Ep 137 - Digital Content Strategy: An interview with Matt Bell, Co-Founder, of MessageUp

As a B2B leader, you need your business to stand out so that you can connect with more prospects – even if you have a small team and limited resources. That's where Matt Bell with MessageUp provides leadership with content strategy. Content marketing has become mission critical for B2B companies to connect with prospects in today's digital world. 

In this episode, we interview Matt Bell to learn more about his team at MessageUp.  How did an Engineer end up in marketing? How can a well executive content strategy help your company stand out? We dive deep into content marketing in this episode.  Learn the inside tips to take your business to the next level.

Be sure to subscribe to be notified of our next episode. If you liked this podcast, please hit the like and share button.  Visit our website to see how we can help your business. 

Transcript

 Ronjini Joshua: Episode 137 interview with Matt Bell from Message Up.

Ronjini Joshua: Hello and welcome to Episode 137. Yep. That we are finally there. The number we've been waiting for and today we are talking to Matt Bell, the founder and CEO of message up, a content marketing company. HI, Matt. Good, thanks for joining me today.

Matt Bell: Hi Ronjini. How you doing?

Matt Bell: My pleasure to congratulations on reaching the magical 137.

Ronjini Joshua: it is the magic now.

Ronjini Joshua: 137. It's such a spell day of so I would love to do a quick introduction of yourself. How'd you get to where you are today and we'll have some exciting content marketing questions to follow.

Matt Bell: Sounds good. Matt Bell. You might be able to detect from my accent that I've come from landsafar. I was born and raised in England. Lived the first 20 odd years of my life there till I went to college and then roamed around the world. I was part of a large energy company for a while. I'm an engineer by training. So we'll talk about how you get from engineering to marketing maybe in a minute.

Matt Bell: And landed in the US in 2001. I live in Houston Texas. It's very cool home. Now have done for the last 20-something years and my career took me on a really kind of serendipitous journey. I was an engineer as I said, and I worked my way into a role involving new technology and that led me into venture capital hoping to, invest the company's money in growing early stage companies and I got the bug for starting and growing companies there, and I ended up leaving to join one of those companies and eventually became the CEO and that company for several years. Did a couple more of those kind of investor backed business jobs. And then in 2019 decided, what, I've always been a builder that's why I became an engineer like building things probably more than I like actually running a company because as it grows more and more of that becomes finance and love all those things.

Ronjini Joshua: I don't think anybody likes running a company.

Matt Bell: Yeah, it's funny. once you get to do it for a while. You realize it's not necessarily what it's cracked up to be. it's no,…

Ronjini Joshua: Not the fun part. Nope.

Matt Bell: it's nice to be the face of the franchise. It's nice to do that but I was spending less and less of my time actually building the business and realize that, that's what I really wanted to do. So I took a step back and became a strategy and marketing consultant trying to help companies position themselves and grow. And that's what I've been doing since. And I found a message up in 2000 21 after having spent a couple of years working with all the B2B companies. And realizing that this content marketing piece that we're going to talk about was really at the heart of a lot of the challenges that they were facing. So, That's a very short version of a twisty, turvy journey.

Ronjini Joshua: yeah, I mean it's really funny that you are engineered to me because, we work with a lot of tech startups, and anytime, I talk to an engineer, they're typically communications wise incoherent, So we're yeah.

Matt Bell: We'll get there.

Ronjini Joshua: So we usually are the ones that have to bridge the gap. We have to sit there and ask them numerous amounts of questions that they probably think are so silly and dumb just to get to the kind of the root of what they're trying to communicate to their audience. So it's interesting that you came from an engineering background

Matt Bell: And I came from real engineering hard, making metal engineering not from the software side. and…

Ronjini Joshua: Okay.

Matt Bell: if that changes anything, I think we're still generally incurrent.

Ronjini Joshua: We're still same boat, but It's good to know that you kind of have touched every part of that. Communication funnel, from the user, the engineering like that architect to the person who architects the actual business side, who has to speak clearly to get investors and do all that. so now obviously content marketing which I've been saying for a long time, but I think now is finally resonating that content marketing and maximizing content is really the key to any good communication program and there's so many ways to do that. And I think, my kind of peace There is, I always try to say, hey, public relations is bridging, the gap between all the different departments within your company that communicate. But then also pulling those messages all together because often times what we found is that the sales team is saying one thing the

Ronjini Joshua: the same one thing. The team is saying something and they're kind of similar but not really like, they don't match 100%. And I think that's when you start, having this kind of communication breakdown to your customers, they don't feel like it's Consistent and congruent. So we'll talk about that a bit.

Matt Bell: Quite likely, I use the words authenticity and consistency far too many times my clients liking, but those to me are the two things that underpin all great communication. If you're being authentic and you're consistent with it, people will trust you and you can do business with them.

00:05:00

Ronjini Joshua: so, I'm interested to hear your perspective on how, I guess business development in general for especially, small companies startups has changed. Why content marketing has become so important. Why do you think that's it? The case.

Matt Bell: I think you actually have to look at the buyer and not the seller, and I think that's where the biggest change. So, if you think about your own life, We used to go to the store. I want to buy myself a T-shirt, I'll go, into the city and I'll go to a few shops and I'll look around, I'll touch and feel and I'll buy now, I would never dream of doing that. And I get my computer out and I search and I read reviews and I order my T-shirts and I wait for them to show up in the mailbox. And so the consumer B2C market is way ahead.

Ronjini Joshua: Nice.

Matt Bell: It's a very advanced digital buying experience and…

Ronjini Joshua: Or they're impatient,…

Matt Bell: what's happened and…

Ronjini Joshua: they're just impatient.

Matt Bell: yeah, right it's convenience right? We love convenience and…

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: so it's very hard to go back from convenience to something less convenient and indeed as a society I think we're figuring out we might a little too convenient and we're trying to make some of those backward steps and It's hard to give it up once you've experienced it.

Matt Bell: What we're seeing is people taking that into the industrial or the B2B space. So the people that are doing the buying there are also human beings and in their private lives, they're also sitting on their couch, buying everything online. So lo and behold, they go to work and say Why do I need to get on an airplane and then go and visit a supplier or go to a trade show? Why do people have to come and meet me in my office? Which means I have to put my smart clothes on. Why can't I do all of this online? And that transition was happening already pre-pandemic, that we were seeing more search and evaluation, and even purchasing online. And then of course, with the work from home, the shutdown of the pandemic, all of that got accelerated, like, it has everywhere else.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: And that's gonna stick, right? And so, now, a lot of those buyers who used to sit together in one office in headquarters a scattered all over the country or even all over the world, excuse me. So if you're a vendor trying to reach those buyers you have to do it digitally. You cannot now go and knock on the door and say Hey let me show you what I have to off.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah, absolutely. So that brings us to the whole idea of content marketing is pretty much king. So when you're a company that's looking to promote yourself and obviously there's so many ways that you could do it. I find that a lot of our customers get caught up in the okay. What exactly should I be producing as far as content? So where do you guys start when it comes to identifying,…

Matt Bell: Now.

Ronjini Joshua: what kind of content should I produce?

Matt Bell: So I'm gonna sound like a school teacher and Do your homework because I think, companies think that they can leap into concept marketing. We know who we are. We know we want to say. So let's just bang that out in a blog post or social media wherever and I like to rewind from there and go. Okay, before we start, Why are you in business? Who is your ideal customer? And let's think about it through their eyes. And so we do a lot of what we call buyers journey mapping thinking about that, by all the way from, when they first become aware that they might want something, you produce to them going through the evaluation phase of seeing, what alternatives are out there to choosing your solution and going on and implementing and hopefully becoming an advocate for your brand. In those early stages. Thinking about what do they need to read? Or see in a video or hear in a podcast?

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Matt Bell: What information do they need to receive somewhere?

Matt Bell: In order to be able to progress through that journey and arrive at a decision to buy. And to me that tells you what that relevant helpful information is, you should be sharing and also tells you where you should be sharing it because you can think about. those prospects, Where are they going to go, Are they just going to go to Google? Are they going to go to YouTube? The other big search engine, is it on LinkedIn? Are they on Facebook? are they going to read it on a billboard? I mean, there's so many places we can put content, but not,

Ronjini Joshua: I love having these conversation because, as you're talking, I'm like going through my mind. Where are they gonna find me? Where, …

Matt Bell: Yeah.

Ronjini Joshua: I have these conversation with myself all the time. And it's so funny to remind yourself. he's just said, You take your ego out of it. It's about the customer and you have to remind yourself. What exactly are they doing at that moment,…

Matt Bell: Yeah.

Ronjini Joshua: when they need your help?

Matt Bell: And that's especially true for businesses that have been around for a while. If you're running marketing for a tenured business that say, it's been around 40 years and it grew up long before digital marketing was a thing.

