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Social Media Marketing Podcast
Content Marketing Strategies for 2025: A Framework for Success
00:43:54
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- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
According to Gartner, 87% of marketers worry about technology replacing their jobs. You might be one of those 87%. Here's the good news. Staying ahead of the changes in marketing isn't just possible. It's your competitive advantage. Secure your marketing future by attending social media Marketing world. Visit social mediamarketingworld.info and get your tickets today. Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [00:42]
Brian Piper
Hello, hello, hello.
- [00:43]
Michael Stelzner
Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know how to navigate the ever changing marketing jungle. Today I have an amazing show for you. I'm going to be joined by Brian Piper and we're going to explore a content marketing framework that any business can employ to radically increase the chances that you attract your ideal audience for almost next to nothing. Trust me when I tell you that this is solid gold. You may even want to listen to this interview again. By the way, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow us on whatever app you're listening to. We just have some incredible content coming your way and I do not want you to miss any of it. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Brian Piper, helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Brian Piper. If you don't know who Brian is, he's an AI and content marketing strategist who helps businesses optimize their content for more exposure, lead and sales. He's also the co author of Epic Content Marketing and author of Epic Content Marketing for Higher Ed. Brian, welcome to the show. How you doing today?
- [02:06]
Brian Piper
Fantastic, Mike, thank you so much for having me on.
- [02:08]
Michael Stelzner
It's been great to have you on the other show, the AI Explored show, and it's awesome to have you on this show as well. So today Brian and I are going to explore a proven content marketing framework for attracting your ideal audience. Before we get into that, Brian, I'd love to hear a little bit of your backstory on how in the world you got into marketing and content marketing. Start wherever you want to start.
- [02:29]
Brian Piper
I mean, I started off as a website developer and not a super talented or satisfied website developer. So most of the time I was working with some very talented developers and they would put me on the content side of Things and have me doing SEO back in 1995, which wasn't really called SEO back then.
- [02:47]
Michael Stelzner
Dang. Yeah.
- [02:48]
Brian Piper
But working on making sure that the content was showing up on the search engines. And then in 2015, I read the first edition of Epic Content Marketing, and shortly after reading that, we got a new VP of marketing. I went right down to her office, told her she needed to hire me to do digital marketing for her because no one knew what content marketing was at the time, so they knew what digital marketing was. So I did that. That led into my current job at the University of Rochester, where within the first two weeks of taking that job, they sent me to Content Marketing World, where I got to meet Joe Polizzi, who wrote the first edition of Epic. And then through getting into speaking and getting into doing more content and more marketing and establishing a friendship with Joe, we worked together to co author the second edition of Epic Content Marketing. And that has really kind of supercharged my professional development in content marketing space.
- [03:44]
Michael Stelzner
And tell us about this other book, the higher ed one that you wrote.
- [03:47]
Brian Piper
So while Joe and I were working on the second edition of Epic, I was working at the university. And every step throughout the book, I was thinking, man, why aren't more universities doing this? I mean, we have so many students, faculty, staff, so many stories, so many problems that we're trying to solve. We're all about educating people. But most of our content is, you know, push marketing, paid marketing, and we have all these stories to tell. So I decided, you know, we need to write a book. There needs to be a book for higher ed about content marketing. So that's when I decided it was time to write that.
- [04:22]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. And folks, if you're not familiar with Brian, he has definitely made a name for himself in the content marketing space. He's been all over the content marketing world stages, if you will. And he's also going to be at Social Media Marketing World for the very first time, which I'm very excited about. And he'll be talking about AI, but he's definitely got an incredible tenure on the content marketing side of things. And he's definitely one of the, one of the leading voices in that space. So, Brian, it's super awesome to have you here today. Okay, so content marketing, let's just briefly describe what the heck it is and then explain why it is so important as we're recording this moving into 2025.
- [05:03]
Brian Piper
You bet. So we all, as businesses, as brands, we put out a lot of content on our websites, on our social channels. But the thing that turns content into content marketing is it has to be valuable for a very specific audience with the end goal of having them take some action that will help your business succeed, help you reach your strategic goals. So those are really the three criteria. Valuable content that either teaches them something, helps them learn something for a specific audience. So it has to be very targeted and then it has to, you know, help you reach your business goals. I mean, that might just be having them read more content, or it might be purchasing a product or signing up for your newsletter. And the reason it's so important and how it's so different than other content is it's authenticity. I mean, it really is. You're just helping your audience, you're just trying to solve their problems, answer their questions, and you're building relationships, you're building trust. Because after they read enough information, they read enough of your content, they consume you on different channels, they will start opting in for your newsletter, or they'll start subscribing to your podcast or your YouTube channels. So they want more of what you have to offer. And that's where you start creating those relationships, building those communities, finding those super fans out in your audience. And that's where the real value of content marketing is.
- [06:31]
Michael Stelzner
And just to add a little bit to this, folks, what we're doing right now is a form of content marketing, right? So any business that creates a podcast designed to draw an audience to them, in our case, marketing audience. Right. And also designed to help promote a product or service. And in our case, social media marketing world. Right? So this is a form of content marketing. And it can be newsletters, it can be blogs, it can be podcasts, YouTube, short form video. It can be just about everything, right?
- [07:02]
Brian Piper
Yeah, absolutely.
- [07:03]
Michael Stelzner
So let's talk about, like, why do you feel like this is so critical in 2025? Like, what is it about now that makes this more critical? And if you want, you can start to talk about maybe some of the changes that you see going on in the world of content marketing.
- [07:18]
Brian Piper
Yeah, I mean, we're in very interesting time right now. There is less trust from our audiences in different areas. I think it's very important to try to create those relationships. It's more difficult for your content to be found because there's more content out there. There are more people publishing, more people with blogs and podcasts, and we're seeing a decline in the value of search optimization. So, you know, it used to be that you just put a blog up and you'd optimize it for search and you'd show up on search and you drive traffic to it. But the audiences are changing how they search and there are different options for search. So especially if you're targeting younger generations, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, they are searching on social, they're searching on voice, they're searching in communities, they're using AI for their search. So you can't just put your content up on your website and expect people to find it and come to you. So we really need to start thinking about what the search habits of our audiences are and how we can make sure that our content is found in all the places that they're searching.
- [08:24]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. And as a guy with kids who are using social media, I can tell you that they're using Snapchat and TikTok to find places to eat, all sorts of stuff. Like it's not intuitive to those of us that are a little bit older, right. We would think that we go to Google for that, Right? And obviously I think many of us that have been tracking the world of AI understand that. And this has been going on for a while. The single best answer concept, right? This started with Amazon, Alexa, sorry if I just triggered anybody's system, but Alexa started this process of giving the single best answer, right? And now you've got tools like ChatGPT and many other tools. Gemini Claude all these tools are designed to give you a single best answer. And as a result, this consumer behavior has changed, right? The old behavior was here's 10 answers with a bunch of ads around them. You get to pick, right? And a lot of those things have been really optimized in such a way that they're gaming the system and they're not super, super valuable anymore. And people just want a really good answer to a lot of their questions. And as a result of that, a lot of bloggers are seeing declines in traffic and maybe what they're starting to do now is post on the socials. We're hearing a lot of people that have been on this show talk the value of LinkedIn, for example, right? Andy Crestedina is utilizing LinkedIn for his long form content. We've got a couple of episodes that have preceded this about LinkedIn newsletters and, and all this kind of stuff. So there has been a shift not just with the younger generation, but in general. There's been a consumption behavior shift also. I hate to say this, but it seems like people are reading less. Have you found this to be true, Brian? Yeah, they're watching more content and reading less, right?
- [10:08]
Brian Piper
Absolutely. Especially the younger audience. They want video content. They'll go to YouTube for all of their DIY information, instructional videos, before they'll ever go read a blog post or even, you know, they'll even prefer to have something read to them. If you can translate your blog post into an audio clip, they'll listen to it while they're doing whatever they want to be doing.
- [10:30]
Michael Stelzner
And audio consumption, I think, is the trend that's moving in the right direction. We're seeing a lot more people listening to audio podcasts, for example. We're seeing a lot more people watching. We had Sean Cannell on the show. He's talking about how a lot of people are watching really long form videos on their television, why they're doing things in the kitchen or whatever, almost listening to it as if it was an audio only source. So there's a lot of shifts in behaviors. And my personal thoughts, and I want to hear your thoughts on this as well, Brian, is that there is an audience for every kind of medium, right? There's people that choose to read, there's people that choose to listen, there's people that choose to watch. And in each of those categories, there's people that just want snippets and, and there's people that want really rich data. So the good news is like, none of these things are quote, unquote, dying. It's almost as if we're diversifying across all these different mediums. Would you agree?
- [11:18]
Brian Piper
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's being segmented depending on what audience you're trying to target, which platform, which channel, what type of content you're going to produce that's ideal for that specific audience.
- [11:30]
Michael Stelzner
So in light of everything that we've talked about today, it is getting harder, as Brian mentioned, to get in front of your ideal audience, especially on the social platforms. That's why we need a really rock solid, solid strategy. That's why we need a framework. And that's really what we're here to talk about today, which is a lens in which through we can follow a certain strategy so that we can increase the likelihood our content is getting in front of that right audience for the purpose that we have in the business. More email signups, more leads, more sales. Right? So you've developed a really great process. We're going to break it down. We're going to go through each of the steps of the process. So where do we start when it comes to your content marketing process or framework?
- [12:13]
Brian Piper
I mean, we really start with identifying your goals and your audience. I mean, that's the foundation for everything. If you don't know where you're going. If you don't have a destination in mind, you'll never be able to measure whether or not you're getting there. So start with your business objectives, what are you trying to accomplish? And then think about who is your audience, a very specific audience who can take action on your content that's going to help you reach your goals. And there are a lot of different ways you can, you know, break that down. You can look at, you know, either if you're selling products, you can look at who's purchasing your products. If you're doing consulting, who are your target customers, what are their preferences? And really you're building audience Personas. You're looking at what are their demographics, what are their content consumption habits, what are the decision criteria that they are going to use to decide whether or not to go with your products or services. So then you're aligning your goals with the audience needs and figuring out now where are they consuming that content.
- [13:20]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, real quick. For folks that want to really understand how to develop the Persona, check out the AI Explored podcast because Brian and I went deep in how to use AI to kind of create AI Personas, which is magic sauce kind of stuff. I'll see if I can get that link a little bit later, but for sure we'll have it in the show. Notes on the goal Is it unreasonable for people to try to expect content to actually lead to a direct sale? I'm just curious what your thoughts are in this like modern era that we're in right now. Is there a more appropriate goal like just brand exposure or top of mind or leads? I'm just curious, do you feel like it's reasonable for content to directly sell in this, you know, current environment that we're in?
- [14:01]
Brian Piper
I absolutely do. I think it's important that we look at what content we have at every step of the marketing funnel. So if you've got a lot of content out there that's just like high level problem solving and people are coming in and you're getting that really good top of funnel engagement and they're signing up for your newsletters, but they aren't actually going through the process and purchasing your products or your services. There's something missing, there's something in the middle or there's something at the bottom of the funnel that's not convincing them that this is going to add value for them. This is going to make their jobs easier, it's going to make their processes more efficient. So it's really figuring out where is your Content breaking down, like top of funnel. Yeah, absolutely. Just read more content, consume more, but do it strategically. Like, once you kind of have this big idea, now you can dive more, you know, into the specifics of why this particular product or this particular solution might be valuable to you or how we operate within this certain framework. At some point, I mean, you're giving away the information, here's how you do it, here's how you improve your products or your services, and then at some point they're going to say, well, it's really hard to actually do that. Why don't we bring you in to help us out with that? Or, you know, why don't we just purchase what you have already so that we don't have to try to build that from scratch.
- [15:20]
Michael Stelzner
So it's kind of an indirect sell then, really? Right. It's not like a direct sell. That's the key part of it. Right. Like it's, it's going to influence someone to move a little bit further down the funnel so they can become a customer. It's not like you just can expect this one piece of content to click to buy kind of a situation, right?
- [15:36]
Brian Piper
Absolutely. Absolutely.
- [15:38]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, folks, social mediaexaminer.com A11 will get you to the interview I did with Brian on building custom GPTs specifically that are like your ideal Persona. It's magic sauce. You're going to love it. Okay, so what's your goal? Who is your audience? Anything else before we move on to the next part of your process?
- [15:56]
Brian Piper
Yeah, those are the key things in that first step.
- [15:59]
Michael Stelzner
Yep. And this is an acronym and this is the letter I. Okay, so we're going to spell out a word. What is the word that we're going to be spelling out?
- [16:06]
Brian Piper
Ideal. You keep talking about finding your ideal consumer, making sure that you're on the ideal channel. So we're creating the ideal content marketing framework.
- [16:16]
Michael Stelzner
Perfect. What's next?
- [16:17]
Brian Piper
So next is discover. So discover your content opportunities. Figure out what existing content you already have, that's high performing, that's strategic, that's working well, and then figure out how that current content can be repurposed, reused, can fill gaps in your process. Figure out what new content you want to create based on where you're missing something, what's not working. Figure out how you can extend that content across different channels.
