CMWorld 2015: Content marketing grows up

At the fifth Content Marketing World conference this year in Cleveland, 3,500 marketers got together to listen, learn and commiserate about the challenges we all face back home.

But this year felt a little different to me.

It was my third conference and I truly love it. Someone attending with me for the first time this year told me it was like I had found my people…and I have. The best part about attending #CMWorld, as we like to call it, is the people. We often see each other online, but it’s rare that we get to meet face-to-face. When that happens, as it typically does every September in Cleveland, it’s simply a joy.

But there was a nagging difference for me this year. Sure, I learned a lot; and I had the chance to meet many great people I had only known previously in cyberspace, which I wouldn’t trade for anything. But there was something.

I think CMWorld, and Content Marketing as an industry, is growing up.

We're talking more about grown up things, like measurement and ROI and audience development. And we're acting more like grown ups, with more sessions that went beyond the basics of simple content creation than ever before.

And the sponsors have grown with us. What was once a room filled with very similar tools has expanded to include a variety of experts who are truly practitioners in the space themselves.

But it's still there, that feeling.

Parents reading this may understand best, but there’s a bittersweet element to having your child grow up. There’s a sense of accomplishment, for sure, but there are other feelings, too. Feelings like a loss of control and knowing that you will at some point have to let go.

I wonder if this is how the folks at Content Marketing Institute feel. Joe Pulizzi and his team have created this event from nothing in just five short years and, in the time most of us have just paid off our latest cars, it has blossomed into the premier event in the world for Content Marketing.

My guess is that, as the parents of a five year old, they may be too busy raising their child to have time to see it. Or feel it.

Oh don’t worry, I’m not ready to let go of Content Marketing just yet. But I can start to see a time when it’s not just us anymore, if you know what I mean. Others have said this and I believe it to be true: Content Marketing will just be marketing at some point in the future. And that gives me pause.

It’s not that I don’t want to share Content Marketing (well, okay, maybe there's a little of that). But after trying hard to share the practice of Content Marketing with the world -- as so many who attend CMWorld have done these last five years -- the scary reality is that we might actually be successful.

Then we will have to watch our baby walk out into the world all by herself and hope she comes back to visit every once in a while.

Enjoy Content Marketing while you can, CMWorld peeps, she's only ours for a little bit longer.

I was an introvert before it was cool

The world isn't a place that can be easily divided into two groups. But, if it could, introverts and extroverts might be the way to do it. Almost everyone understands this distinction and very few people fit into both camps.

To put it simply, you're either in or you're out.

Whatever you call it, people generally understand whether they prefer to be around other people or by themselves. At least they do today. I would submit that this was not the case in 1992…certainly not for me.

I was just getting out of school and was full of that conquer-the-world attitude. This would be easy, I told myself. Oh, how little I knew.

While in college, I worked for the school newspaper. It wasn’t your typical school paper…we had a daily circulation of 30,000. We were essentially a small city paper serving mostly college students. I was in the Journalism School, but I didn’t write for the paper; I was in the advertising sequence, so I sold (and created) advertising that made the paper possible.

It was awesome.

This new computer called a Mac SE30 (you know, the little one with the built-in monitor) had carved out a corner of the business office and all of us budding creative types begrudgingly took turns — literally, by appointment — creating ads to sell.

Turns out we were supposed to sell the ad space first, then create the ad; but it was so much easier to create an ad especially for a local business, take it to the owner and tell them that 30,000 people can see this for $50. Cha-ching! This selling thing was great.

In retrospect, it wasn’t selling at all. But what did I know. Or care. We were making commission and having a blast (not to mention building our portfolios along the way).

After two and a half years of this, they made me leave. Put another way, I graduated.

I didn’t really want to, mind you — I was having too much fun. But they told me I had to go out into the real world. How bad could it be, I told myself (I really need to stop telling myself things). This is also when I accidentally invented the phrase ‘famous last words.’

And it gets better. Along with graduation, my fiancé and I had been waiting to get married until after I got out of school. There’s a distinct possibility that I didn’t think this through as much as I could have, but I graduated on June 12 and we were married on June 20. Of the same year. Yeah.

Needless to say, I was the only unemployed person on the cruise we took for our honeymoon. Do you know how many times people ask you what you do for a living when you’re unemployed? Well double that on a cruise ship.

When we got back, it was seriously time to get a job. Lucky for me, a local group of weekly newspapers was looking for an advertising sales rep. Perfect! This would be just like in school, right?

As you can probably guess, wrong.

I started out learning about the small businesses in my territory: a bank, a furniture store, a funeral home…eek. Then, I started creating ads for them.

“Whoa, hold on there, son,” my boss told me. I was not his son, but the message was quite clear — the newspaper group had a creative department, thankyouverymuch, and I wasn’t in it. I was in sales.

It was my job to pound the pavement. To meet new people. To uncover leads.

Wait, what?

I don’t want to do any of that! It makes me sort of sick to do that. And, perhaps most importantly, I suck at that. But that was the job and I needed one, so I gave it a shot. I might not be outgoing, but I’m no quitter.

So I called. And called. And called. If I didn’t love the face-to-face thing, I could just give people a call and do this whole thing all over the phone, right? This sales thing wouldn’t be so bad after all. I had a plan, I told myself (I really needed to stop talking to myself).

There I sat, in the office, on the phone. There may have been cell phones in 1993, but I sure didn’t have one. And I quickly learned an interesting thing about business owners: unless you’re a customer, they don’t want to talk to you on the phone — because they are busy running a business.

Still, I called. Of course, no one was answering (or calling me back) but I was calling. That would have to count for something, right?

Well, about three months of calling (and no sales) and my boss was calling me ‘son’ again. I don’t think he had any kids, because he didn’t appear to be using it as a term of endearment. But the message again was clear — sell some ad space or else.

I didn’t like the prospect of ‘or else,’ but I also didn’t like meeting new people or asking these new people to buy something from me. Especially something they can’t see. Back in school, I didn’t mind asking people if they wanted to pay for the ad I had created especially for them because I was proud of what I had made…and, typically, they liked it. I was helping them, not selling them.

Now, I was selling newspapers. Granted this was a time when newspapers were well regarded (no Internet yet) and our paper was especially so…it was the source people relied on for news in my area. Why couldn’t I sell that?

Because I would have to talk to people.

And, as they were showing me the door, it still didn’t dawn on me that this was the problem: I was scared to death of people.

But I was so lucky. After a brief stint at the local General Electric plant, where I learned a ton about man-made diamonds (ask me sometime, it’s cool) and authored an employee newsletter distributed on two continents (also cool), I was fortunate to land a position with the local Caterpillar dealership. You know, bulldozers!

Aside from it being the coolest place I have ever worked — need to get away from the office for a bit? Go hop on a tractor! — the company was also heavily committed to the training and development of its people. The owners routinely brought in what we now call thought leaders for training sessions and we all learned so much about each other and, most importantly, ourselves.

I finally learned that I’m an introvert and that this would be okay. I learned why I was scared to death of people and, to my great relief, that others felt this way too!

Then, I learned the most important thing I’ve ever learned in a business environment — if you discover what the person you’re dealing with needs and you can find a way to give it to them, you will win. It’s all about adaptability.

As it turns out, it’s a lot like the field I find myself in today, content marketing.

So, if I’m fortunate enough to meet you someday and I don’t exactly make eye contact the whole time, maybe you’ll understand why.

I’m still scared to death of people, but I’m working on it!

Picking on the words: audience

Photo credit: Vicki Lam

Think of content marketing as a conversation: spend time getting to know your audience beforehand so you don’t look unprepared

I’m sure you’ve heard it before: know your audience. But how does this help marketers, especially those responsible for creating content? That’s simple: in just about every way possible.

Whether you’re creating the content yourself (as a writer, video producer, designer, etc.) or directing the effort of others (freelancers, agencies), it’s critical you appreciate the value of understanding your audience — upfront. And I mean, understanding them as completely as you can.

If Abraham Lincoln were here, he’d probably say something wise like, you have to know where the target is in order to hit it. With apologies to Mister Lincoln, here are three ways that knowing your target audience can help content marketers:

1. Creative inspiration

Creative people need inspiration. They thrive on it. Given something that inspires them, creative people can deliver great things. But the opposite is also true — without inspiration, creative people are handcuffed and can only deliver what the person or group requesting the work thinks they want (which is usually not what the audience wants at all).

2. Message resonance

How can you know if the message you’re sending will resonate with those you want to reach? Only if you know who they are and what they want. This doesn’t have to be creepy where we need to know an audience’s innermost desires. But, if we’re trying to change behavior (getting someone to want what we have, buy what we’re selling or agree with our position on an issue), we need to know what will appeal to them.