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Matt Bell: And all of a sudden that company is realizing we're not getting found in the places that we used to because the buyers aren't there anymore, the buyers are now sitting on their couch and timbuktu wherever they are and they're looking online. So the company has to stop putting information where it has traditionally done and perhaps wants to do so and actually force itself to do content marketing somewhere else. And when there's a finite resource for doing that, you've got to be pretty selective. One of the bees,…

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Matt Bell: I, bees in my bonnet is always don't do random acts of marketing. Don't do one billboard here and one social post there and one blog post there because all of those algorithms and your customer actually reward consistency. They want to see you in the same places over and over. So they become used to you and start to trust you and see you as a trusted source of information.

00:10:00

Ronjini Joshua: a sense of curiosity building, right?

Matt Bell: I mean, how often. And I work with clients all the time that, a few months into the process of kind of doing content marketing, If you'd like, we'll say, Wow, we've just had three customers tell They're seeing us everywhere. We seem to see you guys everywhere. These days. And the answer, isn't that you're everywhere. you're in the places that they notice you. And so, …

Ronjini Joshua: It's like when you're buying a brand new car,…

Matt Bell: you're on the right channel when you start to hear that,

Ronjini Joshua: this is you figured out what car you want and then all of a sudden you see it all the time.

Matt Bell: That's it. Yeah, there's loads of them. Very true.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah. No. That's yeah.

Matt Bell: And in the same color, amazing. That's

Ronjini Joshua: You're like Wait a minute. Wait, do I and then you're like Do I really want that card?

Matt Bell: Yeah.

Ronjini Joshua: Do I have to pick a different color? But yeah, I know that. That's very true and I think that's something for people to remember too. It's the same thing like the car example. It's like once they're kind of ready to make a decision, they see you everywhere. But then there are not just seeing you, they're seeing your competitors as well. So you've kind of given us the insight of okay, what should you do? And you should do more and few different tactics, but how do you pick the type of content that you're How do you know that the type of content that you're gonna put out is gonna be effective? I guess those are two different questions. Sorry, I jumped ahead of myself.

Matt Bell: They're related to each other and…

Ronjini Joshua: Yes.

Matt Bell: there's I think a common answer, which is you have to experiment, Marketing is a game of experiments, there is no fixed and…

Ronjini Joshua: Mmm.

Matt Bell: so if the answer was fixed, everybody would do it. And then it wouldn't work for anybody, everybody would be doing the same thing so it's a constant game of trying to find out what's working.

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Matt Bell: Best, what's resonating both with humans and with algorithms, So LinkedIn, famously changed its algorithm last week and all sorts of people are up in arms because all the posts that they were putting out aren't working anymore and that's the reality. The goal posts. Keep moving marketers. Can never win. Poor souls that we are. So First of…

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: it's figuring out. if I'm the buyer what kind of content do I do I notice what kind of content do I find engaging kind of content? Do I have time for if I'm marketing? Someone who's an extremely busy person,…

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: don't send them a 53 page ebook that's unlikely to work. but at the same time,

Ronjini Joshua: Send him a tip or something? Yeah.

Matt Bell: Yeah, right that's so let's focus on snappy things that will get their attention and engage them. Each channel has appropriate content, So a billboard, you can only fit 12 words on that. You can see from 800 feet away or whatever the formula. There is for billboards LinkedIn post.

Ronjini Joshua: Okay.

Matt Bell: Maybe it's a thousand characters, a blog post thousand words. So formats fit a big question at the moment I think is video versus text. people are increasingly receptive to video buyers even business buyers will go to YouTube before Google so they like to see a video more than they like to see pages of links and…

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: texts. And so deciding. Okay, Best in video as what's going to work. Best written down versus an infographic. For example, all good questions. Yep.

Ronjini Joshua: I think it depends on what you're delivering, Because there are some things where I just want to quick answer in a Google and…

Matt Bell: Yep.

Ronjini Joshua: then there's Okay I think this requires a quick explanation, then I would go to YouTube so I think that's also something you have to think about when you're creating those contents.

Matt Bell: And it varies by stage in that buyer's journey. So if they're at the very early awareness stage and…

Matt Bell: they're just trying to figure out What is this problem, I'm trying to solve and what kind of solutions exist, and what other people doing and is it even worth my time? That's one kind of content. Once I move into evaluation, I need more factual content. I need to be able to, tell me how I should be comparing different solutions of this type. what doesn't matter how I should evaluate that? And then once I get into the actual purchasing, now we're down to nuts and bolts, right? You want to know pricing, you want to know what trainings available, What kind of support do you offer me and…

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Matt Bell: things like that? Those different types of content lend themselves to different formats. Maybe it's videos earlier on, maybe it's a more informative article in the middle. Maybe it's a knowledge base and FAQ at the end, then function of the information. The purpose it's serving really helps to define what format it goes.