- [16:47]
Michael Stelzner
So let's talk about how in the world do we know what's working? Because some people aren't going to know how to audit their stuff. Like, what's some tips that can help out here?
- [16:54]
Brian Piper
Yeah, A ton of tools out there. Hopefully you have Google Analytics on your website. You can just see what your high performing pages are, what your high performing content is. You can look back through your social content, see what posts had good engagement, which ones had good impressions. You know, depending on what your goals are, will help you determine what metrics are most relevant for you. If your goal is just building brand awareness for your business, then impressions are a great source or page views are great. But if you're really looking to, you know, improve your bottom line or your revenue, then you want to start making sure that you're set up to track conversions or set up to look at engagements on social to make sure that you're tracking the most relevant information. And then, you know, when we're talking content marketing, a lot of it is about discoverability. So you can use tools like Google Search Console to help you figure out what terms people are searching on to find your website and then how you rank how many people are looking for those terms and then that'll give you a really good idea of what pages are converting, what terms are converting, what else you should be thinking about as far as creating content to help you target those specific messages.
- [18:06]
Michael Stelzner
I think a word of caution here that I think you will agree with when you look at your data across the socials and Google Analytics, your highest viewed content, make sure it's ideal for the target audience. Right? Because you and I both know you could have something picked up on YouTube for the wrong reasons or you could have written something that went crazy in Google Search, but it's not for your ideal target. Do you have anything to add to that? Because I think people could get astray if they just looked at the numbers there. Right?
- [18:32]
Brian Piper
Yeah, absolutely. So it has to be strategic, it has to be relevant for your audience. It has to be, you know, ideally it has to be directly related to your goal. So if you're looking to increase your revenue, that piece of content has to be converting people into customers.
- [18:47]
Michael Stelzner
So once we've identified this content, you know, we've discovered these content opportunities, are we going to come back to that in your process? This part I'm not clear about. And if we're not, is there something we need to do with these discoveries?
- [19:01]
Brian Piper
Yes, we will come back to that once you're distributing and creating new content.
- [19:05]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, perfect. Okay, so I is identify your goals and your audience. D is discover content opportunities.
- [19:13]
Brian Piper
What's the E Empowering authentic messengers. Okay, so we know at the, at the university we're trying to create more potential Undergraduate students, that's our primary audience. We're trying to increase enrollment. They don't want to hear from me, a 50 year old guy in the marketing department, why they should come to our university. They want to hear from other students. They want to hear from people like them who are doing authentic, real content. So from a business side, you need to start thinking about who is in your audience and how can you integrate them into your process. Whether that's, you know, hiring someone who is in that target demographic that you can then train and build into becoming a creator on those different channels to help deliver your message. Sometimes it's bringing someone that you already have on your team who's in that target audience, who might be interested in getting into content creation, leverage those opportunities, find people in your audience. It might be a user generated content opportunity where you could create a contest among your audience so that now not only are they creating content for you, but it's all authentic content that's original from them.
- [20:27]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so let's unpack what authentic really means a little bit here because, you know, I think I know what it means, but I'm not completely sure I know what it means in this situation.
- [20:36]
Brian Piper
People don't want to hear a lot of. Especially our target audiences aren't looking for scripted, highly produced, highly edited content. They're looking for real stories. They're looking to see how they could be one of those different audience members. They're looking for things that are human stories that are obviously connected to experiences that those current audience members have had. So we see this a lot of times with testimonials that are featured on websites which are great little short pieces of content. But if you could get one of those people that created a testimonial for you to deliver a longer form piece of content that answered more questions that was becoming like a regular part of your content landscape, then that's going to have a lot more power with your audience than, you know, just somebody who throws out one testimonial about how great your product is. If you could pull in one of those people to do a weekly podcast for you, you know, hire them, pay them, train them how to do it. Now that's going to be much more believable for your audience. You're, they're going to see that and relate to that much more than they will relate to someone who is not in their same demographic trying to convince them of something.
- [21:48]
Michael Stelzner
Well, that's really intriguing. So I think what I'm hearing you say is first you got to know who that ideal audience is. And ideally, you pick someone from that ideal audience. So in your case, you're dealing with people that are younger or their parents. Right. So you're either dealing with the students or you're dealing with the parents of the student. But it sounds to me as if in your case, because you're mostly dealing with people that are teenagers or young 20s, you would want to pick somebody who's in their young twenties that perhaps was first seeking and then became a student. Is that the idea here?
