Content marketing: play the long game, says Robert Rose

Content marketing guru Robert Rose says the chase for undeliverable quick wins is turning marketers into ‘day traders’.

Content marketing expert Robert Rose, who is founder and chief strategy officer at The Content Advisory. Picture: Supplied

Faced with intense pressure to deliver results for clients in rapid time, content marketers have become day traders by default, says US content marketing executive Robert Rose.

Mr Rose — who has 20 years experience working alongside major companies including Microsoft, Dell and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on their content marketing strategies — said short-term thinking is hurting companies over the long-run.

“Marketers today have become day traders in our desperate attempt to get ROI (return on investment) in minutes and hours and days, instead of weeks, and months and quarters,” said Mr Rose, who is the founder and chief strategy officer of the education and consulting group, The Content Advisory.

“Telling a business to have the patience to invest in something that is going to take that amount of time, that is ultimately going to be a value investment, that provides long term value, is a hard case to make.

“Businesses are like, ‘No, I’ve got to keep the lights on this month’,” Mr Rose told The Australian.

The 52 year-old said many chief executives ask him how to execute on a content marketing program that delivers results in a month. He tells them not to bother.

“The whole point of a content marketing campaign is that it builds and engages an audience.

“It is a long-term investment,” said Mr Rose, who is based in Los Angeles.

Consumers and businesses have become very impatient, with a laser-like focus on immediate results. During the 1980s, consumers expected a company to respond to its needs within in two to four weeks on average, Mr Rose said. Now it’s 15 minutes.

“The democratisation of the internet, advertising, and all this fragmentation of audiences everywhere has really lowered the bar in marketing to what we see today,” he said

“Banner ads plastered everywhere, billboards plastered everywhere, buy now, buy now, buy now.

The upshot of that short-termism is that many companies had reduced marketing to “how many leads can I put into the funnel today”.

Mr Rose will be in Australia next month to work with Australian content marketing agency Brandalsim as part of an exclusive partnership in the APAC region.

He will speak at a conference and meet some of Brandalism’s clients, which include baby formula and food retailer Bubs Australia, building materials firm James Hardie and ticketing agency Ticketek’s TEG Live.

Brandalism managed the social media channels for Spanish football giant Real Madrid’s World of Football Experience event in Melbourne last year, aimed at lifting the event’s profile and driving ticket sales.

Mr Rose said Australian content market is avoiding some of the mistakes that the US made early on, such as “getting so tied-up in the SEO (search engine optimisation) ball of complexity” and putting too much emphasis on social media.

Mr Rose said many US companies turned too much of their marketing efforts to producing content to gain attention of Google’s search algorithms, which didn’t always work very well. From 2012, Google has changed its algorithms several times, which frustrated many businesses.

Tracy Fitzgerald, founder and managing director of Brandalism, said Mr Rose was the global leader in content marketing, and is a “highly respected, incredibly smart and a true thought-leader”.

“He’s been a massive supporter of Brandalism since the business began and cementing an official relationship with him gives us the opportunity to bring his smarts and passion over to Australia and share his knowledge with the entire market.”

Ms Fitzgerald founded Brandalism in 2014, and was a founding member of King Content, Australia’s largest content marketing agency.

Mr Rose has also written three books, including his latest, Killing Marketing, and produces a weekly pod cast, The Weekly Wrap.