Last week, I spoke to a client in the health care industry whose team wanted to develop a new digital content customer experience. But they felt frustrated.

Five years ago, with help from a couple of ad agency consultants, they’d come up with the idea to launch a digital platform to provide easy access to facts. All they needed, they thought, was to set up a digital library that could answer every question existing clients might have.

They would “let the facts speak for themselves” and win the customer retention battle.

<Narrator>: “It didn’t work.”Continue Reading

Are you trying to build your plane while flying it?

I don’t know where that phrase originated, but a 22-year-old advertising campaign from Fallon for digital consulting firm EDS helped popularize it. The comical TV and print ad showed people assembling an airliner in the air and testifying to how much they love their jobs.

The ad’s tagline explained the point – that EDS could help you “build your digital business even while you’re up and running.”

Fallon created the ad as part of an integrated campaign with two other funny videos: Cat Herders, about managing the complexity of digital business, and Running With the Squirrels, which claimed EDS could help legacy businesses compete like disruptive startups.

But the “building the plane while flying it” metaphor endures in digital strategy, and it’s usually invoked when established processes or procedures change.

These days, it feels like companies are building a whole lot of airplanes.Continue Reading

The pandemic made organizations care (finally) about building a strategic content development function.

As a result, I see more and more content marketing leaders face the challenge of solving how content flows through the business. It all comes down to organizations finally learning what it means to act like a media company.

It won’t be easy.

Enterprises are a messy thatch of conflicting agendas, values, priorities, and goals. And the effects of these conflicts seem particularly harsh when it comes to content.

Why? Because content is communication. When parts of the business aren’t communicating well internally, the business can’t communicate well externally.Continue Reading

We humans sometimes have a funny way of planning.

When thinking about how we’re going to allocate our time, resources, etc., we like to categorize things. In our personal lives, those categories might be work, lifestyle, family. In our business lives, they might be via divisions, marketing, sales, product, human resources, accounting, etc.

To make a plan, we put all the decisions made about our desired goals in each of these categories and break them down into tasks so that we can achieve them. Then we try to juggle them all. But we can’t. The decisions made here don’t fit the plan for there. And the plan there doesn’t fit the critical decision made here.Continue Reading

Visual stories have structure. They have beginnings, middles, and ends. They are about people – or at least humanistic souls – and they argue for a theme, or a moral, or a point by adhering to this structure.Continue Reading

For the first time in a long time, I was asked what the difference is between inbound marketing and content marketing. My answer wasn’t as up-to-date as it could have been, so I did a little digging.

Gather round friends, it’s been a hot minute since we’ve talked about inbound marketing.

Almost exactly 10 years ago, my pal and CMI founder Joe Pulizzi wrote an article, Inbound Marketing Isn’t Enough. I was credited as a co-writer. Truth be told, we were on a bit of a rant then about the misperceptions of the content marketing approach.Continue Reading

Our annual content marketing research was released last week, and as CMI’s Stephanie Stahl wrote, “(C)ompanies are waking up to the power of content marketing due in part to the pandemic.”

I say, “Yes, and …” through the lens of our consulting and advisory work with more than 30 brands over the last 18 months.

In spring 2020, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella famously said, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

Since then, we’ve seen at least three major disruptions that help us spot where we may be headed. And identifying the implications of these disruptions may help you develop your strategies to be ready for the future of content and marketing.Continue Reading

Welcome to the wonderful world of content marketing analytics.

I hear you saying, “I was told there would be no math in marketing.” The good news is that all kinds of tools will help you do all that math.

The bad news is none of these tools will help you understand what the numbers mean for your business.

In marketing, there are no standard rules for what defines success. The measurements – or metrics – that mean success at your company may indicate failure at mine.Continue Reading