- [22:21]
Brian Piper
Absolutely, that's exactly it. We hire student interns to come work in our social media department because they understand what works on TikTok and Instagram much better than most of us do, and they know what their peers are looking for, what kind of content they're looking for. I was at a higher ed conference where we had a student panel of seven high school students who had recently decided on what college they were going to. And every one of them said that after looking at, you know, whether the school had their course that they were interested in, their major they were interested in and what the finances were, the next thing they all wanted was more content, more social content, more day in the life stories from people that were already attending.
- [23:08]
Michael Stelzner
We at Social Media examiner, which I will disclose for the first time, recently hired a guy named Dan Sanchez full time. And Dan is someone who's been on my AI podcast. He used to be a director of marketing. He now is the senior AI marketing strategist at Social Media Examiner. He's on my marketing team. He's going to be working inside my AI society. He's in his 30s, mid-30s, so he's younger than I am. And he's also going to be creating content on our YouTube channel, specifically around AI. So this is an example of what you're talking to. And on the AI frontier right now, it's. It's more guys than women that are intrigued with this frontier, as you know, Brian. So we hired him to kind of help us draw that audience to us through the creation of video content. So this is almost exactly what you're talking about, right?
- [23:55]
Brian Piper
Absolutely. And you're seeing big brands do this also. They will purchase an existing podcast or an existing YouTube channel influencer to come on and not even promote their business, but just to be part of their network so that now that they kind of connect with that audience, it's almost like they're purchasing that audience. Instead of trying to build that yourself, you actually go out and you find someone who already has the audience that you're looking for and pull them in.
- [24:25]
Michael Stelzner
Do you ever feel like no one understands your marketing challenges? Do you wish you had people you could talk to about AI content creation or marketing strategy? That's exactly what you'll find at Social Media Marketing World. Mallory Bezit said, quote, I love the overall atmosphere and that everyone was so willing to share and network with each other. Imagine having a network of expert marketers you can turn to whenever you need advice or inspiration. This becomes your reality when you attend Social Media Marketing World. Don't go it alone. Grab your tickets now at social media marketing world.info any tips on, I mean, obviously you could hire someone who's already gifted, like what I've done, or you could hire someone and train them who maybe has good communication skills but doesn't understand how to do some of the things, which is probably what you're doing with some of these students. Generally speaking, do people need to hire full time employees? Can they hire them as contractors? Any tips on how to do this at all?
- [25:29]
Brian Piper
Yeah, you can bring them in in whatever, you know, whatever format works best for them. Some people are just looking for opportunities to work on their social media skills and to create their, build their personal brand and to create their own online identity. So you might even, depending on who your audience is, you might even be able to bring people in for, you know, I'll give you a $50 Starbucks gift card if you come in and you know, help me come up with some ideas for some content. And then once they do that now you can kind of evaluate them to see if they might be a good fit for your business and then hire them on a, you know, freelance part time basis. You're going to create four Instagram posts for me a week and then just kind of test it out. And we'll do that a lot with our students, will let them kind of develop their own personality and their brand. We train them on what our, you know, brand messaging is and what our brand guidelines are and then we kind of vet them through the process before we just turn them loose on our social channels.
- [26:27]
Michael Stelzner
Now this particular third part of this thing, and again from the beginning, it's identify that audience and goal. It's discover your content opportunities and it's impossible. Empower authentic messages. The word empower has some meaning that I don't think we've fully unpacked here. What do we mean by empowering them?
- [26:42]
Brian Piper
What you're really doing is you're helping these people build their personal brand. You're giving them opportunities to, you know, not only help you promote the institution, but to get out there on a channel that hopefully already has a following and that they're establishing themselves, they're building their brand, they're developing themselves. And, you know, you start off by training them by, you know, looking at all the content they create before you release it. But then eventually you give them the keys to the cabin, kind of you let them go out. And as. As long as it's working, as long as it's on brand and on message, you let them go out and create. So you're empowering them to not only represent your brand, but also to work on their personal brand.
- [27:25]
Michael Stelzner
But, Brian, I know somebody's saying this, but Brian, I don't want them to leave me in a year or two. What do you want to say to that?
- [27:33]
Brian Piper
Absolutely. And we run into this because we know our students are going to leave us, but the value that they add while they're with us is fantastic. And then if they leave and they continue to be advocates for the institution or advocates for the brand, that's even better because now we're not even paying them. But they still see the value that they took away from their experiences. They still have all the knowledge that we gave them. Now down the road, these are lifelong advocates and influencers that we could have helping promote us. So we're really training different advocates out there that we're releasing out into the wild and giving them a leg up on a lot of their peers who maybe haven't had the opportunities to work on their personal brand and don't understand the value of networking and connecting with all these different people that we give them the opportunities to do when we're.
