Content Marketing Myths You Need to Know with Michael Brenner

Man, thanks for having me. How are you?

Yeah, it sounds good. So I live in Westchester, Pennsylvania, which is about 30 miles southwest of Philadelphia—it’s kind of a halfway point. I grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, which is about 50 miles directly west of Philly. My wife grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, which is about 30 miles directly south of Philadelphia. So where we live now is a sort of central point. My brother and sister-in-law ended up going to the university in town, so they live close by. My mom moved nearby as well. So, yeah, we didn’t all grow up here, but we ended up congregating around this area, and it’s nice.

I’m one of four—I’m the third of three sons, and then I have a younger sister. So we had a lot of fun in our household growing up.

Well, yeah, I mean, I do aspire to be a stripper at some point. So that’s kind of a life goal.

I’m trying to think. The town I grew up in—Reading, Pennsylvania—was a major industrial center back in the late 1800s, and the Reading Railroad was actually one of the more profitable railroads in the country. If you’ve played Monopoly, you’ll know it. More recently, Reading’s become famous for other things, too. It was once called America’s Pretzel City because many major pretzel manufacturers started, or at some point were based, in the city. Reading was also the outlet capital of the world for a while, until gangs invaded the city a couple of decades ago and someone got shot in the head, which basically killed the outlet industry in writing. Now its claim to fame is the largest murder rate per capita. So things have gone from good to bad to worse. There’s a lot of economic development happening there now. I’m rooting for the city. I haven’t lived there in, gosh, 30 years, but I still have a lot of friends and some family there, and I’m still rooting for it. If you grow up in an industrial city, any of us who have been there know the ups and downs of the economy.

Yeah, so I wanted to go to a small school in a big city. A couple of friends of mine, who were a year older from my high school, went to a small university in Philadelphia called St. Joe’s—St. Joseph’s University—right on the border of the city and suburbs, actually not far from Villanova (which is a bit more widely known). But it was a great school—about 1,000 kids, and pretty much everyone knew everyone else. About 50% were from the local area, 50% from elsewhere, but there was easy access to downtown Philadelphia and to beaches about an hour and a half away. I had a blast. Of all the people I know, I think I had a better college experience than they did. And the professors, the university, and the friends I made there—it was a nice little hub city.

I went in as an undeclared business major. St. Joe’s is a liberal arts school, so you go in undeclared, but you do pick a school. I chose the business school undeclared. Then I took my first finance course and realized I didn’t want to be in the business school—math was never a strong suit. But I stuck with it and graduated with sort of an informal business minor; I took all the credits for a business minor (plus some finance) but ended up graduating with an English Literature degree, which I loved. And there’s a study (I graduated in ’18) showing that liberal arts majors sometimes actually outperform business majors or MBAs in progressing up the management chain. So it served me well. I learned how to communicate, think critically, and write a sentence, which is always helpful. Ultimately, I think it served our speaking careers too—it taught me the fundamental components of a story.

Yeah, I’m kind of a nerd when it comes to geeking out about the components of effective storytelling. If you could see my desk, I’ve got index cards all over it with different formulas for telling stories—like Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, the Pixar approach, and a number of different ways you can structure a story. I just find it really fascinating. It’s one of the things I’m thinking about for my next book—although it’s kind of a saturated space—just the importance of storytelling, no matter what you do. If you think about the pandemic, for example, the CDC needs to figure out how to communicate information in a way that emotionally engages people. Or look at CEOs or CFOs; they need to learn how to tell a story, whether they’re running a business, a finance department, or even a global health organization. All of those roles rely on connecting with people through stories. So yeah, for me, it’s something I nerd out over. If I can find a niche or angle that’s unique, that might become my next book. I don’t know—we’ll see.

