This week on the Content Marketing Quickie, something a little different, a little special.  My takeaways from this year’s Content Marketing World 2016 in Cleveland.  Some of it was stuff I learned, some of it was stuff I knew but needed to be reminded of.  Let’s see if any of this will provoke your thoughts.

 

I had a chance to chat with Content Marketing Emperor of the Galaxy Joe Pulizzi and expressed my appreciation for his calling out that after banging the drum for 6 years, only 20% of organizations are fully committed to this content marketing thing.  And a lot of what is being done is just the making of more marketing assets, not audience building and storytelling.  And because he believes lame content hurts your brand worse than doing nothing at all, he’s calling on marketers to get in or get out.  Stop saying you do content marketing and just go do interruptive ads and admit that’s all you’re willing to do.  Much needed tough love.

 

Lego’s Lars Silberbauer, whether he realized it or not, said something kinda profound that speaks to how we view our products vs. how we view and do our marketing.  He said Lego is just a brick.  That’s the product.  It’s a fine product.  But it’s the imagination put into those bricks and the content made around and using those bricks that makes Lego what it is.  So if you have a decent product but you’re not putting any story or imagination into it, your product is probably just sitting there like a brick.

 

Andy Crestodina made me take a lot of notes.  He said the stuff we’re making, it’s mostly not working.  75% of articles have zero external links and 50% get 2 or fewer interactions.  Another truth you should probably accept, a mere 1% of people on the internet actually make the internet.  Everybody else just lurks and consumes content.  So you have to target the other makers with your content if you want your stuff actually shared.  That makes so much sense, but that’s a tough and jaded audience.  I know, because you guys never share or tell anybody about this podcast.  Well I’m not emotionally crippled yet, because Andy gave us the two kinds of content that work.  1. Original research, studies, survey results.  The sharing audience likes sharing that.  2. Strong opinion, which is super rare out there.  We’re all trying to be so careful and it’s incredibly boring.

 

Got some good “contextual marketing to mobile” advice from Rebecca Lieb, who says content is getting increasingly visual and abbreviated.  And buyer decisions are broken up into multiple micro-moments of info-gathering and question-asking.  So the question I’m asking that might make you shiver is, “Can your brand be THE answer-provider in a one question/one answer consumer future?”  Rebecca says contextual takes all of the following into its makeup: thing, place, time, history, conditions and the individual.  You know how your bosses are always screaming for ROI?  Context might be your path to pursue.  No less than the engineer responsible for Amazon Echo and Disney Magic Bands says the more context there is, the more ROI there’s going to be.

 

CMI’s Robert Rose is also aware many of us are struggling.  Only 36% of content marketers feel like they’re being effective against senior leadership’s arguments against content marketing: costs more than ads, too slow, takes too long, can’t tie it to revenue, etc.  But those guys are trying to fit the old things into new forms.  Content marketing is about the audience.  That’s its value, not another widget sold.  And when you build an audience, you acquire knowledge of them that gives the business super-powers to optimize all their marketing.  To build that valuable audience, work backward from the customer experience you want.  Adobe’s CMO.com is an experience for corporate marketers worth subscribing to.  In return, Adobe’s gathered incredibly valuable intel about that target audience.

 

Once we got past his threat to show us Irish folk dancing, RazorSocial’s Ian Cleary gave us the steps to conversion.  You know, in case you do want to sell a widget.  First you build that social audience, but it should be a relevant, active audience.  Next you build the relationship with them.  You build it with citizen influencers using content.  You build it with power influencers one-on-one by promoting them.  Transactions rarely happen on social so now you’ve got to drive inbound traffic with links in your content.  Obsess over building your email subscriber list.  Also build a retargeting list of site visitors that didn’t opt in and hit ‘em with interactive content.  To help with all of this process, map out your funnel with a yes or no journey chart.

 

What, you think I’d go to Content Marketing World and skip the session on podcasting?  The only and one Jay Baer conversed about that subject with Mirum’s Mitch Joel and what stuck out was how different their podcasts are, and how differently they approach producing them, hosting them, distributing and promoting them.  And that’s the point right?  Podcasting is so creatively liberating and the topics and methods so diverse, the opportunities for brands are wide open.  Did you know more people listen to podcasts than use Twitter in the United States?  You do now.  But how much does your company focus on Twitter compared to how much it works on its podcast?  Oh, it doesn’t have a podcast?  Well that’s smart seeing as how the average podcast listener listens to 5 podcasts per week, it’s a lean-in format, it gives you a niche & relevant audience, and listeners build trusting relationships with hosts.  Who would want all that?

 

I spent half a day listening to Andrew Davis in a special session so imagine how relieved I was that he was really good.  He says don’t sell, inspire demand.  If you sell, you’re skipping critical parts of the funnel.  His focus is on creating moments of inspiration, which then lead to questions that start the active evaluation.  Way too many of us focus on the end stage of that evaluation, where frankly, most of the decision has already been made; driven by emotion by the way, not the logical selling points we love to push.  Moments of inspiration send people, using content, on a journey they didn’t expect to go on.  And here’s something that will turn you sideways; if you try to execute that on your site, you’re asking way too much of the user.  Andrew says don’t create branded content.  Create content brands, audience-first propositions that happen to be “brought to you by” the brand.

Lastly, shout-outs to reunions I had with former Vitrue and Oracle Social colleagues Paul Broft of Atomized, Jack Newton at Manhattan Associates and the inimitable Jill Rowley with Affinio.  It was great seeing you and I’m sure you’ll agree I haven’t aged a bit.

 

That’s it.  Follow my smart alec marketing remarks @mikestiles.