Dennis is an independent marketing consultant who works with brands on content marketing, product messaging, and social media marketing. Formerly, Dennis led the content marketing function at DNN Software. Dennis curates an email newsletter called Content Corner and publishes marketing-related content on Medium. Feel free to reach out to Dennis on Twitter @dshiao
This story begins in the present.
Brian Fanzo is a founder, CEO, and keynote speaker. He does 70 speaking engagements a year. Over the past four years, he has done more than 4,000 live video broadcasts.
Brian works with leading brands, including Dell, Adobe, IBM, and SAP. He did influencer engagements at Mobile World Congress and the Super Bowl. Chances are you know Brian.
Whenever I predict the winner of an A/B test, I get it wrong.
With years of marketing experience and a lifetime of filling out online forms, I think I know what combinations of copy, layout, and design will work better. But thousands of users prove me wrong, time and again.
As I was getting ready to pick up my wife and daughter at the airport, I went to Google and entered the airline and flight number.
I wasn’t expecting what I found.
I expected to see a Google answer box neatly displaying the flight status like I do for simple searches like “time in London,” “100 dollars to Japanese yen,” and “59 degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius.”
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Are you a left or right brain?
If you’re comfortable with numbers, logic, and reasoning, you’re a left brain.
If you’re creative and rely on intuition to make decisions, you’re a right brain.
Mathematics? Left brain.
Art? Right brain.
In the world of marketing:
Automation? Left brain.
Creative? Right brain.
Omelets and scrambled eggs have the same ingredients – cracked eggs mixed with a liquid and seasoning. But they aren’t the same. One is an elevated egg dish and the other is a banal breakfast item.
The difference? Technique.
An omelet involves a gentle lift of the edges of the cooked eggs so the runny eggs can flow underneath. And it finishes with a flip to fold the smooth egg mixture. Scrambled eggs involve stirring the eggs until cooked.
An omelet generates a better reaction – and often a higher menu price – than a few scrambled eggs.
And technique is the difference between a well-aligned sales and content marketing strategy (the omelet) and a disparate strategy where sales and content marketing operate separately (the scrambled eggs).
It’s the middle of an all-hands meeting; the newly appointed chief marketing officer at Autodesk said: “Dusty’s going to fix the content problem.”
Dusty?
Dusty DiMercurio, the director of content marketing and social media at Autodesk, and the hero of this story, asked himself, “Hmm, I wonder what that means to her?”
Dusty shared the story of how he learned about and addressed the challenge in a ContentTECH Summit presentation, From Tech Chaos to Content Coordination: Organizing for Success in the Enterprise.
Our hero was presented with a formidable task: to wrangle with the chaos that results from large teams operating in silos. (Autodesk has over 10,000 employees worldwide and uses a decentralized model for delivering content.)
We’ve all worked on projects, right?
They tend to consist of these elements: deadlines, timelines, due dates, deliverables, checklists, and project status meetings.
What happens when one project is done? You move on to the next one.
And that begs the question – can your content marketing achieve its potential if structured as a series of projects?
For Amanda Todorovich and Matt Bakaitis, the answer is no. A project-based approach to content marketing gets the job done but won’t result in exceptional or even differentiated content.
Imagine working at your content marketing job for a year. In December, you proudly look back on all the great content you and your team produced. And then a knockout punch arrives: Only 35% of your work was used.
That’s a common scenario for many B2B marketers. SiriusDecisions reports, “60% to 70% of content produced by B2B marketing organizations goes unused, sitting on sales portals and Web site shelves.”
This is a sobering statistic.
Pokémon GO, a popular mobile game published by Niantic, is an example of augmented reality.
Oculus Rift, a headset developed by Oculus VR, a division of Facebook, is an example of virtual reality.
You’ve probably heard of Pokémon GO or Oculus Rift, but can you explain augmented reality and virtual reality to a friend?
I went to Google in search of simple definitions. The best definitions are in a CNET article, titled fittingly enough, AR and VR Made Simple. Here are the definitions provided in the article:
