Why Content Marketing Isn’t a Long-Term Process with Andrew and Pete

Your Dream Business

English - September 22, 2018 23:41 - 58 minutes - 56.4 MB - ★★★★★ - 34 ratings
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Previous Episode: Facebook Advertising, Entrepreneurialism & Managing Stress with Rick Mulready

Next Episode: Email Marketing 101: Tips and Tricks

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTContent marketing isn’t an overnight success. However, it doesn’t have to take years like you’ve been told. It’s only long-term if your content is boring and you’re the same as everyone else.Sometimes, it isn’t enough to be yourself in content. It takes being different and standing out to make a difference and to grow.Consistency is key with marketing. Create an amazing idea and be consistent in always improving. However, don’t consistently do something that isn’t working. Be consistent with what IS working.Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone is a great tool for marketing. Test the waters using your Instagram story or social media first to see how it’s received!What piece of content got the best reaction? Milk it. Use it again and create something new out of it!For bouncing ideas around as a solopreneur, find an accountability partner or get involved in a mastermind group.
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…You have to be different. Don’t be afraid to break the mold and do things others won’t expect. There are so many marketing services out there, so it will take something new and unique to make it all work. The moment you stand out, the quicker you grow.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSContent marketing isn’t a long-term strategy – 12:13The remarkability trifle -14:44How to test your ideas with reaction spikes – 22:04All about Andrew and Pete’s very first event Atomicon 2019 – 45:52
LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODEAndrew and Pete’s website Find Andrew and Pete on:Facebook Instagram Twitter Andrew and Pete TV Atomicon 2019
Transcript below

Hello and welcome to episode 31 of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple podcast. I am your host, Teresa Heath Wearing. I am so glad to have you here with me today. I am now at the end of September, where we have focused the entire of September on interviews, on bringing you amazing guests. Today, to round off, I have not disappointed yet again. I have got a fantastic guest for you today. Now it's not to say that after this week, we're not doing guests anymore, that's not the case at all. We're going to mix things up. So there's going to be episodes with me that are solo episodes, and then we're going to have yet more amazing interviews. I still have some amazing people lined up coming soon. But I just wanted to really kickstart the interviews, as I had done none since starting the podcast. Hence, why I decided to dedicate an entire month just to giving you amazing guests.

Today, I've not got one, but two amazing guests. I am so privileged to not only have them as guests on the podcast because they're amazing marketers, but that I am lucky enough to have them as friends. So in today's podcast, I bring you Andrew and Pete. It's like I need to fanfare again, I want to do this on every single one. I am definitely going to have to get that kind of sound clip that plays when I mention someone's name. So if you haven't heard of Andrew and Pete, they are the funnel content marketing duo who help business and brands get faster results from their content. They have a weekly YouTube show, and they run one of the UK's leading content marketing membership communities called Atomic, where they...

I was lucky enough, not so long ago, to do a lesson for them all about webinars and converting people from an email to a sale. So that was great. So they provide some great content within their membership. They've also written two books, the Hippocampus, and Content Mavericks. They regularly keynote internationally at conferences around the world. They've spoken at Social Media Marketing World a number of times. I have to say, they are some of the most entertaining people you will see on a stage.

Whenever I see Andrew and Pete, I always, A, learn something from them, and B, am thoroughly entertained. So, today, you are up for a real treat, because this is going to be a fun podcast. I do feel, though, it needs to have a slight warning in place that there is a lot of laughing going on. So I apologise at times if it gets a bit silly. But I can assure you, they drop some amazing value bombs and you are going to get some great content from this podcast episode. They are the kings of content. So let me not take up any more time and go straight to the interview. Here's Andrew and Pete.

So I am super excited about today's podcast episode, and to introduce you to these amazing guys that I am very lucky to call my friends. So it gives me the greatest pleasure to welcome Andrew and Pete, yay. Thank you so much for coming on, guys. I am so please to have you on the podcast with me today. Thank you for saying yes.

Aw, it's our pleasure.

We would say yes to you any day of the week.

Aw, thanks guys.

I feel like there should be a pre warning, though, to anyone listening, that when Andrew and Teresa are in the same room, they laugh a hell of a lot. We just trigger each other off. I don't know what it is.

We love a laugh, don't we?

We love a laugh. It's good exercise.

Do you know what? I think it's a great way to be. I think if you can laugh at stuff, then life is just so much nicer, isn't it? And easier.

We should call each other every morning just to-

Just to like pump each other up, get each other kind of all siked for the day. The problem is, though, the other thing that we do is we get on a call, and we take forever, because we just can't stop laughing. So we are ...

For this podcast interview, we've already taken half an hour. We've only just started recording.

Yeah, yeah. So I apologise now, that this is going to be ... This is going to be great, these guys are fantastic. It's going to be fun. But we are going to laugh a lot, which hopefully you don't mind, because I quite like that.

I'm going to try not to.

Yes, should we try and be reasonable.

[inaudible 00:05:13].

