Molly Ruland:
All right. Coming in hot on another episode of Camp Content. Thank you all for tuning in. Today we have a special guest. Emanuel Rose is a renowned expert in lead generation and the CEO of Strategic E Marketing. He’s got twenty-five years of experience helping manufacturers achieve their sales goals through cutting edge strategies. His agency has a proven track record, delivering exceptional results such as ten X website traffic and Twelve X sales growth. He’s dedicated to leveraging digital solutions, including machine learning to provide a competitive edge for clients worldwide.
Matt Billman:
So, yeah, there is a rich and diverse background there. It honed the skills through years of persistent growth leading that digital industry agency and pioneering innovative lead generation and retention strategy. So we’re happy to have you today. How are you doing, Emanuel?
Emanuel Rose:
I’m doing really good, thanks. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
Molly Ruland:
Yeah, me too. I enjoyed our pre-call that we had a couple of weeks ago, and so I knew this would be a good conversation. So how are you doing today? How’s everything going in your world on this lovely morning?
Emanuel Rose:
Oh, it’s good. It’s got a little bit of rain this morning up in the very northern part of California, and it’s kind of like winter, so it’s a little break from summer.
Molly Ruland:
That’s interesting because it was the same thing this morning in Costa Rica, it was a little overcast and a little cold, and it’s been hot, hot, hot. So it was a nice break from the norm. So to jump right on in. So tell me a little bit about strategic e marketing. When did you start it? What was the desire behind that? All the good stuff.
Emanuel Rose:
Yeah, my company has been around for a little over thirteen years now.
Molly Ruland:
Wow.
Emanuel Rose:
And I started it after my last kind of sour experience as an employee. And I actually got fired from a job where I had been brought in to be a change agent. And then they said, don’t do anything new for sixty days, and then about four or five months after that, then they’re just like, well, you don’t have a future at this company, I know why. And eventually don’t want you to change anything. Yeah, exactly. Come in and change it, but don’t change it, kind of thing. They eventually went PK and parted out and they went the way of the dinosaur because of that philosophy. And so I had to sit there in a moment of reflection, say, well, what am I going to do? Am I going to go? It was the second bad experience in a row. The time before that, I had a sales contract that I got reneged on once I hit my sales numbers. So I had two bad bumps and I said, well, clearly I’m unmanageable and I don’t pick other companies very well, so I better just work for myself.
Matt Billman:
It’s relatable. Don’t touch it when you come in here.
Molly Ruland:
Yeah.
Emanuel Rose:
And that was right when social media was coming in. It was thirteen years ago, so there was a lot of confusion, and I had to come up to speed and learn a lot and get out in front of my potential clients. Just basically one page ahead at that point. And then it’s been, as you know, dynamic and crazy and fast moving over the last thirteen years, for sure.
Molly Ruland:
And so I noticed in your bio, it said manufacturers. But who is your typical client? What does your client base look like?
Emanuel Rose:
It is B to B clients that are the bulk of my work. And that was where I had spent the time, my career before that. I started out in clothing manufacturing, actually. I was part of a group that bought a hemp mill in Hungary.
Molly Ruland:
Oh, wow.
Emanuel Rose:
And so we were bringing hemp fabric over to the US and manufacturing jeans and those sorts of things in La.
Molly Ruland:
Right.
Emanuel Rose:
That was early s, man.
Molly Ruland:
You’re a trendsetter, dude. That’s a big deal, man.
Emanuel Rose:
Yeah, it was pretty cool to be part of that kind of in that beginning, nascent industry. But yeah. So I’ve got clients that build paint booths for NASA and United Airlines and then Med devices that are doing the small little clamps that go on the blood tubing. So it’s diverse. I call my technique duct tape simple. I like to work on the fundamentals. So as much as every client likes to think they’re special and their industry is so different, we know as marketers that the fundamentals is we’re talking to another human being. They have a problem they need to have solved. We need to serve up the solution in a way in a channel. They need to hear it and then create an opportunity for them to transact right. The most simple way possible. So I’m kind of agnostic in that way in terms of a typical client.
Molly Ruland:
And are you seeing in this new age of AI and overwhelm with all these different platforms, are you seeing that with your more corporate clients or is it kind of the opposite, where they’re a little more stagnant and not as willing to change and moving a little slower? Because I think with entrepreneurs and I’ve been guilty of it, one day I’m like, we’re doing this, and then two days later we’re doing this. And sometimes you gotta bob and weave like that to maintain your position. Like, if a global pandemic hits and you can’t have people in your brick and mortar studio anymore, you definitely have to make some changes very quickly or you will not survive at all. So how do you manage that with your clients? Are they slower moving, faster moving? How do you navigate that?
Emanuel Rose:
Yeah, the manufacturing clients tend to move a little bit slower. In my experience, at least the ones I’ve experienced. And they’re used to breaking things down in prices of pennies per thousands and so they move slowly and they are very committed to cost effectiveness and sometimes even marketing itself. They’re willing to cut it loose and just have the sales guys make phone calls, kind of thing. I’m always working to get them at least to do the fundamental activities, to do content marketing, to have blog posts, to carve out a little space of expertise, at least in LinkedIn, and then get on a consistent email and drip. But sometimes even that is more than they think is valuable because it’s not producing weekly income from that activity that they can see well.
Molly Ruland:
And I see that a lot too, because I have a lot of calls with CEOs and founders. And so I’m looking at their website, I’m learning about their business. I’m looking at all their social media channels. And you’ve got a lot of bad websites out there, but whatever. I digress. But what I see is, huge companies like Ford and Xerox and Cisco are their clients, and they’re making tons of money, and they got thirty five employees. And with everybody, it’s the same thing. One hundred twenty five on the LinkedIn page, three to four hundred on Facebook. It’s like seven posts on Instagram, maybe one hundred followers, and that’s it. And then you go to the LinkedIn page for the company, there’s really nothing. You really have to go to the founders and the employees of the company, their LinkedIn page, to find that content. So I would imagine if people are saying, dude, we’re making millions of dollars, we’ve got Xerox on our client list, what the hell do we need social media for? Right? I would imagine you get that a lot in your world. How do you deal with that projection?
Emanuel Rose:
Yeah, well, it’s a tough conversation about who the buyers are. Now, even in a B two B setting, right over half the B two B buyers or researchers are millennials. And coming up again are the z’s who are the assistants or early in their career. So we’re hitting that kind of pivot point of these are people who trust the Internet first and humans second. So you better get on the digital train now or you are going to have a hard time competing, or you’re going to pay a big premium to catch up in three years, five years, whatever that eventuality is.
Molly Ruland:
Exactly.
Matt Billman:
Your bio there says ten qualified leads in thirty days. Now, do you have a set proven strategy that way? Every time you get a new client based on their industry, you’re just kind of tweaking and plugging in? Or is it like every time it’s just to wipe the slate clean? Let’s completely rebuild this based on this exact client and go from there.
Emanuel Rose:
Yeah, the template, obviously, it’s an adjustable template, but the template really is around carving out some space of expertise, a unique selling proposition, some kind of a stake in the ground, building some content so that got some current content. Just like you’re talking about Molly, right? Like, hey, maybe we need a blog post since you haven’t posted anything since two years ago. So it’s around developing some current content. I really love to look do forward trending, say, in this industry over the next eighteen months. This is what we see is going to happen, right? So that you got something to talk about with your prospects and hopefully trigger some action that way, and then digging into LinkedIn at the same time that you’re building A prospect list. So there’s a few steps in there, but that’s kind of the process that I use. You’re going to hit somebody, you’re going to get some action from email and starting to email those prospects, and you’re going to get some action from LinkedIn. Exactly where it comes from or what the blend is, I don’t know, but we’ll find those prospects for you.
Matt Billman:
And then obviously, you mentioned the example earlier too, of back in the 90s with the hemp manufacturer and the jeans. Obviously now we’re in 2023. Have you seen a huge difference or was there like a big adjustment period at any point for you when it comes to that stuff? Because obviously things have moved along quite rapidly.
Emanuel Rose:
In 19 93, 94, literally, I was still going to the library and looking in those big compendiums of companies and getting physical addresses and mailing letters. So from that kind of dinosaur age of marketing to being able to go jump on LinkedIn and grabbing somebody’s, all their information through it, plug in, and being able to call them on their cell phone, right?
Molly Ruland:
It’s crazy, honestly. I hear you. 1993, that was an excellent year for hip hop. If you look up the top hundred hip hop albums, 90, 93, it was every single banger you could ever want. But it was such a different time. We didn’t have cell phones. I think Pagers hadn’t even really come out. So it was a very analog world. So it’s an interesting timeline to straddle, coming from an analog world and then surviving and thriving in a digital world. I think it’s a unique kind of blend of experiences. So how are you advising your clients to use content marketing to generate those leads? What’s your formula?
