Christopher Day and Ryan Brock: Episode 1156

Transcript

[0:00:31] HA: As customer behavior evolves, simple hacks and tricks aren’t going to cut it if you want to make your content into page one. Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m joined by authors Christopher Day and Ryan Brock, who are here to talk about their new book called, Pillar-Based Marketing: A Data-Driven Methodology For SEO and Content That Actually Works. Let’s flip through it. Hello friends and welcome back to the show, I’m here with my friends, Toph Day and Ryan Brock. They’ve just launched an amazing book called Pillar-Based Marketing and I’m excited to have you two here. Thanks for coming on today.

[0:01:11] CD: Thanks Hussein, we’re excited to be here, it’s going to be awesome.

[0:01:14] RB: Yeah, this is the first real big, you know, show or anything we’ve done specifically for the book, so that has me feeling really energized today, even though this is the third podcast I’ve recorded today.

[0:01:25] HA: I love it, man, well, I hope to do it justice because you guys have written something really phenomenal and I’m excited to get into it but before we do that, I always like to lay the foundation down and share with our audience, our guest’s personal background, perhaps, where you two grew up and maybe what’s – you know, somebody that influenced you or you know, inspired you while you were growing up to be on the path that you are on now. We’ll start with Ryan and give us a little bit of a shpiel of where you come from, man, and who inspired you. And then we’ll jump over to Toph.

[0:01:55] RB: That’s a good question. So where I come from, it’s a little bit of everywhere actually. I was born in Germany to two Air Force veterans and it was actually West Germany, technically, at the time I was only there for a little while, came back to Northwest Indiana, Chicago Land is where I’m from. So I’ve lived in a bunch of towns, Crown Point is where I graduated from high school, that was my home for the longest time and went to college with my high school sweetheart in Indianapolis and we stayed down in Indianapolis ever since, got married three weeks after we graduated college and now we’ve got a three-year-old son Charlie and just living the dream down in Indie. But in terms of who inspired me, I was raised by a large family of quasi-immigrant women actually, like a lot of old ladies who were born here but raised by Hungarian parents and yelling at each other in Hungarian and they forced me to learn to get loud, to get heard when I was a kid but also my grandmother, she was always just such a positive influence, helping me read and pushing me to pursue thoughtfulness and intellectual activities and things like that. So I think without her, I probably wouldn’t be where I’m at today.

[0:03:05] HA: Oh, shout out to grandma. I love that. Great story man. What about you Toph?

[0:03:10] CD: Yeah, so I grew up on a small farm, about an hour north of Indianapolis and we were German Baptist, which I call Amish folks with wheels basically and I remember taking a horse and buggy to church on Sundays. No TV, no radio when I grew up, paid my way through college. I went to Purdue and then I left Purdue, I headed down to Atlanta for about five years and did projects across the southeast and southwest. Always based out of Atlanta and then I moved back in my late 20s, I moved back to Indianapolis and had been here ever since. I’d say, the people that influenced my life, [were] my parents, my father, I learned work ethic and how to think three steps ahead on the farm. I do remember my grandmother used to sit me down when I was little and curl my eyelashes, that’s a big memory and then I think, you know, mentors, I was just really lucky to work with people throughout my career that I just watched and learned and listened from. So gosh, I hate to mention names because I’ll leave out some names but I knew when I was 15 years old, I worked for a commercial developer, a German named Jim Cochran and first shot out of college and a brief stint with a company with a gentleman there, Al Wurster. A big influence on my life and in my entrepreneurial career, one of my partners, Todd Brighton, and I had multiple businesses together, a big influence on my life. One of our investors and Demand Jump, Bill Godfrey, probably doesn’t realize it but I watch and listen and learn a lot from Bill and Ryan Brock, right? Coauthor here on this book, I learned a lot from Ryan. So yeah, I mean it, and I’ve just been blessed to have incredible relationships both personally and professionally throughout my life.

[0:04:43] HA: I love that so much. I think it’s one of my favorite things about this question with authors how much it brings out in the sense that you know, it’s like no matter how much we think, we are completely the authors of our story, there are so many characters in that story, right? And I just love just paying homage to them. In that way and I think, what I’m interested in is, how did you two meet. Where did you guys end up working together, where did you two meet?

[0:05:10] CD: We met in an iconic bar, you want to take it away, Ryan?

