It is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore the growing focus on content marketing, which is has been defined by Joe Pulizzi as “the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
So how do brands approach content? What are the strategic and tactical considerations that have to be explored before brands launch themselves into content marketing. To answer these questions – and many more – we’re excited to have Kristina Halvorson, the CEO and co-founder of Brain Traffic, as one of meshmarketing’s keynote speakers.
One of the world’s leading content strategists, Kristina will provide attendees with the insight, perspective and advice they need to successfully leverage content to drive their strategic and tactical objectives.
To get a flavour of Kristina’s presentation, I did a mini-Q&A with her about a few key areas:
What’s your take about all the buzz out content marketing?
With content marketing, you need to produce a lot of content and send it across all the different channels to establish yourself as trusted resource and create alliances and create value. Now, brands are dealing with their Websites, they are dealing with search, which is screwing up a bunch of content, they are dealing with blogs that are under-resourced, and social media channels they have lost track with. They are dealing with trying to format all this content for all these other things and everyone is creating silos, which is making it worse and worse.
This stuff is not just random activity. We are creating content and the content is what we are asking people to engage with. We want them to find it valuable, so how can we go about consider content from a strategic perspective? Let’s not think about it as tactical. Let’s think of content as sharing across silos. Content strategy provides guiding principles and identifies work-flow to ensure we are creating the right kinds of content for our business and users, that we are measuring its effectiveness and identifying area for re-use, and we have the right people in the right seats empowered to the right things. How can we create consistency across channel to optimize communications efforts?
What are the mistakes being made about content marketing?
People are jumping into tactical initiatives without thinking about what is going on elsewhere and what they will do with it once it’s out there. We are basically making the Internet a dumping ground for content. Everyone is under pressure to create more content and always be producing. We ask people to slow down and say “Why?”.
When you dig into their objectives, there are no solid outcomes that are mapped back to business objectives. We are creating content that we think our customers want versus what they are reading or talking to them about or done analytics about. As communications professionals we have been measured on activity, and so it is a different idea that we would be asked to back up and spend time choreographing our efforts, which takes time and investment.
Tickets for meshmarketing are now on sale for $299 until Oct. 8 – a $70 discount from the regular price.
Once in awhile, you come across a blogger that resonates because their posts consistently deliver valuable insight. A great example is Lee Odden, who writes about content marketing, search and social media on the Top Rank Marketing blog.