Yeah, and the myth I’d love to bust, if I could, is that a lot of people—and I even thought this at some point—look at these authors and think, “Wow, I remember reading them in college. I could never write like they do. I couldn’t. I’m not a natural-born storyteller.” But you can learn it. That’s one of the things I’ve realized: if you become a little bit of a superficial student of the art, you start to see there’s a formula—there are techniques anyone can apply. Actually, I did a webinar for Harvard Business Review on the art of storytelling for startup founders and small business owners, because it’s so important when they’re trying to get funding. Some of the formulas that are out there—and it’s actually one of the most downloaded HBR webinars of the last two or three years—tell me there’s something there. Those are some signals I look for from the universe to decide if this is a topic I should double down on. So we’ll see.

It’s kind of funny. I was actually fired from my first job before I even started. I wanted to get into consulting, and I graduated in ’93—we were coming out of a recession. I interviewed at a couple of the big consulting companies, competing with the top, smartest minds around the country for very few positions, and just didn’t make it. I ended up working for a market research company called Nielsen—many people have heard of them. They had an account management role open outside Philadelphia, working on the Johnson & Johnson account. If I’m allowed to say so, I think I am Johnson (laughs). And Johnson fired the company I was supposed to be working for—that made my position a requirement—so I got a call on Thursday before I started saying, “Hey, sorry, your job isn’t here anymore, but we do have an opening for a similar role out in Chicago.” So I was actually rehired the next week, but I had to move to Chicago for a similar role supporting the Wrigley gum company.

Nielsen, if you know the TV ratings side of it, is really a measurement company. They also measure things sold in supermarkets. They’re very, very busy right now. Any manufacturer or retailer that sells anything with a barcode—that’s what they track. They measure those four Ps of marketing, if you will. So yeah, it’s kind of interesting. I was selling data to the world’s greatest marketers, using that data around the four Ps—that was essentially my first job.

So it’s funny—I was there for three years, single, right out of school. Eventually, I worked my way into a marketing role that was based in New York, and I was allowed to commute about two days a week from Philly. This was before remote work became popular, so it was a bit of a battle, but I managed to move back to the area. I was in Chicago for two and a half years when I met my wife, got engaged, and then the Thursday before our wedding, they asked me to move back to Chicago for their global headquarters—with my wife this time. So, in total, I spent three years there single, and then three years there married, which was interesting. And honestly, Chicago is my favorite city in the world. It might not have the beaches, mountains, or ski resorts nearby, but 60% of the U.S. population is within a two-hour drive of Philadelphia, so there’s a lot to see there, too. But I really loved Chicago and had a great time there.

Yeah, so, to make a long story short, I was with Nielsen for nine years—about half of that in sales and half in marketing. Then we moved back here; I managed to get the company to move me back to Philadelphia, working remotely. At that point, I had a great mentorship with the CMO, who was two layers above me. He said, “Listen, there are four people reporting to me (or six, whatever it is), and none of them are leaving. I’m not leaving. The company’s offering packages right now, and we’d love to keep you, but you’ve basically hit the ceiling.” I was only 28. He told me, “You should take this package and go do something else.” So I did. I took the package—had six months of severance—and left on great terms. I’m still friends with almost everyone I worked with there.

I ended up at a couple of startups, and as I like to say, that’s where I learned to do marketing without a budget. At the time, it was essentially marketing with content, what we now call content marketing. We didn’t use that term back then, or at least I wasn’t aware of it, but that’s what I was doing—taking a couple of company websites, generating traffic and leads, implementing Salesforce, setting up marketing automation, and seeing really strong, “hockey stick” results.

After that, I was recruited to be the first head of digital marketing at SAP, where we focused on content-driven lead generation. The success of that program is basically all in The Content Formula. Since it worked so well, they asked me to head up a new global content marketing role that had never existed. I helped define the role and then ran it. So I spent about seven and a half years at SAP—first in digital, then in content marketing.

I did some content marketing strategy consulting for a software startup for just over a year, and that’s where I learned the process I wanted to use with my own clients. So in June 2015, I started Marketing Insider Group, really focusing on developing content marketing strategies—all based on those practical lessons I learned in corporate marketing departments and startups. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.

