Heidi Cohen Interviews Garrett Moon
New book – 10x Marketing Formula: Your Blueprint for Creating ‘Competition-Free Content’ That Stands Out and Gets Results
Q: What’s your best piece of advice for readers looking to improve their marketing?
A: At CoSchedule, we have a battle cry: “Results or Die!”. Content marketing is competitive, crowded, and cluttered. Everyone is clawing for the same people’s attention—and they’re doing the same things to get it.
In the end, the marketers who find their competition-free content niche will win out. Competition-free content is about boiling the principle of differentiation into your content marketing strategy.
Regular content marketing is filled with noise, thrashing, and fierce competition. Competition-free content is content that adds tremendous value to your customers and audience that only you can produce. It’s content that stands out through topic, structure, or media type. And it renders competition irrelevant because this is uncontested space.
My best advice is to look at your competition, research their content, and strategize your competition-free content.
Q: What was the inspiration for 10x Marketing Formula?
A: The promise of content marketing is that it’ll create a magic, inbound funnel dripping money into your bank account. We see constant proof-texts and success stories that “prove” it’s the way marketing must be done. But there’s a huge swath of marketers NOT getting the results content marketing promises.
They use copycat marketing techniques, only to find out what worked for one brand doesn’t work for them. So, what should they do? Abandon content marketing? Keep slogging through the bog of zero results? I vote neither.
That’s where the 10x Marketing Formula comes in. In the book I try to outline a formula that will actually help the get results, but not by just telling them what to do. Instead I outline a process that should help them build a strategy of their own.
Q: What is the key concept behind your book?
A: This book’s title tips off the premise: I want marketers to get 10x better results! This means that our return on effort will be ten times over what we put in. We aren’t looking for 10 percent year-over-year growth; we’re laser-focused on blowing the roof off last year’s, last month’s, and last week’s numbers.
The book identifies a formula for finding these projects and orientating your team behind executing them on regular basis.
In order to do this, many marketers need to undergo a mindset shift, and that’s why this needed to be a book. We need to add experimentation, and a willingness to fail to the day-to-day marketing process. Most marketing today is still built on the back of the traditional “marketing plan,” and while we mean well, this model tends to lock us onto strategies that don’t really pay off.
So, this book is really about finding those strategic shortcuts, taking more risks, and short-circuiting the path to jaw-dropping growth. YOU HAVE TO FIND YOUR OWN WAY – and the 10x-Marketing Formula is that path.
Q: What do you want readers to take away from your book?
A: One of the concepts that I hope readers take away and implement is a concept that I call the content core. In the 10x Marketing Formula your content core connects the dots between what your customers care about and what you have to offer them. It contrasts with parallel topics, which drive traffic, but fail to bring business results. Content core topics intersect your target customers’ needs with the value your products or services provide.
Q: How do you describe yourself professionally?
A: Above all, I think of myself as a starter with an addiction to marketing strategy. I have worked in marketing world my entire professional career. I started as designer in an agency setting and then ran my own agency for several years before launching CoSchedule with my Co-Founder, Justin Walsh.
I’ve become a student of starting and building new things, finding new ways to approach a market, and then getting people onboard as customers or team members. My unique experience as a startup founder, and dare I say “growth hacker”, give me a really different lens and I think that makes my approach, and this book, unique.
Q: What are 1-3 books that inspired your work/career?
- What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis – This is an old book, but it really helped awaken me to the revolution that Google and the web as a whole was going to bring to everything we do. It was important to me in the early stages of my career.
- The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh – My favorite management book and one that I give to all the leaders at CoSchedule. It covers everything you need if you are leading and managing a team.
- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight – Easily one of my favorite books ever. This is an amazing story of how Nike, one of the world’s most iconic brands, got its start. Warning: this one is hard to put down!
A:
Q: What is the biggest challenge that you’ve had to overcome?
A: The process of becoming of entrepreneur was hard. I was stuck in a job that I hated with two young sons, a mortgage, and basement that was in need of a total remodel after both a fire and a flood. It was a bad time to not have a steady paycheck.
Fortunately, the timeline on my job ran out and I was forced to make things work as an entrepreneur. This lead to my business partnership with Justin which is going on 10 years now with our biggest achievement being CoSchedule, which now employs a team of 65 and serves more than 8,000 marketing teams in 120+ different countries.
Q: What’s something unusual or fun that most people don’t know about you?
A: I am a die-hard Chicago Cubs fan and total wanna-be Chicagoan. Professional sports seem silly sometimes, but November 2, 2016 was the day that they finally won a world series and one of the most memorable nights of my life. Go Cubs!
Q: Is there a piece of content, a social media campaign or a marketing campaign that you worked on that you’re particularly proud of?
A: I love the Headline Analyzer we built at CoSchedule a few years ago. We used a ton of internal data (more than 1,000,000 headlines) to determine what types of headlines get the most shares and built an algorithm that helps predict success headlines. It’s a huge success for us and available for free today as a stand-alone tool, or comes built into CoSchedule itself.
Q: Is there anything else that we haven’t covered that you’d like to share?
A: They can download the first chapter of the 10x Marketing Formula for free at coschedule.com/10xbook
Where to find Garrett Moon
Where to find Garrett MoonThank you Garrett.
Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen