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The worlds largest software conference may seem like an unlikely location to find a group of passionate creatives, but that didn’t stop over a hundred content marketers from filling the room at Dreamforce this year to hear some of the industries leading minds speak about the current state of content.
Kyle Lacy, Senior Manager of Content at ExactTarget, shared the stage with Chris Moody of content platform Compendium, and Marcus Nelson of Addvocate, to discuss their varying approaches to answering content marketing’s most pressing question: how do you create content that generates results?
Lacy started by sharing the three types of content development employed by his team at Exacttarget, all of which are essential to his team’s success:
1.) Empathy
People are complex and dynamic, and your content needs to take that into account. Appealing to what your audience is doing on the weekend is just as important as appealing to what they are doing from 9-5.
2.) Perspective Taking
Understanding your audience’s emotions through empathy is only half the story. You also need to understand their motivation and thought process as they are seeking out your company. You need to create content that maps to their concerns and priorities to deliver real value.
3.) Personalization
With all of this understanding comes a responsibility to deliver more personalized experiences to your audiences. You need to use all the information you have to deliver customized recommendations, calls-to-action, and messages.
Marcus Nelson tackled the question of how to effectively promote your content. Nelson opened his presentation with 3 statistics:
The problem with these statistics is that a huge majority of the financial investment companies make in promoting content is only in one of these areas, and it’s the wrong one. While companies spend big on advertising for their content, they are ignoring a resource already at their fingertips: their employees.
According to a new Edelman Trust Barometer report, the average employee is trusted two times more than a chief executive. Customers want to engage with your employees, and more than likely, your staff wants to engage with them too. However, they may not know what to share or what to say. Creating a program that makes it easy for employees to share your company’s content can give you a channel of promotion that is more trusted, and more effective than any paid advertising.
At a conference primarily focused on technology, it may seem strange to hear so much about understanding and engaging people, but after using many different technologies and sifting through mounds of data, this panel of content experts concluded that content, at least for the time being, is still all about the people.
