Ep.45- Creating a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy with Karine Abbou with "The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever"

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Richard Bliss:

Welcome to the show. My name is Richard Bliss. I'm your host, and you're listening to Digital-First Leadership podcast. And I wanna thank you very much for being here. It's always great to have you listening in, participating, and sharing with me some of the things that you're learning and talking about out there as I have my guests on and we cover so many interesting topics. Now I'm also grateful for the fact that so many of you have signed up and continue to receive a weekly tip from me on LinkedIn and how it's changing the algorithms. If you'd like to be part of my LinkedIn community, and receive these weekly tips – one went out this morning. Here's the phone this is all you do. You send a hashtag hashtag linked in to the following phone number, 415-534-9722. If you send a text to that number, you'll get an automatic response from me welcoming you to the community. And then every week, usually Monday morning, I send out a tip on what you can be doing on LinkedIn to be successful. And right now, we've got, hundreds of people who've already signed up, so it's been kind of exciting to do that. Now, today, we're gonna have a fantastic conversation because I have one of my favorite people on the podcast she and I have just recently met, but have really enjoyed our relationship so far. And so Karine, I wanna invite you to the show. Thank you for joining me.

Karine Abbou:

Thank you so much for having me. Really? I'm a fan. You know how much I'm a fan. Everything you share on LinkedIn on your great community. I'm a fan.

Richard Bliss:

Well, I appreciate that. We've had so much fun talking about a wide variety of topics and the time that we've known. We got to spend a week to together, in Knoxville with Mark Schafer, which was a singular event. It was very unique, right? It's very seldom you get an experience like that. So before we get started though, let me introduce the audience to you. I'm gonna read, so we're here talking about “The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever.” because, you and I were both, authors in that book, one chapter each, and let me read to the audience right now. what your bio says so that people can know where you're coming from. Karine Abbou is a content marketing consultant as a former lawyer and entrepreneur. She has years of experience in conceiving, launching, and implementing B2B content projects and marketing strategies. Karine is the founder of the French Content Marketing Academy, and the author of the book, Content Marketing, The American methodology. So that sounds pretty impressive, Karine's. And you live in Florida, which right now is which is dying from the heat wave that's going on down there. But.

Karine Abbou:

I do. That's why, actually, we're not doing this interview inside, which I would technically do during the winter.

Richard Bliss:

Right. So no. No. We're just kinda hanging out. So we're gonna talk about I wanted to talk about three things from your book. And I'm gonna just highlight these real quick. Frank, excuse me, from the chapter in the book because you talked about your chapter was on creating powerful content marketing strategy. And there were three points I wanted to talk about approach content creation with help from AI. which is fascinating. That's one thing you and I talked about a lot. Measure your results and commit to consistency. But as you explained to me right before we started, you don't wanna talk about those things. You wanna talk about what you wanna talk about. What are we gonna talk about?

Karine Abbou:

No. I do wanna talk about all those things, and I thought you did a great job, but summarizing the 3 most important things when you actually launch a content strategy. My point was just that before this book and now this book, the at the time we wrote this book, AI was not as big as it is. Okay. It's just got started. Chad GP was barely, barely, barely here. I don't even remember if it was. And definitely, it was not a thing as it is right now as we talk and things has changed. That's the nice things with marketing is that you get to be a a change, a change addict every single minute. And my I would have just emphasized that in the book, my point number 2, I think, was that, of course, after setting your goals when you want to create content, you need to pick a topic. You wanna be– 

Richard Bliss:

Yeah. Here, let me let me just read what that, number 2 says so that we, that we have the consistent language here. As you said, your point number 2 was identify your main content topic. That was your point number two.

Karine Abbou:

Exactly. And the reason why it was very important, and it still is The reason why we addressed it I addressed it in a book in a certain way, and I would address it in a totally different way today is because at the time, When you were creating content, the purpose of this creation was at some point for your user's standpoint. to be helpful and to help them understand the 3 stage of their problem usually because we have identified as marketers that you have generally 3 phases to until you, a user finds that he's he has a problem, then he noticed and learn that you exist. And 3, he will eventually buy from you because he will think you're the best solution to his problem. Okay. So Usually, content marketing was very good at very used to create content at the very, very first stage okay, which was what we call the informational stage. And the idea was that you had to be in some way one of the best providers of informational content on a certain topic, which topic would be the one who solved the problems of your potential customer. Okay?

