Chat with Ahava Leibtag – Let’s learn about building a brand from the scratch with an effective content marketing strategy

So every Wednesday, I release something called Writing Wednesday. I started doing it to answer questions I kept seeing come up and as a fun way to experiment with video. Andrew Davis, who’s a good friend of mine, is always talking about video, so I thought, “I’ll try it.” The funniest part to me is that the thing people react to most is my red lipstick or my red glasses, which is a comment on society, right?

No, but a lot of people have really given me great feedback and are super excited about what they learn, and it’s 60 seconds. If you can’t pay attention for 60 seconds, then you probably don’t really want to learn to be a better writer.

The other thing is that in November, we’re releasing a November Writing Challenge, where we’re going to give people a calendar, and every day we’ll challenge them to write for about five minutes. I’m excited about that too. I’ll probably do a couple of lives—you can watch me knocking my teeth against the keyboard. That’s really fun.

The Instagram account is my personal account, and my team isn’t so happy about that. They want me to transfer Writing Wednesdays over to the Aha Media Group account, but I have mixed feelings about it. You’ll see my kids, things I cook—just all kinds of different things. I’m a pretty open person, and I invite people into my life up to a certain point. That’s just who I am.

I also feel a big responsibility toward working women—women who have kids, want to be successful, and build things. People can look at someone like Sarah Blakely, who built Spanx, but most of us aren’t going to be Sarah Blakely. Still, I run a solid business and have a reputation as a thought leader, which is a privileged position.

I think it’s important for people to know you can do all those things and still raise a happy, healthy family—even if they’re hitting each other with Nerf balls while jumping on a trampoline.

So that session was really successful. I got the best reviews I’ve ever gotten in my career. There wasn’t a single negative comment—well, one person said the music clips were too long, but I didn’t think that was really negative at all.

I wanted to show that even business writers can learn from all kinds of writers. Songwriters, in particular, have mastered two really important things that business writers should focus on: telling a story by building images and pictures, and following the melody of language. A lot of what I talked about was how we need to adopt some of the techniques musicians use, so we can become better writers ourselves.

Yeah, I’ll give just two examples that I think are valuable. We started the session by having everybody stand up and sing “Living on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi. That song is a great example of the storytelling formula: exposition, conflict, and resolution. We went through it and looked at those different parts, and then I explained how, as writers, we should be trying to mix those three elements into the three-part story we’re taught to write.

Then we looked at “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson, and saw how he interweaves conflict and resolution together. Another point I talked about is that I think we’re too siloed when we think about writing and editing. Very often, there’s the writer, and then the writer passes the copy on to the editor, and there’s sort of a turf war around that. I think we should strive to be more collaborative in our environments.

So I shared the story about how Glenn Frey lived above Jackson Browne, and Jackson Browne was composing “Take It Easy.” Glenn Frey came downstairs and said, “You really have something there. That’s a great song.” But Jackson Browne couldn’t finish it—he had the first verse and the chorus, but he just couldn’t get into the second verse. Glenn Frey ended up finishing it for him, and that became the first big hit the Eagles had.

That’s where I think we need to move toward a pair-writing paradigm, which is popular in user experience design—where everybody gets in a room and figures out what the labels should say together. Those are just two examples of how I tried to pull together things from the music industry that I think we can learn from in the business writing industry.

Yeah, I mean, I think also writing is considered a lonely art, but we’re not writers like novelists. We’re writing non-fiction books, writers who are writing for a very specific purpose. And so getting together in a room with our colleagues—that’s the way it’s done in almost every industry. Engineers collaborate with each other, lawyers collaborate with each other, and doctors certainly collaborate with each other. So why shouldn’t writers?

I don’t know. Everybody’s a writer, as Anne Handley says, Everybody writes.

So what happened to me was that I was writing for the government, and I had a boss who sent me to learn how to write with a woman named Ginny Redish, who’s considered the godmother of web writing. I was really hooked after I took that class and really wanted to learn as much as possible.

Then I moved on to become a freelance writer for hospitals and healthcare systems, and I started using Twitter when it was a new thing. All of a sudden I found a lot of people doing the same thing I was doing. I remember when Christina Halverson talked about how her book had come in the mail—I ordered it immediately on Amazon—and when I read it, I was like, “Oh, this is what I do.” I thought I was the only person having these problems, yet everything she talked about in the book was something I was struggling with in my career as a freelance writer and in trying to start a business and get more clients.

So I reached out to her, and we developed a friendship. At the same time, I saw Joe Pulizzi writing about similar topics, and I think he invited me to come speak at the first Content Marketing World. I’ve spoken there every year since, which has been a real privilege.

