My Eight Favorite Grenades from a Day at “Content Marketing World”


A really great conversation can offer you one or two “lightning bolts” of inspiration.  We give our friends and colleagues the power to excite us, move us and to force us to stop and think.

Similarly, a great conference should offer speakers that inspire and move their audiences to action.  I had the chance to spend a day at Content Marketing World recently, where I had the good fortune to hear a number of presentations that rose to meet the challenge to inspire. Two of the best speakers were author and Digital Marketing Strategist Jay Baer and Content Marketing Leader Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute.

I used Twitter to take notes during the conference, so you can get a fuller sense of my experience by going to my Twitter stream.  In the meantime, here are some challenging tweets for marketers to consider, along with my own italicized observations:

  • “The goal is NOT to make content, but to make content that achieves business goals” (Baer)
    • Has your marketing program gotten lost in the “make it engaging” maze and lost sight of your company’s business goals?
  • “Your buyer doesn’t value your value prop@RepCleveland
    • People are moved by marketing that is about them.  End of story.
  • “You don’t have to move away from traditional marketing, you just have to integrate better”  @paulroetzer
    • Many marketers are so caught up in “going digital” that they have forgotten how to seamlessly tie their traditional and new activities together.
  • “Good brands polarize. You can’t be loved if you are not willing to be hated” @eileenrochford
    • Many companies are just not willing to go out on a limb, so they knowingly aim for marketing mediocrity.
  • “You know who gets the marketing budget? Whoever keeps track of the data best” (Baer)
    • Who owns data in your firm?  It’s probably not you, but it should be…
  • “Create a community of like minded people BEFORE you try turning on Social” (Rose)
    • Have you started your 2014 planning with the usual discussion of strategy and tactics?  Perhaps, you’d benefit by adding a community assessment to that mix.
  • “Product Demand folks are drivers for content marketing…I’m not seeing the PR profession. Many PR agencies only pay lip service” (Rose)
    • I grew up in PR and still have many, many friends that define themselves by the terms I used when I started my career over 20 years ago.  I’m frightened that the corporate storytellers have lost the thread of their story.

 

  • “LITTLE data is hard for marketers right now…forget about Big Data.” (Rose)
    • Lost in all of this talk about Big Data?  So is the marketing profession, who is still scrambling to define ROI metrics.

If you want to find some of your own lightning bolts, search the hashtag #cmworld on Twitter.  Or, better yet, attend next year’s conference with me!

What about you? What conference or speaker has inspired you lately?

Photo courtesy of RickC on Flickr

Connect with Elizabeth:

Phone: 212.840.0017

Email: Elizabeth@blissintegrated.com

Twitter: @elizabethsosnow

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