​Loz James:                             Thanks for coming on, Sarah.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Well, thanks for having me. I'm really delighted to be here today.

Loz James:                             Now, before we dig down into the subject of today's show, which is really looking at does content marketing actually work? We'd love to hear your backstory, please.

Sarah Mitchell:                   My background is not in marketing funnily enough. I started my education was in computer science, and I spent just about 20 years in software and software development, really, this will date me, but by the time the Y2K bug rolled around, I was just so over software. I left the industry and I started freelancing, freelance writing. I had done a lot of writing especially around that Y2K bug, and thought that I would be writing case studies and white papers for technology companies. That was about the time people started blogging, and people started blogging commercially.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I started a business called Global Copywriting. That just took off on the back of content and social media, much to my surprise and delight. Found out that there was a need for good writing and good content in all kinds of businesses. Pretty early on in the history of the Content Marketing Institute, I started working with them when they were just really a blog and they were looking for bloggers. If anybody can imagine that the Content Marketing Institute would have to struggle to find content providers.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I became their Australian editor and about four years ago, Global Copywriting rolled into a video production company that was here in Perth, Western Australia called Lush Digital Media. We've rebranded, we're now Lush - The Content Agency. I brought that whole kind of strategy and editorial part of the mix into the company. We're out here in Perth as some people would say, at the end of the earth. But also in the beautiful sunshine and beautiful blue skies and sees, and working on strategy all the time.

Loz James:                             Let's talk content marketing. Obviously, you wear many hats, you're very accomplished, you're at the top of the tree as it were in terms of what you're doing with content marketing at Lush and with the Content Marketing Institute. But there's a problem, there's a bit of an elephant in the room as it were in the content marketing industry. I've been running this blog for four years at Content Champion and in this podcast, and I have noticed over the last year, 18 months, there's been a bit of a backlash against content marketing because it's just simply not working for many businesses.

Loz James:                             Now, is this in your opinion because most firms aren't doing it properly and neither of the agencies they hire? What is at the root of that inability to get it right?

Sarah Mitchell:                   I think it's so interesting to me this question because Australia, I've always felt like is about three years behind the US and the UK or Europe in general on the adoption of content marketing. It's almost like here, we can see what's coming down the pike. Because we weren't early adopters, we also got the benefit of learning what worked and what didn't, I think we started to see, it was probably three years ago, this idea that almost mantra the content marketing doesn't work.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I honestly believe it's because people haven't kept the business objective in mind, the business goal in mind that they were trying to meet. They start out just really go great guns, producing a lot of content, very enthusiastic, and it fails over time if you don't have a clear strategy, good reasons about why you're doing it in the first place, buy-in from your management team, budget to keep it going. It's such a complex thing, content marketing, and I think people enter into a content marketing initiative with the idea that it's as simple as writing a blog post every week.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I think that's where it goes wrong is that there's so many moving pieces, there's so many things that you have to consider. If you haven't documented a strategy, if you aren't able to execute against that, and if you aren't able to keep reporting back into the business about your success, it doesn't work.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Now, the other thing that I think happens is that as marketers, we're looking for quick wins or silver bullets all the time. I think content marketing requires a real engineering mindset. In that something that you start today, you may not realise the result for 12 months or 18 months. I think that's where my technology background has really helped me a lot where we would work on projects that we knew were going to take four years, and you plot that out. But I don't think marketers are particularly made that way. We want to run a campaign and we want to see results and measure results, and get on to the next thing.

Sarah Mitchell:                   So, I think that's part of it, too, is it's not just that we haven't thought it through and created a strategy and stuck to business goals, but it's we also don't have the engineering mentality we need to keep at it and keep working at it over a long period of time.

Loz James:                             I guess you touched on it there. A lot of agencies are doing great things, especially here in the UK. I know of some fantastic agencies doing great content marketing work, but I guess the inability to plan a proper strategy for the content marketing for clients extends into these agencies as well. They may be just using some content creation or some blogging as the service they provide without any strategy behind it. And that's a mistake as well.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Yeah. I think often ... I would hazard I guess that, it might be as high as 85% or 90% of the people that we talk to, that I talk to. And it's not just in Perth or in Australia, I've got clients around the world, they always ask for a tactic. They'll come in and they'll say, "We want to do content marketing." When you ask them what that means, they're thinking about a video or they're thinking about a blog, or they want to start a podcast.

There's still a lot of education to be done around what is a strategy. In content marketing, there's two pieces to that, there's two words in that. There's the content, the production and what a lot of people focus on, and that is the fun part. But there's also the marketing of that. So how are you going to distribute it? How are you going to amplify it? How are you going to continue to produce content consistently with a high frequency or the same frequency for an extended period of time?

Sarah Mitchell:                   I think that's what people don't think about it. I know agencies and we are an agency are so pressured for quick turnarounds and results and to sign up more clients, and to get more people on retainer, that that's their focus. When you work in strategy, I think you always have to push back on that and really know that unless you get the strategy right, it doesn't matter how much content you produce, you're not going to have that conversion that the business is looking for. So, you're not going to get the people coming through the front door. You're not going to get the phone to ring, or you're not going to get people come to your event or sign up for your newsletter. Whatever that conversion is, that's not going to happen. It requires an entirely different mindset I think, than marketers have traditionally had.

Loz James:                             It's interesting because Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute when he came on the show, was sort of saying exactly that. You shouldn't look at content marketing as a campaign, but something you do for the duration of your business. Once you've committed to it, it's just something you do for the lifetime of that business.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Yeah. And I think commitment is the big word. Look, it's hard to get excited about ... It's like exercise. To convince people that if you go in and say, "Look, we're going to start a blog, and we're going to post once a week, and we're going to post on a Tuesday at nine O'clock because that's when people will expect to find us. We're going to do that every Tuesday, day in day out, come vacation, come holiday, come winter and the dark mornings or the light late nights of summer when you want to be doing something else. We are going to be out there posting, posting, posting, and we're going to do it or the next three years."

Sarah Mitchell:                   If you sold it like that nobody would get excited about it. But that's is really what it takes. I think that marketers that stick with it, that really have ... Part of it is a lot of marketers don't have the support of their company to work on a project that long before they start to see results. I'm talking six months, or nine months, or a year, the ones that do stick with it, they do start to see results, but it's slow. It's like a slow burn method.

Sarah Mitchell:                   But once you start to see those results, and once the stuff starts to work, that's when it gets exciting, and that's when you can get really energised. When you reflect back on where you started, especially if you're starting from scratch with no audience. And you can build something where you're getting people that are expecting your content, that are reacting to your content, that are taking action based on your content, they're having conversations about your content, that's really exciting. But it takes a long time to build that. I think that we don't have the mindset or we don't have the support from our organisations to keep at it, or people just don't see the value in building that long term asset.

Sarah Mitchell:                   The key to it is really, is that what we are doing is building assets. We're building business assets. If you treat it that way, I think it's easier to keep going in those dark days of not a lot of activity when you just have to keep going and just keep pushing through.

Loz James:                             You touched upon it there as well. In terms of marking that success as we go along six, nine, 12, 18 months in. Measuring the success of your content marketing efforts is another contentious issue because it is difficult to say, okay, you might not be seeing any huge gains that you'd see from something like paid advertising or whatever, or a different strategy completely. You might not see anything for 12 months. That's obviously not a way to sell it. But it's a very difficult subject to broach with clients and people doing their own internal content marketing. How exactly we measure that for success. So you can be encouraged that you're meeting milestones. That the stuff is actually working as you go along and build into it.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Yeah. I think what's really important, again, is if you start with your business goals in mind, and you determine what kind of marketing objectives you're going to create to meet those goals, then I think you really do need to, need to focus on, keep the focus really narrow. So, what is the main goal? Is it brand awareness? Is it lead generation? These are common ones that people come to us with that they want to do.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Is it direct sales? Is it being recognised in the community as a certain kind of service provider? Whatever that goal is, you then need to define how you're going to measure success. I think that's where a lot of marketers fall down. Even if they have the documented strategy and they have their business goals, and they have their marketing objectives, and they have their the main focus that they're going to perform. How do you prove that? What is the conversion?

Sarah Mitchell:                   I always say, if you can't measure it, you can't report. If you don't report, it is really hard to get more budget, or more buy-in from your executive team. Because make no mistake, I think in the early days, there was this feeling that content marketing was free. You could go to market without spending any money. In the early days, things like Facebook and Twitter were all completely free. But you still have to invest time and resources into developing blog post or a video or a podcast or whatever it is.

Sarah Mitchell:                   If you can't measure the success of what you're producing, you're never going to be able to get the long term investment that you need to keep it going. I think any responsible marketer, at least any marketer that I know, does have a responsibility to their executive team, or to their management to show how the money is being spent and the results that they're getting.

Loz James:                             As you say, it can be done. It's quite lapsed to just assume that perhaps we just compare it to the traffic that we had before. Let's just compare what we had on the blog to what we've got now. There are ways of, as you say, setting up, structuring your measurement, your analytics with various different tools for each section, each stage of that buyers journey. So that you can see what's converting along from different parts of content.

Loz James:                             When you get that right, it's a great thing. When you strategically set out a goal that you want to achieve, and you produce that content mapped to your customers buying journey, and then a fully qualified lead comes out the other end and converts into a customer, that makes it all worthwhile. When you can trace that back and see those steps through analytics and other measurement tools.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Yeah, and I think that's also the real challenge is that I have yet to write a blog post or see a blog post written that can close business. It's usually a part of a long chain of events. It's sort of like online retail, you can't really tell exactly where that purchase should be logged because maybe somebody went in and tried on a pair of shoes in the shop. Then they went online, and they started looking around, and then they compared four or five different websites. Then they came to your site and they bought it immediately.

Sarah Mitchell:                   So, who gets the credit for the sale? I think content falls into that. I think what marketers can do is to put very clear conversion metrics in their strategy so that when they do report ... You just gave that great example of the whole path to purchase. But a conversion could be as simple as getting somebody to sign up to an email newsletter, or it could be getting them to phone your company, or it could be getting them to go to a specific page. I think that you need to be able to prove in really small ways that your content is working to move people along a path to purchase.

Sarah Mitchell:                   We know the great thing about content, it's wonderful for lead generation. People may make a decision to work with your company, or achieve purchase from your company because of your content long before the transaction actually happens. So, what other signals do you have that that content is being affected? It could be maybe the length of time that they're staying on the page, it could be the number of emails that they open that you have, of course, it could be click through rates, and it could be stuff would work if you had calls to action, or different calls to action, or more calls to action.

Sarah Mitchell:                   So, there's so many ... It's complicated, there's so many ways that it can go wrong. I think that's why it's important to be really, really precise in defining what that conversion is. I also think you have to educate your management team that a conversion doesn't necessarily mean a sale.

Sarah Mitchell:                   If you look at the definition of content marketing from the Content Marketing Institute, and I think they've got the best one, it's really designed to move people to take some sort of profitable customer action. Well, profitable customer actually could be viewing a webinar because you know that if they view the webinar, they're going to be more likely to purchase in the future. It could be that they sign up to your email newsletter, it could be that they come to a free event. It's really important that you define very explicitly what you expect to happen for people that consume your content.

Loz James:                             Those incremental touch points, those attribution points along that journey. You can't know as you say what those look like unless you have a strategy that's aligned to your business goals. Otherwise, it's all kind of guesswork.

Recording:                             You're listening to the Content Champion Podcast. Showcasing the training and tools you need to become a content marketing champion in your online business. We're back with Sarah Mitchell.

Loz James:                             Okay. So we know that content marketing works with a sound strategy, the correct allocation of resources, as we've discussed, and we know that it can be measured. But it's all very well, I guess us saying this, but further to that, could you give some examples of companies who are killing it with content marketing doing this really well at the moment?

Sarah Mitchell:                   I love this question, and I see it all the time. People always want examples of great strategies or great content marketing. I always say, well, it's really hard to know if you don't know what their goals were in the first place. I can look at content that I like or things that are obviously content marketing, but is it a good example, or are they killing it? I don't know if I don't know what the strategy is.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I'm going to share two examples that I know are killing it because they're organisations that I've worked with. One's a B2B in one is a B2C. I tell you, I love working in the B2B space, because I think people feel like it's too hard or content marketing might not work. And businesses don't consume content, which is just ridiculous, because we know businesses of all kinds are staffed by people who make the decisions.

Sarah Mitchell:                   So, one of my favourite ones is a company called Acquire Technology Solutions. They are a company, they're based here in Perth, but it's an international company. They develop databases for geologists to use in the mining industry. Now, when I first started working with them, their website was pretty much like a brochure. It was written largely by the people that were developing their software who were technology people, and we're also geologists. It sounded like just about everything else that was in that space. There was no way to really differentiate them from anybody else.

Sarah Mitchell:                   It was really, you know, technical and bogged down in detail. About the last five years, they've implemented content marketing strategy. They've worked on their strategy all the time, and they've developed a brand newsroom, a way to go to market where they've just have done such great work with articles and blogs and case studies and white papers. They've added a podcast, they do a lot of events. They always did events before. With a strategy, it was able to stitch all these things together and get everything working towards one common goal with key messaging that everybody in the organisation agreed on.

Sarah Mitchell:                   They also invested ... I think this is really important, they invested money in design. They've gone from looking like a really ... They've always been a brainy company, a really hard to understand, highly technical company, to now, a company that helps people solve business problems. And it's just fantastic.

Sarah Mitchell:                   It has helped them in many ways, not just by creating leads for their sales department to qualify and go out and sell to, but it's also been an opportunity for people for them to approach people in their industry; thought leaders, service providers, to participate in their content marketing programme. The podcast, they take to events with them, and they have been really pleasantly surprised by people that they have never been able to even have a meeting with that, "Would you come on our podcast and speak to us about what you're doing at your company." People have really embraced it.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I consider that somebody that's really killing it. They've really turned their whole marketing around not only in the results that they're getting, but also their image in the industry. To me, that's super success story. The reason I like that is because whoever thinks about databases for geologist in the mining industry? It's not very sexy. They don't have a Coca Cola budget either. They've got a very modest budget. I think that's really interesting too, when small and medium sized businesses can take a modest budget and get real results using content marketing.

Sarah Mitchell:                   In that case, if you look at a modest budget, content marketing goes so much further than if you had that money to spend on advertising or traditional media. I love their story. Another one I like is Mining People. They are from Australia that look at getting people into the mining industry. It's primarily a jobs board, it's a jobs placement. But they have gone with a really strong content marketing approach, and they've just taken off like nuts.

Sarah Mitchell:                   They write all kinds of articles about lifestyle. They've got the CEO of their company has started a blog, and he comments mostly on executive management issues. While it's a B2C company, they have other businesses that they're communicating with. So, he's putting out commentary all the time about state of the industry. They developed a really cool little thing where they run a poll every week on their website. As their audience has grown, and they've got more subscribers, and they've got more visitors to their website, they've got more people contributing to those polls.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Well, those polls which are pretty easy to set up, have started to become a source of data for not just them, but other mining publications and mining companies in the area. Quite often it's about things like, what's the best fly-in, fly-out shift or what's the ideal length of a shift that you'd like to work. But it could also be things about, who's your favourite footy team, or who do you think is going to win the AFL Grand Final?

Sarah Mitchell:                   So, they have a lot of fun with it. But it's also beginning to provide them incredible insight into the industry. That's a great one. Because, again, they don't have a big marketing team, they have modest budgets. But they really took that engineering mindset. They started with a strategy. They started with one thing with their blog. Once that got up and going, they added more things, they've added more channels, they've got Instagram, they do Facebook, they've got the executive blog now, and they've got the polls.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I just think it's a really great success story. They are now always asking what can we do next? What's the next thing? What should we focus on? That to me is a company that's really killing it.

Loz James:                             We mentioned it at the top of the show, the word commitment seems to me there's total 100% commitment there for the top down based on a strategy and it's working. We can see that content marketing works, we could see it's measurable, we've seen your example showing that it works there. Let's now bust some myths surrounding the discipline that is holding a lot of organisations back. These points come from an excellent post on your Lush blog entitled The Great Content Marketing Swindle.

Loz James:                             There's 25 points there that act as a rapid fire, defensive content marketing. Let's go through them all, and really find out where we're going wrong.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I'm so glad you brought this up, because I was on a tear of the day that I wrote this. I thought I'd talk to some people that I felt like had been ripped off by their agency. I thought, I bet there's 10 different ways that I could come up with a list. I started writing this list and when I hit 20, I thought, oh my goodness, and I wasn't even done. So, thanks for the opportunity for me to get to voice my rant.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Number one, is you have to start with a documented strategy to be effective. If you're buying into content marketing without taking the time to develop a strategy, you're being swindled. I understand the need to go straight, or the desire to go straight to tactics, but just hold your horses and get that sorted out. That's the only one that I've gotten bold. That is start with a documented strategy.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Number two, if you're not producing original content, and I don't consider advertising original content, then you're being swindled. Because Google says, if you want to rank, you've got to have high quality, original content. Number three, if you're engaging in content marketing without a goal to build your own subscriber list on your own terms for use when and where you choose, you're being swindled. This goes back to, you build on rented land, when your networks are all on Facebook, or LinkedIn or Twitter or some platform that you don't own. You need to get your own subscribers.

