Top content marketing insights from 6 industry leaders

This post is by Anton Buchner, a senior consultant with TrinityP3. Anton is a lateral and innovative thinker with a passion for refocusing business teams and strategies; creating visionary, data driven communication plans; and making sense of a more complex digital marketing environment.

TrinityP3, in conjunction with Warc and King Content ran a half day seminar on “How to be an effective content marketer”.

It was a thought-provoking afternoon attended by over 230 marketers. The proceeds ($6,000) were donated to the Charlie Teo* Brain Cancer Research Trust.

Ed Pank, Managing Director, WARC Asia Pacific, set the scene with a summary of the content marketing landscape.

For me, this was the killer statistic that made everyone sit up and take notice:

• 90% of Australian marketers claim that they are using content marketing, yet most don’t have a formal content strategy. This was reinforced by only a handful of attendees raising their hands to show that they had a content strategy for their business!

Ed focused his discussion on 6 key areas:

1. Be campaign led – create a compelling campaign to tell your brand story
2. Be social led – generate a groundswell of social interest
3. Be customer led – focus on consumer benefits and lifetsyle rather than product features
4. Make your content discoverable – understand the role of search marketing and the technical requirements for ranking organically
5. Success requires long-term thinking – take a long-term, committed approach, rather than a short-sighted tactical test
6. Pull, don’t push – invite people into your story for co-creation rather than simply push messaging at them

He presented some great examples including:

Oreo’s “Daily Twist” campaign

Pfizer fighting back against counterfeit Viagra

JetBlue’s online game show, “Get Away With It”, where real contestants could appear on set by Skyping in from their home.

And an interesting interactive story and ecommerce platform for Denmark’s youth denim fashion brand ONLY.

I was lucky enough to be part of an expert online Q&A panel which covered some critical insights into the world of content marketing.

Other panelists included:

• Todd Wheatland, Head of Global Marketing, Kelly Services
• Luana Zugman, Senior Manager – Strategic Marketing Legal, Tax & Accounting, Thomson Reuters
• Skye Murray, Marketing Manager, Robert Half Recruitment

Some of the key insights and discussion areas centred around:

• Gaining C-Level buy-in up front
• The need to overcome silo structures and align Content Marketing to business strategy
• Defining the communication goals and demonstrating how Content Marketing can deliver on the sales cycle
• Treating Content Marketing as a test and learn communications platform for optimising format, channel delivery, engagement and ultimately ROI
• Challenges in assigning a holistic Content Marketing budget
• Identifying in-house skillsets for content and story creation. Although Skye Murray highlighted that working with an agency in relation to Content Marketing helps Robert Half to scale opportunities and keep projects moving rather then getting bogged down in processes and other internal priorities

Darren Woolley took participants through the penultimate presentation outlining several key considerations and questions for success:

• Steering clear of buzzwords and creating credible, compelling and quality content
• Is your strategy achievable using content marketing?
• Define Content Marketing success for your business and whether it’s measureable and achievable
• Who should be responsible for content creation (internal resources or external suppliers) and who is optimising the activity?

Darren also recommended a good read about the collapse of the current media ecosystem, Z.E.R.O.: Zero Paid Media as the New Marketing Model by Joseph Jaffe, Maarten Albarda.

Todd Wheatland ended the day with his summation of the cultural shift and committed philosophy required for content marketing.

My favourite quote:

“Our job as content marketers is to create internal rock stars.”

I love the passion and emotion he evoked with this thought, rather than getting bogged down in procedures and politics.

As Todd says, Content Marketing needs champions throughout an organisation.

If you’d like to download any of the presentations, then simply request them here:

* Dr Teo is Australia’s leading Neurosurgeon who is pioneering keyhole minimally invasive surgery techniques in order to remove aggressive brain tumors. He gave a moving speech about the advances in brain surgery due to micro instrumentation and the improvements in imaging.

I didn’t realise that brain cancer has been the leading cause of death from cancer in Australian children and young adults for the past 20 years, and that the prognosis has remained unchanged for 30 years despite significant increases in survival for Australians diagnosed with other types of cancer.