The UK's foremost content marketing show hit London on Friday May 31st with more than 1,000 attendees gathered to listen to a collection of the nation's top content creation and marketing minds.
Zazzle Media sponsored the event for the second year running and our team was there in numbers to bring you the highlights and top takeaways from all of the key talks.
Zazzle founder and MD Simon Penson was one of those asked to speak and his talk on Content Strategy > Making Data your Friend can be found in full by following the link!
Below are those top tips from all the other key presentations:
Danny Denhard
The Sir Alex Ferguson’s way of building the best (content) team
Slides can be found here > http://www.slideshare.net/dannydenhard/the-sir-alex-fergusons-way-of-building-the-best-content-team
Disclaimer: Arsenal fan and tendency to swear!
Voucher codes - concentrate on quality content, find innovative ways to engage 6.7 million customers.
Alex Ferguson - legend. Can learn a lot from him, particularly when creating large content pieces. You need to have the right people in your team.
The Team
Great teams contain a mix of the below people:
Goalkeeper Qualities: Safe, attention to detail, great agility, legal. Lead from the back and protect your project
Full Backs: Agile, strong, athletic, intelligent. Most athletic person on the pitch, cover for everyone
Centre Backs: Solid team players, often leaders, communicators.
Midfield work horse: Dru, beater, underrated, do the jobs that no-one else wants to. Will just get on with stuff without being asked. Hugely important to any content marketing campaign, you need these in your agency.
Attacking midfield: Creative, drive team forward, assists. Contact the right people, build relationships. Like to have things their own way. Take time to understand who are the most creative people in your team.
Strikers: Match winners, selfish, goal driven, money earners.
Natural born leaders: Every team needs a true leader. Without one of these on your team, you will struggle to get the best results from your project.
Things to know & Takeaways
Know when to make a sub - recognise when you need fresh people on the team. Prep the subs bench as if they're the 2nd part of the team
Squad rotation - smaller to do with a smaller team, but important to realise when you need to change agencies.
Fergie Time - It's not over til it's over! Make the team work until the final whistle. (79 seconds extra for Fergie)
Your best players can and do leave - prepare for this happening. They may join your rival team, business is a long term game
Always know your goals - make sure people understand and know their role in the team
Concentrate on the right trophies - put your best efforts into the games you really want to win (like the Champions League)
Be part of the bigger picture
Build the best team
The best players in the world don't always work well together
Pick the right attributes however large or small your team is
ALWAYS have a leader
Not all players can play every game - rest people wisely
Laura Edwards
How to Create Content People Have to Share
Slides can be found here > http://vimeo.com/nitternatter/videos
How do you stand out?
If your content is good you wont need to fight for their attention - they will just give it to you and share with friends.
Investment & Effort - 2 important things to remember.
Budget should be relative to the content you want to deliver
Remember it's long game work
Lots of ways to get cheap content - spun content is about ticking boxes only. Good content takes effort
Make the blog the centre of your website - use an editor to be responsible for the content delivery
Build on smaller pieces of content up to the one thing you want people to share - get niche!
Research - Find out what people are sharing and what they're interested in
Understand your goals - if follower growth is important stick to one platform only
Sharing content - give people a reason to follow. Place share buttons at the top of an article.
Think about the message you're asking to share.
Make sure your message is ready to share.
Dan Fielder
Developing an editorial mindset in a non-editorial business
(Slides to follow)
B2B marketers struggling to plan and create great content but understand they need to be doing it
Find niche - something you can talk about comfortably with expertise and that your users want to know about
The more niche the better - longtail keywords provide great conversion rates.
People aren't looking for sales pitch, want answers to questions - make sure you're answering these.
Become a specialist in your niche and pre-empt the questions your customers want to know
Work your contacts book
Hunt people down - ask the right people the right questions.
Your internal staff will have stored lots of info. Sell in benefits to them and get them on side. Show people what they've contributed to.
Indium Corporation established top 73 keywords and asked engineers to write a blog about each one.
Have ideas - lots of them
Content ideas come from various places - customer queries, brainstorm, keyword traffic, forums, audience research, news
Edit your ideas
Get some momentum - initial euphoria will fade. Don't be a one post wonder and avoid the exploded sausage feeling. Keep blog regularly updated!
65% of business haven't updated blog for a year - don't be this business.
Editorial calenders critical
Keep a list of digital genres: FAQ, step by step, Q&A, facts at a glance, etc
Slice, Dice & Curate content. For example - turn talks into lots of different types of useful content
Use same content ideas for various different formats (mobile, etc)
If you can't create then curate.
Final thought
Information sells online - build relationships based on trust and confidence
Ben Redford
Robots, gumballs and Marxism
Create something that doesn't live on the screen - something build a bear! Create content that will generate an emotional response from people.
Ben created Olly, a smell generated robot & Polly sweets when you tweet
Connect things to the physical world. Create content that people WANT to share! People want to talk about real things.
Build a community interested in what you're doing
Will Koch
How to used LinkedIn for Content Marketing
Tech buying process is complex
6X more content than jobs
Linkedin can help target content to individuals by geography, seniority and industry
Slice, dice and curate - Linkedin can help you build a phased approach to content marketing
Trusted platform to share content
Linkedin Own SlideShare (who knew?!)
