[Best of Season] AMP075: Getting 10x Results From Your Content With Garrett Moon Of CoSchedule

Speaker A: Hi friends, it's Nathan from coschedule here on the Actionable Marketing Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. If you remember me, you've been a listener for a very long time. Coschedule started this podcast back in 2015 and things were a little raw back then. And we, uh, have improved so much over the years and gone through a few different hosts and lots of different seasons of change on the Actionable Marketing Podcast. What I want to do now is a season to help us change even further. Since 2015, we have recorded and published more than 300 episodes of this podcast, which is insane and I'm very excited about it. We've had the opportunity to work with some of the smartest minds out there and share their stories with you through this podcast. What I want to do on this season is bring back some of the best of the best. We know that really great marketing advice is hard to come by, and that advice coming from very exceptional marketers is also difficult to get that first hand experience. So what we're going to do is take some of the best content that we've got and share it with you again by republishing some of the pieces that are more evergreen, but we think still provide tons of value. So thanks for sticking with us again. This is just a brief season. We'll be back better than ever very soon.

Speaker B: You're listening to the Actionable Marketing podcast, powered by CoSchedule, the number one marketing calendar for everything you need organized.

Speaker C: It's no secret that content marketing is a highly competitive space these days. There are nearly 60 million blog posts published every single day. There are 5 billion YouTube videos watched every day and millions of search results that your content is trying to edge out. But that's exactly why I'm so excited that you're listening here, because my guest has answers to these competition problems and so much more. I have Garrett Moon, our very own CEO of CoSchedule, talking to us today about his new book, 10x Marketing Blueprint for creating competition Free content that stands out and gets results. It is actionable and action packed. We cover a ton of ground that will really help marketers reframe their mindset on the entire enterprise of content marketing specifically. So, without further ado, here is my conversation with Garrett.

Speaker D: Garrett, thanks for being on the show.

Speaker E: Hey, glad to be here.

Speaker D: Well, Your new book, 10x Marketing Formula, is launching soon, which we're all really excited about. For those who aren't in the loop on that, can you give us an overview of what it's about.

Speaker E: Well, 10x marketing formula is all about results. Um, I always think that as marketers we're given these big, uh, tasks of bringing in sales, bringing in leads, bringing in visitors, building traffic, and all of these, uh, different activities that support the core business metrics. What do you need? You need to be able to produce results on a regular basis. The 10x marketing formula is really about taking the formula, the process, the tips and tricks, the things that work for us at CoSchedule on going from 0 to 300,000 plus subscribers on our email list, uh, in just a few years, packaging it up and making it something that anybody can use and implement in their business, uh, and in their marketing process.

Speaker D: So in some ways you've kind of been writing it for a few years then over the course of just experience, right?

Speaker E: Yeah. Learning the hard way, we learned a bunch of lessons. We tried things that worked. Uh, we tried a bunch of things that didn't work. And in the book we cover both of those. We kind of say, here's some things that worked, here's some things that didn't work for us. And um, we can kind of give you a, uh, blueprint to save a lot of the trouble and the frustration, um, or if you're just feeling like your market is going okay, but just not generating the results that you're looking for, uh, this book can really help focus your efforts and make sure it does.

Speaker D: So why did you decide now was the time to write this book?

