Content Marketing World 2019 Recap

In today's episode, recapping Content Marketing World 2019, there were a number of very common themes, as we talked about in pre in previous episodes, uh, throughout the event this year. Um the basics, things like content that's worth reading, content that's worth enjoying, content that's audience-centric. Uh, those have been uh ongoing themes for content marketing for years now, and the uh the fact that they are still themes means that people aren't doing them. No surprise there. That's one.

A big theme that was in many of the keynotes and listening to many of the speakers is that uh social media as we knew it uh is toast. The idea of just post it and they will come, and the ability to get something for nothing is toast. Uh from a strategy perspective, you should be treating social media as an advertising channel, just like you treat Google Ads as an advertising channel uh or YouTube ads or whatever, uh if you want to play, you must pay on social media. You don't necessarily have to pay a lot, but something for nothing is over on that front, and uh your strategy should reflect that. Uh search engine optimization, organic search engine optimization has retaken center stage in part because the uh the free lunch of social media has has largely come to an end.

And so many of the sessions, a lot of the content, a lot of the focus at Content Marketing World was really about um creating content that is findable. What's changed for a lot of folks is that because people took their eye off the ball on search for a number of years and focused on social media, much of their search knowledge is out of date. Things like individual keywords are not the thing anymore. I know in my own work, we've been spending a lot of time with machine learning using natural language processing to try and better understand how the search engines and their machine learning and artificial intelligence uh create rankings. And so for many SEO practitioners who are a little rusty, a little dusty, uh, it is time to reskill up on what modern SEO is now.

And modern SEO means extensive use of data and extensive use of machine learning and AI. You can't do SEO today without it. Now, the good news is for many uh marketers who are just jumping in or jumping back in, many of the uh tools that are on the market now are beginning to incorporate uh machine learning into their own processing, and so uh you won't have to necessarily do a lot of the heavy lifting on your own. You just have to find a reputable SEO tool. Um, I use uh RFs, uh, a number of other folks use things like Moz or SEMrush uh or spy foo.

Take your pick based on on your budget and your and your specific requirements, but uh those are sort of the major vendors that are uh well known and um and respected for what they do with development. And again, as we've seen many many years at many, many events, uh, analytics and effective use of data still elude most marketers, marketing departments, and companies. There's just not enough usage of the data, and uh I think that's gonna be a perpetual battle because of two reasons. One, uh, churn. As new employees come in, they don't have the institutional knowledge, and most companies don't have effective training.

And two, if you can imagine a marketer's knowledge and then the field of analytics, the field of analytics is advancing this fast, and marketers, even those who have good professional development are advancing this fast. And so the two, when you put them together, the data side of things is just accelerating so much faster. So there's there's that. Those are the major four themes at content marketing world. And in chatting with a couple of folks on the influencer marketing side, listening to what they're doing with influencer marketing, I thought it was very interesting.

Um influencer marketing is that it is going to be much less about loudmouths, because again, social media's organic reach is increasingly declining. And curated communities are very much on the rise, whether it's Slack groups, uh Facebook groups for those folks who are foolish enough to build on Facebook's land, uh, email lists and email uh uh newsletters. Those folks who have the asset of reliably reachable audiences will be taking the influencer crown because they are the folks who can still get an audience to do something. When you if you have a million friends or followers or whatever on Instagram, but only one percent see your posts, that one million number doesn't do much uh for a brand if no one ever sees the content. But if you have a a million people on your email newsletter, a your email marketing bills are really high, but B, you have much more reliable reach.

And it doesn't have to be email, it can be uh text messaging list of people's mobile phone numbers if you have permission to text them. It can be a private chat group, uh, Slack, Discord, uh, any of these newer digital communities. That's where reliable reach is going to come into play. So, one of the things to think about in your marketing is how much reliable reach do you have? How much reliable reach do your influencers have?

Can you measure it? Are you tagging things correctly to give credit to the influencers and collaborators you're working with? And if you're not, now would be the time to start because that is as far as I can tell, the way the wind is blowing. The free lunches are over. You need to build your own first party communities, and you need to build relationships with people who have reliable reach.

So, some uh some final wrap-up thoughts there from Content Marketing World overall. Terrific event. Um special thanks go out to Robert Rose and Andrea Larrick and Stephanie Stahl and Kathy McPhillips and the entire CM World team for having me. It was a fantastic fun. Um, enjoyed sharing uh my thoughts on artificial intelligence and the way things are going.

And uh look forward to coming back uh again next year and sharing what's new in AI. Who knows what it's gonna be. Um, as always, please leave your comments below. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. What helps solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

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