Ronjini Joshua: One of the things that you mentioned just a little bit ago, was experimenting and…

Matt Bell: yeah.

Ronjini Joshua: That to me, in my heart, it hurts me because I'm like God, that means to me experimenting to equals time and…

Matt Bell: Can you imagine…

Ronjini Joshua: I'm a very impatient person.

Matt Bell: how it sounds to an engineer where they're supposed to be a formula? And a right answer for everything. I mean it's horrific.

Ronjini Joshua: And so for me I want to know something's gonna work and it's gonna work quickly and I know a lot of startups. Also they don't always have the luxury of time or the resources of time and money. And so what do you say? I mean again I'm in the PR game so I know things take time. I've done in a review where it doesn't come out for six months and you're just every day. I'm just trying not to bother somebody to post a review because I know That a normal human takes a long time. So, how do you navigate along around these time constraints and…

00:15:00

Matt Bell: No.

Ronjini Joshua: and what do you plan for in advance? Because it just feel like There's a lot of impatience because there's so much information and things happening all the time. Our level of patients has declined drastically. I know mine has. what do you say to people? When you're also talking about experimenting? What does that exactly mean and how much time does that take?

Matt Bell: Yeah. it's an uphill struggle and unfortunately, if you have a common sense conversation about marketing, you realize it takes time it costs money and it's quite hard to get right? If you just look at your social media feed, it is full of people saying. It's quick, it's cheap. It's easy. Give me a very small amount of money.

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Matt Bell: I'll put 50 leads in your box tomorrow. You'll be a millionaire by the end of the month,…

Ronjini Joshua: Exactly. Yeah.

Matt Bell: Which is all nonsense because if any of that actually worked again we would all jump on it. Why wouldn't we? And then it would stop work. So we know that sort of sensible level that it that easy. Experiments don't have to be complicated and they don't have to take a long time if you do them, right. And…

Matt Bell: what do I mean by I think the mistake, I see a lot of companies making is experimenting with too many things at once.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: And then they get a bunch of answers and they go, we can't actually tell what works and what didn't because they're all sort of overlapping and mixed in. So for me, it's about saying, What's the most important answer? I could get today between a and b. What if I crack that one, then that takes me down a certain path, let's go test that first and…

Ronjini Joshua: Okay.

Matt Bell: only that, and get an answer. And then, let's test something else. And then, let's test something else. And I think the companies that most successfully run lots of experiments, but they do them very efficiently one after the other.

Ronjini Joshua: You methodically.

Matt Bell: Not lots of things in parallel, very methodical. I work with quite a lot of early stage companies who do have very limited resources and one of the answers. I give them that they don't like there is a minimum price to pay if you want to be seen. If you think about who you're competing with.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: Even if you're a small company and you think your competitors are other small companies, it's not really about who's in your space. It's about who else is competing for that. Buyer's attention. And so if they happen to also, buy things from big companies, those big companies are spending a bajillion dollars to keep their attention.

Ronjini Joshua: They're also your competitors. Yeah, they're all see.

Matt Bell: They're also that you're in direct competitors.

Matt Bell: So unless you

Ronjini Joshua: I love it.

Ronjini Joshua: I love it. When people come to me and say, I don't have it, We don't really have any competitors.

Matt Bell: We're gonna have any competitors. Yeah, That's right. Because you're buyer is absolutely sitting there with nothing in his…

Ronjini Joshua: Captivated, they're just waiting for you.

Matt Bell: And just the mesmerized. All they do is watch you all day. Yeah, I wish that was true. I'd love that to happen once the undivided attention of a buyer. So yeah, it takes something. and so there have been several situations where I've sat down with clients and said, Look, if you want to do marketing, you really want to get seen in this market, you need more money. You are going to have to spend more than you thought. You haven't budgeted enough. So either find it somewhere else or go raise some money. But don't think that you can do this for free.

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Matt Bell: It really isn't that you can create some brand awareness for free, you can grow something organically, but generally the less you spend the slower. It will be so…

Ronjini Joshua: You are gonna have to spend in some way somewhere.