Speaker E: I think when I look at the content marketing industry as a whole, I kind of think we've reached sort of a pinnacle. Um, in the book I talk about Gartner's hype cycle, which is, uh, just kind of an interesting way of looking at how new technology is adopted. It kind of goes through this process where when something comes out, Content marketing really started to take shape few years back. Everyone was really excited about it. There was a lot of energy, a lot of hype behind it, um, and a lot of big promises that content marketing made to all of us. And so teams began adopting it in droves. They reworked their entire marketing teams. They, uh, shifted everything in order to be able to adopt this process of content marketing. They're creating content, blogging, building email lists, all of those types of things. I think we're at this point now where, uh, entering what I would call the trough of disillusionment, where, okay, yes, we did all of that, but what about all those big promises that content marketing made to us, right? Like, what about the results that we're supposed to get. What about the leads that should be pouring into our coffers? Uh, and marketers are kind of starting to look around and say, like, you know, what happened to that? Where are the promises? Why am I not getting the results that I was promised? Uh, you know, when I adopted this, uh, new thing and, you know, if you're a marketer, your boss is looking at you saying, hey, you know, I thought this was really going to pay off, you know, where are the results? So I think it's just come to a time in content marketing where everyone's kind of reflecting and saying a little bit like, like, okay, if we're gonna really double down, if we're really gonna continue doing this, um, how do we really make it sing? How do we really make it pay for itself and become a true part of our results? So, short story, right? Uh, more and more marketing teams, they're looking at how do we provide business value, uh, how are we helping the business that we serve? And I think there's also a lot of marketers that are coming up short in terms of, uh, how to answer that question. And content, uh, marketing sort of needs reinvention. 10x market formula really tries to do that. I think the other thing I would say is we have this sort of epidemic in marketing. Um, we call it Me Too marketing in the book, which is there's a lot of free content online, uh, blog posts, people sharing what works for them. And I think there's just this process of sort of take a little bit here and there, take a few tips here, uh, take a piece of this strategy, uh, copy this tactic and those types of things. We're kind of pasting together our content marketing strategy and our marketing strategy, um, and it's not really giving us a complete blueprint. So that's kind of the other piece of it that we really wanted to solve is we want to help marketers get past this like, uh, trough of disillusionment, help them get results, and then give them an actual framework that's a full package, right? Start to finish. This is the type of process that'll help you find something that's unique to your business that only you can do, uh, and yet you can really be successful with.

Speaker D: Yeah, I love that. And I think your subtitle really speaks to that. And I wonder if you could tell us more about it. You say finding your competition free content niche, so you create stuff that stands out and gets those business results you're talking about. So what is the competition? Free content Idea?

Speaker E: Well, it's sort of this acknowledgement that your marketing is in competition with other marketing. Uh, it's really easy for us to think about our business being in competition with other business or our product being in competition with other products. And as marketers, we're dealing with that all the time as we're going about formulating our pitch and helping our sales and our marketing teams convey our message. But one thing that we kind of fail to consider pretty often is that our marketing is actually in itself competing with the time and attention of our readers and our audience. And so competition free content is really about finding a way to break past that barrier that those competitors are causing you. Um, in the book, I talk a bit about a book called Blue Ocean Strategy. This is a business book. Uh, it's a few years old now, but it talks about two different oceans. And one is the bloody red ocean. Uh, and that is the, the ocean that is full of competition where businesses are fighting each other to stand out. They're fighting each other to, uh, get noticed by the customer. And they're all basically at war with each other and it's draining all of their resources. Then you contrast that to a blue ocean, and the blue ocean is this wide open expanse of uncontested ocean you're free to swim and move about. The reason is because you've been able to successfully differentiate yourself from the competition. And so competition free content really starts to take that concept, which is a business concept and related to the business model and many other things, and starts to back it into how content marketing works, how content is created. And it goes to the topics that you create. It goes to how you go about creating the content. It goes to how you end up connecting, uh, that content to your audience and sharing it with them. And it covers that whole everything. And it's basically a way to start looking at, hey, is our content marketing differentiating itself from all of the other marketing and the other noise that's in our industry? Uh, and can we really stand out and compete with that?

Speaker D: And that really seems to me like what lies at the heart of getting 10x results that the book's all about, right? 10x marketing formula. So there's lots of talk, 10x results, 10x projects, becoming a 10x marketer. Like, throughout the book, readers are going to find those. Can you talk about what the 10x idea is all about now?

