left-hand corner? Great. It’s not wrong to be an internal agency, but we just need to acknowledge it as a business and manage the requests accordingly. But if we start cross-functioning, right? In other words, if we start demanding that yes, you’re both an internal agency and you’re responsible for the blog, but we haven’t given you the resources, the budgets, or the measurement strategy to be able to deal with, well, you’re just destined for failure. So the self-assessment is really to say, where are you today? Again, whether you’re a team of one or a team of 40, where are you today? And where do you want to evolve to tomorrow? And then draw a line. And that starts to give you a visualization, if you will, of what kind of skills you need to develop, what kind of measurement strategies you need to develop, and what kind of operational workflows need to be developed in order to maintain that scalability.

Adrian Tennant: Now, if a brand doesn’t have all the resources it needs to execute its content marketing strategy in-house, in what kinds of ways do you see external agency partners being able to contribute most effectively?

Robert Rose: That’s a great question. And you know, one of the benefits of doing the self-assessment is to identify where external help may be really useful. In other words, if we discover that our team is really skilled at creating content and supplying it to the internal teams, however, what we’re not good at is SEO, and what we’re not good at is persona development, and yet that is still an expectation of our output, well then, okay, that’s a place where we could go get external help. Or, we could say, and this is more common than you might think, “We’re really good at managing the workflow, we’re really good at working the process, we’re really good at making sure that all the cats are herded, but what we’re not good is very creative content creation, we’re just not terribly good writers, we’re not terribly good content designers, etc. And so, we go for external help on that.” To the extent possible, my recommendation is always in-source strategy and outsource execution where you need to because in-sourcing strategy … nobody’s ever going to care about this or have the subject matter expertise theoretically that you do for your particular business. But what you can successfully, or more successfully, I would say, outsource is the execution of some of those things. Design, the words, the persona development, the research, you know, some of the executional pieces of it. And that, I think, is, a great place and sort of a way to pull the levers of which decisions can be outsourced versus not.

Adrian Tennant: Chapter 5 of “Content Marketing Strategy” discusses one of my favorite topics: Audiences. Your background in entertainment marketing is evident here, so could you briefly explain the key difference between audiences and customers and why it matters?

Robert Rose: Yeah. You’ve hit upon, probably just as you were just mentioning, one of my favorite topics and chapters of the book, which is that this gets to the idea that we talked about at the beginning where we need to operate as a media company, not just act like one. And the key is that today, modern marketing, modern business, all audiences are customers, but not all customers buy our classic products and services. And what I mean by that is that engaging audiences and building an audience asset, people who want to hear from us and subscribe to our ideas, and engage with our brand, may never actually purchase our product. They may only ever recommend it. And the interesting thing there is that one of my favorite examples of this is Red Bull. So Red Bull, at one point, did the research, and what they discovered was is that a great amount of their business came from people who either dislike the drink or have never tried the drink, but yet will still recommend it to their friends to drink, because they’ve gotten value out of the content. That’s the power of having an engaged audience these days – is that people will recommend your brand or your product before they’ve tried it or if they’ve tried it and didn’t like it. And so that has all kinds of implications when it comes to things like B2B marketing or B2C marketing, where creating an engaged audience can be an asset to your business – from referrals to the data that you can get the insight about – that adds wealth to your business – to even direct revenue, think about the Cleveland Clinic for a moment, you know, – all of those kinds of things can add wealth to a business. But they aren’t traditionally customers of our classic products and services. And of course, it’s just a redefinition of how we define customers. And so, Peter Drucker, 60 years ago, said the entire purpose of a business is to create a customer. I agree with that wholeheartedly. My only quibble, I guess, these days is we just have to redefine what “customer” really is. And media companies understand that. Media companies really understand what a customer is. It’s an audience member. And I think about examples like Amazon, for example. Amazon Streaming Services, Amazon Prime Video, is the most unprofitable business you could think of. I mean, if you looked at it as a standalone business, you would go, “Put that thing out of its misery!” Because it’s awful. They spend billions of dollars on content and make low billions of dollars in return from their subscription fees. But of course, the purpose isn’t that; it’s to engage their audience, who have a much higher preponderance of becoming Amazon Prime members who spend twice as much on products and services at Amazon.com. Therefore, it is totally a marketing loss leader for them, Amazon Prime content, to get Prime members who will ultimately spend twice as much, and that is just a classic view of what a new customer looks like. It’s an audience.