For me, the idea of building relationships with people through content really appealed to me. I believe we help people make very important decisions, especially in heavy-jargon fields like healthcare, insurance, and financial services, which is what we mainly do at our Media Group. I like the idea of building those relationships and telling people, “We’re here to help you when you really need help.”

But that might be next. So, if there’s any government contractors listening who are looking for a writing partner, let us know. What we mostly do is help those three industries and companies in those three industries write content to explain to their customers what services they provide and what products they have, so that they can understand what decisions to make.

For example, when Medicare open enrollment starts, you have to educate people about what that means and how to sign up—and when they turn 65, they’re responsible for doing so. There’s a three-month window before and a three-month window after. That’s the kind of thing we write about.

If you’re looking for cancer care for one of your parents and trying to figure out where the best place is locally—should you go nationally? How complicated is it in financial services? We do blogs about saving money and figuring out how to prepare better for your financial future—things that people really need help understanding.

One thing we know is that when people read things that are hard to understand at first, they leave their frontal cortex—the part where we make executive decisions—and go into their amygdala, which triggers a fight-or-flight reaction. So one of the things we talk about, and that’s really important for writers, is having a ton of empathy for your audience and using plain language. Plain language gets a bad rap because people think it’s dumbing things down, but it’s not at all—it’s about making writing clear so that people can understand what they’re learning and then elevating the conversation as they move through the content flow.

Super ventricular tachycardia. Your heart is beating too fast. You know, you can say it the same exact way. So, yeah, absolutely.

All by myself!

All did it by myself!

So I’ve had it since 2005, although I wasn’t really incorporated until 2006 because I just thought I was hanging out a shingle for a few projects. Then I worked on my own until about 2011, when I really started to build staff and get people in place. So, there were two phases of this entrepreneurial journey.

So we do a ton of eBooks and thought leadership. We get a ton of downloads that way. Then we also get inbound leads because people see me speak or we have a reputation in the industry. We do social media, and it’s always a tough nut to crack. Content can have either a long sales cycle or a really short one—it depends on whether people really need it right now or they need it but don’t know exactly what they need, depending on where they are in the sales cycle.

What I found is that the most effective way to market is to make yourself available to answer people’s questions. That means people coming to me at conferences, emailing me with questions, or downloading our eBooks on topics like SEO and content governance. For example, we did “118 Healthcare Experts Predicted 18 Trends for 2018” and “Healthcare Marketing Trends.” We’re getting ready to do one about Instagram and healthcare.

It’s those types of things that really help people make decisions at their jobs. I think they come to see us as a trusted advisor, and then they want to use us—or even if they don’t, they still value what we do, even if it may not fit into their budget or they have a web design firm that handles content for them. It really depends on those kinds of things.

Exactly. I really feel that it’s very important to have as good a reputation as you can in any industry you’re in. I bridge a few different ones—content strategy, content marketing, and healthcare marketing. From my perspective, hopefully everybody in those industries sees that Ahava is available to answer questions, that she thinks things through in a thoughtful way, and tries to figure out what’s going on in the marketplace.

It’s interesting—I was just on the phone with one of my account managers this morning, and we were talking about a scoping call we were going to have at noon. She asked me, “Do you already know what you think we should do?” And I said, “Yeah, but I still want to stay curious longer.” That’s one of our values, because I do have this feeling like, “Oh, I’ve seen it all.” And that’s a very arrogant approach. You have to be really humble and think, “Okay, well, I’ve got flexibility for this client because this client is trying to do something different than client A, B, C, or D.”

So that’s the other important thing: you’ve always got to be a little bit hungry and stay humble. I think that’s important.

Yeah. So I would challenge that assumption that healthcare is boring because I actually don’t think it is. In government contracting and healthcare, you weren’t always allowed to be as creative as you’d like, but clients ask us all the time, “How can you write for the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and UCLA? How do you do all those different institutions and keep it fresh?”

If you’re smart about content, the number one thing you have to do is align it with your business objectives and help your users accomplish their tasks. Each of those institutions has completely different business objectives and strategic alignments among their executives about what to get done. They also have really different stories to tell. Some places are really great at X, and those are the stories we want to tell about them; some places are great at Y, and those are the stories that deserve attention.

From my perspective, everybody is completely different. You could take a writing firm just like mine that produces the same kinds of content, set up the same way, and it would be a completely different story about how we deal with our clients, what our values are, how we perceive ourselves in the marketplace, and what product we’re trying to create. I just think everybody has a great story to tell, and it takes a good marketer, a good writer, and a good content strategist to pull that out, tease it out, and figure out how to approach it from a business-friendly perspective.

