In the Now: Michael Brown

For content marketing, Michael Brown is your go-to expert. As the founder of nDash, he lets quality writing and expert insights drive leads. 

Listen to the full interview here. 

Nowspeed: My name is Dave Reske of Nowspeed, which is a digital agency for your content marketing needs. Welcome to this edition of In the Now where we focus on uncovering the myths and misunderstandings of marketing and leadership to some of the world’s most interesting people. And my guest today is Michael Brown, founder and CEO of nDash. Michael, you describe yourself on LinkedIn as a writer, marketer, and an entrepreneur who loves creating things from scratch. He founded nDash to help brands tell more compelling, consistent stories, and to help the world’s best freelance writers advance their careers. So, you probably wrote that many years ago. Is that still true?

Michael: No, it’s held up pretty well. It has been our mission from the start. We’ve been tempted to go into other realms of marketing but have been pretty disciplined about staying in content creation. So, yeah, we’re glad to say it still applies.

Nowspeed: That’s great. Well, we’re getting to some of your background and talking about nDash in a few minutes, but I just want to start by asking you to talk a little bit about content marketing. What’s a myth that you think people have about content marketing? And what’s the reality in your experience?

Michael: Right now, we’re seeing a lot of articles and ideas put forward where content marketing is really the long plan. Paid acquisition is obviously very expensive and the benefits go away when you stop paying for it. So, there’s this idea going around that content is a four to five year plan for marketing teams. And that’s certainly true; if you create content consistently, you are going to get those SEO benefits long term. But we see a lot of brands get really good results much faster than that. So, this idea that you have to start on day one, and you’re not going to see results until year 10, that’s not what we’re seeing. So, I think that’s one of the bigger myths that we’re seeing dispelled pretty much on a daily basis over here.

Nowspeed: Wow. So you can quantify the ROI of investment in content sooner. Realistically, do you think that’s just marketing teams saying, ‘Yeah, we want to spend all this money, don’t measure us for four or five years and we’ll have the new guy who takes our job down the road be held accountable for that,’ or what do you think that’s all about?

Michael:  Yeah, I think there’s a little bit of that. I mean, you don’t want to be judged too soon on these results. But I think lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of emphasis on distribution, on building various channels to distribute the content. So, I think as marketers get more familiar with and see more success in those areas that you’ll start to see the diminished expectations pulled back a little bit, and to start to judge some of the results a little bit earlier.

Nowspeed: So, when we talk about content marketing, it feels like not all content is created equal and your firm obviously helps people put together a wide variety of content. What do you think is most effective in the short term? And is there something that’s different than more effective in the long term? 

Michael: For nDash, it’s all about insights and expertise. There’s a lot of content agencies or platforms that are really geared towards, ‘Hey, we have this keyword and we need to write as much as we can on it to rank for Google.’ For us, since the start, it’s about the insights that you offer. So, if the writer doesn’t know the topic or they’re just researching it themselves, it’s probably not going to resonate very well with that target audience. It’s a little too basic. Any time you get bring in a writer’s first-hand experience of a topic or industry, we see that perform really well both for us and for our clients. That’s a trend I would expect to see heightened over the next couple of months or next couple of years.

Nowspeed: So, it’s the better quality content that really makes a difference and not just the quantity. Is there a quantity versus quality trade off or is it always quality?

Michael: No, there is a quantity trade. If you write one really good article per year, that’s probably not enough to engage your audience and generate leads and all that stuff. There’s some quantity to it. We see all kinds of different things, even companies that will do 40 to 50 blog posts per month or publis almost two per day. That might be a little bit overkill. It’s certainly overkill for most brands, but anywhere from three to four posts per month. I’m just talking about blog posts — social and email are different animals —  but that seems to be a cadence that both small and large companies can adhere to pretty well.

To listen to the whole interview, click here.