Richard Bliss:

Right. A subject matter expert. Right? A subject matter expert.

Karine Abbou:

Exactly. Let's say you are you are a plumber and somebody has a leak, okay? He wants to understand first. He doesn't even think he knows or or think he can have he can need a a plumber. He wants to understand what the problem is. So at some point, you would display content on your website explaining what is a leak, what are the types of leaks that exist in what should we do on your own when we have a leak and we discover we have a leak, all those sort of things that would just be helpful and help your potential customer realize that you might be an option.

Richard Bliss:

I had that, actually, almost literally that scenario. My dryer broke. My dryer for washing my clothes and drying. And so I went online because I determined that there was a particular problem. And I went and looked up the problem, and it was the individual who identified how that problem, and here's why the traditional solution wasn't going to work and blah blah blah. It was you're exactly right. They they provided me information that helped me understand my problem. First of all.

Karine Abbou:

That’s exactly right. That's exactly what good content marketing is doing because if you're becoming ideally the first providers in, I don't know, your leak problem, plumbing problems, or dryer problems, whatever, and really provide outstanding explanation, something where you don't sell anything and your only purpose is to be helpful and make sure that your potential audience or target customer, whatever you wanna call it, is gonna be happy with what you provide them. Then you did a great job, and the goal is the, I would say, the mission is that you had been so good that you will think, okay, next time I have something like this, definitely, I'm gonna go back to this website because they did a great job in helping me. Okay? So that's the reason why. But.

Richard Bliss:

But, that is what we're gonna say is that has now radically changed.

Karine Abbou:

That's it. it's about to change dramatically, and we're instill in the middle of it. Why? Because of a little thing that was called ChatGPT. Apparently, it was a nice chat bot where you can talk to and ask questions and you get answered. It was pretty impressive. and everybody pretty much used it whatsoever. In terms of marketing, it's changing everything. Why? Because it change it's changing the economics of the search as we used to know it. Once we, and let's let's put ourselves, from a user's perspective. Okay. Not a marketing, not a entrepreneur perspective. You have a problem tomorrow. Before you had one option, you would go to Google. You would type your keywords or some describing your problem. The answer would come to you in a shape of different blue links. Yep. Okay. And you would decide on which link you would click or not click. It's it was not as simple as that, but just

Richard Bliss:

Close enough. – Yeah. That. – Close enough.

Karine Abbou:

Okay. Now with Chargebee, you have an option. You either go still to Google or you go ask the question to chat GPT. In the first option, you were searching for answers. In the second option, you're asking a straight question. And you're gonna get an answer, and it's gonna be a one on one relationship between you and the chat bot who will provide you with many different types of answers. Some are good. Some are right. Some are not true, but whatever. That's another debate. But as of right now, the economics behind the finding the solution to any types of problem has completely changed. And that was not led by Google. That's what's gonna change, and that's what is shaking us up as marketer. Why? Because once you move from search to chat and once chat is not launched by Google initially, it makes a big fight between 2 giants. OpenAI or whoever is gonna win the chat AI battle. and Google who within the over the past few months, of course, has fought back very, very drastically. So now we're in the middle of this curve. And the question, let's go back to our entrepreneur that you can ask yourself as an entrepreneur if you're on your web on your own, or if you ask anybody, any types of marketers to help you, building your website, your content strategy, and everything, is really to go to ask yourself am I gonna conceive my website right now? Am I still gotta be, some sort of we used to call it a we still call it a topic cluster. meaning you can see the website as a cluster of answers, top answers, to the best to all the question a users can have in your field. And all the what we call SEO was structured around this. a main page with one main keyword and other page related to this main page addressing some subtopics. So in our case, it could be plumbing issues, a leak. I don't know what type of issue plumbers can have, but you can see that there is at least 5, 6, 7, 8 types of – Sure. – issues you cab have? You understand? Now what changed what changes could be that you could possibly conceive your website in a form of a conversation with your potential customer. And that's what OpenAI enables you to do because it's open source. Meaning, if you found somebody, you know, geek enough, you could easily conceive your website in in a form of a in a shape of a chat bot, You will still have to provide some content. I'm not saying that we don't need content anymore. I'm saying the opposite of this. I'm just saying that the way we will conceive content. And the structure of this content will be dramatically changed, and it's gonna be a very, very, a very big course, race to to answer this question.

