Kim Moutsos is thrilled to join the talented team at the Content Marketing Institute as vice president of editorial. After working in content marketing for enterprises and startups for more than 20 years, she’s looking forward to exchanging ideas and lessons learned with other content marketing practitioners. You can follow her on Twitter at @KMoutsos or connect on LinkedIn.
We’re just one month into 2020, and you probably know people who have given up on their personal goals or resolutions.
In our work lives, giving up on goals after a few weeks isn’t an option. Since you’re going to be working on them all year, double check that you’re working toward the right goals – goals that matter to business leaders.
Tom Hanks has been everywhere recently talking about his role as beloved TV icon Mr. Rogers in the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. But as I look over CMI’s 2019 posts, a different Tom Hanks movie (this one from over 20 years ago) comes to mind: You’ve Got Mail.
You know when you hear a line you’ve heard a million times and suddenly you see it in a different light? That moment often comes courtesy of a deep thinker and relayed by a great storyteller.
I get that feeling regularly thanks to CMI Chief Strategy Advisor Robert Rose’s weekly note. If you’re not subscribed to the Weekly Alert, you missed some of these aha moments. To remedy that, I’ve gathered a few of my favorites from the year.
At the end of each year, it’s natural to reflect on the outcome of the past 12 months. What worked but could have been better? What worked so well you want to do more? What didn’t work and you need to permanently delete?
Have a little fun with your annual review this year. Adapt the popular forced-choice game – Kiss, Marry, Kill – and call it “Fix, Marry, Kill.”
The rules of play are simple: List your content projects and choose only one for each of these:
We’ve updated this article with the 2019 results of our survey asking about favorite content tech tools. Many have stayed at the top, while new ones have jumped onto the lists.
Want to be a better content marketer? Don’t overlook the importance of technology.
CMI research shows content tech proficiency is a key differentiator between the most successful and the least successful content marketers.
Content duds. Everybody’s got ’em. In between those pieces that clearly hit the mark, you’ve published (more than) a few that didn’t. What are you to do with those?
There’s plenty of advice on how to make pretty good content better or reuse your best stuff. Last month, I wrote about how to reuse, republish, repurpose your high-performing content. It’s such a sure-win technique for content marketers, we’ve got many related articles. One of them recently made the rounds on Twitter and prompted a great question.
You have a documented content marketing strategy. You’ve outlined your quarterly plan, aligning your messages and goals with demand gen, sales, and customer success, and other teams. But you still have slots to fill in your editorial calendar.
Most marketers have experienced this moment. You know broadly what you need to produce, but specific ideas seem just out of reach.
When this happens, you have two choices: Wait for inspiration to strike or develop a system to find stellar ideas to fill the calendar.
How many email newsletters, blog alerts, RSS feeds, and other content streams do you subscribe to? How many do you read every day? One? Two? None?
Chances are you don’t read all five blog posts CMI publishes every week. Our analytics show that most of our subscribers don’t. We’re not mad – we get it.
Maybe you were extra busy one day. Maybe the topic or headline didn’t line up with your information needs the moment the email landed. Maybe you never saw the article at all. It’s easy to miss even great articles when so much comes at you from so many sources.
If your mother says she loves you, check it out. Anyone with journalism training (or who knows anyone with journalism training) has heard this adage.
Despite its outdated view of parenting (Should we just believe what our fathers tell us? And did only mothers say they love their children?), verifying is a useful exercise when reviewing any best practices or research.
But wait, isn’t the point of best practices and research that other people have done the hard work of figuring out what works for you? Not exactly.
You know you’re in the presence of gifted storytellers by the things they make you feel. Anticipation. Surprise. Awe. Anger. Joy. Sadness. Fear. Relief. Nostalgia. Determination. And – when you can break from their spell for a moment – sheer admiration for their craft.
Some people seem to have a knack for it. The rest of us have to work at it, right?
Here’s a secret: Even the most seemingly effortless storytellers work for it, training formally, studying storytellers they admire, or perfecting the tale by telling it again and again at conferences, dinner tables, or campfires.
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