Emanuel Rose:
There is my guidance, and not that this is easy to implement, even for me as the agency helping the clients or the clients themselves, but it’s to use that 92nd video from the CEO or the CMO to take and hit that every Monday morning. Talk about employee of the week, talk about new project releases, talk about the fundraising events that you went to over the weekend. Talk about some kind of frequently asked question, anything like that, where you can just get 90 seconds with one of the primary influencers from the company and then email that sucker to your marketing department and let marketing do the magic. So that’s kind of the rotation that I’m working on getting all my clients on. And the other thing is, it’s challenging for people over 45 to want to talk about personal life or fundraising life or even be on video. Right. Like, that’s just reality. We’re not wired like that. Right, right. So that’s the challenge leading into, hey, you need to be the face, the primary influencer. You need to be Elon musk Kylie Jenner and develop some stories. So that’s the guidance I’m providing and the structure that I’m helping create for my clients.
Molly Ruland:
And have you been doing any branded podcasting with your clients at all? Have you been using that as a tool or going on other people’s podcasts? Is that a method you use?
Emanuel Rose:
I haven’t done that for my clients. So much for my own promotion of the books that I’ve written. So that’s my experience with podcasting so far.
Molly Ruland:
Right on. All right, so what about AI? How are you seeing AI impact things? Or are those companies not really thinking about AI because they’re still manufacturing? Or are they coming to you saying, I want to use AI to replace me or replace some of this marketing? Are you getting any of that?
Emanuel Rose:
Not so much. That just as much as how are we going to use it or how’s my team going to use it? And it’s kind of sausage making, really, for most companies. They don’t care how the marketing gets done. They just want to get leads in salesforce, at least my clients.
Molly Ruland:
Right.
Emanuel Rose:
I love it. I think AI is amazing. I love it as a tool for generating content ideas and super rough drafts of content. And I think it creates a situation where there’s such an avalanche of marketing even more. I think we’re going to be at one hundred X at some point in terms of just volume. And so as experts, it puts us in the position of being content curators and really helping to funnel out the BS and find the ten good tools for marketing that we can point our clients to when they are interested and want to do it themselves.
Molly Ruland:
For sure. Well, the one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about AI, and AI might replace somebody’s job, but AI can’t replace somebody. And so I like the idea of the CEOs or the talking heads filming that 92nd video, because you can’t fake that funk. That’s not AI. That’s a real person imperfectly recorded. It’s almost better if it looks more real. Right. You know more than me. But I think a lot of times these higher up executives think they need to have, like, a teleprompter and lighting and be in a studio, and it’s like, Listen, man, it’s not 1980 anymore. You got a cell phone with a better camera than you’ve ever seen in your whole life, guarantee aim that thing at you. And that’s something that AI can’t and will never replace. Even though you’ve got, like, deep fakes and all that, but nobody’s deep faking a 92nd. I hope not.
Emanuel Rose:
Anyway, about the Big Brothers Big Sisters fundraiser, right?
Molly Ruland:
Yeah, it’d be pretty narrow for sure, but I guess anything is possible. I shouldn’t rule it out completely, but I think that personal touch is going to make a difference. Right? Like hearing from somebody. Because as we venture more and more into AI, it’s like how we already quickly learned which images are AI. Because in four days, the world recognized those fakes immediately. Right. And I think we’re going to adapt just as fast as technology. There’s obviously going to be misinformation. There’s going to be a whole storm of nonsense coming behind this thing. But it can never replace the person. It can never replace that wisdom, that experience that that C suite exec has. How do you see that kind of tying into bigger picture marketing for smaller companies? Would you recommend that same process for a smaller company as well?
Emanuel Rose:
Yeah, I think it’s a good template and I think, like you’re saying about it’s going to replace some marketing functions, AI marketing software, but it’s not going to replace what I hear you saying is the authentic human being telling their story and then being able to relate even how we do on video. Right. So I think for small businesses, it’s critical to look in and peek at some of these things, the chats and some of these copy generators, and figuring out which one you can drive the simplest and learning prompts or having somebody on your team that you can learn the prompts that you need so that you have good content getting created. But you’re still going to need a human to go through and sift it and clean it up. Otherwise it will get booted immediately. We can sniff that out very easily.
Molly Ruland:
Fair share.
Emanuel Rose:
I think the software is going to obviously continue to get better and cleaner, and there’s going to be more connection between the software. So we have a pretty automated workflow from that, from the video to editing the video to titling the video and then publishing it. I mean, it’s about a four step process, and it’s way quicker than it was twenty years ago when I did my first documentary.