Matt Bell: if you want it quick, You can spend money. Yeah.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah, you said, you could get things for free like we do. We focus on earned media mostly most of the time.

Matt Bell: Sure.

Ronjini Joshua: But for us to get the earned media, you to have to have made some kind of headway in a different area where you have to spend money. So if You got to earn it.

Matt Bell: You got to earn it somehow.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah and I think there's no quick wins and it's hard for people to hear that. Even it's hard for me to say it.

Matt Bell: I imagine it this way it's if a new brand that is selling something I want to buy, So let's go back to my T-shirt, whatever, right? You…

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: a new manufacturer comes out, and they spend a, millions and millions of dollars to make me aware of it. They just put it everywhere, I'll notice it, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna trust that brand. That takes time and…

Ronjini Joshua: Sure.

Matt Bell: we talk about touch points. How many times does a person have to touch experience your brand before they'll go? Yeah, I think I'm comfortable enough for them to purchase for consumer goods for small scale. maybe it's 15 times 20 times but what is it? If I'm going to spend a million dollars on buying something from you.

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Matt Bell: It's a lot, right? I've got to really see you around and in fact, I probably want to interact with other people that have bought from you. I want to hear user feedback. I want to See user generated content that doesn't happen overnight and so to build trust and…

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: to build an emotional connection with the buyer and get to the point where they'll say, Okay I believe in you I'll purchase from you inevitably takes time and I talk about, anywhere from six to eighteen months for to business company to really see the full benefit of a content marketing program.

00:20:00

Ronjini Joshua: So that leads me, you mentioned connection and so I want to go back to this question of, then You were building a connection. how do we figure out what to say to them?

Matt Bell: I would go back to the buyer's journey, mapping that I talked about before in the absence of anything else.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: Ideally talk to them, We all talk to existing customers. We'll talk to people who we know a prospective buyers and we will ask them. What is it going to take for you to make a choice? What kind of information do you need to decide which widget to buy and who to buy it from and how many that you need and get those answers? But even absent those interviews. We in our minds, can put ourselves in the position of the buyer and say, someone who's buying a thing like this What kind of concerns do they have? And so we think about that awareness, phase and say, What do they need to know to choose to move forward and evaluate the solution? What are their beliefs at that point in time?

Matt Bell: Positive and negative, what are there?

Ronjini Joshua: Sure.

Matt Bell: What are they experiencing emotionally that we can play on? what kind of emotions we kind of stoke up Maybe it's fear of missing out because everybody else is using that thing, maybe it's fear of change in…

Ronjini Joshua: Sure.

Matt Bell: which case we want to try to lower it and Don't worry, it's not such a big change after all. This is actually quite similar things like that, so we can look at wants beliefs emotions at that stage in the journey and say, What kind of information can we share? That is useful to that buyer that they can receive and go, Okay. Yeah, then it's worth me going forward and evaluating a solution

Matt Bell: Absolutely.

Matt Bell: No.

Matt Bell: Absolutely.

Matt Bell: I'll save them. Again, use them to look at later and…

Ronjini Joshua: Like steal,…

Matt Bell: get inspiration from here.

Ronjini Joshua: somebody else's idea but the truth is it's an experiment. So you have to pull data from lots of different sources and you don't have to reinvent the wheel if someone's already experimenting. Why not at least figure it out. So I mean, I think that's the other great thing about the noisy market is that There's examples everywhere of things that work things that don't I mean as a marketer, I'm sure when people send you emails and they're really good,…

Matt Bell: Yes.

Ronjini Joshua: you're like that was a really good email. I get excited to see a really good. Yeah.

Ronjini Joshua: Exactly. I even use …

Matt Bell: Yeah, and I think you talk about it from the customers point of view.

Ronjini Joshua: if I see an advertisement that I think is really good. I'm not even in advertising,…

Matt Bell: So if you're always talking about your product,…

Ronjini Joshua: but I'm sure a customer of mine might want to do that someday or…

Matt Bell: your solution, It's benefits. That's very me centric.

Ronjini Joshua: even if I see, really good.

Matt Bell: I need to talk about is…

Ronjini Joshua: LinkedIn posts. So I think people really need to grab from real life.

Matt Bell: what that I'm going to talk about the challenge that you're facing. And what it's costing, you and…

Ronjini Joshua: What attracts you…

Matt Bell: how my solution can help you,…

Ronjini Joshua: because that might attract another customer too.

Matt Bell: that's more value. The other thing,…

Ronjini Joshua: So I don't know.

Matt Bell: I mean, yes, it's okay to look at your competitors material and…

Ronjini Joshua: I think that's a good way of kind of maybe just also taking yourself out of your element of like I always say,…

Matt Bell: say, yeah, they wrote an article about that particular aspect.

Ronjini Joshua: drinking your own Kool-Aid.

Matt Bell: I think I should write an article about that too good idea because,…

Ronjini Joshua: People are doing that a lot especially in the market that we're like the startup small business entrepreneur,…

Matt Bell: if they've cracked they're not like you said, don't reinvent the wheel. But people are not looking for facts.

Ronjini Joshua: You have.

Matt Bell: People are looking for opinions, I can go to chat GPT and Hoover up all the facts that I want But I have an authentic opinion about it. My company has an opinion about…

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: my product is better and why I can help you, and that opinion is what you should be communicating.

Matt Bell: And the city. Because if I put my spin on something, if I took my competitors messaging and put it out there, alongside something that I'd written you'd be able to tell the difference straight away. I mean human beings have a tremendous antenna for the BS detector that…

Ronjini Joshua: Where's your value? Yeah.

Matt Bell: That's pleasure. That's not I can tell you didn't write that. Has to be in your own company's voice and an authentic content.

Ronjini Joshua: Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, its that's The customer service that people are looking for.

00:25:00

Matt Bell: And It's true. The company level. I mean, when people are, using Ghost Riders to produce blog posts. Same kind of thing, you…

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah, right. Right.

Matt Bell: they need to realize that you can't just take that lock stock and barrel. Unless, that goes right is really, really familiar with your company's voice and…

Ronjini Joshua: That's funny that you say that I wrote a book and…

Matt Bell: tone and the way you write things,…

Ronjini Joshua: and the ghost rider.

Matt Bell: somebody's got to go through and edit that up and…

Ronjini Joshua: Whenever she would give me a chapter,…

Matt Bell: turn it into something that sounds like the company.

Ronjini Joshua: I was like say No, it's just never say that. And I was like You're supposed to take the work out of me having to sit there and write but it's like Sometimes you just can't do that. it doesn't work, they don't have your voice.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Ronjini Joshua: So, one of the things that you were mentioning earlier was video text like basically content format and I want to kind of explore that I always tell people to explore different formats. So, you…

Matt Bell: I think there's two ends of the spectrum…

Ronjini Joshua: we talked about, don't try to go and…

Matt Bell: if you're too dimensional and…

Ronjini Joshua: do all different types of things.

Matt Bell: you only do one type of format,…

Ronjini Joshua: But You can play with different formats in the same message.

Matt Bell: you're clearly going to lose some potential customers. So if I have some customers who are only video and…

Ronjini Joshua: So you can let's say write a text about a almost,…

Matt Bell: some that are only text that I do one, or the other, by definition, I've lost others in and…

Ronjini Joshua: a specific message, Write a video about that,…

Matt Bell: some sort of ideal world on the other end.

Ronjini Joshua: same message and…

Matt Bell: You'd have every format of every piece of content,…

Ronjini Joshua: maybe do some other kind of audio clip about that same matches…

Matt Bell: which clearly is probably a waste of resources.

Ronjini Joshua: but How do you play with formats?

Matt Bell: That's overkill. and not even achievable for a lot of companies,…

Ronjini Joshua: How do you select what format the person should deliver in?

Matt Bell: they just don't have the bandwidth. So I think it's a lot of things about…

Ronjini Joshua: Because I feel like you can get lots of different customers…

Matt Bell: what you're communicating. We've mentioned already that,…

Ronjini Joshua: if you just switch that up a bit.

Matt Bell: something's just lend themselves to being produced as an infographic. Some things lend themselves to being talked about in a video where I can show and explain and show the thing being used in real life that I can't do in words or…

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: it's much harder to do in words other times, if I'm explaining a list of facts to you, I don't need a video to point at a list of bullet points on the screen, text is there. So I think that the information itself is gonna lead you towards certain types.

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Matt Bell: But yes, back to experimentation what's working, best with your audience, double down on that. Don't go exclusively that, but do more of that. If that's what your audience is, loving your videos, then make more videos. if they're not responding to the videos but they're loving the short form LinkedIn posts. Then the divert your effort there

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah, I do think video is such a big thing because also again, I think people sometimes overthink it, you…

Matt Bell: Yeah.