3. Getting invited in

Back in 1970s America, brands could simply create a TV commercial and broadcast it out to the entire country. They could buy time on all three major networks at the same time (a media buying tactic called roadblocking) and people simply couldn’t avoid it.

This no longer works. Not only is it cost-prohibitive, people are now bombarded with more than 5,000 messages a day, so they have learned to ignore most of them. And technology (like TiVo and Netflix) helps them do it. In order for your message to break through and inspire someone, it has to be more targeted, reaching a specific group of people with a relevant message delivered in the way they prefer.

In reality today, your message has to be good enough to be invited in.

Of course, in order to do any of this you need to understand as much as you can about your audience. What do they like to do, watch, read? Who do they listen to, who is influential to them? What brands do they buy and what does that tell you about their world? And, perhaps most importantly, what do they need that you can provide for them better than anyone?

To paraphrase Mister Lincoln’s famous quote about the importance of sharpening one’s axe before chopping down a tree, if you have six hours to create a message, spend four hours learning about your audience.

Is content marketing growing up?

One of the biggest challenges we content marketers face today is ourselves.

Sure, it can be tempting to try to keep up with the latest marketing success story — the Oreo dunk in the dark, the Arby’s hat at the Grammy’s. And real-time affirmations from social media can make it easy to confuse attention with success.

But, if you study them, most truly successful content marketing examples focus on a very small group of targeted prospects, rather than trying to hit a home run with millions of people (even though the latter may be the result).

One of my favorite examples, from Jay Baer’s book, Youtility, is Taxi Mike’s Dining Guide, the humble, printed flyer created by a taxi driver who lives in a ski resort town in the Canadian Rockies.

As the story goes, Taxi Mike would routinely get questions from his riders about where to go and what to do in the small town of Banff, Alberta. But nothing existed that he could use to answer these frequent questions.

If nothing exists, an opportunity does

Realizing the need, Taxi Mike created a simple brochure that identified the best places for certain types of food and drink in Banff. He handed it out to people in his cab and gave it to local restaurants and bars. It wasn’t designed to ‘go viral’ or help people across the globe, just those who asked him for help.

As you know by now, Taxi Mike’s Dining Guide caught on…but why? Who do you think the grateful patrons who relied on his guide would call for a taxi at the end of the night?

Exactly.

A model for how to create great content

Did Taxi Mike create a series of high-production Vine videos? Did his guide spend weeks in design? Was it printed on 100-pound coated pearl white metallic card stock? Of course not.

And that’s exactly why it worked.

A big part of its success was in its authenticity. People could tell this was something created locally and that’s why they trusted it. Of course, that doesn’t mean everything should be humble. Or even printed.

But it does mean content marketers need to be aware of what their target persona are looking for. In this case, it was useful information — but it was also authenticity. In others, it will almost certainly be something else.

The point is to find out what your audience is looking for so you can give it to them as you’re helping them. Did Taxi Mike know all of this? Probably not, but who cares! His guide is a great inspiration for content marketers.

With everyone focusing on creating content today, we not only need to help people with our content, we need to do it in a way that builds trust. 

I, for one, think content marketing is up to the challenge.

Image courtesy of taximike.com

Did advertising create Content Marketing (and, perhaps more importantly, should horses wear hats)?

Back in colonial America, business owners had to rely on advertising (mail-order catalogs and newspaper ads, mainly) to pitch their products and services. But, as department store owner John Wannamaker is often credited with saying, no one knew for sure what was working:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

Promotional products became the solution

Searching for a way to measure effectiveness, companies started creating promotional items they could offer as an incentive to measure response. And, as you can imagine, some of these early giveaways were pretty bad.

While the traditional promotional product standbys like rulers and hand-held paper fans with printed messages were great (and are still popular today), some companies thought that hats for horses were a good idea.

Yes, hats for horses.

Okay, let’s place the blame where it really belongs

It’s more likely that printers of the day, who created the fledgling promotional products business to utilize their presses when they weren’t printing newspapers, came up with some of the more questionable ideas. It all started innocently enough with burlap book bags for students. That escalated to bags for marbles, card cases, calendars and the aforementioned horse hats.

Taking an idea and making it bigger (and better)

While horses everywhere shuddered, some innovative companies took the idea of creating something to measure response and elevated it — creating things that actually did more. Heard of John Deere’s Furrow magazine? Or the Michelin Guide? Or Jell-O recipe books? These companies went beyond horse hats (the 1880s version of click bait) and decided to create something that was actually useful.

