12 Lessons from Content Marketing World 2013

12 LESSONS FROM CONTENT MARKETING WORLD

By Roslyn AtkinsonHead of Client Services, Mahlab MediaSeptember 2013

mahlabmedia.com.au

1. TELL STORIES

Marketing is no longer about ads. Storytelling is the most powerful tool we have to develop a relationship with customers and prospective customers. How has your brand changed the lives of people for the better?

Story telling is at the heart of all families and all cultures.”Jonathan Mildenhall, VP of global advertising and creative excellence at Coca-Cola 

People buy brands because of stories, not because you have the niftiest deal or discount." Professor Don Schultz, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University

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2. BE USEFUL

Help people with your content. Provide tips, advice, apps to solve problems, answers to their questions. Even if the solution isn't your product or service. If they're people you'd like to do business with, help them however you can and you will establish trust. To be useful means first really listening to your buyers to find out what problems they have. You might think you know, but you won't really know until you talk to them.

How do you get attention? Just be useful... 'Youtility' is marketing so useful, people would pay for it. Don't create content. Create Youtility.” Jay Baer, best-selling content marketing author

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3. BE ENTERTAINING

This is especially true if you're marketing to a consumer audience. If you want great word of mouth recommendations and shareable content, make your audience smile.

Coca-Cola is in the business of beverages and entertainment ... We want to develop the world's most compelling content.”Jonathan Mildenhall again

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4. BE EDUCATIONAL

Be a teacher and provide your audience with content that makes them excited because they’ve learned something new that will help them be better in business or in their lives.

What's quality content? The moment that someone reads it and goes 'ah, now I get it'. That's quality content.”Marcus Sheridan, blogging star from The Sales Lion (formerly of River Pools)

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5. BE PROVOCATIVE

Provide true thought leadership for your sector by challenging people's assumptions. Inspire debate, provoke discussions, and use research to support your arguments and make people think differently. 

Challenge the status quo that's in your customer's minds. Every customer thinks 'everything's fine, I don't need that new product'. The most successful salespeople help to challenge the customer's thinking - that there's a problem or need that they didn't know about. Identify trends. Look into the future and show where they are now and where it's going to go, and here are the things you need to change.”George Stenitzer, head of marketing and communications for Tellabs

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6. BE VISUAL

Humans process images 60,000 times faster than text. Visual content is a powerful way to tell stories. Images in social media, infographics, video, Slideshare and Pinterest are all great examples of ways that visual content has exploded around the world. For example, Marketo released a whitepaper that received 19,000 downloads. Pretty impressive - until they made it more visual and uploaded it to Slideshare, and received 328,000 views.

7. BE STRATEGIC

Content marketing used to be about generating awareness and raising your brand's profile. It's still about that ... and more. Unless you set strategic objectives that lead to sales, you'll have a hard time convincing your managers (or your clients) to keep spending money on the content you produce.

You can get stuck in awareness, but the primary purpose should be generating leads. Content marketing fuels the (sales) funnel.”Heather Meza, head of digital media solutions at Cisco 

Content marketing has six main goals: build your brand profile, attract new prospects, increase lead generation, build thought leadership, drive sales and increase customer loyalty.”Jon Wuebben, CEO of Content Launch

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8. BE SCIENTIFIC

Test your calls to action. Measure against your KPIs and success metrics. Analyse the behaviour of your audience to gain insights. Utilise technology to help you.  

People can't tell you what they think of your brand. You have to look at their behaviours. Behavioural data tells you what's really happening, not traditional surveys.”Prof Schultz

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9. DISTRIBUTE THOUGHTFULLY

Think carefully about how you distribute your content to make sure that it actually gets read. How can you make it relevant on different devices, for different reader attention spans? Note that studies suggest that blogs have the biggest purchaser influence of all types of media - because they're from individuals, and because it feels like word of mouth, according to Prof Schultz.

10. ITERATE

It's not about having the biggest budgets (although that helps!). Make the best use of the budget you have.

Every time you produce a piece of content, create iterations of it: an article, a video, a webinar, a whitepaper all on the same topic or from the same interview.

11. TAKE RISKS

Be willing to fail sometimes. Not every story or piece of content will work,

but sometimes the most engaging content comes from being brave. 

If you don't have room to fail, you don't have room to grow.”Jonathan Mildenhall 

Keep trying to get the thing right and eventually you will.”William Shatner, actor, author and film maker

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12. REMEMBER IT’S ABOUT PEOPLE

Speak to your audience in their language about what's in their heart.”Jonathan Lister, VP North American sales for LinkedIn

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