1585 – How Content Has Changedwith Goodman Lantern’s Raj Goodman Anand

Josh (00:00:05) - Hey, there thoughtful listener. Would you like consistent and predictable sales activity with no spam and no ads? I'll teach you step by step how to do this, particularly if you're an agency owner, consultant coach, or B2B service provider. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create more than 10 million in revenue. Just head to up my influence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live, and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the Thoughtful Entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to up my influence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you with us right now. Raj Goodman Anand. Raj, you are the founder and c e o of Goodman Lantern, you're found on the web@goodmanlantern.com. Raj, thank you so much for joining us.

Raj (00:01:11) - Josh. Thank you for having me on. Good to be here.

Josh (00:01:14) - And Goodman Lantern is content marketing by humans, for humans. Tell me more.

Raj (00:01:22) - Yeah, so Goodman Lantern's mission is to help our customers sell better and grow faster. And in the, the dawn of AI and what's happening with the ecosystem, we were always passionate about how do we allow people to make human to human connections. You know, at the end of the day, it's not B2B or b2c, it is human to human. It's H to h actually. And so the more we can make it authentic and real and really bring in that the top leadership from the point of view of the the customer and their clients, that's where the magic really happens. So it's about that, the strategy, the creation, and then distribution of content we can really help our customers with. And it's all came from the back of my work previously, where I helped the company grow from seven and a half million to 45 million in revenue in the back of great content that's mainly, storytelling and thought leadership content and, and, and SEO. So that helped grow that in b2b, in insurance and telecom market that applies to almost every B2B industry. And so that's why we started to work on that. And, you know, we're now helping mainly high tech companies, so defense companies. We actually build planes and whatnot. Satellites, for example, telecom organizations, FinTech companies, green banks, and we also help organizations who are in the medical sector.

Josh (00:02:56) - And how have your kind of, your customers, like what they've been asking for and how those conversations have been going, how has that been evolving in, you know, kind of the, I'd say this era of more accessible AI tools?

Raj (00:03:17) - Yeah, so there has been a lot of changes which have happened over the years. And stead steadily, we've seen the, you know, the incoming AI taking a big part of the of the attention span of people. And I love AI because I actually did research in AI 20 years back. And back in the day my mom thought AI was a study of UFOs. So that's where it was 20 years back. And today, obviously we're talking about AI and chat, G P T.So you know, AI is something which will change a few things for us across in different sectors. I mean, reimbursing AI quite a bit, it's helping us a lot with research, for example, I often often talk about this for about 20% ish savings on the research, which you would do traditionally, but there is a lot to be said from where AI is, you know, kind of create that kind of content initially, which might be some people might feel like, yeah, this is it.

Raj (00:04:23) - There's a lot of work to be done beyond that to really match the company's value system. The company's talking points con content style guides. So, you know, in different content types, like for example, blog posts versus drug descriptions versus white papers, the input required by human beings can vary. In fact, things like case studies and white papers require 40%, 50% input from human beings to make it more real, to really bring it back into that human to human connection. Uh, so while AI does help in the research part, there's an element of additional work required. Sometimes you bring in that proprietary content from the customer and bring that into the white paper or the writing, the content.

Josh (00:05:16) - Raj, where does content fit today? And, you know, I'm primarily concerned about trends in content marketing and where that fits in. Where do you see content, thinking about like, even just like an smb, what should a great small business be doing today in regards to content that is going to pay off dividends?

Raj (00:05:40) - Yeah, so as I was saying earlier, sort of, you know, content has been around for decades, I was talking about Napoleon and how Napoleon used to do best releases as part the content, as a content strategy. Now, while content has been around in today's world, you know, we have been kind of coming to a dawn off like a lot of changes in content. And I think at the end of the day, the marketing, which we do depends upon our target market, whether they hang out, what do they do on what set of marketing are you looking at? I is your customer sort of more b2b, it's more b2c. I think that's the fundamental starting point to figure out where do your customers hang out? What do they do, you know, and then planning things around it.

Raj (00:06:28) - Do they like a, you know, are they very busy people that you like, go and do a bit of outbound, for example, are they looking for stuff and so they gonna send you inbound? So it's, you know, typically if we look at the, the generics of market, I think, you know, what we, what marketers recommend is having a marketing mix. So a bit of everything is required to really make sure you are really wrapping around the opportunities across which you miss as a company. But it's also really important to have a forte. So for example, for us, our biggest driver of leads is SEO, that's inbound marketing. So we rank really well for ton of keywords, like telecom, content writing, manufacturing, content writing, and that will help us get the leads coming in. So that's a forte. Then we add to it advertisements that are outbound. So that's really important. Mix it up a little bit.

Josh (00:07:26) - Yeah. So let's say that you're getting content to rank, but no one's doing anything. Like they're, okay, cool, they read your article, but now they're not, you know, , I don't know, you see people, bunch of people consuming this article. What can we do to better, maybe capture those folks so that maybe we could do some business together?

