Content Marketing World Day 2 Recap

In today's episode, round recapping uh the yesterday day two of content marketing world. Uh tons, tons of really fun, entertaining content, uh useful content. We started the day with Robert Rose doing a recap of content marketing where it stands now. Fundamentally, a whole bunch of people are still doing content without a strategy, a whole bunch of people are not measuring content effectively, and the impact, unsurprisingly, is that uh content and ROI are difficult to connect together, and they don't have to be. I know from my own experience, just getting good at Google Analytics will fix a lot of those problems for you.

Uh, but you just have to be good at it or become good at it. Uh second really good talk was by Joe Politzi, uh recapping his seven laws of content marketing, and probably the ones I thought were really the most impactful were selling your your content marketing or any of your marketing internally, um, doing as much internally as you can uh as well as externally. Uh Joe talked about uh making sure that people understand what the value of the content is and what the role is. Uh after that, Tams and Webster took the stage for how to get to the green light, how to get people to approve your ideas and the fundamental, her talk was really good. The fundamental tenet was people will not do things if it opposes their own sincerely held belief that they are good, capable, uh, smart people.

And a lot of her, she came out with a very strong message for marketers who who market nothing but you know uh making people feel bad, um making people feel uncomfortable in that pain she said she's pain is a pain is short-term action. You can make somebody feel pain, but it only incites a short-term action. As opposed to getting somebody to change and stay changed, they have to feel good about themselves. And so there's a lot of nuance to how you sell, but fundamentally, you have to not oppose somebody's beliefs in themselves. And there's a lot of marketing out there which is condescending, um, egotistical, self-centered on the marketer or the company that violates that, and then the marketers wonder why they're not selling anything else because you're not fundamentally making people feel better about themselves.

And if you can get that over that internally and change your messaging, you'll do much better. That was uh fun uh talk. After that, spent some time with uh friend and trust insights board member, full disclosure, uh Ginny Dietrich, who talked about the ways that agencies uh need to change their content marketing. In Ginny's session, the main thing, the main emphasis was not trying to do as all the content marketing, but trying to develop a strong uh focused bit of content marketing that powers your sales funnel. Um and working on what it takes to what that piece of content needs to be very, very useful.

After Ginny's session, uh we enjoyed uh Lee Odin's session on uh your content marketing fitness, getting your your content marketing beach body. Um the big thing from Lee's session was there wasn't anything in there that was like, oh my god, you know we didn't know that. It was all stuff that everybody knows and nobody does, just like fitness, right? Uh that was one of his main points. You know what fitness looks like.

You know how to get to a state of fitness and health. Eat less, exercise more, eat less bad crap, right? We don't do it. Um we just know it. And his point in his session was you know what to do with content marketing, but that doesn't mean you're doing it.

So make sure that you are spending uh time and effort and energy on doing the things that you know will lead to content marketing fitness. After that was uh Ann Handley's session, which I think was probably uh the most entertaining of the day, but also useful in a lot of the basics of what your marketing should be about. Your marketing should be relatable. She had um, what was it? Time times truth equals connection, because you need to build the relationship over time, times affinity, which is your likability and your relatability, and making sure that you're doing all three because that's how you get to the business relationship you want with people.

Um said a really fun thing. Can I have your attention is the equivalent of saying, can I have your trust? May I have your trust, even for a moment, and it is that trust that then allows you to market effectively to somebody, but you have to earn it, and it takes time, and it takes that relatability, and it takes creating stuff that is truthful. There was a lot of emphasis across the board on many of these speakers on those basics. Create material that is truthful, that is relatable, that is useful and entertaining.

That there really wasn't anything like, oh my goodness, I've never seen this before, but you're still not doing it. We as marketers are still not doing content marketing well. At this point, content marketing is decades old as a profession. People have been creating content for the purpose of marketing and selling really at scale for seven decades, maybe eight decades, ever since mass media, radio, and television became available. And even in the digital marketing space, which is really where I think content marketing world spends most of its time, as it should, um the fact that we're rehashing these same lessons over and over again says two things.

One, the space is mature, which is good, because that means there are proven practices you can use to get up to speed quickly, and two, there's a revolving door problem. We've seen this in social media as well. I'd say this after every social media marketing world. The fact that we spend so much time on the basics all the time, and that we have to keep reteaching the basics really shows the negative impact of the revolving door in companies. Anytime somebody gets to a role in their company where they have achieved some level of success, they get promoted and moved on, and then you get some new person, and the new it there's nothing wrong with being a new person.

We were all new the new person at one time. But that new person does not inherit any of the training, any of the knowledge, any of the experience of the person they just replaced, and they're starting from scratch again. And when they do, then they come to content marketing world and they say, here I am, please teach me the basics. And we do, and that's good, they get value out of it, they understand the value of it, but it means that the profession as a whole is not advancing. If you're never doing anything more than the basics and you're not researching and training and innovating and inventing, the profession as a whole does not advance as quickly as it could or should.

So one of the things that we have to think about as content marketers and as marketing professionals is what comes next for ourselves. What does that leap from basic to intermediate to advanced look like? And who are the practitioners who need and want to pursue advanced? Where how do we get those folks in a room while continuing to teach the basics? We must continue to teach the basics, but how do we get the advanced stuff in the room so that we can continue to grow the profession and innovate?

So, some things to think about. Heading into day three today, I'll be speaking twice due to some speaker cancellations. So looking forward to that, and I'll see you there if you're uh around. If not, catch up tomorrow on the recap of today. Thanks for watching.

Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.