[0:05:14] RB: Looking back in time, it feels like a very fateful moment, you know? Because this was like late February 2020. So we’re in a giant crowd of people, COVID-19 has already ravaged its way around the planet, we just hadn’t heard of it yet and we’re in a bar venue called The Vogue Theater in Indianapolis, Indiana where there’s a startup community event called Powder Keg and I owned a content marketing, it was called Metonymy Media for a little over a decade. And I was a partner of their organization, the Powder Keg Organization, hoping to serve software to service companies and marketers and different tech comp firms and things like that and just so happened up on the same little side riser to the side of the stage, a company called Demand Jump was also a vendor with the booth and Toph, we sort of like maybe looked at each other across the bar, right? But who I met first was Shawn Swagman, Toph’s cofounder at Demand Jump. Shawn just starts going off about, “We got this technology and we’re going to change the way people think about SEO and we have this completely different way of thinking about like keyword research and how we target our content and I want to write like 500 articles, do you want to talk?” and I just thought he was insane because you know, that’s what happens at these events. You never know who you’re talking to. It turns out, I walked away and I was like, “Huh, I should probably follow up with that guy” and Toph, I think he probably went right over to you, right?

[0:06:41] CD: Yup, that’s right. I walked in and I was probably about 15, 30 minutes late to this event and I walked in and the Demand Jump team was already there and I walked up these risers and my partner comes over to me and immediately says, “Toph, we got to talk. See that guy over there?” He pointed to Ryan sitting on a dimly lit bench and he said, “That’s Ryan Brock, he’s the CEO of Metonymy Media.” “He totally gets what we’re trying to do, we need to work with him.” I think we said a brief hello, Ryan, that evening.

[0:07:06] RB: Yeah, I think it was. I do remember just a little, “Hey, what’s up? Nice to meet you, bye.”

[0:07:10] HA: How great encounters start, right?

[0:07:14] RB: So then of course, three weeks later we were locked in our homes for a year. So it’s just like – I think that’s why it’s so easy to look back on that night because then we had a few conversations and started working together and then really started building what we wrote about in the book together and that all started as the world burned to the ground around us. So I don’t know, I’ve already got some nostalgia for it, I guess.

[0:07:35] HA: Yeah, that’s crazy. So you know, for those of us that are not familiar with this, pillar-based marketing concept and methodology that you begin to implement and work on, take me through the next parts of the story. So you go through COVID, of course, all the madness but you’re sort of in the background kind of building this thing. Talk to me about how you all came together to start this sort of marketing path.

[0:07:58] CD: Yeah, as we were building Demand Jump, we were kind of solving several pain points and a lot of math involved, a lot of data and a lot of math and you’ll see in the book, we kind of shy away from, we don’t use the terms like AI, et cetera because we think they kind of get misused. At the high level, Demand Jump was all about trying to help marketers wake up every day and know what to do more than guessing what to do and so as we were going through, probably about five years of solving various pain points, one of the folks at Demand Jump said one day, he said, “Could we apply this math to content?” and the whole concept of knowing what content you should write that would actually be aligned to your customer’s journey. Like to know if it’s aligned with your customer’s journey and if would that put you in a better position for people to actually see the content. Like, I think this data is like 96% of web pages and blogs never get seen.

[0:08:52] RB: 90.63%. Yup.

[0:08:54] CD: Yeah, 90, yeah, 90.63% of blogs or webpages never get seen. Like just imagine waking up every day and knowing for a fact that 90% of the things you were going to do that day didn’t matter. That would be not very compelling and so we put the chief scientist, you know, on that path to say, “Let’s see if we can apply this math to this issue of content” which led to what we were trying to solve with, could we solve SEO in a real way, right? Not whack hat things, not box, et cetera, but really solve it in an authentic, genuine way and so they went to work on that, right? Working with I think, the initial solution had, I think it was like, 20 or 30 algorithms of different types of math involved in trying to solve this. It’s a very complex issue and we finally got to a point where like, “Let’s try it” and so we had this short article written. We knew from the math that one of the customer bases we were going after, we knew cared about a simple question called, “What’s a good CAC?” and CAC stands for customer acquisition cost and so we had one of our marketers write a short blog about what’s a good CAC. We posted it and I’m looking at it literally right now during this podcast and on April 19th, 2019, April 19th, 2019 is when we had this blog written and it’s still on page one in the number two spot today years later and we’ve never touched it. And so that was the moment, and it went to page one like literally within, I can’t remember exactly, but it was quick. It was within maybe days or a few weeks and it has stayed there ever since because it’s aligned with how the human brain works and thinks, which is the Internet’s nothing more the next day, right? The Internet today is an absolute reflection of the human brain and so we knew at that moment, holy cow, we were on to something and so we started doing more and more testing with our customers at the time and then we started testing it on ourselves as well, for our Demand Jump content and that’s when the relationship with Ryan really verged in because we engaged his team to write a bunch of content and that’s where I will hand it over to Ryan to head for that next phase.