Yeah. I mean, I think that at the end of the day, there’s a lot of political and turf wars around that kind of thing. From my perspective, I always say to clients, “What’s your audience going to say about this? What are they looking for? What’s really important to them? What do the data and metrics show us?”

So, yeah, I think we saw in that B2B report that Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs just released that 91% of marketers are saying they’re focused on their audience and not on the brand anymore. That’s unbelievably encouraging. When I first came into the industry, it was the exact opposite—like, 10 years ago, or 13 years ago. So it’s huge.

Yeah, I also think what we’re seeing, which is really remarkable, is that more and more we’re designing our products around what our audience wants—not just looking for opportunities in the marketplace, though that’s still important—but really bringing user experience people into the conversation about what the products should look like and what would serve our audiences or customers best. I think we’re starting to approach an exciting time where we’re really seeing the synergy between customer experience and business strategy.

Totally weird times also, right? Shane, like, what is going on?

I didn’t even mean it politically. I meant it also just, like –

A little over 40.

Yeah, well, I’m getting close to really crazy. So…

Yeah. I think for us, scale hasn’t really been the problem—it’s not about quality; it’s more about strategy. Anybody who works for me knows that quality is number one. I always say every single thing that goes out here has my name on it, and if it’s not perfect or close to perfect, we’ve got problems. I don’t expect perfection on the first shot, but everyone has issues they need to work out with their clients.

I do think we’re at a point where marketers are more educated than ever about what they need to do for their customers. I used to do a lot more education, but now I’m talking more about voice, voice-activated search, and technological improvements. I still educate people about that. I remember when social media first started and people needed to be educated about it—it was so frustrating as a content strategist that they were focusing on social media strategy before their content strategy. I don’t see those mistakes anymore; they’re getting smarter about how they approach projects and thinking about what really makes sense.

On the other hand, I do see them pressured by executives to just get stuff done without thinking it through strategically. But I feel like marketers are smarter than they used to be—or maybe they’ve always been smart, but now they’re really educated. They care about data, analytics, and they want to know the ROI.

I agree 100%, and there’s room for both. I mean, that’s the other thing we have to remember—there’s totally room for both. But at the end of the day, people are trying to do the best they can, and I admire them for that. I do think there’s a ton of training out there. I also think that sometimes when I listen to people talk, they do need more education around this, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that even if we provide it, they’re free to make the decisions that the training would enable. That’s where we really have to show a lot of patience and empathy for the clients we serve, because sometimes they just have these executive mandates to do things that don’t always make sense.

That’s really fascinating, because I had the exact opposite evolution when I was younger. I used to be like, “Yo, this is how you do this.” And now I’m kind of like, “Okay,” and I do feel like we educate people and then tell them they have to do what they want. Maybe it’s the delivery that’s changed the most, but at the end of the day, I’ve been in enough situations to know that as a consultant, you can’t influence as much as you hoped you could.

Yeah, that’s really… I come in. There’s a great book called The Art of Consulting that Jared Spool suggested I read at the beginning of my consulting career, and he says, “You really can only move the needle 10%.” Now, I don’t think that’s really 100% true—I think you can move it a lot more than that if you’re in the right situation with the right client. But I think that’s… I sort of changed my approach of, “Okay, what am I really here to accomplish for people, and how can I be most useful to them?” And then it’s interesting to hear you say that. That’s really fascinating.

Oh, same name, Shane.

Hey, can you teach me how to write ebooks and make 1000s of dollars a day?

I remember that craze. I remember when that was going on. You can’t do that anymore.

Press is assigned, SOW and a happy client. No, when it is the case studies that we provide. You know, we wrote a blog once—we used Jack to blog—and we got 16 media pickups for a hospital system. We breached traffic on blogs in the 100th percentile; one blog, 800%—we rewrote some content on a website, and they got a $1,000 donation, totally unsolicited, just because they love the content on the site.

I mean, we have some really cool stories about the things we’ve been able to help our clients do. For me, the biggest wins are when I get on the phone with clients and they say, “This could have been the biggest nightmare of our lives, and you made it easier.” That, to me, is really part of what our secret sauce is, because it’s not just about great quality content; it’s also about phenomenal account and project management. It’s a product—it’s not just words on a page—and a product has to be run according to a project life cycle. That’s where we really excel.