Speaker E: Yeah, we contrast 10x versus 10%. Right. That's kind of two different ways that you can look at the projects that you're taking on as a team. And we have a whole system for analyzing this and brainstorming this with your team. But it's really about looking at the things that you're doing and asking yourself, um, is this thing whatever I'm going to be doing here, is this potentially give our team the ability to multiply our results, multiply the number of visitors to our website, um, multiply the number of sales qualified leads that we give to our sales team, uh, multiply the number of email subscribers by 10 times a magnitude, uh, massive growth versus uh, 10% uh, versus hey, can we increase our email list by a few hundred or a few people per day? And a lot of times what we see is once you start really looking at what we do as marketers, a lot of the things that we do on a day to day basis end up being these 10% tasks. They're not bad per se, but they're only going to be helping uh, us increase results by 10% or so by a little bit. They're incremental improvements uh, versus what could be 10x opportunities, uh, instead that are going to multiply our results by magnitude. Now we take this concept from co schedule. CoSchedule is a startup and uh, like any other startup, there was a day when coschedule was very young. We had to prove our uh, existence as a product, so to speak, that customers wanted to actually buy what we were selling, uh, that our product actually solved a need that marketers had on a day to day basis. And um, we also needed to do the simple things like turn a profit so that we could pay for the uh, lights, the computers, the salaries that we have every single day. So for us it was results or die. We had three to four months to figure out how to get customers coming in the door or we're going to have to shut things down and go back to the starting block on a new business or go take jobs or whatever. So in those situations when it's a results or die for a startup, that startup has to find ways to survive. They have to find ways to produce results. If they spend any time focusing on a 10% project, they're going to miss the boat. They're going to die. We're really looking at how do we apply that intensity to marketing teams, how do we cut the crop and focus on 10x growth versus just incremental uh, maintenance based improvements to our marketing programs.

Speaker D: Now how do you think that mindset would translate well for marketers who are maybe involved in a more traditional marketing team? They're an agency or they're more established, how do you think that mindset shift could help them?

Speaker E: Yeah, I think more and more the larger organization you tend to be in, the more concern uh, there is for risk and the more resistance there is to taking on risk. Um, I think once teams start looking at what they're doing, how their processes are built, one thing that they tend to find is that much of what they're doing is based on mitigating risk, uh, versus generating results. That's a really important distinction and something that you really have to identify as a team. Even in an agency you can have that same confidence, particularly if you're working with clients and stuff. Right. Like there's a lot of things that you get worried about or uh, you don't do or you don't go after because uh, you don't want to damage that client relationship. So you kind of end up tiptoeing around it. So I think the key is learning to identify what's a risk based process or thing that you're doing to avoid risk versus something where it's solely focused on producing results. At the end of the day, your company has an internal marketing team in order to produce results, not avoid risk. At the end of the day, your customer, your client is hiring you to help them produce results. You have to find ways to get around that so called risk that is out there.

Speaker D: One of my favorite parts in the book is toward the end you describe what marketers will look like if they adopt these frameworks, if they work the formula. It's the section called the 11 traits of a 10x marketer. You describe what this is going to look like. What are a few of your favorites out of those 11 traits? And can you unpack them for us to sort of paint the vision of like, well, what could this look like for me as a marketer?

Speaker E: Yeah, I mean, um, this was sort of based on one of the stories that inspired me as an entrepreneur which was ah, something called the Agile Manifesto. And I think a lot of people are probably familiar with the term agile as a project management methodology that's used for developing software and used for software teams. Um, and we don't go, I don't go through great strains in the book to connect every bit of the marketing process to Agile. But there's some things that we can learn from that process. In particular why they invented uh, or developed that project management process in the first place. Um, one of the cool stories from that is you had a group of engineers and software developers and software builders that were frustrated with how projects were managed and they thought there has to be a better way to do this. Um, this process that we're using doesn't really take into account the creative process that frequently comes with softW, that doesn't take into the account just the nuts and bolts of how software is actually built. So they ended up having this retreat out in the mountains and a bunch of uh, engineers go out there and uh, I'd spend a weekend skiing and talking about, I believe they were in Colorado somewhere skiing and talking about, um, software development and how it could be better. Um, they didn't come out of that meeting with a specific process, but they actually came out with something called the Agile Manifesto. And it's just these three or four lines, it's very short, um, that really I think is very powerful in the way that it causes, ah, an engineering team to sort of rethink and reframe what they're doing. And so, um, I kind of thought it'd be appropriate to try and attempt something like that in the 10x marketing formula and that we call that the 10x manifesto. Uh, now of course these guys were like super smart. Obviously there was a group of them and they developed this over time, uh, for me. And this 10x manifesto, it's really just the first run and it's just kind of my thoughts and my way of blowing it down. So it's maybe not quite as grandiose as theirs. I think what it tries to accomplish though is that so much of marketing is I think about mindset in terms of how we really frame what we're doing and how we approach things. I always talk about focus, uh, is really a big piece of it. That's something I cover a lot in the book. Just how to get the team to focus, how to keep yourself focused as a marketing manager or whatever your, uh, role is on the team. Um, and you know, simple tools like the 10x marketing formula and the 10x manifesto I think are kind of hopefully just there in the background to kind of keep our eye on the ball, so to speak.

