You may have read my previous blog "Is Content Marketing the Next Big Thing Down Under?" , this is a followup to that post.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Two Day conference last week - Content Marketing World Sydney. 

I'd like to share with you some key highlights and take aways from the conference. 

The conference had two streams; one for B2B and another for B2C marketers. I was maily interested in attending the B2B sessions (sorry B2C folks).

Here are some official numbers: 

• 200 attendees at the event, 
• 23 speakers, and 
• 24 sessions (this includes 2 workshops). 

There was a lot of Twitter action happening at the event and I was lucky enough to make the Top 10 Conversationalists using the #cmworld hashtag on Twitter.

The above report courtesy of Marketing Cloud (formerly Radian6), I will be sharing some of the highlight with you below.

9:00am - Opening Keynote by Joe Pulizzi

(Joe Pulizzi - @juntajoe)

The MC announces "..and let's welcome to the stage the Godfather of Content Marketing... Mr. Joe Pulizzi..."  and with a huge round of applause Joe jumps onto stage in a bright orange suite with matching shoes!  It was a quite a sight to see.

Joe shared some excellent insights on the Australia Content Marketing Landscape (here is the slide deck).  

The key slide for me was the trend in Content Marketing (via Google Trends), it's something that can't be ignored.

There was another excellent slide that he showed on the Top challenges facing Australian businesses who are doing Content Marketing. Here are the top 3:

1. Producing the kind of content that Engages  (21%)
2. Lack of Budget (18%)
3. Producing Enough Content (18%)

If you like stats, check out - Content Marketing Australia: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends [Research]  for all the details.

9:30am - Youtility: Why Smart Companies Are Helping, Not Selling

This was an excellent presentation by @JayBaer who is an author of "The NOW Revolution". 

The key quote from his presentation was:  

"Sell Something - you make a customer today. Help someone, and you make a customer for life - that's Youtility."

This was the key slide for me...

I'm putting this "Youtility" concept into practise through this very blog post. I've decided to write this post to help my fellow Marketers who weren't able to attend the conference. 

11:00am - How to Dominate Your B2B Niche with a Multi-Author Blog

This was a tag team presentation by Joe Pulizzi (@juntajoe) and Jodi Harris (@joderama) and it was right down my alley as Salesforce Australia is quite new to the blogging scene and Joe and Jodi shared some tip on how to manage a multi-author blog. They share with us how they started out (it was just Joe blogging in the early days) to now having over 200 blog contributors attracting 150K visits per month.  

The key slide for me was this:

It gave me some ideas on how we can recruit writers for our blog. We have a team of Salesforce experts here in the Sydney office, they all have knowledge and experience. The blog can be the best way for them to share with you our readers.

12:00 - Behind the Scenes: American Express (AMEX) Content Marketing

I really enjoyed listening to the very open and candid presentation by Robin James Patrick (who is the Head of Marketing and Product, AMEX Small Business Services). He spoke about how they got started in Content Marketing. They started with a Facebook page to test the audiences reception, then they followed the US to create a site that aims to help small businesses based on the US version http://www.openforum.com.  This lead to the birth of Business Room for Australian Small Businesses.

I love this slide:

... and I really like his quote:

"You got to live with the fact that it's in perpetual beta.  You've got the give marketers the license to fail."

I hope my boss reads this blog post.

2:00pm - Ultimate Guide to Content Marekting Measurement (ROI)

This was by far the most popular session of the 2 day event. There was standing room only and here I stand at the very back of the room.

@JayBaer is a seasoned content marketer and presenter. It was a joy to listen to him talk about ROI from Content Marketing.  He opens with an awesome quote: 

"Help beats Hype. Don't create content, create YOUtility."

But how do you measure content that helps. His presentation goes into great detail on this and he gives excellent examples for each.  He breaks it up into 4 main metrics to consider:

1. Consumption Metrics - This is all about how people consume your content (E.g. Page Views, Video Views, Document Downloads etc...).
2. Sharing Metrics - This is all about how people share your content with others (E.g. Likes, Shares, Inbound Links etc...).
3. Lead Generation Metrics - This is where Jay really shines, not all content produces leads, so he tries to tie a dollar value to a piece of content (E.g. Viewing a blog post is $5, viewing a video is $10)  he then ties this behaviour to the value of a lead to help score un-gated content. But then there are other metrics like Email Subscriptions, Blog Subscribers and Gated Content Downloads.  These are all good measures.
4. Sales Metrics - If you're an eCommerce site, this is essential, but if you have an offline sales model, CRM becomes the key component. 

3:15pm Transforming your B2B Brand into a Content Machine

Todd Wheatland - @toddwheatland (VP, Thought Leadership and Marketing) at Kelly Services took us on a journey (he literally had a map on the screen) that weaved it way through various topics. He covered a lot but I know this post is getting quite long so I'll get right to the point. The key highlight for me was how he approached persona development. It's the crucial process that help you create and map relevant content to your audiences.

In Kelly Services case they have 3 types of audiences:

1. C-Suite Executives
2. HR Professionals
3. Procurement Managers

They are all interested in different topics, but some overlap.  I really like how they mapped out the content topic areas:

4:15pm - Unleashing Customer-Driven Content

 The closing Keynote was by @Ray_Kloss of SAP. He gave some interesting insights into how SAP are leveraging their SAP Community to help do there marketing. Here was some interesting stats on the SAP Community:

But was was really interesting is SAP's application of Design Thinking to Marketing and doing this through the community.

Design Thinking was nicely summarised by Ray as a combination of two different approaches to solving a problem:

a) Heads Down Mindset - This is focused on delivery and meeting deadline.

b) Heads Up Mindset - This is focused on possibilities, thinking outside the box and producing ideas. 

The SAP Community is a rich combination of both mindsets. Ray spoke about "unleashing the customer" and getting them to come up with the marketing ideas, because they know best how they want to be marketed to. It was deep and thought provoking and I needed a drink after that. So, we all jumped on a bus from the Sheraton on the Park to Cyren Bar down at Darling harbour for some drinks, dinner and lots of networking.

What ways are you creating customer-centric content? Are you using content marketing to enhance your SEO? Share your ideas here and download our FREE EBOOK below!