[0:11:00] RB: To take a step back, when we’re talking about the world of marketing, we’re talking about search engine optimization, that’s SEO. Like marketers trying to get their content to show up at the top of the results because that’s where all the clicks go and people are looking for answers to questions, right? There has been an industry around this for a long time but it’s always been wrapped in mystery. There’s always just been this notion that you know, the search engines make the rules and they don’t really want to tell businesses what the rules are because the rules aren’t there to be [a] shortcut. You’re not supposed to have loopholes, you’re not supposed to just like check some boxes and win. What search engines want is for the people who have the most authoritative responses to queries to be the ones to show up on top. They want to find the best information and put it right there and so like you know, we talked about the 90.63% of blogs and webpages that never get any traffic, I spent 10 years as an agency owner selling content talking to businesses and trying to convince them that, “Hey, instead of just advertising to people who don’t want your ads in front of them, why don’t you write some content so that when people are actually looking for what you have to offer, you can give them value.” But it was always so hard — even with traditional methods of like, there are keyword databases, there are tools out there that will help you figure out what keywords drive how much traffic and who else is competing for them and all the stuff but at the end of the day, we’d still guess at we think based on what we know about our business, our customers, the ones we’ve spoken to anyway, this is the direction we should go with our content. We should write these kinds of pieces and we put them out there and we know, I lived this, nine out of 10 of them would never go anywhere and the 10% that did go somewhere, it takes six to 12 months. So by the time I met Toph, Demand Jump had gone implementing this content-focused solution. This innovation around, “Hey, if the Internet is a human brain, then search engines are sort of like, the speech processing center of that, right?” It’s like where people go and in their most honest self because you’re not talking to anybody, you’re talking to a search engine, you’re just telling the search engine what you want and, if we could access that information and we could look at a macro level at all of the different ways people search for things, we could probably find patterns and we could find that even though no two people have the exact same search history, that a lot of people end up searching for this term or this term. Or you thought it was this way of phrasing it but it’s actually this way of phrasing it and so you know, we started working together and they started letting me into their platform to see this data, and together over time, we sort of trial and errored the thing, found a sort of step-by-step process that every time we did it, if you pick this kind of a topic to write about if you develop a strategy and build it in this hierarchical way if you link it together if you make the articles so long, just do these things. Every single time, you find yourself going from no rankings on page one, none of your content is visible to people who are searching to a ton of it is and that’s without all of the stuff that other people in search engine optimization have been wasting a lot of time on over the years like link building or scammy-spammy things. When Toph said black hat, he’s referring to people trying to trick Google into putting them in the front. What we’re saying is, actually technology’s advanced to the point where we can pretty decisively understand the broader conversation around a given topic and use the data we have available to us to tell marketers and businesses, “Hey, if you want to serve people, if you want to provide value to your customers before they even buy from you, these are the things you should write about and by the way, if you do that you’re going to drive more traffic to your website, it’s going to be better quality than the traffic you get from ads and your business is going to grow.” And together over a few years, we tested this system, we put it to work, we watched my agency grow as a result, and we watched Demand Jump grow as a result. Toph eventually offered to buy me a drink and said, “Hey, why don’t we get married in a business sense?” Demand Jump acquired Metonymy and we came together and it wasn’t long before Toph and I sat down and said, “We have something here, we have a methodology that is like step-by-step and works every time, let’s write it down” and I think that’s what brought us here today.

[0:15:25] HA: Amazing, what an amazing journey. It all started with, “Hey, what’s up man, nice to meet you” and then the madness of 2020. I love this story so much, it’s so good and you all, and honestly, there are parts of your book like, I still don’t want to put it down because again, it’s so easy to read and access and it started giving me ideas about how to think about my own content for my website and stuff. So I just love that and it’s really powerful. How do you see the field of organic content marketing evolving in the future and how can marketers stay ahead of the curve with their strategies?