Richard Bliss:

Yeah, it's gonna be an adjustment, and I know that, Google is is scrambling. The challenge is if I was to walk down the street, well, I did the other day. I was with my barber, right? And if I started talking to him about AI, he's not gonna have any idea what I'm talking about.

Karine Abbou:

I know.

Richard Bliss:

But if I talk to him about ChatGPT, he immediately knows what I'm talking about. And this is the differences that in marketing, and we all know this. The the mind in the marketplace can be occupied mainly by one brand. Right? Mhmm. And right now, when you say AI to the vast majority of the people, right? They know one. They know ChatGPT. Right? That's the one that has begun to occupy the mines I can talk to my mother about it. Right? My mother's almost 80. She knows what ChatGPT is, but she knows no other AI on the planet, but she knows ChatGPT. My barber knows ChatGPT. ChatGPT has now entered into the lexicon in such a way that it's almost synonymous with AI. Right? And so Google's gonna try their best to take this fight back, as you said, the challenge problem is is that hundreds of millions of people now are associating AI with chatGPT. And when Google comes out and says, well, ours is just as good as ChatGPT, or better, well, that actually elevates ChatGPT even more, right, because here, Google is acknowledging the competition. There's all kinds of challenges here. So as a business owner, what I'm hearing you say is, I better get good at understanding what's going on with this AI. And when I start to create content, I need to start thinking about how do I incorporate AI? How do I make advantage of it? How do I use it? that my content strategy needs to have the whole AI mentioned that you mentioned actually now seems to develop almost all of it. Is that accurate?

Karine Abbou:

This is exactly perfectly well summarized. There is actually 2 things with this AI thing. And by the way, I remember that at the uprising, you are the one comparing AI and chatGPT with, Tesla and electric cars because – 

Richard Bliss:

Oh, yeah. That's right.

Karine Abbou:

This is the exact same thing. We barely knew about electric cars before Tesla. Okay? If I'm telling if I speak about electric I don't think nobody lots of people will know exactly what it is about. If I talk about Tesla, everybody will figure it out. You know? So that's the same thing. What happened is when a product is so good, so good, that's just by its use, it's disrupting an entire way of solving problems, which is exactly the case with Google, Okay? It's making those 2 giant, you know, trembling. It's it's really shaking the the basis of everything. And the problem is so far, when we had to answer a question, what would would what would we do? Search going on Google? We'd Google.

Richard Bliss:

We would Google it. We would use it as a verb. just like in the, for you and I are old enough to well, I'm a little bit older than you, but to remember where the term was Xerox something. I'm gonna just go could you make a Xerox for me? Right? It became a verb, or I'm gonna go put a BandAid on.

Karine Abbou:

That's exactly the same thing. That's what my kids are saying all day.

Richard Bliss:

It's yeah.

Karine Abbou:

It's but that's when a product is so disruptive and so good that it's sticking the mind of the people as something that is like, it's here.

Richard Bliss:

It's synonymous. Right. And then suddenly it's where it's at. So if I'm a business and I'm putting together a content strategy, I've read your chapter. It's very informative. It's one of my favorite. I read it about creating a powerful content marketing strategy, do I just throw the book out because chatGPT came along and changed it all?

Karine Abbou:

No. Of course not. That's that's exactly the the point you just, raise is exactly true. The thing is that was a kind of an introduction to understand that we're in a shift that this is not a little one. Okay? It's a big deal. And so now the question is, do I answer question to search, or do I trigger a conversation with my customer. That's one thing. Now what AI, artificial intelligence, which is we're not gonna get into it right now, but which is what basically OpenAI used to build chatGPT. This technology Okay? Since it has been developed in open source, has been used by 1000’s and 1000’s of developers out there. Yeah. Build some other products based on the same system of conversation. Okay?

Richard Bliss:

Yeah. I'm gonna pause it just for a second. So for an audience, my audit, most of my audience is aware of the concept of open, open source. So I'm just gonna explain it though for some, those who are listening. So open source is the idea that you put the code that actually is running out into the public domain so that people can use it, see it, modify it, make changes, and put it into their own system. Linux is the classic example that we have of a kind of a open source concept there are some rules and guidelines about if you're gonna use it to do something commercialized. There's some rules. But in general, what, Karine, you just said was is that the engine that runs ChatGBT, people can look at it. They can lift the hood and see how it's doing it, and then build their own applications on top of that engine and take advantage of that. And so that's what's happening. Right?