- [28:25]
Michael Stelzner
Looking for somebody like this. And I hope people appreciate that. I'm slowing down a little bit here because this is kind of a important concept that we're focusing on. This e. This empower thing, do they just need to be good communicators or do they also need to understand kind of what the product or mission is or the service that the company is providing?
- [28:43]
Brian Piper
Yeah. So it's important that they become very aware of what it means to follow your brand guidelines and what it means to align with your strategic goals. So they need to see that because of what you're doing, the actions that you're taking, and you can show them, you know, how on your current social channel, all your posts align with your strategic goals or how they're focused on brand messaging and you give them the nuances. So as you're first working through their first Few weeks of posting, you have to be really informative and be like, yeah, this is great, but we really like to stick to these research stories. We're really focusing on 17 year olds in high school, so this might be a little. The language might not be right for them. So just working with them and training them along the way and letting them know that, you know, all your content on your personal channel is not going to be targeted to the same audiences that we're trying to target. You're probably trying to target, you know, your next employer or trying to figure out, you know, how to establish yourself in the professional space in your, you know, whatever your major is. So we're working with them to not only create content for us, but also to create content for themselves on their own channels and build their brand.
- [29:58]
Michael Stelzner
Empower authentic messengers. Plural. How many messengers do we need? Is one enough?
- [30:06]
Brian Piper
Well, and it depends on your opportunity. So we currently have five social media interns working on our team. I know MIT, I think, has like 13 or 14 working on their team. So it depends on like the scale that you can operate at, how much oversight you can provide, what your training operation looks like. I know there are people out there who will actually come into institutions and train classes of potential influencers or, you know, potential student interns who are looking to help with their social media accounts. So it just depends on, you know, I say start small, start with one, try it out, see how it works, and then if that works well, scale from there. Yeah.
- [30:50]
Michael Stelzner
And folks, obviously they don't have to be interns, they can be staff, they can be contract or full time employees. Like, for example, we have Jerry Potter who hosts our social media marketing talk show and he's been doing it for years. And before that it was Jeff C. And before that it was Eric Fisher, and before that it was me. These people, some of them have been employees, some of them have been contractors. So you can hire these people to do podcasts, to host the podcast, give them a certain amount of agency, right. To be able to decide what the topics are. You can have them create YouTube videos. I mean, there's, there's a lot you can do. And it seems to me as if there really is no limit to the number of messengers as long as they are achieving that objective, right?
- [31:31]
Brian Piper
Absolutely.
- [31:32]
Michael Stelzner
Because this is actually really affordable marketing in the grand scheme of things. Would you agree?
- [31:36]
Brian Piper
Definitely. And I mean, you're both benefiting from it. Not only are they benefiting from having a job, but they're benefiting from creating a future opportunities for Themselves, they're benefiting from being tied in with your network of existing influencers. And we've had some of our students that have gone on and found jobs at companies that they have gone and talked with and connected with through our channels or through our stories that we're promoting.
- [32:03]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. And obviously, they could be in house staff. Right. So there could be already somebody on your team that's a really good communicator that maybe has a gift, but you just haven't unlocked. Right. Have you seen this happening with other organizations?
- [32:14]
Brian Piper
Yeah. So Carroll Community College actually has a personal branding class that they offer for free for all their faculty, staff and students. And they have seen great responses from faculty who are figuring out now how to get out on social and how to activate themselves and how to create more buzz around, you know, not only the institution, but around their brand and about their opportunities.
- [32:38]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, perfect. So we've talked so far about, first of all, identifying that ideal audience and the goal of wanting to create this content. Then we've talked about auditing or discovering the letter D in ideal, what kinds of content opportunities are out there based on what has performed well in the past and is attracting that ideal target audience. Then we'd spend a lot of time talking about empowering authentic messengers who may or may not be internal staff, maybe interns, maybe contractors, and allowing them to get out there and grow their personal brand under your direction and creating more content. What is the next part of your process now?