[0:15:57] CD: Yeah, I think you just hit on something that’s really interesting. I think the pace of change that’s actually happening digitally is not fully appreciated by humans in general and so a couple of examples I’ll give here are, so we see about 22% change in networks and content like things are changing so rapidly because we have so many more smart devices, right? So we’re talking to things today and so if you search for something using one word or two or three words, which is how people used to do it 20 years ago, and then today, people are like I literally search in full-on questions that are five, 10 words long, right? Or I may not even put a question mark but basically, any search, even if you’re not asking a question, it is a question, right? You’re trying to find information and so the two things, the increase in data that’s happening like exponentially today, humans simply can’t keep up with it and when you look at the month-over-month change that’s actually happening, this is absolutely impossible to keep up with. I don’t have the data memorized anymore but Ryan, I don’t know if you remember the data chart that we put together but it’s a… I don’t even remember the word, it’s like you know, we’ve blown way past terabytes, it’s like child’s play at this point, right?

[0:17:12] RB: Petabytes, yeah.

[0:17:14] CD: Yeah, petabytes. The number of petabytes and the growth over the next three years, like all the world’s data, was created or 90% of the world’s data was created within the last like 10 years or something and it’s just that today, right now as we’re speaking is the slowest rate of change that you and I will ever experience and so this problem is only going to get worse.

[0:17:31] RB: Think about this, Hussein, it’s so funny because we wrote this book last year, we wrote this book in 2022 and it doesn’t talk about AI at all. It doesn’t even touch on like ChatGPT or Bard in Google or Bing and how they’re all… all these, you know search engines and also a lot of marketers are looking at AI. Generative AI or conversational AI is like, this is the future and so already, just in the last three or four months since the manuscript of the book got locked, the conversation that’s happening in marketing, especially digital marketing is completely changed and now we’ve got to think about a world that’s coming up soon where some of the basic questions that companies out there might have wanted to address in their marketing, they know what they’re competing against is no longer their business competitors but it’s an AI system being powered by Google. And so as we proceed into this year, and it’s going to happen fast, I think what’s going to happen is, we’re going to very quickly understand this as a society what’s the kind of question that’s simple enough that I can ask it and I’m going to trust an AI response in a search engine and then what’s the kind of question that is complex enough that it’s worth my time to scroll passed that AI response and see what a lot of people have to say. So sort of what I think is the key to pillar-based marketing and like the methodology in our book, even though we don’t address AI, we’re sort of providing the blueprints for how to start thinking about that in your marketing in 2023 and to realize that all that’s going to happen is behavior is going to change. People are still going to be searching, they’re still going to be looking for information. Now, what needs to happen is brands need to listen to what those people are searching for, more than ever, so we could start taking the critical steps of understanding like, “Where should a brand be involved? Where is their subtlety? Where is their difference of opinion?” and let’s make sure that we keep that but also, let’s acknowledge that there’s going to be some level of information moving forward that’s just so basic, the computer’s got it and that’s like crazy to me to think about it. Like that would have never even entered my brain even six months ago and here we are, it’s the reality we’re dealing with.

[0:19:41] CD: Yeah, if we thought the rate of change was fast previously, it’s nothing compared to what’s going to happen next, which makes this whole approach that much more critical. It will literally mean – I don’t mean to be dramatic but I can’t remember who put this article out but it’s predicted that the future CEO, the majority of the time will come from the marketing side of the business because the ability to break through the noise will become more and more critical. So marketers out there that read this book, great news for you, if you embrace these types of methodologies, that’s going to get you a seat at the table, at the strategic table, and put you in a position to get those promotions, to get those bonuses, right? And to rise through the ranks. Folks that, you know, there’s still a lot out there, right? To kind of do things just the way they think it should be done, they’re probably going to have to move to a different department.

[0:20:29] RB: Um, I love it when you get dramatic, Toph.