Speaker C: Well, if you're getting as much out of this interview as I am, I've

Speaker D: got some great news for you.

Speaker C: You can head over to coschedule.com

Speaker D: and

Speaker C: grab your free copy of chapter one in Garrett's new book, 10X Marketing Formula. It really lays the foundation for the entire formula by pressing that big reset button on your mindset and really can change the way you approach all of your marketing. That's 100% for free. So head over to coschedule.com 10x book

Speaker D: for your copy of chapter one.

Speaker C: Alright, let's get back to my interview with Garrett.

Speaker D: You said this a little bit earlier, but you mentioned this phrase, results or die, and that's one of these like bits of the manifesto. Uh, let me read the line. You say 10x marketers work in a results or die oriented business. No 10 percenters allowed. Um, can you talk a little bit about what that means?

Speaker E: Oh man, so much is in that little phrase for me because I think it goes back to a lot of what I think is wrong with marketing much of the time. Um, a lot of times I think it's very easy for us to think of marketing as a process of things that we do. Marketing is the blog, Marketing is the social media channels. Marketing are the sales, uh, brochures or the tear sheets that your sales team needs. Um, marketing is the booth that your sales um, team is going to stand in front of at the conference. Um, and there's all these deliverables, right, that a marketing team creates and hands off to the sales team, to the uh, support teams, to whoever is conducting the day to day business. Um, and it's so easy to think of marketing as those things that is actually the tangible results of marketing. Maybe it's an ad or a radio ad or web ads, whatever. But to do that, it's the wrong way to think about what we do as marketers. Marketers aren't here to produce web ads. We aren't here to build a website. We aren't here to write sales copy. We're here to help produce business results. Right. We're here to help grow the companies that we work in to help um, expand the client list of the clients that we serve on a day to day basis if we're in an agency. So that phrase is about, you know, we, we need to be thinking results or die. Like in order for me to prove my value as a marketer, in order for this marketing team to be worth the investment that my employer or my client has put in me, I need to create results. I need to create 10x results. Not 10%, not minor improvements, but 10x results. And I think it's just again like mindset kind of reframing how uh, we approach our day to day work and making sure we're locking that in uh, as we approach our projects.

Speaker D: Yeah, I absolutely love that. It just pumps me up listening to you talk about it. And the other one I wanted to ask you about, it's related to that one. I'm going to read this. You wrote 10x. Marketers understand that growth requires failure. Strength is in progress, not perfection. And I think, you know, when we start talking about something like results or die, it can make some of us marketers start to get a little nervous maybe like geez, that's a high bar, um, and maybe some of us haven't held ourselves to that before. But this, this next one that understanding growth requires failure, strength is in progress, not perfection is sort of a good counterbalance to that, right?