So did advertising create Content Marketing? Maybe. But, now that technology has enabled Content Marketing to come into its own, the time is right to look for the next challenge.

What’s next for Content Marketing?

If we, as content marketers, think of ourselves as similar to those first companies that made a conscious choice to elevate promotional products to a more ‘useful’ status — shouldn't that cause us to think more broadly about the content we're creating today? (That's rhetorical...yes, it should).

The next time you have the opportunity to create content, think of those trailblazers who chose to elevate their content (even though they didn't call it that). Don't settle for something your audience will merely click on or subscribe to -- help them solve a problem.

In other words, create great content. People will thank you with their business.

Photo credit: roundstable.com

Picking on the words: native

Those of you in the content marketing space probably know where this is headed, but I want to challenge the way we use the word native more broadly than just in terms like native advertising.

So what is native, really?

Dictionaries say it’s a term that refers to a local inhabitant; something or someone that’s innate, not acquired. Based on that definition, very little about what we use the word for today fits at all.

Native software, for example, refers to programs that are created for or supported by a specific operating system (not typically those that were there to begin with). That’s a miss.

Native Americans refers to the people Europeans encountered when they discovered the so-called ‘new world’ they named America. How can you be native to a ‘new’ place that someone else has given a new name? They were certainly native, but I doubt they would consider themselves Americans. Miss.

And, finally, native advertising refers to messages created by a publisher to essentially deceive its audience by camouflaging a story from a brand to look as if it’s part of the publication.

Oops.

As expected, while there are some pretty big offenders in the use of the word, native advertising clearly wins.

Perhaps that’s what we should expect when combining a publishing industry desperate for some way — any way —to survive in the digital world they didn’t adapt to quickly enough with brands that are equally desperate for some way to stand out.

Expected? Perhaps. Does that make it okay? Absolutely not.

Tricking people who are not just your customers but also your greatest assets is more than offensive, it’s downright stupid. In fact, I’m not sure who’s more to blame here…the publishers who haven’t adapted and feel forced to take this path or die; or the brands who are clearly leveraging a short term gain in spite of those who would be their customers. Maybe both?

The bottom line is that native advertising is neither native nor advertising. And hiding behind a term that is deliberately nebulous to extract a short-term gain is cowardly and both the publishers and the brands that are participating should be called out for doing so.

But we probably won’t need to worry about that.

Today’s consumers are empowered, connected and smart. In the long run, they will understand (and remember) which publishers and brands are taking advantage of them currently through native advertising.

So what can these publishers and brands do? Not much.

Smart consumers know they are in charge and the publishers and brands attempting to fool them today through native advertising probably won’t be around too much longer to worry about it.

Photo courtesy of stockimages via freedigitalphotos.net

Picking on the words: campaign

Sometimes, when I comment (okay, rant) on a specific word choice, some of my friends (who shall remain nameless in hopes that they will remain my friends) will say I’m focusing on semantics or that I’m just picking on the words.

Exactly.

People, words are important. We should take care when picking the words we use, especially in this digital-first world where it’s likely people will ‘meet’ you online long before they do so in-person (if that ever happens).

Ironically, even as images and video become increasingly prevalent, the words you choose become even more important — because they represent you.

As Ann Handley says in her book, Everyone Writes, “Words matter. Your words (what you say) and style (how you say it) are your most cherished (and, yet, undervalued) assets.”Agreed (you should pick up her book, by the way).

Which brings me to the word for this time — campaign. Those of us who are self-proclaimed ‘purists’ of content marketing believe that content marketing is not a campaign, because a campaign has a beginning and an end.

Content marketing is ongoing, so to talk about a ‘content marketing campaign’ is akin to referring to ‘military intelligence’ or ‘jumbo shrimp’ — it just doesn’t make any sense.

Campaigns still exist, of course. There are political campaigns and advertising campaigns, both of which have a beginning and an end. And, remarkably, these kinds of campaigns aren’t going anywhere, even as consumers look for and find new ways to avoid both on an almost-daily basis.

Content marketing, on the other hand, isn’t about interrupting. It’s simply about helping. Or, what author and speaker Jay Baer calls Youtility in his book by the same name. Jay says, “The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters are critically important to the success of business today.”

Content marketing doesn’t have an end because it’s merely an extension of your business (which hopefully doesn’t have an end, either). So the next time you find yourself talking about a ‘content marketing campaign,’ please,choose one or the other because they are very different things.

Want to nominate a word for next time? Please feel free to do so in the comments!