[0:20:33] HA: Well, I love this man because you guys are right, I feel like we’re going through lek a sonic boom right now with everything with ChatGPT in, it’s just like, “Whoa” and it’s kind of caught everyone, now I don’t want to say off guard but just like, “What is this, how do we…” now that all the question’s around it. How do I grow, how do I grow my business — all these things and I feel that you’re 100% right in that, we don’t even know how fast we’re going to be able to go because there’s a whole new vehicle now. I feel like human nature, who we are, doesn’t change very rapidly. I feel like human behavior is slowly adaptable, right? So how we choose to adapt even technology and all these things but what I love is that the roots of all of these things are human emotion. You know, that’s the stuff that we could all connect on that’s always going to be there and so this idea of just listening, you know, I really appreciate that. Can you share maybe a success story of a company or organization that you have implemented pillar-based marketing with and what kind of significant results they’ve seen?

[0:21:33] RB: Yeah. Well, there’s one company in particular that I know has used this pillar-based marketing approach. It’s a great success and Toph, I feel like we can reference him out loud because he wrote a blurb on our book, right? But yeah, there’s a company called Collective[i]. Stephen Messer, you’ll see his name in print on our book if you buy it, he has been an innovator in the business space for a long, long time. Toph can talk a little bit more about that in a moment but long story short, you’ve got this company that you know, is one of many AI-driven, machine learning-driven software startups that’s come out in recent years, where their whole idea is using sophisticated artificial intelligence, they can provide to sellers, salespeople within organizations prescriptive insights into what they should do next to drive revenue and it also [has to] do with sales forecasting, right? So like sales forecasting is this crazy thing that all businesses do because we have to, because our investors need us to because we need to know how much cash we’re going to have to spend and how, you know, like what we need to do to get more of it and it all comes down to this activity, which is kind of completely counterintuitive if you think about it. Sales forecasting is, “I’m going to try to build a model to understand how much money I’m going to be able to bring in, in the future” like what am I going to be able to sell. Historically speaking, the only information you have to go off to build that model is historical data but if you’ve ever invested or seen a commercial for a financial advisor or listened to the advice in a financial column, you’re probably familiar with the phrase, “Past history is not indicative of future events” right? What happened yesterday does not guarantee it’s going to happen tomorrow and you have to say that if you’re telling someone, “Oh, we got really good returns on our investment somewhere” or something. So the long history of sales forecasting has been, “Oh, we can use Excel now and that’s going to do some math for us and make our models faster and then we can use machine learning to do things like scan our emails or take our communications the customers and then if we put it through like a fancy algorithm, we’re going to predict like what percentage of the deals we have right now are showing the right signals then we’re going to close the deal.” But Collective[i] comes along and says, “Forget all of that. That’s stupid because crystal balls don’t exist and you can’t know what’s going to happen in the future based on what happened in the past. Instead, we’re going to start collecting data from a broader set of signals including your CRM like where you host your interactions with the customer, what you know about them but we’re going to start building like smart data sets out of social signals” like stuff that’s available out there on the Internet. I am sure I am butchering some of the technical aspects of this but this includes like on an anonymized level, how other people who use this software are engaging with the same companies you are engaging with, and at the end of the day, it’s able to say, “Hey seller, you feel really good about this deal that you’ve just said you think is going to get over the finish line in the next two weeks.” “But we know from signals we are seeing from six different places that that company hasn’t spent money on a new contract in like six months. They are on a hiring freeze, they are on a spending freeze” whatever, “Instead go here” or they could be like, “Based on everything we’re looking at, we believe the person that you are talking to at this company is not going to be the right person to sign in a contract because they don’t have purchasing power but this person is their boss and they do. Here’s their contact information.” So it is about empowering people to move forward. Now, that was a really, really long explanation. We could probably trim that down in the post a little bit but the point I’m trying to make here is you have this new tool that changes the way people think. It completely destroys the need to get a better future prediction because instead, you can just make better choices to influence your revenue, how do you market that organically? How do you write content that is going to be found by people when they’re searching for tools? You can’t write prescriptive sales forecasting because that doesn’t exist yet. There’s so much you want to say but if you write about it, no one is going to find it because they are not looking for it. So they’re a really good example of somebody who can actually look at the benefit or look at the network of search behavior around a topic like sales forecasting. See what people are actually asking about and surprisingly, a lot of it is like, “How do I build a sales forecasting in Excel?” or “How do I build better sales forecasting in Excel?” or “What is qualitative sales forecasting?” It is the sort of stuff that somebody who wants to do better at forecasting is looking for at Collective[i] Innovative because not only do they have a product that’s different and changing the market. But they were willing to say, “Maybe we should write about how to build a really good Excel sales forecast and while we’re doing that, we can be right up front and say, by the way, you’re wasting your time. We’ll tell you how to do it, we’ll show you how to do that but if you want to actually like fix your revenue issues, come here and talk to us about this product instead” and you know, over just a few months with some very targeted content, they were able to make a huge splash. Drive a ton of revenue in a marketplace in a category that they were kind of creating and it all happen to do with listening to the current conversation, providing value where possible, and then waiting for the right time to move the conversation toward what they had to offer instead of trying to force it on people. That’s just such a good example of what it looks like to leverage technology but still be superhuman.

