Modern fundamentals of marketing: A Content Marketing World 2017 Review

Last month, I attended #CMWorld in Cleveland, Ohio (#tbt).

Hearing from some of the brightest and most influential leaders in the industry - ranging from Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose (the founders of Content Marketing Institute), to Linda Boff (CMO General Electric), and Kate Santore (Head of Content, Coca Cola) – I was inspired by their efforts to highlight the often forgotten strategic fundamentals of marketing.

Best practices that all successful marketers should understand (and follow!) before all else, as highlighted by many of the speakers and leaders at #CMWorld:

1.      They know their audience

2.      They know themselves

3.      They know their objectives (and are laser focused)

Despite the simplicity of these statements, it is easy to over complicate marketing and lose focus on these fundamentals. We often get entrapped in the cycle of excess content creation, data and analytics, attribution, personalization and attempts to be a jack of all trades.

If this combination sounds familiar to you – I encourage you to read on for a recap of conference highlights below! Video on demand assets available at Content Marketing World.

1.      “Know Who You Are” and “Know Your Secret Sauce” (Linda Boff)

Linda Boff (CMO, General Electric) shared the methodology behind how GE, a 125-year-old company, remains relevant with consumers by understanding their history and core objectives.

 “Know Who You Are”- One of the hardest things to do is to step back and convey a simple message or idea that truly represents a brand. “What’s in your DNA? What does your brand stand for?” Sometimes, communicating the core messaging and purpose of the brand is the hardest part about storytelling.

“Know Your Secret Sauce”- Once you know who you are [as a brand], the constant challenge is to find a way to communicate your core values in a way that is relevant, attractive, engaging and memorable to new audiences. People relate to people, not brands. The key question companies must ask of consumers is “why us?”.

GE uses storytelling to reinforce company values and bring relevance to the consumer.

2.       Create Less Content, not more (Jay Baer)

“Do more with less”, meaning more content does not equate to better results. By knowing your audience, delivering relevance and value to them comes easy. The “battle for attention” is negligible. Content fails when it doesn’t matter enough to trade a person’s time for information. Relevancy is the value exchange.

Jay Baer drives business objectives by doing “less but better” four ways. 

1.      Adapt topics and frequency of sharing based on being relevant. Create outputs people are interested in, outputs they need and outputs they will want to read, and delivered frequently enough to keep them interested.

2.      Use a relevant channel of distribution. Consumers visit 38% fewer websites than they did in 2010. Of that website traffic, the majority is intentional. Consumers visit websites with a purpose.

3.      Build trust by developing a relationship by consistently delivering entertainment, or value to the consumer.

4.      Prioritize amplifying great content over more content. Prioritize content that has been designed to meet a specific business objective, is relevant to a specific audience, and delivers value in a medium that reflects a point in time within a users buyer journey

3.      You can’t have a story without a problem (Ann Handley)

Storytelling for the sake of telling stories makes it challenging to build an audiences’ trust and attention. But, by telling purposeful stories that propose solutions to consumer problems or pain-points, you can influence consumer behaviour to match organizational objectives. Ann Handley’s strategy to help with this process is to write with one focus, on one goal, to one person, at one time. That single person, generally reflects a larger audience. Thus, by trying to help the busy mom, the affluent single professional or the overly scheduled teen, it keeps the content focused on the user’s problem (and your core audience), and tells a story to fix it. How can you help them?

All in all, knowing your objectives, knowing your business and knowing your audience, sounds basic, right? These are the basics that are enabling success in marketing.

As marketers, we often get caught up in the day-to-day nuisances like technology debt, data over analysis paralysis, augmented reality and hyper- targeted personalization. When in reality, reflecting on the fundamentals of our industry should be a priority for every marketer. In the end, we need to pause for a moment and think about how well we know ourselves, our customers and our objectives, all of which are guaranteed to set us (and our teams) up for success.