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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