Sarah Mitchell:                   If your content marketing is focused on social media with no plan to convert or move your audience off the channel, you're being swindled. Again, building on rented land. Why would you do that? If your content strategy is not focused on building long term assets, you've been swindled. If you're not building a content brand that provides additional value and stands on its own, you're being swindled. Because why bother with throwaway content? Let's look at the long term future and see what we can put out there.

Sarah Mitchell:                   If your strategy is not considered distribution methods like social media and email, you're being swindled. That's the whole, what Mike Stelzer calls the post in hope. Just because you ride it, they will not come. If your content strategy consists of social networking with no original content attached to it, you're being swindled. If your content marketing is set up to run like a campaign, you're being swindled. If your content is full of industry jargon, with no consideration for the search habits of your audience, you're being swindled.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I see this over and over. My favourite example is the client I was working with that was an aged care facility, but I had to break it to them that the majority of people and I'm talking 92% that we're looking for their services we're typing nursing home into Google. You can call your company whatever you want, but if the people you're trying to reach can't find you, what's the point?

Loz James:                             Okay, next five, continue the rant.

Sarah Mitchell:                   If you have no amplification strategy for your content, you're being swindled. If your content marketing strategy consists of AdWords, Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads, you're being swindled. You need to figure out a way to get some organic reach. If your only goal is to get more traffic to your website, but there's no way for them to take positive action when they get there. You're being swindled. What's website traffic worth it, if they're not going to do anything when they get there.

Sarah Mitchell:                   If your content has no call to action, or a clear indication what the reader should do next, you're being swindled. If your content is of poor quality, has no substance, or doesn't support your brand, you're being swindled.

Loz James:                             Great stuff. Carry on.

Sarah Mitchell:                   If your content marketing strategy doesn't support your business objectives, you're being swindled. If your content is plagiarised, copied or scraped, you're being swindled. If your content marketing is limited to advertising, you're being swindled. If your content marketing is limited to PR, public relations, you're being swindled. If your content marketing is limited to search engine optimization, you're being swindled.

Loz James:                             Okay, homestretch. The last five.

Sarah Mitchell:                   If you have disparate content pieces that are not attached to a strategy or integrated with any other content, you're being swindled. Just lots of content is not going to help you. If your content is not optimised properly with the right keywords, phrases, and meta descriptions to attract your audience, you're being swindled. If your content is not focused on your audience, or of interest to your audience, you're being swindled. If your content is not published on a consistent basis, or with the same frequency, you're being swindled. And if there's no plan on how to measure your effectiveness, you're being swindled.

Loz James:                             That's brilliant. That's it folks. Everyone listening to this podcast, that's why I wanted you to come on the show, because when I read that, I just thought, well, that's it, isn't it? It's almost a flip around. It's not how does content marketing work? How do we do it? It's like, if you're not doing these things, then it's never going to work.

Sarah Mitchell:                   This list is borne out of me seeing companies that are saying content marketing doesn't work. And then when you look at what they've done, it's easy to see the problem. There are a lot of companies out there that are saying they're providing content marketing services, and they're not. They're providing advertising services or providing PR services, or they're providing SEO services.

Because there seems to be this thing four or five years ago, where all of a sudden, every company that worked in the marketing or advertising space, became a content marketing company, but they hadn't actually changed their service or the product they were providing. They just re labelled it for the word of the day. Though, I keep thinking they're probably a few more things I could add, because every time they change the Google algorithm, it seems like there's more ways that you can get caught out.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I look at this list when I'm doing strategies, and make sure that ... I use it almost like a checklist. Have we considered all these things as we go through?

Loz James:                             It's interesting because I started as a journalist 20 years ago now in BBC local radio, and then I moved sideways into copywriting. That was mainly print back then. And then through into online, digital work. Everything that comes from that, the central tenets haven't changed. It all comes back to your strategy or goals to your audience. I actually find myself more frequently than I'd like not working with companies that come to me because they want to do content or one tactic in isolation, and it isn't part of any wider strategy. I have to just be honest and say, well, that's not necessarily going to work, and there's no one that can help you to make that work unless it's borne out of the top of that list that you bolded there. They're basing everything on that strategy.