Raj (00:07:48) - Yeah, so even like, if you think about content as well, it had the different style of content. If it divide into, so say the, the thing was the funnel, for example. Yeah.

Josh (00:07:57) - The shop funnel. Hey, rush. Sorry to interrupt. Could you take maybe your microphone and just pull it back just a little bit there? Yeah. Awesome. Okay. Is that better? Sorry, back, back to the question.

Raj (00:08:06) - Yeah. So you know, at the end of the day, it comes down to the type of content you're creating and different content have different style and different purposes. So we divide the content into say, three parts, the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, top of the funnels, all about education, bringing a large set of people who might be potentially interested in your offering to come in. That's the top part of the funnel of about just generic education about the industry. When they kind of come in there, come to your website and start to click around, then it's about educating them on your offering, your product, your service, or that might look like, educate them on that. The third part is conversion as a bottom of the funnel. That's where you can, you know, create a work on, you know, really offers, you know, contact us for different things.

Raj (00:09:02) - You give them like forms to fill in, for example. So if you're getting a lot of people coming to the top and they get stuck there, then it's about educating to the, the middle, and they, you get, you're getting stuck in the middle. Then did you educate, come to this, the third part, that's how you will get more conversion. So it's about identifying where your clients getting stuck and then bringing into the funnel. And then when they come to the funnel and they buy from you and do a great job for them, then that goes back to the top because they commend people as well. And that comes into like a, what we call flywheel effect as well.

Josh (00:09:35) - Yeah. You know, as an a agency or as a company, Goodman Lantern has, I mean, you've worked with a lot for over a hundred businesses, including TikTok, Calvin Klein, Travago, among, others. You're, you're part of eo. You're pretty well established. What did Goodman Lantern do that separated itself maybe from other content agencies that you think has really led to your growth?

Raj (00:10:06) - Well, two bits of things. One is having a mission. I dunno if you saw this on the website or not, but our mission is what drives us every day. Our mission is to empower women in technology and marketing. So much so that we 80% women in our organization. Why is that important? That's important because when there's a mission attached to a company, that company owner and the company, the team are driven by goals beyond just making a lot of cash. It's about making everyone in the ecosystem successful. And that's what drives all of us. We all aligned in this same direction. Number two, a clear vision for the future. So we are all, you know, we know what we're gonna do. We have a mission to go public as a company. And so everybody's driving in that direction to go, you know, okay, this is what we need to focus on. We all want, we all wanna do this for our families, for our team members. We're going together. And that's what makes us, Goodman Lantern is of that clear focus and a bigger mission than just making money

Josh (00:11:13) - On your website. Goodman Lantern. By the way, your social media content's pretty good. Especially I was going through your, your LinkedIn posts, so, my recommendation is Raj connect with you on LinkedIn and just kind of follow what you do on social. It's good stuff. But on your website, you know, someone that is listening to your conversation and maybe they're doing some research and they came across this podcast, and where would you recommend that they go from here? They may or may not be ready for a conversation, but they definitely wanna learn more about why Goodman Lantern excels.

Raj (00:11:50) - Well, I mean, I think LinkedIn is a great place, you know, connect with me, follow me, and, you know, learn more about that. Goodman's blogs, goodman london com slash blog to see what we're talking about. And then I'm just starting to like, really focus bit more on Twitter. So Twitter, I'm twitter.com/ra. Yeah, follow, follow. Let's have a chat. Always keen to connect with people and, and just converse.

Josh (00:12:18) - Yeah, again, your website, goodman lantern.com. And there's plenty of opportunities. You got a, you know, brochure that covers everything. Certainly. there's a lot of resources on the website itself, everything from, and, and again, Goodman lantern, when we're thinking about content, everything from article writing to marketing, copy, infographics, press releases, that that's all a part of what you do, specifically on the gener under the generate leads for someone's like, yeah, we just need more client conversations. What is the typical prescription for someone that's looking to just, get more engagements and hopefully do so a little bit more quickly? Yeah,

Raj (00:13:05) - I mean, again, it depends upon the company itself. You know, it's great with some companies, it's really hard to just, to just say, listen, we'll just get you a ton of, like, leads on day one. It just doesn't happen. Yeah, content is a gift that keeps giving, but for that to happen, there's a investment required in time and energy, especially when you're working with like, you know, our clients have big ticket items, you know, some of them are selling stuff for 10 million, a hundred million. And when that comes into play, it's a, a lot about education and thought leadership content, thought leadership style of creating media. And, that takes time. So, and Im not a big believer of this, like, you know, quick turnaround opportunities. I think that's, you know, if that is the case, then the barrier to entry is also very low, cuz then the next person's gonna exactly the same. When you put in the energy, you put in the effort, you build something for the long term. I'm always, I'm always a believer for long term strategy and a quick short term win.

Josh (00:14:15) - Yeah. Yeah. Well, awesome. Raj Goodman, again, founder, c e o of Goodman Lantern, founder on the web@goodmanlantern.com. Raj, thank you so much for joining us.

Raj (00:14:26) - Thank you, Josh, for the opportunity. Lovely talk to you.

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