Yeah, we ought to do five minutes.

I think Pete is going to keep us on chat.

Yes, absolutely. I think we need to be kept on chat.

This is the look.

Oh, that's a good look.

It's great for a podcast.

You have to screenshot that look, so that people can see. But yeah, Pete just gave me a nice sort of firm, teacher stare, eyebrows down, basically saying that is enough now, get on with the podcast.

Question one, please.

Let's talk about content.

So, let me start off, because I just have to let you guys talk, because honestly, we're just going to keep laughing. So let me start off, if my audience hasn't heard of you before, one, where have you been? Because Andrew and Pete are amazing. But tell me guys, who you are, how you got to be doing what you're doing now, which is mainly just laughing? But please share for our audience.

Okay, so me and Andrew, we've set up a business together and we met each other at university. We bonded over our friendship to one day rule the world and run a business together. When university was over, we had to make that decision of do we go into business together? Do we not? Do we just get a job like everyone else? What do we do? Andrew wanted to move all the way to the other side of the country to live in New Castle, which is just below the wall, hello Scotland, and any Americans there. He wanted to go and live with his girlfriend. I was like, oh my god, what do I do? Because I'm going to have to move out of my comfort zone, I've only ever lived with my parents and the university halls-

Which was like half an hour away from his parents.

Yeah, okay. My parents did everything for me. I had to move all the way to New Castle, to set up a business in a place where I knew absolutely nobody. We have no business contacts, we had no experience, we didn't really have a proper business at that point. We had no content, we had no social media presence. We thought, how the hell are we ever going to make this work? So we started doing all the regular things that everyone does. I made that decision, let's move to New Castle with Andrew. I decided to be that third wheel in the relationship. I didn't get the hint.

Yeah, his girlfriend was thinking, great, we'll get away from Pete now. Pete was like, no, no, I'll just come with you.

All the same house as well, it was tough.

I'll sleep on the end of the bed, it'll be fine.

Just a little.

So we did everything that we should do, and that's something that, a lot of people get into that stage where everyone is doing all the things they think they should be doing in the way that they should be doing it. We were [inaudible 00:08:08], we were doing email marketing, we were tweeting, we had a LinkedIn, we had a Facebook page. We were doing everything right-ish. But yet, we weren't seeing any results. Not any results, which meant nothing. It was really devastating. But we knew that it was a longterm strategy. So that's what we always tell you, right? It's a longterm strategy.

In this podcast today, I'm going to prove to you that it's not a longterm strategy. Well, it is, but you can get short term benefits too. We were doing this for so long, and nothing was happening. In fact, we got all of our results from networking, face to face business networking. We did that, because although we were the two youngest people in the room, like literally every time, we looked like we were 12. We would always go and do something daft, wouldn't we? We'd go and take indoor fireworks, [crosstalk 00:09:06]-

We threw chocolate across the room.

Once it landed down a woman's top, and a man went to grab it, and it got awkward. But it was hilarious.

That's a true story. I don't think she ever came back. It was like I was aiming, but I honestly wasn't. I was forgiven, because the guy that went down to get it, I feel like everyone thought, what in the world?

I think everybody does networking, especially when you're starting in a location. I have been to more networking things than I care to remember. I can only imagine how you two went down, because they're not that fun. You know? People aren't for like ... Sometimes when people do do quirky things, it's a bit like, oh, cringe. But, I can only imagine that they must have thought, what the hell have we got here? When you two walked through the door dressed as [inaudible 00:10:00].

We made a name for ourselves quite fast.

Locally.

Locally, anyway. But still nothing was happening online. Like you said, you can imagine how people are reacting, because nobody does anything really different.

It did not go down well at BMI.

Probably one of the most serious ones I've ever been to.

Yeah, they did not want us to join, I don't think. Well, it kind of, the point there was it was working offline with networking, because we were completely ourselves, we did things completely differently. Looking at our online presence, it just didn't match up. It was just boring, it was blasé, it was the same as everyone else. That's when we though, right, we've kind of conquered New Castle, let's try to conquer the world, which was always the grand plan.

How do we take what's working offline and put it more online? So that's when we really started looking at our online content, thinking how do we make this more fun? How do we make it more sharable? How do we make it more us? It wasn't necessarily, I hate the overnight success kind of thing of it. But, relatively quickly, like six to 12 months, we were suddenly becoming more and more known. A lot more people knew about us, a lot more people were sharing our content. It felt like we had funds for the first time. We started getting us to speak at awesome events, even though people had never seen us speak. They had just kind of seen our online content, assumed we could speak, and booked us these huge events all over the world. That was over maybe 12 months.

Yeah. So like, I mean, in the first six months of, what was it? 2015? We achieved more in that first six months of the year than we had in the previous five months. We made more money, we got more speaking gigs, we got more ...

Five years.

Sorry, yeah.

Take two.

That's quick.