Speaker E: It is. And so I mean I'm attacking all of the pillars of marketing here. I'm attacking the marketing plans uh, that we spend and hours writing in these multi page documents. And maybe not everyone does it. I know, um, many people don't. But certain industries and certain uh, types of marketing teams, particularly large organizations, they kind of live by these big documents that say this is exactly what we're going to do. Uh, this is exactly how it's going to work. This is how the campaign, this is how the year is going to work. From the marketing team's perspective. What's interesting is once you start looking at the marketing plan, even once you start looking at many, um, you just break it down into smaller things like just how we plan out a campaign, uh, even if it's a multi month campaign to highlight a specific benefit that your product provides, when we come to those things there's so many assumptions built into them. We assume that the methods that we use for getting the message out uh, are going to work. We assume that we have the right mix of email, of uh, ads, of content, of uh, sponsored posts or whatever those types of elements are. We assume we have the right messages. We assume that we have the message going into the campaign, uh, that's going to really trigger the emotions of the customer and get them involved in what we're saying and have them invest in what we're doing. Uh, we assume that we have the right timeline, the right time of year. There's all of these things. Once you start, if you don't get overwhelmed when you're planning a campaign at all of the options and the variables and the AB tests and the difference in email headlines and all those things that you could be doing. You're probably not aware of how many things you're just guessing at or how many things like assumptions that you're walking into because it's absolutely overwhelming the difference that some of those things can make. Right. My point isn't that the problem is in the variety or the variables is a better way to say it. The variables that you can choose when putting together a campaign. The problem is in the plan. And what I mean by that is when we make a plan, we write it down, we pre decide this is how something is going to work for the next three months, six months, six years, whatever. Uh, we set ourselves up for trouble. Now, what that document becomes is a risk removal tool, right? Like it says, if we made a plan and I got my boss to look at that plan, or I got my client to approve that marketing plan, then it's on them, right? Like, I made a plan, they had the opportunity to give me feedback or tell me it was wrong, but they didn't do it. And, uh, so I ran the plan, and if it works, great. If it not, hey, it's not just my fault. You own part of this too, right? So they become these de risking documents. They prevent us from shouldering 100% of the risk. All of that adds up to what this line in the manifesto that you're talking about means. Our strength as marketers is not in our perfection. It's not in our ability to write out a marketing plan as if it's a medical prescription. Right? And if we follow that exact medical prescription, we will have all the business results that we need, rather than how we need to see our jobs as marketers. Is teams that embrace failure. They have the phrase fail fast. And it's always kind of hard to imagine, like, what does fail fast mean? And that sounds really like a bad idea. Like, why are you failing all the time? Um, uh, but I think basically all you're doing, it's not about failure. It's actually about just acknowledging imperfection more than anything. It's about saying, like, I don't know all of the variables. Like, I don't know, um, if we have the exact right mix here of paid versus, uh, unpaid content or sponsored content. Um, I don't know if we have the exact right formula, but I have a list here of all of the things that we need to consider and that we need to try. Um, and I have a general idea of how we're going to do it. But here's the thing. On day one, we're going to start running these ads and they're going to use this phrase or they're, uh, going to try to connect with the customer in this way. And these are the results that we're looking for. These are some of the benchmark numbers that we want to hit. And if we don't hit that, we're going to change everything. We're going to try something different and we're going to do that every single week, uh, for the next however many weeks it takes in order for us to find the right combination that's going to work for what we're trying to accomplish. So really what we're doing is we're flipping around rather than saying, as marketers, we're not going to start with the campaign and the plan, but rather we're going to start with the goal. What's the KPI? What's the number that we're trying to hit? And we're going to work backwards and we're going to do whatever it takes to get that number to be willing to fail. We're going to be willing to release ads and send emails that don't convert so that we can learn and write better ones and get, uh, the emails and the ads that convert so that we can achieve, uh, our goal.

Speaker D: I love that, especially today because I think, in fact as we record this, it might even be happening now. I think SpaceX has a launch today. They're launching the Falcon Heavy or something. And Elon Musk said something. This is either going to be the most phenomenal launch you've ever seen or like the best fireworks display ever. He was just like, it's going to be amazing or we're going to fail, but we're going to learn a ton.

Speaker E: Right. And the gut wrenching feeling that he still feels if that thing explodes on the launch pad. Right. I mean, it's millions of dollars up in smoke. Um, but Elon Musk is a great case study in that. I mean, you're absolutely right because, um, you've seen all kinds of tweets. I think even they've released even a video of all the different failures that they have, uh, released. You think that $5,000 ad buy, uh, that you did was, uh, a miserable failure? Uh, it tried the million dollar rocket that blew up on the launch pad or fell into the ocean. Um, the stakes are high for sure, but SpaceX, uh, isn't a company that launches rockets perfectly every single time. SpaceX is a company that has big goals, big KPIs, um, and is willing to fail because it accelerates their learning. And I think that's really the key. Um, we talk about failing fast and that's all fine and well, but the goal isn't failure, ironically. Right. It's just sort of a punchy way to say it. It's really more like iterating quickly, which is super boring. And not nearly as sexy as failing fast. So I guess it doesn't work. But, uh, it's about learning. It's about like, hey, we're going to try something, something. We're going to test it, and we're going to learn from it, and we're going to go into this thing knowing that we don't have all the answers, but we do know is that we have the process to figure it out. And that's really, uh, what I love about some of the things that we put in the 10x marketing formula is that it is the process to get the results, um, because it kind of takes away the assumptions, uh, and the guessing and kind of puts into place a framework for finding the results, finding success, how to make it repeatable, how to scale it once you get there, and really making those KPIs sing.