[0:26:51] HA: Yeah man, I love that. What a deep sort of understanding of not only the work you do but how you genuinely get people to see the value in your marketing strategies in these pillars. So go ahead Toph.

[0:27:03] CD: Hussein, the word you just used genuine is so spot on, right? There’s a little analogy I like to use and so let’s say in real life, let’s say you are driving home, it’s before Thanksgiving and your spouse calls and says, “Hey, you know can you pick up a frozen turkey at the grocery store?” and you decide to wheel in because you’re thinking about buying a new car, so you wheel in some car lot across the street and you’re like wheeling through looking at an Audi or something. But you’re not ready to buy, you’re just kind of thinking about it and maybe you’re interested, maybe you’re not, maybe you’re in fantasy mode, you know, decision mode, research mode, whatever mode you’re in but you drive in a parking lot and you drive across the street and you go look at the butterball turkeys to pick one out and all of a sudden that salesperson from the Audi parking lot shows up at the aisle of the grocery store shaking a flyer at you like, “Hey, you want to buy this Audi” and you’re like, “Well, that’s kind of weird.” You turn around and there’s a Porsche dude on the other side and he’s shaking a flyer, “No, no, no, you want to buy the Porsche and that you buy the red one” like you would think that’s weird and you might call the cops but for some reason, we think that’s okay. When I say we, not us but in general, there are a lot of people that think that’s okay on the Internet, right? You just throw stuff up against the wall and hope somebody engages at some point. Well, that’s one way to do it, or how about you engage in authentic conversations digitally with your ideal customer profile and meet them in the moment when their brain is thinking about what you ultimately solve like the pain you’re looking to solve. I always think it’s like people do two things on the Internet. They are trying to solve pain or there is some desire there they’re trying to fulfill, right? I don’t mean that in whatever way, I am talking about buying a basketball, the desire to play basketball, right?

[0:28:49] RB: We’re from Indiana, we love basketballs, yeah.

[0:28:51] CD: Yeah, it’s like those are two big buckets and so if you meet them in the moment when they’re in exploration research decision mode and you are answering whatever is going through their mind and then oh, by the way, your solution happens to be sitting there, they’re much more likely to, especially in e-com, they can buy right on the spot or in B2B, they’re like, “Wow, these people understand me” and then they see your product page, they’re much more active to engage, just like the networks in real life.

[0:29:17] HA: Yeah, that’s very powerful, and thank you for that sort of real-life explanation. I mean, it feels like you know, anytime in real life we’re out here doing our own things and then sometimes just talking about something and then it shows up on your phone or on your computer or whatever, you know it’s no coincidence because it’s all set up that way but you know, in the way that you all share how to approach content and creating content to meet that customer is really powerful. I know writing a book is no easy feat and I’m sure that was a journey for both of you. What was it like maybe perhaps your favorite part of pulling the book together? Let’s start with Ryan.

[0:29:51] RB: Yeah, so I’m a writer first and foremost like I got into this by being a storyteller and being a writer and being someone who loves that. So the process itself is not something that I am afraid of, it is something that I am very familiar with. The process of sitting down with another person and saying, you’ve got your story in your head, I’ve got my story in my head and then there’s a lot about like the methodology that we teach that we both know. That we both understand and then of course, there’s my perspective and as a marketer, as an agency owner, I have a certain closeness to the subject matter. Toph, being the founder of the company that runs this stuff has that too but he is thinking about it from a different perspective and so like finding the middle ground and finding ways to like balance each other out was really, really cool to me because I don’t think we ever failed in that endeavor Toph. I don’t know what you think but I feel like we learned a lot about each other and ourselves and like how we need to position ourselves to communicate effectively to the world. I had to pass through your lens, you had to pass through mine and at the end, I think we ended up with a book that’s greater than the sum of its parts because of that.