- [33:19]
Brian Piper
You need to activate your multichannel strategies. So now you look at all that content that you've identified. You've got the ideas for your content, you've got your messengers all set up ready to deliver that content. Then you need to optimize and distribute that content for maximum discoverability. So we know that you can't just put content up on your blog anymore. You might be creating social posts from your advocates, from your internal creators that you've built up and have them distributing that content. But you need to look at how that content can be reused across all your platforms. And think about that. When you're creating content, think about if you're looking at what content is the most repurposable. It's video content because you can pull out audio clips, you can pull out transcriptions, you can rewrite those as social posts. You can put those out in newsletters. So we try to start with video wherever we can. If we know there's a video element opportunity, then we'll start with video. But then you want to make sure that you're covering all the bases that maybe your interns, your student creators, your internal creators are posting out on social. Maybe they could also be posting in Reddit or following threads within Reddit and adding that content into there, because a lot of people are searching on Reddit. So if your audiences are in those platforms, you need to figure out how to distribute that content into all those platforms where they are. And AI is fantastic at helping with repurposing and redistributing that content.
- [34:55]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so we're kind of back to where we were in the second part of this, which is discovering content opportunities. Let's say that we have discovered a really nice piece of blog content that performed really well and it seems to be seemingly evergreen, meaning it's never going to go out of date. And then let's say we also found a podcast episode that's amazing and maybe even a YouTube video that's amazing. And we've identified, okay, these are three different pieces of content that we know did well. What do we do? Talk to me about once we have this. How can we optimize this? Let's break it down a little bit.
- [35:32]
Brian Piper
So we're doing this all the time now. So we'll find a news story that has performed really well on our website and maybe it's targeted towards, you know, other potential faculty who might be coming here. It's some research content or something like that. So we'll take that, we'll put that into ChatGPT and say, rewrite this and create four different TikTok scripts for a 30 second TikTok that will be most relevant for potential undergraduate students considering the university as a choice. And so then we'll take those and we'll give those to our social media interns and say, look through these. These are the ideas that we want to communicate, the concepts that we want to communicate. Put these in your own words. You can pull parts and pieces. If you see things in here that are good, we don't ever do a, you know, copy and paste a lift and deliver. And then we'll say, all right, now take that, record that. And now you have social media post that is pulling from that same authentic original content that you have. It's just repurposed now, targeted at a different audience, ready to go on a different channel. And you can do that so quickly from basically any piece of existing content that you have. You have a podcast episode that's performing well. Pull that down, grab the transcript, convert that into, you know, five different posts for LinkedIn and figure out what audience are you trying to target? What platform are they on? And how can you deliver that content to that audience on that platform?
- [37:00]
Michael Stelzner
Well, and to get even more fascinating, Andy Crestadena was recently on the podcast, and I think I might have published before this one. We could look at that piece of content and ask AI to analyze it and say, what did we not cover that we should have covered? Right. Or gap analysis? Or is there something that would be a logical next follow on to something like this.
- [37:20]
Brian Piper
Right.
- [37:21]
Michael Stelzner
And I would imagine this could open up like kind of Pandora's box in a good way. Of all these possible explorations that you could take from this initial piece of content, even though it's not repurposing it, it's being inspired by it. Reactions to that.
- [37:34]
Brian Piper
Absolutely. And I mean, that's a great way to think about training a custom GPT that could look at your. Your overall business goals, your current content strategy, and you can dump a piece of content in there and say, this content's great for top of funnel. What content is next to get the users into the middle of the funnel or to the bottom of the funnel? How can we use this to help them convert to becoming customers? What are the gaps? What is the flow based on the Personas that we have? So connecting all of those pieces, AI is really good at doing that.
- [38:08]
Michael Stelzner
Brian. I can speak for at least one member of our audience, but hopefully lots that we hear this stuff all the time. But maybe just today, for the very first time, the dots are starting to connect in people's brains. Because the truth of the matter is that a lot of us are like just content creation machines. We just keep coming out with new stuff, but we don't ever look back. We don't ever really say, all right, what worked and why did it work and what can I learn from that? Right? And there's so much there that can simplify our lives, like, enormously. I mean, were you like me in the beginning, just pumping out content, or were you always like a perfect strategy kind of mindset kind of guy?
- [38:47]
Brian Piper
No, no, Just push out the content, get as much out there. And then all of a sudden, you know, when I started really getting into data analysis, I started looking back at all that content that was behind us and all the gold that was in that data. And we could start saying, well, we don't even need to create brand new original content for the next six months because we've got this huge backlog of pieces of content that we can just look at and say, okay, well, what are we Missing out of here. How can we expand on that? How can we make offshoots of that? And then once you start doing that now you've got all this content that you can link back to. And internal linking is a great strategy for increasing your search rankings, driving more traffic, letting Google see that you have this breadth of knowledge around a particular area. So you're really making the most out of all that time you spend, all that effort you spent creating that content to figure out. Now you can go back and optimize that content and find places where you have holes, where you have gaps, instead of just kind of blindly scrambling forward and making more content and just hoping that it's working as you're going.