What’s interesting is that I see a lot of people focusing on industry segments or niches—they focus on B2B versus B2C, big budgets versus small, large organizations and their politics versus smaller, leaner ones. But I’ve found those differences aren’t always relevant. What’s true for every company is that you want to grow in a way that delivers a return on investment, and you need to figure out how to navigate your organization’s culture to build enough confidence, as a marketer, to propose and defend the things that drive results.

So really, the two books I’ve written—The Content Formula and Mean People Suck—are meant to address those points. The Content Formula is all about delivering guaranteed results with content marketing, even if you work somewhere that won’t let you do the marketing you know will work. It’s a way to break through that impasse—breaking through the politics and focusing on customers, because that’s the best way to deliver value. My career has basically followed my frustrations, if you will, and those books are my way of giving back and helping people navigate those challenges.

Thanks. I appreciate it. You know, one thing my publisher keeps emailing me about is how now’s the time to push the book—people are home, they have free time, and I could sell more copies. But I’m actually doing the opposite. I’m not really pushing it. In fact, if your audience wants to reach out to me on LinkedIn, I’m happy to send them a PDF of the book for free.

The book covers how to build the business case for marketing from an ROI perspective, as opposed to just doing something because a senior executive asked for it. One of my most popular lines (retweets when I speak) is, “Behind every bad marketing idea is an executive who asked for it,” and people laugh because it’s true. When I talk to senior marketers and ask, “Why are you doing this? Why are you wasting money here?” they often say it’s because someone in marketing, product, sales, or on the executive team wanted it.

Building the business case is the first step. The second step—finding the budget—is actually easier than people think. That’s because, in every audit I’ve done, 50%, 60%, or even 70% of a marketing budget is wasted on activities that produce no results. Granted, some of those activities are just hard to track. I’m not saying advertising doesn’t work—if you can spend the money, it might help. At SAP, we did a massive, expensive multi-attribution modeling project, and we found that when SAP spent a certain amount on advertising, it did increase the velocity of lead closure. It didn’t identify or close leads, but it helped move them through the pipeline faster by raising awareness. So yes, that can work. But there’s still a ton of marketing efforts—like lead generation programs, event marketing, or email campaigns—that should be measurable but aren’t showing results. That’s where you can find budget.

The bulk of the book focuses on measuring results and showing ROI. I present 10 formulas—calculations anyone can use to measure return on investment, whether you’re trying to reach, engage, convert, or retain new customers. It’s laid out in a logical way, tied together by my SAP story (and a few other case studies) showing how we turned $1 into $7. We did that by building the business case (looking at the many marketing campaigns that delivered zero results), finding the budget, and then implementing a marketing program that delivered real ROI.

Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, I’m happy to share the PDF of the book—The 10 Formulas—if folks just want to go right to the heart of the matter. But it’s been a lot of fun; it’s also been great lead gen for me, as well. I’m now working with a lot of clients who’ve read the book and asked, “Hey, can you come help us do this here?” So it’s been fun. One of the things I did when I started my first blog post back in May 2009—it was titled “Why I’m Starting a Blog,” and basically I just said, “All I want to do is learn.” At the time, I was in the digital function at SAP, leading the digital marketing efforts, and I was thinking, “I’m learning so much, and I’m making mistakes, but I just want to help people.” That’s been my main trajectory—amplified and accelerated because I’ve been trying to help folks. Anything I can do to help your audience, I’m here, just sharing these thoughts so we can achieve that goal together.

Yeah, there are a couple of things. The biggest challenge I see is that a lot of companies still don’t understand that “content” and “content marketing” are not the same thing. Or, as I like to say in my keynotes, “marketing with content” isn’t the same as “content marketing.”

What I mean is, an eBook isn’t content marketing. A single podcast episode isn’t content marketing. A podcast series is, because there’s a consistent commitment. A blog series or a commitment to publish on a regular schedule—that’s content marketing. A YouTube video isn’t content marketing if you don’t own the platform. A Facebook post, boost, or ad isn’t content marketing either. Especially in the UK and Europe, I still see a very campaign-based mentality: you pick a target, define a message, blast it out, and call that “content marketing” because you used content. It’s not.

You can probably tell I get worked up about people saying, “Oh, content marketing is just another name for advertising, or it’s just another name for marketing.” I hope it becomes another name for marketing, but right now most marketing is campaign-based and driven by advertising, and that’s not really content marketing.

So what are some components? First, content marketing can be promotional—but only if it answers a customer question. I say it has to be customer-question-and-answer focused. Sure, customers do ask, “What do you sell?” and “How much does it cost?” But I love using search terms to illustrate that for every one person searching for, say, an SAP cloud computing product, there are 10 or 30 or maybe 300 people searching “What is cloud computing?” or “Why do I need it in my business?” Then they start asking, “Who sells it? Who are the competitors?” Only at that point are they looking for your product. So you need to begin with the larger group asking more basic questions before you get into the direct promotional stuff.

Second, it’s consistent. One eBook, one blog post, or one podcast episode is not content marketing. Content marketing, like a publisher, answers questions every single day—or at least provides easy access to those answers on a regular basis. There’s consistency. In fact, I’ve written a lot about the “magical math of frequency”: going from random to regular to more frequent (weekly, every other day, daily, even a couple times a day) leads to an exponential increase, not just in traffic and social engagement, but in leads. I don’t have a single client that went from random to regular content and didn’t see a 30–400% increase in traffic—and they also saw a similar increase in leads. Like I used to tell my old boss: “It’s just math.” That phrase drove him crazy, but it’s true.

That math of frequency often gets lost in this false choice between “quality” and “quantity.” I’ve never sat down to write a blog post and said, “This is going to suck, but I have to publish on Tuesday.” I do my best every time, and I stick to the schedule. You do your best with every podcast. You’re consistent, and you produce the best you can on that schedule. No one decides to publish something intentionally bad just to crank out more stuff—why would you? So those are a couple of big myths or misunderstandings around content marketing. Sorry if I got too worked up.

Yeah, I love your questions. Again, I’m not sure when you’re going to publish this episode, but I just wrote an article on how to market in a time of fear. It’s totally free—your audience can check it out if they’d like. It’s funny—Katie Martell (who was also going to be at Oracle) published something on LinkedIn around the same time, and I published my piece on my blog site with almost the exact same title, within the same hour, on Friday last week (March 27, I think).

One of the things I talk about is finding your influencers—not just to share tweets, but to co-create for your audience. Right now, people are looking for expertise. Instead of sending out a generic COVID-19 email from your CEO, maybe send an email that says, “Here’s the future of our industry and how it’s being impacted by this pandemic. Here’s an expert we’ve reached out to.” I see companies doing that; I’ve been asked by a few myself. It shows you’re putting customers first.

At the end of March, I also wrote a post about the content marketing tools I use for my own business. One of them is a partner—DivvyHQ, which I use for content calendaring. The others, I’m not affiliated with in any way. I use Hootsuite for social sharing. If you get the pro account, you can semi-automate things: every time I publish a blog post, Hootsuite takes the RSS feed and automatically shares it to my LinkedIn (both business and personal). I don’t recommend automating everything, but it’s a great way to free you up to focus on engagement. For example, in Twitter, I’m not really sharing articles manually (that’s scheduled out); I’m there to thank people, comment on others’ posts, or reply to comments.