[0:31:02] CD: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I thought it was an awesome process and I felt like I learned a lot. I learned even more about our own subject matter just by spending so much time with Ryan and all those interviews and laying everything out and going through the editing process but I agree with what Ryan just said and the real magic I think happened because we both know a lot about the same topic but from two totally different places and we share that. That’s kind of how the book starts out, right? Ryan shares his journey from his vantage point and then I share my journey from my vantage point and then we come together and how this creates you know, magic for your team. I think if we were both like if I was the same level of expertise as Ryan is with his skillset, it probably wouldn’t have been such a beautiful experience, you know? Because we’d probably be arm wrestling for, “No, we’re going to say that word or that word” but I think if you’re going to coauthor a book, you probably got to make sure you start off with a deep mutual respect, right? It probably works better and then if people have different backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets talking about the same topic, I think it’s romantic. It’s created in bringing it to life on multiple levels at more depth.

[0:32:11] RB: Yeah, so when Toph says a deep mutual respect, which is certainly what we have, I think that it’s important to note that what that allows is for you to have fun with yourself. For example, in the first chapter of the book, that’s my story of the stress I was under trying to find a predictable methodology for again, the content, and how I was just really conscious all the time that I was asking my customers to wait six months, 12 months. To let me spend a bunch of money, write 10 articles, and maybe one of them succeeds, and like that’s no way to run a business. It’s hard but it’s how we’ve been doing it for a long time and so it is all about my anxiety and I think the chapter is called, “Marketers Don’t Sleep” and it’s talking about why I’m afraid of this perception that we’re wasting people’s money and then Toph, his chapter is chapter two and it’s called, “Marketing is a Waste of Money.”

[0:32:59] CD: Because that’s how I felt for 25 years.

[0:33:03] RB: Exactly and so like only do we need their respect so that we could rip on each other in that way but like if we were coming at it from two different perspectives, we could have never had the two sides of the same coin conversation, starting the book, which I think is going to make it easier for readers of any background to come in and say, “Okay, these guys aren’t taking themselves too seriously but they do have serious issues that they needed to solve and I can trust that they were doing whatever they can to solve them.”

[0:33:30] HA: So powerful. I love that. Well, I am just – man, the level of depth you all bring to the table right now I’m just blown away and I feel like you are the people to hit up, to figure out a marketing strategy because you’re around content creation and reaching a level that I feel like I’ve never been able to get to myself because you’re right, I’ve thought so traditionally about SEO that you know, it is evolved. It’s grown and who knows how much more it’s going to evolve, so what are the new tactics and techniques that we can deploy to kind of meet that?

[0:34:07] CD: Yeah, Hussein, I think there is a moment in the book where I think I say, and by the way marketers, I don’t think this is your fault, right? I truly mean that. I think that technology couldn’t keep up with the pace of the growth of digital in the Internet, right? In all of the different user cases and marketers have been, they’re the most and I sincerely believe this, they’re the most, historically they have been the most underserved department with technology in any organization. What I mean by that is every single other department has a piece of technology that you can input data into and it spits out how you can do that better because you know the data, right? Finance, right? It’s numbers, it’s your financial numbers even warehousing, right? Did the box you know, arrive and did it exit or not? You know, just simplistically. So every department has a piece of software that tells you what to do to make something better except for marketing. This is one of the first real components, there is so many channels in marketing today. I sincerely believe this, I see it today with what I do and company after company, you can’t see, touch and feel the Internet or the data within the Internet or the customer journey or the customer consumer behavior within the Internet until now.

[0:35:30] HA: It’s very powerful, what an incredible tool. I think it is going to change a few different things and how we approach it certainly. Oh man, again, I can keep going. I feel like you guys have so much more to share but is there anything else you two want to add? Is there anything specific that we haven’t touched on just yet? Toph, Ryan?