Tony Samios
Great content marketing is about great storytelling
Storytelling is joke telling - from the first sentence to the last is leading to the punchline
We're born for stories and love them
Stories cross the barriers of time
2.5 billion people online - 643 million websites online
Enter the rise of social media - able to share stories in a much more personal way than ever before. Need to stand out from the crowd
Consumers less concerned about what brand has to say - more concerned about what others have to say about the brand.
Google is a sexy product, how do you use it to sell something less exciting, eg soap? The answer: A great story is a great story, no matter how you tell it.
Great story commandment > Make me care please!
Audiences should not feel 'sold' to - content should drive them to action, story should compel and make people change.
You need to master the art of telling a story, make it personal, funny and engaging.
Stories can make you laugh, cry and love
Sarah Howard
Getting the right content mix
Know your audience & revisit regularly - look at social media to find out what your audience like to share. Read forums and immerse yourself in their world. Read a couple of industry blogs every day (not Daily Mail - Kim Kardashian wont help you here!)
Where to start - take a content inventory. QA, align content with objectives and make sure your content supports customers through buying cycle (awareness > consideration > purchase) message can get lost when lots of people contribute.
Get analytical - GA is a great place to start
Check conversion to make sure you're achieving your goals. Use GA to check which piece of content led to conversion.
Use an editorial calender
Make it a company wide exercise. Teamwork = great content. Use all parts of business to contribute to content and reward and incentivise when they do
Become your own audience
Capitalise on what works, scrap what doesn't
Get everyone involved and use data to inform
Eric Ingand
Why Multicultural content marketing is key to grow your business
Multicultural content marketing needs a different approach.
365million people English
400 million speak Spanish
1 billion speak Chinese
Takes 12 languages to reach 80% of worlds audience
Europe is not the most successful economy in the world - many businesses rely on worldwide exposure in order to grow
Passion - you need passion to succeed. Translated content often lacks passion
Data - listen to data to create translated content. Data has become our crystal ball, good translations listen to what data is telling them and will act upon it
Data helps you listen - use it to help understand cultural differences
Launching global product outside of comfort zone means thinking outside of Google and Facebook.
Differentiate - Create different content for different local cultures. This will make you credible and is the first step to success
Pak Hou Chueng
Telling the content marketing story
Began with Google and SEO > tactics used to manipulate search engines. Used to work, but then Google updated and it all went wrong. Start playing a cat and mouse game with Google. You will lose.
Along came content marketing > tactic shifted to writing a guest post, infographic, white papers & video, all orchestrated with social media.
The truth is you need SEO, content strategy and social media - at the core of this should be your brand.
What should I be doing? Go back to the core and understand what your goal is > how will your content marketing achieve goal. Bottom line is always to generate sales for site.
Content crucial at all points of the sales cycle.
Awareness > get brand name out there and let people know you exist
Consideration > what differentiates your brand from your competitors? Takes time.
Purchase > Customers are price focused, show customers how you are value for money compared to competititors
Retain & Upsell > Understand target market
What is success? Depends what your goals are.
Valuable content crucial at all stages of the sales cycle
You might not see much difference, immediately, but over time you will.
Amanda Poole-Connor
Making video work for your brand
TNR @ press association
Broadcast your brand
Editorial expertise used to create video.
Video is becoming a must have and key method of communicationg with audience. More than 4 billion hours of video used every month.
61 of the top 100 brands embed video on their website
4 key questions:
What do you want to say
Who do you want to say it
How do you want to say it
What do you want them to do about it
Produce lots of diverse, quality content
Integrate with youtube and embed your content
Engage your community
Justin Taylor
Putting the conversion into content
Conversion into content
People have abandoned SEO and thrown it all into content.
Great content being generated but the way it's measured is questionable - measured by social shares (vanity metrics) and no-one pays their mortgage with FB likes!
Start judging content campaigns by conversion
Define your objectives - focus on end goal. appreciate where you want to be rather than where you are.
Understand your audience - Do your research, create personas, talk to people, hang out in forums.
Concentrate on headlines - 5 times more people read headlines than body of article.
Anchor products into content - if someone is interested enough to read about something, they're likely to buy it.. Make it easy for them buy including links to products
Use calls to action and triggers in your content
Create content with visual impact
Add value - fashion sites like ASOS do this really well (buy the look including all accessories) great way to improve conversion and push people further
Never stop testing - don't aim for perfection as it doesn't exist. Try a few different methods and experiment.
Use analytics tools, talk to people, understand what's working
Testing encourages innovation
Play to win - achieve the best results you can for your clients and then your services will always be in demand
Matt Roberts
Raising the quality bar using the Smarter Content Framework
OK - the most commonly used word in the world
Good copy - the ability to persuade somebody to do something
OK is not OK!
Smarter content > socialization > measurable value
Nobody shares average
Is your content SMARTER?
Launch of new content sharing platform - #smartercontent smartercontent.org
Place to tweet and share amazing (smarter) content and submit case studies
Ed Bussey
7 Content Marketing tips for eCommerce
Value your content - companies invest huge amounts of money in creating logos, but not so much in defining how they will communicate with audience. This is changing
Define objectives - If you get this right the format, style and frequency of content will flow well
Customers first, SEO second - write for the audience not for Google
Be consistently on brand - create a long term strategy and take customers on a journey with you. Make sure you have someone that can enforce brand guidelines
Don't translate...localise - write global content in the same way you would local content. Ensure your brand message translates
Use solutions that scale - 2-3 years from now having a couple of copywriters just wont be enough.
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