All About Content Marketing at the Custom Media Day
The Custom Media Day event that I attended Wednesday, organized by the Custom Content Council was an event not to be missed by anyone interested in content marketing, content strategy, or digital publishing. Below are a few brief takeaways for those who could not attend.
A Few Take Aways on the Channels
- Stop saying, “Social media does not have solid ROI metrics yet,” as an excuse to do nothing. Start realizing that social media done well should drive people to your existing revenue models. That is your ROI. It was said best by @JuntaJoe (credited by another speaker – my apologies for missing the name!), “Social media is like butter. You don’t eat it by itself, but it goes great with a lot of things.”
- Think that iPads and other tablets are just for early adopters? Apple has already sold roughly 3 million iPads and everyone from kids to seniors are using them to read the next generation of publications. If you are waiting for tablet penetration to grow before investing in a digital version of your publication, think again.
- Are you considering how your customers are accessing your content? By 2014, US mobile Internet access subscribers are projected to increase to 96.1 million.
A Few Take Aways on the Content
- Thanks to @DanBlank for his insights on content aggregation. As consumers of content we are all on information overload. If you want to create actionable content for your customers, you need to look past basic content aggregation and enhance what you have aggregated to create truly unique and engaging content.
- What is your biggest content marketing challenge? Not surprisingly, the majority of survey respondents in a soon-to-be-released joint MarketingProfs and Custom Content Council study, stated that creating engaging content is their number one challenge, followed by the quantity of content demanded.
- Consider using infographics as a content marketing tactic. They can be a very powerful (and quick) way to visually display complicated and confusing data from your industry to your customers.
- Is your content actionable? Content must be actionable, not unlike an ad. There is a simple recipe you can follow as you create new content: state the information, then explain how to take advantage, then provide links to additional content. Thanks to @JoshGordon for the great synopsis.
Another Suggestion
- Consider talking to your IT staff about the iterative development methodology (yes, I just suggested talking to IT for marketing advice). The iterative development process can be extremely successful when marketers start applying build->test->build to content creation, new product development and other marketing challenges.
Thanks to the Custom Content Council for putting on a great event. Again, thanks to all the speakers mentioned above, as well as @eatmedia and everyone else not mentioned for some great insights.