[0:35:48] CD: One high-level thing I might mention is I think there’s an overarching message in the book. This is more than just about marketing or about page one or about SEO or about pillar-based marketing. This is about enabling deeper professional relationships across the department and I think if like mister and miss Pacman, like a match made in heaven when they bounce together in the heart, you know, it’s like sales leaders and marketing leaders can finally work in lockstep, right? Can work in concert, they can drive not only many more leads but many more qualified leads for what the company’s trying to specifically sell and whether it’s a widget, right? Like a pair of reading glasses or whether it’s a piece of software or anything in between but it is about more than just having content that actually ranks and people actually see. This is about the strategic direction of a company in informing the CEO at a much more sophisticated level of where to take the organization. We even had public companies at the board level leveraging the data in the platform to make acquisition decisions, right? I feel like the used cases just become massive. I want to layer that on that like this is a solution that enables so much more than just producing good content. It’s transformative for your inner department relationships and the trajectory of the company as a whole.

[0:37:19] RB: Yeah and that’s the only other thing that I wanted to say is we’ve talked a lot about data and we talked about things like keywords and content. This is a methodology for that but it all does come back to the same idea and something that we talk about early on in the book that like Toph, he just said something to the effects of marketing doesn’t have that tool that you can just say, “Here’s the situation. Tell me what to do differently.” There are plenty of tools in marketing for finding more data like there are tons more data available in marketing. There are keyword-building tools and there are SEO tools and there’s audience research and demographic tools, there’s all this stuff but like who cares? If you have a whole ocean of data and you don’t have a boat, you’re just going to drown and you are not going to be able to make a good decision if you can’t see the shore. If you don’t know which direction to go or anything but if you can get just a little bit of help, a push in the right direction, data can actually have the chance to transform not just your marketing tactics but like Toph said, the way you as a business understand the market and your place in it and the future and where it’s going lead and so just like in my story about Collective[i] and prescriptive sales forecasting, that’s what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the beginning of something in organic content marketing, which is a discipline that’s been sort of fuzzy and soft for a long time. We’re saying not only is there data that’s better than the data you’re used to getting to inform that process but it’s got to actually give you direction. It is going to prescribe steps to you and that is where this methodology is different from anything else you’ll find in marketing or in market research and just listening to the market itself. So we’re really excited to get that into people’s hands.

[0:39:01] CD: Yeah, pillar-based marketing is the only appreciating asset in the market.

[0:39:06] HA: What a powerful note to end that with. Toph and Ryan, thank you for sharing your stories and your experiences with me today. Man, I thought that was really powerful at the end there like it’s just – because you’re right. There is so much to think about when it comes to marketing, however, in a lot of people’s minds — especially as a creative entrepreneur like when you think about creating content and all those kinds of things, there is a lot of hope involved, right? Not seeing information that can really help me develop the next thing in the trajectory that is best fitting, that’s really powerful, man. So I think you guys have something remarkable at work. Of course, the book is going to help people get there. The book is called, Pillar-Based Marketing: A Data-Driven Methodology for SEO and Content That Actually Works. So besides checking out the book, where can people find you two and connect with you and maybe even learn some more?

[0:40:00] RB: Yeah, so for me, search me on LinkedIn, Ryan Brock. I’m there, I’ve got a new newsletter called The Pillar Column. It is a weekly newsletter where we get into what is happening in organic content, SEO and technology, and pillar-based marketing specifically. So just Google The Pillar Column on LinkedIn or find me and my bald head on LinkedIn and I’ll be happy to connect. Then if you want to learn more about pillar-based marketing methodology and how to put it into play in your organization, obviously buy the book first, then check out university.demandjump.com, where I’ve got hours of coursework designed to help certify people in this new way of thinking and drive some results for them really fast.

[0:40:42] CD: You can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Christopher Day and I’ll be the one that says Christopher and in parenthesis, Toph, Day, and my ugly mug will pop up.

[0:40:53] HA: Right on. Well, thank you two for joining me today. I’ve learned so much, I know our audience did too. Your stories are remarkable. Thank you two, man, this was great. Congratulations on your book, I know it’s going to hit some number-one sellers because I know that you know what it is that you’re doing in that space, this is how you do it. I love it.

[0:41:10] CD: Thanks Hussein, you’re the man.

[0:41:12] RB: Yeah, thanks, this is awesome.

[0:41:13] HA: Great man, yeah but I appreciate you two. Seriously, a wealth of knowledge today, lots of gold gems. So for you listeners out there, get out there and get the book. It’s a good one I promise you, super easy to read. Again, congrats you two on this remarkable journey. Thank you. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find the book, Pillar Based Marketing: A Data Driven Methodology for SEO and Content That Actually Works, right now on Amazon. For more Author Hour episodes, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.