So, to me, the wins are obviously in the results, but I think every agency should be able to prove results. I think that, to me, that’s table stakes. What’s really important is the feeling—the experience—that people have when they work with us. Our clients have a set of wins that are metric-based, but they also don’t always recognize how much they’re getting out of the experience. We have an unbelievable retention rate with our clients, and I think one of the reasons for that is that they are so happy with what we’re able to give them in terms of that experience. I just said the word “experience” 17 times—they have a great experience when they work with us.

Yeah, completely distributed.

Remote live.

Taxes get to be a nightmare. Like, how many different states can you have tax reporting in?

Here’s the thing about watching television shows. I’ll say one thing about that that I actually think is similar to the songwriting thing. I have a friend, Amy Kramer, who’s really into pop culture, and she challenged me to watch The Wire and Breaking Bad. So I went ahead and did it. I gotta say that I learned a tremendous amount about storytelling, about character development, about how to really think through narrative storytelling, and how to switch chronology up, and things like that.

I understand people who say, “I don’t watch a lot of TV” or “I don’t watch a ton of movies,” and I get that. But I think the whole point of art is to connect us to each other. A lot of people think that business writing or being in marketing or being in customer experience is an art, but that’s what we’re doing—we connect people to each other and connect people to ideas. I think it’s really valuable to pay attention to what’s going on in pop culture, because it helps you become a better storyteller, a better writer, and a better creative person. So, Shane, it’s time to start watching TV.

You know..

I did not learn how to make meth, and I also learned that the world is a terrifying place.

It was like, Yeah, it really doesn’t. It’s not. It doesn’t look that fun at all. Actually. What’s interesting is that right around the time I finished watching it, my ninth grader had to write a paper on Macbeth, and I had never read Macbeth, which is a hard thing for me to admit on a recorded podcast, because I’m an English major, but it was just one of the Shakespearean plays I had never gone to. And so I didn’t read the entire play, but I read enough of it, and I read enough on Wikipedia, quite frankly, to understand the story. And I said to her, you know, you really should compare Macbeth to Walter White from Breaking Bad, because that’s the story. And she was like, Mommy, I can’t compare Macbeth to a meth King. Like she don’t even know who Walter White is, but, you know, like she had heard me talk about this show. And so that was really a fascinating experience for me, because one of the things I always talk about when I teach writing is, you know, they say Hollywood has seven plots. It’s really true. The same stories are told over and over and over again, and when you study them and you compare them, you can really see the way the society has changed in terms of thinking about those issues. So that was sort of a nice segue for me to talk about how much I really paid attention to Breaking Bad.

I cannot. I cannot make meth.

I cannot. I really. I mean, the hardest drugs I do are Percocet after a really bad dental procedure. I’m a suburban mom. Sorry.

I’m pretty boring. I gotta be honest.

Yeah, so we have a daily huddle with the executive team, which includes all the account managers, junior project managers, the CFO, and everyone else. We go in alphabetical order and talk about what we did yesterday, what we’re doing today, and where we’re stuck. It’s an agile huddle. People working on different projects have bi-weekly or weekly meetings. We use Base Camp pretty extensively, and we also use Slack—basically, all the tools that most distributed workforces use.

One thing I worry about is retaining talent. I do think that being in an office with other people helps build relationships, and it makes you less likely to want to leave your job. Sometimes, people can feel lonely when working from home. On the other hand, part of why I started this company was because I really felt passionately about giving working parents a place where they could have a meaningful life and meaningful work.

I think working remotely works for a few years, but eventually, people might want a more cohesive office environment. I just hope they learn a lot while they’re here. It’s interesting—some people find that working from home just isn’t for them. As for me, I think I’ll eventually go back to an office at some point, but for now, I love working from home. I like being able to throw in laundry, take a 20-minute walk around my neighborhood, and set my own schedule. That flexibility is important to me. However, for some people, working from home is just not a good fit.

So he has a lot of dirty laundry everywhere. Everybody knows.

I like that circle bookshelf thing you have behind you, you got some nice succulents going there. That’s nice.

I think you could just put it on your calendar dude.

Yeah, I’d be happy to jump on that one. I have a lot of thoughts about that.

Well, I’m a Jewish homemaker on some level. Like, I have to make stuff for Rosh Hashanah and things like that. So I have this apple challah thing that I make, that people really love. So that’s something that I’m very proud of. In fact, Ann Handley saw the trampoline video, and she goes, “I need to come to your house for two reasons: one, to eat, and two, to jump on that trampoline.