Molly Ruland:
That was like a hand crank.
Emanuel Rose:
You were like, using the.
Molly Ruland:
Real to reel, right? Like tape to tape.
Emanuel Rose:
It was a dual Mac, but it took a long time and we paid a lot of money to go real slow.
Molly Ruland:
Isn’t it crazy how fast everything’s evolved?
Matt Billman:
So it looks like just back in May, your book came out or just started shipping out the social media edge, kind of. What was the thought process of starting that book and writing and then kind of, what can people expect if they read it?
Emanuel Rose:
Yeah. So the first book that I wrote was about authenticity and marketing. And I kind of outlined this one of the steps was the Social CEO. And as I got questions and follow up on it, I got more on. Can you get more into the technical part of what the Social CEO does? And then to support the Social CEO is the social media advocacy which is having staff promote the business, the brand posts on social also it’s a little bit more of a technical review of how to make that process go. And it starts like we just were talking about a simple content calendar, a commitment once a week to capture that short video, get it published and then get your team to promote it or use software to promote it.
Molly Ruland:
Interesting, that is. And so tell me about one of your success stories with your clients.
Emanuel Rose:
Well, the process of taking a company like you were talking about, where she’s got one hundred followers on LinkedIn and no activity on their staff, and being able to generate a meaningful content and blog posts, videos, ebooks and then taking five executives and promoting out, getting a getting new connections or old connections they didn’t know they had and getting good content on the LinkedIn sites and then generating five hundred leads over the course of a year for a software company. But it’s a simple but methodical process to build something content that’s valuable. Right. We always have to be creating value for the listener and something they hadn’t thought about and then publicizing and distributing that to find the people who are interested in that at the time. That’s a recent one.
Molly Ruland:
That’s awesome. And what would you suggest for people like a smaller company, maybe somebody who’s listening to this who thinks, I don’t have a team to send a 92nd video to. I don’t know if you work with any clients that are that small that don’t have marketing teams, but what would you say to somebody who says, all right, I’m into this interview, I get it, I’m down. But what the heck do I do with this 92nd video now?
Emanuel Rose:
I would say go to Clipscribe, track down Clipscribe on the Internet and use that software to learn that software. And that basically you upload your video, it titles it for you, you make some cuts, you clean up the Titling and then you export it to LinkedIn and YouTube.
Matt Billman:
All too familiar with clipscribe.
Emanuel Rose:
Yeah, they’re awesome. I was so happy when they finally came to market. I’m like, I’ve been waiting for this for years.
Molly Ruland:
That’s hilarious. Yeah, we got a lifetime deal for Clipscribe from like appsumo or something like when we started the company and it’s like the best. All these other subscription services are hitting our pockets up daily and it feels like nothing. And Clipscribe is probably one of the most functional tools on the market and for a very good price. That’s excellent advice. I would imagine there’s a few more now, like not Iris, but what’s the other one? Opus. There’s a few other ones now because of AI, but Clipscribe has been around the longest, so they probably have the sturdiest platform, to be honest.
Emanuel Rose:
And then I like, Filmora is another one that I use that’s a little more technical editing suite. But it’s an annual, whatever, $50 or something. So it’s very affordable and you’re able to do all the cutting you need to make it clean and title it.
Molly Ruland:
Yeah, and I suppose even if you didn’t want to do all that, right, if you get overwhelmed by that, I mean, you could just do a really clean 92nd cut with your phone and just go for it. Maybe practice a couple of times, reshoot it, whatever you need to do. If you’re a little intimidated by the video editing, I do hear a lot of times people say, oh, my cousin is in college, and I’m like, yeah, and he’s going to take seven weeks to get you that video back, that’s cool, but it ain’t going to work. Excellent. Right on. Well, on that note, so tell us the name of the book and where people can find it and then of course, how to find you as well.
Emanuel Rose:
Yeah. Thanks, Molly. It’s the social media Edge and it’s at emanuelrose.com. All my books are there.
Molly Ruland:
Yeah, perfect. Well, the link is in our description and comments below. So anybody who wants to get more of this knowledge and get that book, you know what to do. And on that note, I think we’ll wrap up. We try to keep these under thirty minutes when we can, so they’re not super long for people in their morning commute or wherever they’re listening to this. But Emanuel, thank you for your time today. We’ll definitely link to all your stuff and if you heard this and you’re intrigued, pick it up, emanuelrose.com , get that lead magnet, buy that book, do all the things. And until next time on Camp Content, be excellent to each other. Thank you.
Produced by Heartcast Media
