Duke University Archives

Creative marketing outlets are ripe for the picking. Seemingly every big company has its own blog, as do countless small and medium businesses. Many organizations are also finding ways to reach thousands upon thousands of consumers through podcasting. Although it’s easier than ever to create content through these mediums, the market for blogs and podcasts has become fiercely competitive. Thus, the path to monetization can be tricky to find.

That’s where marketing expert Dorie Clark comes in. Clark—who is an adjunct professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, a professional speaker, and a bestselling author—preaches patience and perseverance when it comes to content marketing. As she points out, the average podcast only lasts 12 episodes. Similarly, a high number of blogs run dry after a handful of posts. So while the creative marketing field is crowded, it becomes considerably less cluttered once an extensive base of content is established.

On this episode, Clark shares her experiences in the content marketing arena. She discusses insightful dos and don’ts of web media, while also explaining how to know it’s time to reinvent our marketing strategies. You can listen to the episode here.

Here are some sample Q&As from Clark’s interview with Drew Neisser:

Drew: How do you create a blog today, particularly if you’re a CMO or an aspiring senior marketer who wants to cut through?

Dorie: A lot of people who may be in the early stages today look back and they say, “If I had started in 2007, then great. It was open terrain then.” But now, it’s gotten filled out. It’s gotten crowded. Let me share two thoughts. The first one statistically comes from the world of podcasting, but it is very relevant to blogs as well. There’s actually a study that I quote in Entrepreneurial You, which was a longitudinal look at podcasts between 2005 and 2015. And what they discovered is yes, it is true there are hundreds of thousands of podcasts, but what they also discovered is the average duration of a podcast…is 12 episodes. When we look out at the field we say, “Oh it’s so crowded! I could never compete!” But the truth is, yes, if you’re at the starting line, there’s huge numbers of aspirants. But if you literally can keep it going past a dozen episodes, the field thins considerably. All of a sudden you’re not competing against 300,000 people; you’re competing against 3,000. In some cases, depending on what field it is, 300. In many ways, it is a persistence game. It is a longevity game.

Drew: What is your second thought?

Dorie: The second thing that I’ll just mention briefly is that it’s absolutely true that in the early days of any content creation that you’re doing (podcasts, blogs, whatever it is), you’re not going to have an overnight success. You’re not going to have millions of readers. But it’s really important to think about the interim metrics. And what I mean by that you won’t be successful if the only thing you’re looking for is wide scale. However, a blog can be incredibly successful for you—even if you have a hundred readers or fifty readers—if you write a post and it enables you to close a deal. In the early days, understanding how your content creation factors into your sales process and aligning those very closely saying, “I’m going to write this post” that lays out the answer to ideal clients’ problems, and being able to share that in a targeted fashion with them, often helps expedite the decision-making process when somebody is saying, “Which company should I be going with?”

Drew: How do you create direct business value through blogging and podcasting?

Dorie: It’s likely to take a while. I’m not a podcaster, but in terms of my blogging, which I’ve done quite seriously, it took me two to three years of consistent blogging—and by consistent, I mean 10 to 15 times a month—in order to literally get any clear value in terms of inbound, unsolicited inquiries. Now once you cross that threshold, now I get a lot. But it took two to three years before I saw anything at all. That’s the dark period…where people are worried that it’s not happening. It’s not going to happen for them. You have to plow through that in order to get to the other side where the competition is scarce.

Drew: You really are a connector of people. How do you recommend others grow their networks?

Dorie: One of the things that I’ve studied over the past number of years, especially with my book, Stand Out, was the question of “How do you become a recognized expert in your field?” And what I came to discover through my research is that fundamentally there are three key pieces that you have to keep your eyes on. One is content creation, which we’ve just been talking about. The other is social proof, meaning what is your perceived level of credibility? What affiliations do you have that give people confidence in you and your ideas? The third is your network. Your network is critical for a whole host of reasons. One is that they’re the people who can speak to you honestly. They can tell you what’s a good idea and what’s not a good idea. Another is that you’re kind of judged by the company that you keep. Your network is part of your brand in some ways. And then also, your network, if done right, they’re the people who often want to be your earliest evangelists.

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of witnessing Duke’s first bowl victory in 54 years. By all measures it was a momentous occasion as two basketball powerhouses battled it out on a gridiron carved out of the baseball diamond that is Yankee Stadium! Indiana University, whose founding dates back to 1820, has a long track record of success both on and off the field and its fans, turned out in red & white droves to cheer on their Hoosiers. Duke University, which traces its roots back to 1838 though it didn’t actually get its current brand name until 1924, also attracted several thousand delirious Blue Devils who were thrilled to learn about an obscure rule in college football — field goal attempts that rise above the goal posts can’t be reviewed after being called fair or foul. It was upon this rule that Duke’s victory was sealed and history rewritten.

So why perchance am I sharing this scintillating bit of trivia in what is perhaps my last blog post of the year? Of course, there’s the reveling part but fortunately for you there’s more to it than that. As I mentioned both of these institutions are household names, have weathered the test of time and occasionally risen to the top of their competitive set–JUST LIKE KEDS. (Bet you didn’t see that one coming!) Turning 100 in 2016, Keds is indeed a well-known brand that has played the fashion game effectively, getting hot at times without the usual melting away. No doubt many have contributed to this success over the years, yet like new players on a college team, big gains often come with the new arrivals, a pattern I expect to see repeated with the arrival of Emily Culp, who was kind enough to spend time with me just before receiving The CMO Club’s Rising Star award. This is part two of our winning interview (read part 1 here). In it we cover the gamut from social listening to emerging channels like Snapchat, a marketer’s need for passion and the challenges of global initiatives. I certainly got a big kick out of talking to Emily and I’m sure you will too.

Drew: I was at a customer service conference recently and one of the things that really struck me was how social listening and social customer service has advanced in the last couple of years to the point that not only are these people listening, obviously for the product issues but they’re also preemptively recommending changes to products based on things they hear. In some cases they even have a seat at the table for new product development because they’re so close to the customer. I’m just curious if social listening has played a part at all in your program or what role it does play?

It absolutely does. We listen to our consumers, engage them & make real-time changes to programs and products. We strongly believe our customers have the most important insights, hence we invite them to participate in Beta releases of new services and seed products early on to get feedback.

Because we have these amazing customers who love us and who are vocal when things go well and equally vocal when they don’t go well it is important to provide them with the level of engagement they desire with our brand. So this could take the form of providing feedback on advertising, testing to price elasticity, to literally just saying, “we’re between these two product names, which one do you like more?” And that way you create a loyalty, a genuine loyalty because you invite your customers into the process and you’re listening to them and asked upon their feedback.

Drew: It sounds like that could also be beginning of an influence service/advocacy program was well?

Yes, you’re right, there is nothing in exchange for it. Meaning, it’s just genuine love. I do this myself for three or four other brands that I’m ridiculously passionate about. I want to give feedback because I love to create products that I need or that would be slightly modified to my taste. In turn, if a company listens or engages me, then I will be a vocal advocate for them forever. I have told one story about Patagonia (100s of times) and their customer service simply because I love the brand and how they treated me.

Drew: You mentioned Snapchat. Every brand wants to figure out how to use it, but a lot have struggled. What’s working for you?

I fundamentally believe in Snapchat. So when I joined within the first 30 days, we officially launched our presence on the platform. For us right now, we are in the test and learn phase. Hence, I don’t think there is any secret sauce to share unfortunately, but we will learn quickly because it is where most of our 18 or 28-year-old woman are spending their time. Snapchat has became her favored platform along with Instagram and she has left Facebook for other uses, so that’s why it’s really, really important to me that we fully embrace this and drive forward with it but we’re still learning.

Drew: When you talked about your passion for other brands and how you get actively involved, how much does that impact how you attack your marketing and your approach to marketing at Keds?

I have loved Keds for decades. So when the opportunity arose to join the team it combined all the key elements that are important to me: a brand with rich heritage, a brand I personally love to wear, a brand that stands for female empowerment & a brand with an amazing senior leadership team. So a large aspect of my job is to tap into other people who feel that way about our brand and how do I give them a megaphone or at least an opportunity to share their feedback with us. Because somebody who’s worn Keds, even if they just switched from another product to ours or just rediscovered them, I love to hear from them. And my job as a marketer is to make sure that I do hear from them and I provide them platforms to share with us whether it’s on social, it’s in e-mail, you know, comment cards in store.

Drew: Lets talk about the challenge of global branding — the desire to be consistent on a global level yet still somehow localize as necessary has to be difficult.

It’s one of the most intriguing Rubik’s cubes you can work on. There is no question about it. As a marketer I think it’s very humbling and important to understand, you can have the perfect strategy, the perfect brand campaign, the perfect messaging and then you need to enter what I affectionately call the double helix matrix which is the global domain. And what I mean by that is all of these things that you’ve been very methodical and strategic about sometimes go out the window because I was not born and raised in X country and I didn’t understand the cultural nuance of a color, symbol or styling choice. So what may resonate visually or from a techy perspective in one market isn’t going to work than another but what’s amazing about this is your global partners who are in different regions teach you about what these things mean and help you think about the brand in a different way and help you think about how do you adapt to their market to have the same kind of same DNA and messaging but in a way that’s culturally relevant to them. So I actually really love it. For me a big reason is I am extremely curious, so global brands and messaging has always kept me on my toes.

Tag: Duke University

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