Yeah, I make this trifle that she’s obsessed with. Every time she sees it, she’s like, “I’m coming down from Boston. Save it for me.” So I do like to bake. I just made bread today, actually. I’m making the kids grilled cheese and soup, so that’s exciting. I don’t know why your audience would be interested in this, but okay, we’ll go with it. I love to read. I’m a huge reader. I’m not happy unless I have a good book to look forward to getting into bed with at night. I do like to watch TV. My 10-year-old son and I are going through all the Marvel movies together, so we just finished The Incredible Hulk and now we’re onto Iron Man 2. We are rating them all. He gave Iron Man 1 a 9.7, and I gave it like a seven, so clearly, we need to align our ratings a little bit better. He is a 10-year-old boy, though. I gotta say, they are very different than 10-year-old girls because I have a 13-year-old girl and an almost 16-year-old girl, and wow, boys are different.

Yeah, it’s not a good or bad thing. It’s just like, really, just a different way of seeing the world. At least that’s been my experience so far. And I like to watch The Great British Baking Show. I’m super into that show right now. I love it. And what else do I like to do? I’m into Pilates and Pure Barre; those are things I like to do to keep in shape. I have a ridiculous amount of fabulous friends that I enjoy hanging out with. So, I mean, like, I don’t fence or do Viking reenactments or dress up as a furry animal, like my life is very classic, standard. One of my friends wants to call me basic, which I thought was really insulting, but I guess I am.

I just wish I had something that I was really passionate about and did all the time, but I guess that’s work for me. That’s the thing I’m really passionate about—my family and my work. I don’t think there’s room for much else at this point in my life. I hope that one day, when I’m older, and if I’m lucky enough to live a long time, I’ll have more time to do something that really takes up my time and energy. I am pretty passionate about hunger—children’s hunger in the United States. It’s something I really feel strongly about, especially in a country as rich and powerful as ours. And then, I’m really worried about the environment. I think we really need to address that.

Yeah, yeah, it’s a little scary. Little scary. It’s a lot scary.

Yeah, it’s a byproduct of poverty, no question about it. I’ll tell you something—and this is political, so feel free to edit it out if you want—but there are 1.1 million abortions in this country every year, and 16 million American children go hungry. We spend so much of our time debating whether abortion should be legal in this country, but we spend almost no time addressing the fact that these children are going hungry every night. To me, that’s just ludicrous.

Not a goal, though. I was just thinking about that scene from that HBO show, Entourage—you know, the one with the guys in Hollywood. There’s this moment where he does this Craigslist thing, dressing up like that. It’s one of those weird, obscure references I could think of—something I’d do that would just be super strange and confusing.

I think you should put it in the podcast notes.

I bet you every single person at that party is listening to this podcast.

And now they’re gonna know. Now they’re gonna know.

That’s probably the weirdest story I’m gonna hear all week, Shane, I’m just gonna go with that.

Yeah, well, maybe that’s a great idea for a podcast, very weird.

Voice changing software.

Wow. This is going downhill fast.

I’ve been to Australia, and I would recommend it to anyone. It’s definitely a bucket list destination. My next bucket list item is New Zealand, and I’d also love to visit South Africa. Paris is another place I adore. I even took my father on a heritage tour to Budapest, which was amazing – such a beautiful city. I’ve been to Singapore as well, and I’d love to go back. I’ve been to some lovely places in Canada too. Do you speak Canadian? (laughs) But seriously, I really love to travel. It’s something I truly enjoy. I want to hit both the top and the bottom of the world – I’d love to visit Antarctica, and Iceland and Alaska are also on my list.

I was about to say…

Oh my gosh, figure out how to get me a trip to Sri Lanka next time, Shane!

Yeah, that might set you up for trafficking. So now you’re on the hook for meth and trafficking.

Everybody’s not gonna want me to be on their podcast, because they’re gonna think I’m a really bad criminal influence.

I don’t know what you could blackmail me for. I don’t have a lot. I got a trampoline and some challah.

You’re going to be in Sri Lanka dude!

Saturday. Sounds good. I’ll pencil you in. Actually, I don’t make tentative plans. I’m just letting you know now.

Definitely, I don’t know if I would call it awesome, but it was definitely up there as one of the more fun experiences.

I think that’s, I think that’s where we’re at.

Yeah, definitely. You win first place, but you might even get it for the whole month. I mean, really, but the year, the year has been nuts.

To rebut, yeah, I’m down with that. Okay, totally down with that.

Why would anyone want to get in contact with me?

So they can get in touch with me at AhaMediagroup.com, or Hello@AhaMediagroup.com.

Thank you, Shane, this is fun.

Okay. Bye.