Last week, I had the privilege to represent Reload Media at Content Marketing World 2018 – the biggest (and best!) conference on content marketing in the world, hosted by the Content Marketing Institute in Cleveland, Ohio.
✈️ 10,038 miles & 20 hours flown from Australia to Cleveland for #CMWorld! I’m so pumped! Let’s get this thing started!! ???????????????????? pic.twitter.com/TSvMpdBwKS
— Sarah Hutcheon (@shutchh) September 5, 2018
Content Marketing World is in its 8th year, and hosts the industry’s biggest names and brands, to talk about strategy and trends for the year ahead. This year, we had the pleasure of listening to thought leaders such as Robert Rose, Joe Pulizzi, Andrew Davis, Anthony Crestodina, Ann Handley and even Tina Fey!
When your conference looks more like a party ???? let’s do this #CMWorld! pic.twitter.com/H592MITjVW
— Sarah Hutcheon (@shutchh) September 5, 2018
So what did I learn from all of these amazing people? Read on below for my key learnings from the week.
Long Form Content Still Holds Tremendous Value
Boy, was this a big one.
Content is everywhere these days, but it’s usually short-form content that doesn’t truly engage your audience. Without engaging your audience, we all know it’s pretty difficult to build a relationship with your brand. Quite simply, you’ve really got to put in the leg work to capture your audience’s attention in today’s cluttered market.
Yes! THANK YOU @DrewDavisHere #CMWorld pic.twitter.com/oKNIT9zSYv
— Sarah Hutcheon (@shutchh) September 5, 2018
Latest Studies from MarketingProfs show that long-form content of over 2000 words is consistently rated to be the highest performing content in marketing strategies. This is no surprise in terms of SEO visibility, we’ve known long-form content performs better for some time now – however from a nurture perspective, this has now been shown to help lead people through the decision making process extremely well.
So, what’s the answer? The Curiosity Gap. We need to place a much larger focus on storytelling as a way to engage our audience with the message we’re trying to deliver – ultimately, if your audience is telling you that your content is too long, they’re actually trying to say that they’re just not interested (thanks to Andrew Davis for this gem!). We need to structure our stories in a way that keeps them engaged. This was also reinforced in a great talk from Tamsen Webster, where it was discussed that ideas aren’t found, they’re built. It’s our job to create the right conditions for people to change their thoughts, which will, in turn, change their behaviours.
One of my favourites so far @tamadear – thank you!
1. Reframe the problem
2. Make it impossible to ignore
3. Arrive at a moment of truth
4. Promote the change.Most importantly, people are human… they buy ideas, not things!!#CMWorld pic.twitter.com/mWVr2p0TzS
— Sarah Hutcheon (@shutchh) September 6, 2018
Original Research A Key Opportunity
Original research is a key tactic in content marketing that is set to be a sure-fire winner over the next couple of years. It’s hard to say something original without original material – so the key advice from the conference was to make your own!
Truth bomb shared at #CMWorld: “[Original research] may take 10x the effort to create, but you’ll likely see 100x the results of a typical article.” (shared by @michelelinn from @crestodina, co-founder of @orbiteers) pic.twitter.com/HO69VXo1Vt
— Dov Hoffman (@dovhoffman) September 7, 2018
Not only are there an array of benefits for your SEO, but it also helps to build your brand as an authority in your industry. Tips from Anthony Crestodina around how to go about creating this research include:
Observation
Qualitative-style research that involves pulling out observations from what you see in your industry
Aggregation
Look at an array of already published research, and reorganise to fill a gap in data not currently available
Survey
Conduct your own first party research – this could be surveying your clients, partners, employees, or even just the wider community.
“Meaningful Content is the New Content Frontier”
We were lucky enough to hear a very special keynote from Kathleen Diamantakis, who heads up T Brand Studio – the brand marketing arm of the New York Times. Her talk described the psychological changes that have happened at a global level over the past 10 years in particular, and how people are drawn more and more toward truly meaningful content.
Day 2! @nytimes’ Kathleen Diamantakis talks making content mean something. Happy content (pleasure / comfort) vs. meaningful content (self development / inspiration). #CMWorld pic.twitter.com/9uQmpRSy6z
— Danielle Garbo (@daniellegarbo) September 6, 2018
As a result, we need to be creating content that doesn’t just ‘scratch the surface’ but provides an intrinsic value and utility.
AI Will Start Playing a Larger Role in Content
AI was another massive focus of the conference. Essentially, AI can be (and in the future, will likely be) used for any repetitive task to enhance efficiency and accuracy, and will free us up for more creative thinking.
AI enhances human knowledge and capabilities. It will cut out the mundane time-consuming tasks we don’t enjoy. The future is marketer + machine. @paulroetzer #cmworld pic.twitter.com/7dk5jV3ntd
— Ellie Mirman (@ellieeille) September 6, 2018
The key utility of AI for content moving forward will be to analyse large datasets, engage in attribution analysis of which content has contributed toward your goals, and predict content that will perform well in the future). It’s predicted that AI will be a key driver of change in the industry within the next five years – watch this space!
And that’s the key takeouts from the conference! There’s, of course, a lot more detail on all of these topics (plus many more!), so if you’d like to find out more about these trends, just drop me a line!
Otherwise, can’t wait to do it all again next year!