Speaker D: All right, well, pardon the pun. I always like to bring these in for a landing by just asking this sort of sage wisdom.

Speaker E: I see what you did there.

Speaker D: I know, I know. I've been waiting to drop that all day.

Speaker E: Fail fast, man. Fail fast.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker D: Ever the marketer. Um, okay, so, Garrett, what is your best advice to any of our listeners who would like to start down the 10x marketing path? Like, what is step number one, outside of buying the book?

Speaker E: Download the free chapter on the website? Is that good? No, that's too much.

Speaker D: Um, well, it's a good start.

Speaker E: It's a good start. Yes. Right. Yeah. I think a really good place to start might just be just taking the most simple idea here, the 10x versus 10% concept, and just maybe even, you know, take it out a sheet of paper, jot down the things that you worked on today or this week, you know, what were the main focus areas? And just start to ask yourself, are these 10x activities or are these 10% activities? Right. Do any of these activities have the ability or the potential in a short period of time to multiply the results I get as the marketer or my business receives by 10 times? 10 times. Right. That's. That's a lot of. That's a lot of multiplication. Right. That's a big number. Um, or these 10% activities. And I think what many marketers are going to find is that there's a lot of 10% stuff on that list. There's a lot of, oh, go update this little line on a website. And, yeah, that one line on the bottom of your website hasn't converted a customer ever once in the history of time. Or, um, you might tweak A pop up, you might, uh, adjust an ad campaign. And those things are nice little improvements. They'll probably move the goal line a little bit, but they really have the ability to multiply. And I think once marketers start looking at what they do, you'll begin to start seeing seen the problem. There's a lot of stuff in here that's that 10% world where I'm making improvements. They're not unhelpful, but they're not going to give me the results that I really, really want and I really, really crave, uh, and that our company deserves. So I think seeing that sort of sets you up for, okay, we got to find something different. We've got to find a way to get past just 10% stuff and get to some really big things that'll move the needle.

Speaker D: That's so great. I mean, and it's really freeing to think about that. Just freeing to pursue the stuff that's really going to get us those results and sort of stick all the other stuff to the side and enter this maybe new era for some of us in marketing. So thanks so much for being on the show today. This was fantastic.

Speaker E: Oh, lots of fun. I could talk about it all day long.

Speaker D: Yeah, well, there'll be plenty more, so stay tuned everyone.

Speaker E: Thanks, Jordan.

Speaker D: Thanks, Garrett.

Speaker C: If you've been swimming in that red ocean that Garrett was describing, that place where your content is going head to head with everyone else's stuff, you feel like the airspace is just super noisy, super crowded, and you're having a really hard time punching through. I'm very glad you got to listen to this episode because this is the perfect place to start. And so I hope that you will do more than just, you know, receive this knowledge and information today. I hope that you will translate it into action, especially with that 10x versus 10% framework. Are the activities we are doing in our marketing producing 10 fold results or are they simple 10% improvements that aren't really moving the needle big time like Garrett talked about? So fantastic stuff. Thank you so much, Garrett for being on the show today. You can grab Garrett, uh, chapter one in Garrett's new book, 10x Marketing Formula, absolutely free by visiting coschedule.com 10x book. We will zip it over to you via email right when you, uh, click the link to download. It's fantastic and a really good first step toward revolutionizing your marketing results. And as always, you can head over to coschedule.com podcast to get this episode transcript, full show notes and pertinent links and you can also, you know, revisit really quickly all the stuff that Garrett talked about so you can put it into action. And again, you can visit coschedule.com podcast to get all those goodies. All right, marketers, that is it for now. We'll see you next week.

Speaker E: Talk soon.

Speaker B: You've been listening to the Actionable Marketing podcast from your friends at CoSchedule. For more actionable content, visit CoSchedule.com.