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Despite its outdated view of parenting (Should we just believe what our fathers tell us?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.

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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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Those of us who work on content teams eat, breathe, and dream the stuff. But running into someone who doesn’t “get” content marketing changes (and sometimes challenges) your perspective on assumptions you make every day.

I recently watched a Content Marketing World session I missed in September and had one of those aha moments: Oh, that’s why that client didn’t understand the project we pitched. That explains the disconnect between what the sales team thought would happen and what the marketing team knew would happen.

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Does any industry face a more complex audience journey and marketing/sales process than B2B technology? Consider the number of people who influence a sale, the length of the decision-making cycle, the competing interests of the people who purchase, implement, manage, and use the technology. It’s a lot.

Whether or not they have the most difficult jobs, tech content marketers feel the challenge of that complexity. In CMI’s latest research, 68% of tech content marketers named creating content that appeals to multiple roles as their top challenge.

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Every industry has them – the indefatigable ones. The people who seem to be everywhere doing everything every single day.

You see they’re speaking at conferences (sometimes more than one in the same week). You read their articles, newsletters, and even books. You hear them interviewed on podcasts and videos. You follow their conversations on social media.

And you wonder, “Where do they find the time?”

In the content marketing industry, many of those paragons of productivity happen to be speakers at Content Marketing World 2019. We asked several for their secrets. And they gladly shared.

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So many good ideas get published on this blog in a year that it’s nearly impossible for one person to absorb them all.

Examples from 2018 Content Marketer of the Year finalists were so inspiring they stayed with me. When it came time to offer up our latest batch of ideas to steal, I found it hard to pick just one from each. But I made myself do it.

I looked for ones that can be applied in all kinds of organizations – B2B, B2C, big, small, and everything in between. Now I hope you steal at least one of these ideas – and then make it grand for your brand.

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Every week, I have the privilege of editing a column from CMI Chief Strategy Advisor Robert Rose. Each one contains a gem of wisdom – sometimes more than one. Giving each a final polish is one of my favorite tasks.

That’s because Robert’s columns challenge me to think beyond how to do a content marketing task and even beyond how to do things better. Instead, he makes me think about why we content marketers do what we do and about the role of content, the job of content marketing, and what success really feels like.

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Some of the best gifts are those you don’t realize you need, but once opened, you immediately see how useful they can be.

Unsolicited advice doesn’t always fall into that welcome-gift category. But Andrew Davis’ Unsolicited Advice column in Chief Content Officer typically does. He gives an unsuspecting company the benefit of his keen insight into how marketers veer off course and suggests how to get back on track.

Andrew delivers his helpful perspective with a dose of humor and generous offers to help. We share it now in the hope the lessons bring you good cheer.
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