Loz James:                             It all comes from that and I think it's really important that people are honest about what they want to achieve, and then they won't waste money on perhaps short term campaigns that never had a hope of working in the first place.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Yeah. One of the things that I'm really strong about is that there's always going to be people that will develop a strategy based on what they want to sell. So, when we develop a strategy at Lush, my strategy team, I always say I want them ignorant about two things. One of them is, I want them ignorant about what's going on in our production teams. I don't want my strategies to be looking at a company and writing that strategy, and making recommendations about content types, knowing that we have a gap in our video production team, and we could use another video. Or that we've got some new equipment in the studio and we want to start doing more podcasts.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I want them to be totally ignorant of what our business goals are, when they're looking at the strategy that they're developing for a customer. Because I don't think it's fair. Then the other thing that I want them to be ignorant about to a certain extent is the budget at hand. Because I don't want somebody to know, or to think that the customer has only got, for example, $30000 to spend on content next year. So, they write that $30000 strategy. When it starts to work after six or eight months, and the customer says, "Wow, we're getting the results we want, what are we going to do next?" I don't want to be the person that has to come back and say, "Well, we have to go and do another strategy because we only looked at a small part of it."

Sarah Mitchell:                   So, I really want our strategies to look at the utopian view, now, within reason, right? If you're a dentist, with two offices, your budget's going to be much different than if you're Red Bull. But I want that strategy to stand over time. So yes, I don't think anybody's going to be doing editorial, and audio, and visual, and graphics out the gate. But I want the strategy to be thoughtful enough that they can choose where they want to start, and that there's room for them to add as they go along.

Sarah Mitchell:                   I think that that is to be totally independent of what Lush- The Content Agency's business goals are. I don't want them thinking, oh we've got a really good video production team, so I'm going to add video. Because that's about us, that's not about them. I think ignorance is bliss in those two areas. I really fight to keep my strategist out of the realm of what's happening on any given day in our own business. They just don't need to be concerned about it.

Loz James:                             For sure. Okay. Well, that all feeds into what has been a very robust defence of content marketing. So, everyone listening now knows it definitely works, and they should be doing it properly based on a strategy. Just before the PS question, you mentioned your internal processes there, can you remind us where we can find you online please so we can connect with everything you're doing.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Yeah. Well, I'm on LinkedIn, Sarah Mitchell, and I'm located in Perth. My Twitter ID is @SarahMitchellOz. So, @SarahMitchellOz because Oz is short for Australia. Then I have a podcast called Brand Newsroom that we produce weekly. We're in about our fourth year. It's an interesting podcast because I have two co-hosts; James Lush who's a British guy who started with the BBC. He talks about media, and Nick Hayes who runs a company called Media Stable. He's an old PR guy, and then I taught content marketing.

Sarah Mitchell:                   We often have pretty robust discussions and disagreements about the best way to approach promoting your business. So, brandnewsroom.net. If you haven't listened to it, that would be great if you could have a listen. I totally appreciate getting the opportunity to make that ​plug.

Recording:                             Wait for it listeners, here comes the PS question.

Loz James:                             Could you share one advanced content marketing strategy you could use right after the show?

Sarah Mitchell:                   Yep, and I tell you what, this is so important, and it's even when you're talking about a strategy, the first thing that you need to do is you need to get your messaging right. Because I think one of the big problems in content is that people are saying the same thing all the time. I was giving a writing workshop to a group of lawyers, and I was looking at all their websites, and they all said experience you can count on. I thought, "How could they all be going to market with the same exact message that can't work?"

Sarah Mitchell:                   What I always recommend is that you need to find the intersection between what you want to say and what your customer wants to hear. That takes a little bit of a thought, but start with that, find out what those key messages are, and don't worry so much about what you're doing, but really try to focus on what that audience you're trying to reach is looking for. So, get your messaging, right that's so important.

Loz James:                             That's a fantastic answer to the PS question, a really great interview. Very as I say, robust defence of content marketing. All that remains to say is Sarah, thank you very much indeed for coming on the show, and I wish you every success in future.

Sarah Mitchell:                   Oh, thank you. Same to you, and thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Recording:                             You've been listening to the Content Champion Podcast, available at contentchampion.com and on iTunes. Until next time, thanks for listening.