Karine Abbou:

Exactly true. And that's what I'm addressing in the chapter because now we have open to everybody for almost free, okay, for most of for most cases. This technology that enables us to generate. That's why the main famous part of AI is generative AI that generate text based on the question we just asked. So let's go back to our entrepreneur standpoint and <inaudible>. Okay? It means that what was extremely difficult before, to create content? What am I gonna write about? Who am I gonna hire? Who is gonna talk as well as me? Who is gonna know my industry as much as me? All those questions, they're answered now. This is pure magic. You don't have to I mean, like, at least for the first you know, steps of the process. All the barriers to entries at of content creation has been really, really removed. Completely. – Yeah. – No more alibi. Any entrepreneur cannot say, oh, it's too hard for me. I don't wanna create content. That's not true. You cannot. It's – Absolutely. – No.

Richard Bliss:

No. Just a second. Let me grab. I know we're live, but here's sorry. Just a second. I know we're live. But let me... So here's my book, Digital-First Leadership. So let me take exactly what you've just said and tell you what I've done with mine. Using an interface that draws upon the OpenAI's platform. I have taken my book uploaded it into a system. The whole book, it took 30 seconds.

Karine Abbou:

Mhmm.

Richard Bliss:

And now a chatbot, ChatGPT bot is sitting in front of this now, allowing people to talk to my book easily by entering questions and talking to my book. They don't even have to buy it. all they have to do is grab it. and this is now available, not my book, but this concept now where I don't even need to actually and also I can now teach chat to be key. This is the way I write. Could you create some more content similar to my style and my writing and my voice and put it out there? So when it comes to this whole content creation, it is now. You used the term before we started recording that, was a new term and you called it…

Karine Abbou:

Search Generative Experience.

Richard Bliss:

SGE, Search Generative Experience. Let's explain what that is to an audience who maybe has heard it in passing or is just being encountered with it for the first time? What is Search Generative Experience?

Karine Abbou:

SGE is the answer from Google to the partnership between chatGPT, OpenAI, and Bing. The smart move was OpenAI and chat GP is what chatGPT alone had lots of issues. It answered question, but there was no link. It stopped because it was based on all the data we had you couldn't have answer after 2021, so it was not updated. It was, it didn't provide the source, so whatsoever. So some outman, the pro the CEO of OpenAI, made a deal with Google's competitor, small competitor at the time, which is Bing. saying, you know what? Let's do something. I'm gonna provide you my chat bot, and you're gonna integrate it into your link pages and your search engine. And together, we're gonna build something that Google doesn't do so far is that at providing users with some straight questions and some link at some point to answer and to go deeper into their search. And that was the first time Google was really challenged into its leadership. You know? That was the very, very serious thing. So the answer to the answer from Google to chatGPT was Bard. The chat box from Google. Okay? Whether it's better than less I don't know. Honestly, no opinion on that. It's it's as good as it is. Okay? But the answer now from Google to OpenAI plus Bing is what we call Search Generative Experience. And this is actually tested in you have to go at a search lab to register to be part of the people who can use Search Generative Experience and try it and use it and getting familiar with it. I'm passionate about this. It's honestly, it's pretty great. It's, you have to experience it to understand how it will change search. Which is sure is that it's gonna change SEO, at least a lot of things. So SEO, you know, it's the technique of optimizing a content and a website to be well referenced and ranked into search engines. Okay? And search engines being Google so far. Okay. Not that much Bing.

Richard Bliss:

Right.

Karine Abbou:

Well, Search Generative Experience is gonna kind of replacing SEO which is a big deal for lots of marketers and SEO products. A big big deals because you have

Richard Bliss:

1,000,000

Karine Abbou:

of dollars business that are surfing on SEO for the past 15, 20 years.

Richard Bliss:

Right.

Karine Abbou:

So it's a major change that is coming. And those changing, those changes are gonna be that for the most part and to try to make it simple, the same way you try to figure out how you will create content that will rank well on the search engine results page, the previous one, now you're gonna have to figure out how are you gonna create content that will rank into Search Generative Experience pages, which is a mix of a chat bot and links and videos and other content that Google provides around the chat bot that you can converse with, that you can chat with.