- [39:50]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, and this can be, you know, YouTube playlists. Like, for example, if you're making YouTube video content, you can have a little playlist and you can bring all these things together, you can put end cards on your YouTube videos, cross promoting the other stuff, and there's so much you can do. All right, we may have already gotten into the L here. I'm not 100% sure, but I'm going to start from the beginning. Ideal. Identify that goal and audience. D, Discover your content opportunities. E Empower authentic messengers. We spent a lot of time on that. A, Activate multichannel strategies. And A is where we kind of pull the threads together between the D and the A. Now let's talk about the L. What is the L? And have we already talked about it? I don't know.
- [40:30]
Brian Piper
So L is the learn and iterate and yeah, that's the using your data to refine and improve. So look back at your content, look at what's working, look ahead, figure out what's happening. Like predictive analytics, AI is great at that. You could dump all your content in and say, you know, in the landscape of what's happening in the world or what's happening in my industry, what are going to be the problems that different businesses, different customers are going to face that we can get ahead of and start creating content for that, Start doing a B testing and monitor that to look at what content variations are working? So so many different things that you can figure out from your data and establish from your data that are going to inform not only how you optimize your existing content, but where you create your new content and what content you create.
- [41:19]
Michael Stelzner
I really love the word iterate because it kind of sounds like experiment. Right? You can just make a little tweak here and see how it works. Do you have any tips on helping people kind of track this stuff, because this almost looks like a mind map that's got out of control in my brain, you know what I mean? Like, is there any systems you've come up with or tools that you use to help kind of track all this?
- [41:42]
Brian Piper
Yeah. So we always, whenever we're doing a new process or a new project and we start tracking, we always just track in the most basic way that we can. So a lot of times we'll just start a Google sheet. And we started doing this with our news content that we were creating. We just started like every month we'd go back through our news stories and we'd go into a sheet and we'd check off in a column, like, what strategic priority this piece of content related to whether this was content that we came up with on our own from our editorial staff, or if this was content that was recommended to us by a researcher or a faculty. And then after doing that for about three or four months, you get an idea of what data is really relevant and what really matters and what can help you. So, you know, we did this for about six months before we started seeing that content that we came up with the idea for performed much better than content that was recommended to us. You know, when you start doing this across all your channels now you're going to start seeing what content performs better on social or which social channels are better for which type of content. So now we have all these insights into our content performance. So we know if we have community engagement content that goes on Facebook, we know that if we have research finding content that goes on our website and that goes on LinkedIn. So, you know, we're finding out what works best on which channels and that's informing the content that we're going to create down the road, as well as letting us know where we're going to be putting that content. And then you can go from the spreadsheets, then you can, like, once you get it to a point now you can start looking for third party tools that might be able to, you know, track those same metrics or more automate the performance and the tracking of those metrics. And with the pace that AI is evolving at right now, a lot of that can be automated.
- [43:32]
Michael Stelzner
Brian Piper, on behalf of exploding brains everywhere, I want to say thank you for opening people's minds to a framework that I think really makes sense. You know, it's rational, it's logical, it's trackable, it's progressable. And I know there's a lot more where this came from. If people want to connect with you on the socials. What is your preferred social platform? And if they want to learn more about anything else you've got going on, where do you want to send them?
- [43:57]
Brian Piper
LinkedIn is my platform of choice. Currently. I'm Brian w. Piper on LinkedIn or you can go to BrianWPiper.com and I've got lots of information on my website about this.
- [44:07]
Michael Stelzner
Brian, thank you again for sharing your insights with us today.
- [44:10]
Brian Piper
Thanks for having me, Mike. It's been great.
- [44:12]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com 649 and if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a long time listener, would you give us a review on whatever app you're listening to? And also share this episode with your friends? You can tag me if you want to. I'm Stelzner on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and iKestelsner on X. And do check out our other shows, the AI Explored podcast, which Brian and I both had a special episode. We talked about that and also the Social Media Marketing Talk show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. Catch you next time. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. Make 2025 your best year ever. Grab your discount tickets to Social Media Marketing World right now by visiting social media marketing world.in fox.