Adrian Tennant: We can’t talk about content marketing strategy without acknowledging the role that artificial intelligence is already playing in generating content, including copy, imagery, video assets, and, yes, even music. So Robert, did you use AI to assist you in the process of planning and writing “Content Marketing Strategy” and how do you think AI should be used in content creation?

Robert Rose: I love that question. The answer is, for the book, no – with some very small exceptions. So, I actually use AI quite a bit in my work, in my writing. My philosophy on it is that generative AI, as it stands today, as we sit here in 2023, is best at what I call constructed content, not created content. In other words, constructed content is that stuff that we have to construct: the abstract for the white paper, the transcript of the podcast, the meeting notes, the abstract of our webinar – that’s constructed content, the stuff that we just have to create that’s sort of like making the donuts. You just have to do it every day. Created content is that content which is loved before we even finished it, right? It is our passion, what we want to write about, our thought leadership, our original ideas, our creativity – that. So, I think AI is great at the former and not good at all. And quite frankly, I don’t want it to be good at all at the latter because I want to do that. That’s what I’d love to do. So, for the book, as an example of that, I did use AI to give me, I had come up with a title and a subtitle for the book. The title was sort of like a foregone conclusion. That was going to be the title of the book because I wanted it very on the nose, and I wanted it very straightforward. And I really wanted that URL. And the subtitle, though, “Harnessing the power of your brand’s voice” was up for grabs. And so I had written maybe five or six different subtitles of that. And I used AI to say, “Look at these and see if you can come up with something better.” And actually, the AI came up with the word “harness,” and I thought, “That’s a better word!” I had “capture,” I had “get your arms around,” those sorts of things, those sorts of words. And AI came up with the word “harness,” and I went, “That’s a better word.” So, I ended up using the suggestion of AI for the subtitle of the book, but that’s the only thing that AI had a role in playing for the book. But that’s overall my approach to AI is that there is value to be gotten there. creating content is the least interesting thing that generative AI does. 

Adrian Tennant: Great! Robert, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about you, The Content Advisory or your new book, “Content Marketing Strategy,” what are the best ways to do so?

Robert Rose: So our little website for consulting and for sort of our daily, weekly thinking, basically our blog, is contentadvisory.net, which, of course, is the Dad Jeans of domains. And so yeah, contentadvisory.net – you can get all of our content there. There’s the brand new contentmarketingstrategy.com, the book website, as well as a place to get coaching and other assets. We’re going to do some events there, we’re going to do some online classes, we’ve got some big plans for that coming up for the New Year. And, also I’d love to connect with everybody on social media. I’m a big user of LinkedIn, so would be happy to, of course, connect with everybody on LinkedIn. And the book is available through your favorite online bookstore and available in some printed formats in your favorite offline bookstore.

Adrian Tennant: And if you’d like a copy of “Content Marketing Strategy,” you can save 25 percent when you order directly from the publisher, Kogan Page. Just use the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25 at the checkout. And we’ll also include a link in the transcript for this episode. Robert, thank you very much for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS!.

Robert Rose: Oh, thank you so much for having me. This has been fun.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Robert Rose, the author of October’s Bigeye Book Club Selection, “Content Marketing Strategy.” As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation, along with links to the resources we discussed, on the Bigeye website at Bigeyeagency.com.  – just select ‘podcast’ from the menu. Thanks again for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.