Ronjini Joshua: they think it's gotta be produced and it's got to be, perfect. And I don't know that, that's true. I don' I think it just to be kind of clean and nice and you don't have to make it 100% studio made.

Matt Bell: I think the tools are out there that, everybody can be an amateur video producer these days and…

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: it's on what you're accomplishing as a business. So if you're as a business, you are a very formal polished. Everything is kind of, very precise, then putting out some sort of hash together video will look, Dissonantly won't quite fit with.

Ronjini Joshua: Right authenticity again.

Matt Bell: Back to authenticity, But I agree with you. I think people shy away from video because that's very expensive and it takes a long time. And, batch produce them, let's strip up five or…

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Matt Bell: six videos, hire somebody to film it if you want. and that doesn't have to be extremely expensive either and then spend a whole day filming, a bunch of video, you can turn out, multiple pieces in a day for failure But affordable or you can do it yourself.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah, where there's a will there's a way. I feel like it's never I used to wonder my God, how am I gonna get all this stuff done and then doing batch content is always such a great idea because it's just one day and you can get a whole month of stuff, …

Matt Bell: Yeah, and…

Ronjini Joshua: it's amazing. Right.

Matt Bell: you get in the flow of it and I think that's, what's hard with batch content? let's say hard content marketing is a team game. Usually, the whole company is involved in content marketing in one way or the other. So, if I'm the marketer in the middle, that's tasked with, really producing it. I need Those seeds of information from the sales team. That are going to tell me what to write about and the opinion of the company that I'm trying to communicate. So the hard work actually is really hoovering that stuff up once. I've got that, then I can sit down and do a whole batch of posts and line them up for the next three weeks and feel, and then come back to it later. But Getting that figuring out the best way within your organization to transfer those ideas out of people's heads and,…

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah.

Matt Bell: into a file or onto a piece of paper within the marketing team can turn it into good content. that's challenging sometimes.

Ronjini Joshua: Absolutely. No. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Content. I mean I feel like it's a rabbit hole of things that we could talk about. So I want to be mindful of everyone's attention because I think we've talked about a lot of different things that people can go back and…

00:30:00

Matt Bell: Yeah.

Ronjini Joshua: kind of listen and walk through those different steps. As a takeaway. What do you think? Is one thing that a founder, or whoever is working on this content can do to really identify the next step? what should that be? You think?

Matt Bell: I'm going to cheat and give you two that I see as the two biggest wins that I kind of get with clients on a regular basis. One is

Ronjini Joshua: Okay wait, hold on. Once again, you're gonna have to repeat that because you cut out. So just start again and…

Matt Bell: we're getting a network.

Ronjini Joshua: yeah, he'll just cut it out, but Just say, I'm gonna have to cheat that was where it cut out.

Matt Bell: All So I'm gonna cheat a little bit on their sense that I'm gonna give you two because I see two main areas where companies gain a lot of ground, if they focus on the first is, if you haven't done it already go and build a journey map, whatever you care to call it for your buyer and put yourself in the buyer shoes and say, Right, what information are they looking for, in as they become aware of the problem as they're evaluating solutions? So they're choosing to buy. That will tell you a lot about what kind of content you should be producing where it should be going. and then, I think, that the second big thing

Matt Bell: Is to review the content, you have. look at what you're putting out there and say, a lot of companies, get very focused on prospects that are ready to buy now. And so, they're putting out a lot of content It's about its features and benefits, but there may be missing content for those earliest stages. So, make sure that that buyer can actually make their way from the beginning, to the end that you have content to help them through the whole journey and balance up the content that you're putting out. So that it caters to prospects at different points along that journey because if you just focus on the ones that are ready to buy a lot of them have already made their mind up, they know what they want, they know…

Ronjini Joshua: Right.

Matt Bell: where they're going to get in, it might not be from you. If you've got content that's winning the mind share of people who are earlier in the journey as prospects, that will be your customers later. You'll catch those chips in over time. So that's building future business.

Ronjini Joshua: I like that idea of the first step that you said was building that map. So then you can kind of maybe list those pieces under that specific stage.

Matt Bell: Absolutely.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah, I like that a lot, that's awesome. Yeah. Easy to do. I'm gonna do it after We're wrapped here. I'm gonna start working on my journey.

Matt Bell: Excellent, let me know how you get on.

Ronjini Joshua: I mean I do so it's horrible to have these horrible and wonderful to have these conversations with all kinds of communicators and marketers and stuff. Because every time I have a conversation that triggers my brain, I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna go do that. After we talk,…

Matt Bell: More stuff to…

Matt Bell: Yeah, there's always stuff to do.

