Thoughts on Robert Bly's book, The Content Marketing Handbook

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aACds6YJk9E

Transcription

One function of content marketing.

Hi, I'm Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I'm going to be taking a little excerpt from Bob Bly's book, The Content Marketing Handbook. This came out in 2020.

Bob Bly or Robert W. Bly has been around for a while. He's a famous copywriter and marketing consultant.

I mean, if you haven't, if you aren't aware of this guy, he's put out a million books.

He understands content marketing because he's been doing it long before it has been commonly called Content Marketing. And he shows it in this book, this book is like, it's like a textbook, or an encyclopedia for content marketing, if you will.

I can spend time giving you a review about the book another time, I wanted to cover this one piece that I just love in here called the nine functions of Content Marketing. And today, I'm going to cover his first one.

I'm going to go through and I'll cover all of these, but I'm going to separate them out through different episodes. So the first one I want to go through.

And he says that these are basically the reasons for doing content marketing, these are the functions these are things that content marketing can provide for you.

One way is to set the specs is what he calls set the specs.

So it's a way of defining what customers or clients or potential customers and clients should be looking for.

Here's how he puts it I'm going to read you this piece here.

It says, content marketing can educate prospects on what features functions, and capabilities they should look for in buying a particular type of product or service.

Now, because you've presented your criteria, and a white paper or another medium that looks like useful information, not a sales pitch, readers absorb and accept your guidelines, and then they use the specifications you've set.

So you can come out with this, why you see oftentimes reports and other things offered by people who actually offer the things that you're helping them to buy, which is it's an interesting way of doing it.

You would say, Well, what does that actually work?

Yeah, it works. This is because who else is helping them to look beyond just hey, pick me, pick me.

I mean, who else is not saying that?

This is giving reasons this is giving criteria, you're setting the specs for them to be able to purchase by and you're setting them in a way that puts you in the best light, obviously.

So the the paragraph here he says, You say you sell motionless mixers.

One of the products I helped a market at Coke engineering, you're offered in your ads that you offer in your ads, a booklet called seven things to look for once specified.

When specifying motionless mixers prospects, read it and use your criteria when they look to purchase motionless mixers, and whose mixer fits all seven criteria perfectly.

Okay, you can define it, you can define what they should be looking for. And if they actually take those, and it has to make sense.

You can't just say well, they want to have blonde hair. And now that you know, it has to make sense.

But if you make sense, and they say yeah, that makes sense,