I recently spent several hours of a Sunday afternoon making homemade pasta, a remarkably messy activity that gave me a deep appreciation for the complexities hiding behind a simple strand of spaghetti.

I had no idea there are multiple kinds of flour you can use in an almost infinite number of combinations, depending on the type of pasta you’re after.

For many marketers, our relationship with content is much the same.

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Now that we’ve officially declared quality victorious over its long-time nemesis quantity, I’d like to propose that we also retire the well-worn phrase, “Content is king.” Instead, I’d like to propose a new alliterative truth: “Quality is queen.”

But how do we make it happen? In an interesting (and somewhat counterintuitive) twist, it turns out Agile marketing teams may have a good answer because they are more likely to prioritize quality than their traditional or ad-hoc process counterparts, according to results from AgileSherpas’ recent survey of marketing teams.

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Editor’s note: Paul Horstmeier is a finalist for 2017 Content Marketer of the Year. We will be sharing insight from all CMY finalists in the blog before the winner is announced at Content Marketing World this month.

For many content marketing teams, the email subscriber count is a pivotal measure of success. After all, a quality email list is a vital component of a high-functioning modern marketing department.

And, traditionally, you get more subscribers by putting enticing resources behind an email gate. In other words, you require someone to provide their email address to access something of value.

But when Paul Horstmeier took over as senior vice president of marketing for Health Catalyst, he couldn’t follow this typical content marketing script. The health care audience is historically skeptical of marketing, he says, so he wanted to give them an experience that didn’t feel like marketing.

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Editor’s note: Kira Mondrus is a finalist for 2017 Content Marketer of the Year. We will be sharing insight from all CMY finalists in the blog before the winner is announced at Content Marketing World this September.

Mediocre content marketing is often built on the shaky foundation of assumptions and generalities. Creating detailed personas and accurate buyer journey maps takes time, effort, and resources, and often it seems easier to skip those steps and dive straight into writing generic blog posts.

Poor targeting, however, delivers poor results, as Kira Mondrus, SecureWorks’ director of global marketing, knew when she joined its team in 2014. Unwilling to commit to content marketing without personas, journey maps, or useful attribution data, she set about building a firm base from which to work.

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Editor’s note: Drew Bailey is a finalist for 2017 Content Marketer of the Year. We will be sharing insight from all CMY finalists in the blog before the winner is announced at Content Marketing World this September.

Redundancies, overlaps, and a general lack of communication kept good content marketers from delivering a better content experience for FedEx customers.

Drew Bailey wanted to change that when he took the reins of content operations at the company. “My team’s job is enablement,” says FedEx’s manager of content strategy and curation. Continue Reading

Editor’s note: Monica Norton is a finalist for 2017 Content Marketer of the Year. We will be sharing insight from all CMY finalists in the blog before the winner is announced at Content Marketing World this September.

Many brands struggle to stay out of the spotlight in their content. They begin with good intentions to quietly wait in the wings, but over time the brand creeps back to center stage.

Zendesk, however, created a publication that hardly includes the brand. Its newest property, Relate, is all about improving professional relationships. In a growing library of content – articles, podcasts, print magazine, and in-person event – the SaaS company’s customer service product rarely makes an appearance.Continue Reading

Editor’s note: Paolo Mottola won 2017 Content Marketer of the Year. We share insights from all CMY finalists in the blog before the winner is announced at Content Marketing World.

With Mark Zuckerberg recently identifying video as a “mega trend” with the same game-changing potential as mobile, the race is officially on for marketers to add video to their content mix.Continue Reading

Have you ever spent weeks or even months crafting a perfect piece of content that generated almost no response from your audience? You expected trumpets and confetti, praise-filled emails, maybe even a raise. Instead, you got crickets.

While you might accept these disheartening flops as the cost of doing content marketing, they represent an enormous waste of time and resources.

Fortunately, Agile practices offer an alternative. Rather than putting all your eggs into one big content basket, you can conduct small experiments by releasing minimum viable content. I’ll define this term in a bit. For now, the main thing to note is that minimum viable content enables you to learn what your audience is interested in and then use what you’ve learned to create big, high-effort pieces that perform well.Continue Reading