Hootsuite has an RSS function to auto-share. I also use Mailchimp to auto-create my RSS newsletter every Monday at 8 AM Eastern. As soon as I publish an article, it’s automatically queued for that newsletter. I use WordPress, like 60% of people around the world do. I also use SEMrush. (Again, I’m only partnered with Divvy; the others I’m not affiliated with.) SEMrush is great for any piece of content I write and for the content we plan for clients. We rely on SEO-driven analytics. You could also use Ahrefs or Moz—just to give equal time. Those are the tools I use on a daily basis, aside from the native Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook platforms.

So my first post was in May of 2009, so it’ll be 11 years in about two months. I think I’m up to 900-some published posts. I started with once a week, then moved up to two a week. Sometimes, like last week, I did three because I wanted to write about “How do you market in a time of fear?” It was on my mind. Even in that post, I talk about how, for me, it’s business as usual because I have a schedule—I stick to it. I’m not trying to be opportunistic in this time of fear. I think it’s awful for brands to run advertising campaigns unless they’re totally related. So for me, writing is kind of therapy. I listen to the questions I get from my audience and try to answer them as best I can in one or two articles a week. And I just wrote another post last Monday about how we generated nearly a million visitors in the last year by following this simple strategy of consistently answering customer questions in our content.

Of course. Marcus, Joe Pulizzi, and Ann Handley—those folks definitely influenced a lot of my success at SAP in the beginning, as well as how I act and work as a consultant.

Just under, in the last 12 months. Short of this pandemic impact, we had seen a decrease in traffic. I was doing some Google Trend research and saw that in a lot of B2B search terms—marketing, content, website development—search volume is down about 35 basis points from their highs (you can see that in Google Trends). But I have clients who are actually seeing a 10–20% increase in traffic because they’re writing about how their industry’s being impacted or things their customers should think about because of the current crisis. We were trending at about 100,000 visitors per month, so we would’ve gotten to a million in a rolling 12-month period pretty quickly.

It’s fun, it’s fun. I have clients—I’m a company of two—and I have clients with tens of thousands of employees worth billions in stock value, and they don’t get a million visitors a year. It’s crazy.

I always love to say you can talk to the one person who’s ready to buy today, or you can talk to that person and the 100 times more people who might be ready tomorrow or the next day. Why would you focus on just that one person? That’s what your sales team is for. It’s amazing how many companies treat their website like it’s just a sales brochure. They miss out on the chance to build trust, have conversations, and grow an audience they can nurture.

It was kind of organic. I actually worked my way through some pretty intense stage fright and discovered techniques to remind myself it’s not about me and my anxiety—it’s all about the audience. That was the trick that helped me turn a corner.

At SAP, I started getting asked to do webinars. Some of those did well enough that people began inviting me to speak at their events. I always compare it to writing: no one’s a great writer at their very first blog post, but by the time they’ve done 100, they’re pretty good. My first speech was probably terrible, but over time I got more confident. The height of my speaking career was about two years ago, but my health started to suffer, and I was missing my family. As a speaker, you have to chase every gig.

About a year and a half ago, I decided to focus on monthly, recurring revenue—client strategy, content delivery—and stop actively pursuing speaking engagements. I feel awful for friends who rely on speaking right now, but I got lucky. I had two May gigs canceled, but they were small-dollar events. I’ve got a couple more in the fall, though they’re not at the same level I used to command.

I’m still available to speak. If there’s an event I want to attend anyway, it’s great if I get paid to be there. But I have four kids, ages 8 to 16, and they’re in that phase where—normally—I’d be driving them around to practices and after-school stuff. Honestly, I’m happy to be home.

Yeah, so this is the latest one: Mean People Suck. It was, you know, kind of a passion project. Again, coming from a cultural aspect, I wrote a book starting with the idea that advertising is dead—because I feel there’s so much data behind just pounding promotion and product in front of people, and that’s not the best way to sell. But I really started to wonder why people do advertising. Why do they think marketing is just advertising? And again, I’m not saying advertising doesn’t have its place, but I like to joke: if you ask your mom what marketing is, she’ll say “ads.” If you ask a CFO what marketing is, he’ll say “the ad budget.” You know—the TVs, that stuff we spend money on—and they don’t realize it’s supposed to be a conversation.

So I started with marketing, but it turned into more of a cultural or leadership book—really addressing the fact that we don’t put customers at the center of our organization. I think marketing can lead customer experience transformations across companies. This book’s actually doing better—trending better than The Content Formula did. I have merch, too, so if anybody in your audience wants to buy the book on Amazon, I’ll send them one—just send me a note, and I’ll send a T-shirt as well. I did one speech for an HR publisher most people would know, and the fee from that alone covered the cost of writing the book. So, at this point, every dollar is bringing a return. I’m not an organizational design consultant; I’m not looking to get into leadership development, necessarily—but marketing transformation is certainly on CMOs’ minds. I do believe marketing can lead that transformation, so we’ll see.

Don’t do it. I have to give some handling credit for this: if you’re a marketer and you’re doing anything right now—if you have empathy for your customers, or you put, as Ann would say, “make your customer the hero of the story”—you wouldn’t be doing so much of the marketing we’re seeing right now in these times. I saw an ad for Chevy trucks last night. The dealerships are closed. I have friends who work at the Chevy dealership by my house—they’re struggling, they’re fearful. Yet you’re running ads for trucks? Like, what are you doing, Chevy? Those are the kinds of things you’re not—your truck isn’t the hero of your story; your customers should be the heroes. So think of your marketing like that. That’s what “not sucking” means: put your customers, your employees, ahead of your business and your own fears. I think the world would be a better place.

Sure, sure, definitely. So, my dad passed away 10 years ago—he was diagnosed with lung cancer almost exactly 10 years ago and passed away in just a few months. It was crazy how fast it went. I certainly miss him every day. Strangely enough, during this pandemic, I’ve been dreaming about him almost every night. So I guess I’m looking back for some comfort, maybe. He was my best friend in my adult life, and I feel lucky to have had that relationship.

I mentioned Joseph Campbell. I’m kind of a story nerd, and Joseph Campbell’s probably one of the smartest people around. The insight I love—and I remember learning about this, even after graduating with an English Lit degree—was how he studied foundational stories from cultures around the world and found a common thread. They had a common flow, the hero’s journey that he basically reverse-engineered. It shows that even Aboriginal peoples, with no contact to the outside world, tell stories the same way we do. We’re connected; we’re all the same. I love that aspect of what he did.

Then, of course, you’ve got to bring in a political figure. I picked Martin Luther King Jr. I always say he was like a warrior who could have grabbed a gun or a knife, but instead, he used intelligence and skill to bring people together with hope, optimism, and peace in a way I couldn’t have done. If I’d grown up during that time, I probably would’ve been pretty angry. So I give him a lot of credit for not being a physically angry individual but using spirituality and intelligence to inspire millions of people and create what I see as a step toward—maybe a march toward—equality.

Yeah, sure. marketinginsidergroup.com is where you’ll find my content on marketing and all things content. Meanwhile, meanpeoplesuck.com is where you can buy T-shirts or books. LinkedIn is probably the best way to reach out—just send me a connection request with a personal note. Or just once, if we haven’t already connected, I do try to connect with everyone who doesn’t look like spam. Just send me a message: “Hey, I heard you on the podcast. Can you send me a PDF for free?” I’d be happy to do that.

It was available for a really small amount. Can you believe it? When I heard about it—I have to be honest, my wife and I know we’re over time, but we actually thought we might become billionaires with a fashion brand using the meanpeoplesuck domain and creating T-shirts. I’ve only sold two—two total. So I’ve given up on the idea of becoming fashion millionaires or billionaires. But yeah, who knew that domain would be available?

Really, really affordable. And yeah, I’m writing about one post a week on cultural leadership. There’s some marketing in it, but mostly it’s about how companies need to change and focus on customers and employees.

Thanks for having me. It was fun.