Content marketing isn’t a long-term strategy

We did more in six months than we did in five, In five years. So when people say content marketing is a longterm strategy, it's a longterm strategy if your content is horrendously boring and you're not constantly improving, and you're not different from everyone else, and you're not making those fast improvements. So the moment you do it right, you do see immediate benefits. Our very first speaking gig was Social Media Marketing World.

What? No.

That was our first conference.

The world's largest social media ...

That was our first conference, yeah.

For anybody who doesn't know Social Media Marketing World, it's a huge ... It's probably, I think now, guys, it's the world's best social media conference, isn't it? It's a massive event. For someone like me, and for these guys, and anybody in our industry, that has got to be the highlight. It's got to be up there on the pinnacle of events to speak at. So that fact that that was your first event you spoke at, that is crazy.

We were crapping ourselves.

You were like, what if we're dreadful? No one's ever seen us speak before. We could be awful. But the funny thing was, all you said you did there was be yourself, you know. You had this fun personality offline, and for whatever reason, you weren't putting that online. The minute you did, the minute you were honest and said, actually, this is who we are, it made such a difference to your business.

What we will say there is, though, because I feel like this phrase is bandied about a lot, like the be yourself and everything is going to be great. I'm going to actually challenge that and nix that and say-

Don't be yourself.

Because often times, like yes, we want you to be more of yourself, get yourself more, and that's what builds the trust in relationships. But for some people and for some businesses, that isn't enough. For some people, that isn't enough. In a lot of industries, especially the really saturated industries, it's not going to be enough. How many marketing podcasts are there?

Oh man.

How many marketing YouTube channels are there?

Yeah.

The remarkability trifle

Everyone is being themselves, but yet, why are none of them growing? Or why are you struggling to grow? Because everyone is doing it, right? So it takes more than just being yourself. It takes being different, it takes standing up. That's what's going to make it worth sharing, worth subscribing to, worth wanting to come back for more, worth telling people. That's the level that we want to get to. We almost see it as like three different levels. So we call this the remarkability trifle.

We've never talked about the trifle on a podcast before. So this is the first-

This is like an exclusive trifle talk. We haven't talked about trifle either. So this is a first for both of us.

I get Pete, like, are we actually talking about the trifle? We've never actually talked about the trifle before.

I mean, okay, to say this, as I'm saying it, I'm going to go with it anyway. Now, there's a trifle.

Now there's a trifle.

Have to tell you about the trifle now.

Okay, so the first layer of the trifle.

Well, the first layer of the trifle is ideation. So it's coming up with those ideas. So we've got 1,000 ways for you to come up with more creative ideas, and we'll go through those in a little bit. The second level of layer of the trifle is about getting validation. So if you went with yourself, how do you have the confidence to take forward those ideas? How many of you listen to this podcast, have thought of a really fun content idea, kind of giggled to yourself, gone, all that would be great, and then never done it? Right? You're too scared, you don't know how it's going to go, you're going to ruin this professional image that you've been trying to build up. So you might be a little bit scared.

So how are you going to get the confidence? Then if you're in a team or a bigger company, how are you going to convince your boss, your peers, that this is a good idea? Then if you're an agency, how are you going to convince your clients that this is something that you should do for them and it's going to work? Then the third layer, once you've tested that, once you've got that buy in, is about dependability. So one of the biggest problems we had was we really had a lot of different creative things going on. We were known to lots of different people for doing different things creatively. For some people, we were known as those guys that had the funny Twitter DM, to some people we were known as those guys that did that online conference once.

Or dressed as zombies, once.

It was always once. We always did a lot of crazy things, but just once. So it becomes-

Do you have a list, when you say once?

Oh, no. Once.

It was the face. I know, also, you can't see this, but his face when he said the word once, as well, was really good. He was really emphasising the once.

Oh god.

Oh no.

So you did it all once.

Yeah.

That was a good one.

You can't say, oh, you should go follow Andrew and Pete because they do this really cool, and then list the thing. You can't do that. So what we say is you need that five second story. What is that five second story? So for example, our YouTube channel, go check out Andrew and Pete's YouTube channel, they talk about marketing, but they do it in a really fun way. So there's lots of fun, and [inaudible 00:18:14]. Sent to Andrew and Pete's podcast, it's like a game show, where the guests have to drop value bombs to win points, and there's that overall winner.

So it's almost like two prong, right? So you need that kind of story that people can pass on. You need to know what that story is, and repeat it. Yeah? Welcome to our YouTube channel, where we make marketing unboring, or that kind of thing. Then you also need to be consistent. I think that's something that we got really serious about around the same time when we realised, you know what? We need to do this better online. It was just that consistency, like every single week, new piece of content, constantly reminding people. It's completely compounded as well. When you start getting consistent, every single piece of content adds to that in an almost exponential way.

So for example, if we release a video on YouTube every week ... Go check out our YouTube channel by the way, Andrewandpete.tv. So let's say one of our videos gets one view, another gets ten views every week or every month. Over time, those ones and tens, they just keep adding up and adding up. I remember looking at our...

Twitter Mentions

@andrewandpete