Ronjini Joshua: Yes. Always stuff.

Ronjini Joshua: Thank you so much for your time. I think this has been again a good conversation to sit and digest for a minute. And we'll have this in the show notes but tell people where they can find you any information about you that you need to share.

Matt Bell: So the company website is message up.com, and if you go there You will find links to my LinkedIn profile. You'll find ways to contact me. So that's the first point. You'll also find in the main NAV, you can click on books and you'll see the two books that I've written about content marketing. One is called Content Marketing Mission Critical. That's for CEOs that are designing marketing strategy, the other is called Content Marketing, making the magic happen. So that's actually for the marketing leaders that are tested operationalizing it. So that's under books in the nav there and…

Matt Bell: if not, I am Matt at Messageup.com. Everyone is welcome to email me.

Ronjini Joshua: Easy, great, thank you so much. Sorry, I'm gonna go turbulence back here.

Matt Bell: My pleasure.

Ronjini Joshua: Okay, sorry about that. this is fabulous. This has been in such a wonderful conversation and guys, I will have all the show notes in here, the transcription, all the information about Matt and good luck with your content marketing. There's no time right now to get started, we will talk to you next time.

Ronjini Joshua: All right, we had a mental breakdown outside my door. I was looking at my,…

Matt Bell: no, not

Ronjini Joshua: I don't know if you heard it but I could see the light picking it up. So,

Matt Bell: No, it kind of cut out the feed cut a couple of times. you'll notice that I think when you go back through, but

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah, I pause the volume. That's what it was.

Matt Bell: that was why. Okay? Yeah, you muted it up.

Ronjini Joshua: Yeah, it's okay because my guy he's expert. He knows all the interruptions that happen in my house. So You'll get it.

Matt Bell: So he'll get it up, good. That's cool.

Ronjini Joshua: He'll get in there. Thank you so much. I am gonna do a journey map even though I do this, I literally do this, almost every time I have a conversation with someone, I'm going back to square one.

00:35:00

Matt Bell: .

Ronjini Joshua: So yeah.

Matt Bell: No, it's and we're never done with marketing. You've never done. It's always think it through again, and rethink it and think it through a different lens and a different angle, and just looking for that edge, how can we find a way to stand out from the crowd? It's Stuff.

Ronjini Joshua: And you're based in Texas, you have a team.

Matt Bell: And so, my wife and I founded the company one assistant right now.

Ronjini Joshua: Okay.

Matt Bell: I'm would imagine there will be more of us fairly soon. So my goal ultimately here is to launch online training. So I started,…

Ronjini Joshua: Okay. Yeah.

Matt Bell: I started trying to do everything stupidly, you'd think I'd know by now. And realized I was just not getting anything done so I focused on what I thought was going to be the book. And ended up being the two books. That was,…

Ronjini Joshua: I like that.

Matt Bell: I worked.

Ronjini Joshua: the two books method.

Matt Bell: It's brilliant.

Ronjini Joshua: That's probably better. Yeah.

Matt Bell: At the time it was this manuscript that was like a mass and I hired a professional editor and she's like, congratulations, you have a fantastic book. Lots of content, but nobody's going to read it.

Matt Bell: Because …

Ronjini Joshua: It's too much.

Matt Bell: what you have is Siamese twins. it's like this two audiences here.

Ronjini Joshua: Mmm.

Matt Bell: Joined together the CEO and the marketer, and they don't want to read each other's stuff, so if we can kind of surgically separate this,…

Ronjini Joshua: No. Yeah.

Matt Bell: then I think you have actually two books. And that's what we did. Took another three or four months, but I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out. So, it's

Ronjini Joshua: Okay, I'm so glad. So, I'll put the links of those in there too. And then this is 137. So looks like the time is July 25th, is when it would potentially go out,…

Matt Bell: Okay, cool.

Ronjini Joshua: which I usually were pretty good on schedule unless I mess up. yeah, so that'll be that. And then my team will promote it on social media and stuff like that. so,

Matt Bell: I will do the same and get in there and it and do all the good stuff.

Ronjini Joshua: All those things.

Matt Bell: All the stuff.

Ronjini Joshua: All Thank you, Matt. I appreciate your time have a good weekend.

Matt Bell: Likewise. Thanks Virginia.

Ronjini Joshua: All right, have you talked to you later?

Meeting ended after 00:37:12 👋