Richard Bliss:

You know, we're about out of time. And there's a topic that I'd love to have a conversation with you about expanding on this. And that is with, oh, from a pure marketing standpoint because as I'm as you're talking, I'm thinking back. I've been in the industry for a very long time. So I'm thinking about Jeffrey Moore is a marketing guru who has talked about “Crossing the Chasm Inside the Tornado,” a variety of other books. And one of the things he's always identified is the concept of gorillas, chimps, and monkeys that each market can only have a single gorilla, right? It talked about hurt rental car for a long time, although enterprise seems to have taken over a sub subset of that market. But here's what I keep thinking that I look back and think, okay. Did Google invent search? No. They didn't. Who was the dominant search for the longest time? It was Yahoo.

Karine Abbou:

Yahoo. Who who used who who used search engine and branded it. Yeah.

Richard Bliss:

And so all of a sudden, Google identified a new market, pure market of search, and there came they dominated that market. They became the gorilla. they didn't kick Yahoo out. They changed the market when we thought about Tesla. Tesla did not did not steal the market from somebody else, but they weren't 1st, but they dominated the market. They became the gorilla. Now every company is trying to knock the gorilla off. And it's almost Jeffrey more identified if it's almost impossible. And then I think about Clayton Christensen and his and “Innovator's Dilemma” and how it's so hard for the leader to innovate into the disruptive technologies. And so when you combine these two, chatGPT has come along and the the Bing hybrid. We'll have to see if that works, but it's possible that we are seeing the emergence of an completely new market where the ability to transfer your leadership from one market to another has proven to be nearly impossible by every vendor on the planet who has ever tried to do that on any market. And so you gotta wonder if Google is… they're gonna continue to they're gonna try to fit everything into search. Right? They're gonna try to fit it into what they do versus this new emerging concept that just is gonna change the way… I don't know. I I realize how little I use Google anymore that I'm doing it very differently. I still use it. but it seems to be getting lower and, I don't know, it's a whole another topic that we could talk about. Any comments on thoughts on that as we wrap up?

Karine Abbou:

Just one very quickly. The way Google might might win this battle is not only with search generative experience because definitely we'll while creating this word, their expression, they're only trying to maintain the momentum with search, which might disappear. So that's the essence of the fight. Now Google is gonna win probably because of, you know, the usage, 80% of the world. So at some point, If they're good enough, I don't think people will, you know, just move away from Google that easily. 2nd, they're having an outstanding phenomenal strategy around SCG SGE by creating other products that are unbelievable. Not later than this morning, they're working on the chat bot, answering straight quest medical question that will replace doctor. That's true. They're creating among their Google product. They're creating 3D, dimensional, Google Maps. They're creating so many great stuff around. At some point, they might even buy some other platform to fit in their their SGE, you know, because SGE is promoting a lot of different other sources of content. That's something we could talk in a part 2 of your show because the new type of content that might be created and that needs to be created is not gonna be that much written. It has to be deployed in so many different formats, visual, audio, video. Much, much, much, much, much, more diversified than what we used to do, like, with a traditional blog. You know what I mean?

Richard Bliss:

Right. Yep. I do.

Karine Abbou:

But I think today, they're really creating so many other products that's gonna fit around SGE that might make us at the end of the day say, okay. We're staying with Google. We're not going anywhere else. You know?

Richard Bliss:

Well, that's a that's an excellent point to end on is that, with all these changes, We might just stay doing the same thing. Who who knows? Alright. Karine, it has been awesome to have you on the show. I certainly appreciate it.

Karine Abbou:

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Richard Bliss:

You have been listening to, the Digital-First Leadership podcast. My guest has been Karine Abbou. We've been talking about a lot of things. AI being one of the things that she and I are both very passionate about right now, and we have interesting discussions on that. We also both belong to a community on Discord called Rise, founded by Mark Shaffer. That's how we both met, and it's one of the ways that the book, “The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever,” came about. I wanna say thank you to all of you for listening. Again, if you'd like to receive those weekly LinkedIn community tips, the phone number that you can send that text message to is 415 534-9722, and you'll get those updates from me. And, maybe I'll throw in some things about chatGPT and AI that come from Karine. You never know what you're gonna get there, from those tips. I wanna say thanks for listening. Take care.

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