Big Content Edges Out Big Data (Gartner Event)

I recently attended a Boston content marketing event by analyst firm Gartner entitled The 3 C’s of Content Marketing.  Jake Sorofman and Jennifer Beck of Gartner and three stellar panelists provided their views, insights and best practices on content marketing and content curation. (panelists:  Pawan Desphande, CEO of Curata; Vala Afshar, CMO of Enterasys; Craig Dowley, Dir. of Web Mktg. and Brand at Cognex)  It’s always good to hear from the “big gun” analyst firms on their opinions and vision for content marketing; however, it was an especially interesting event with expert practitioners complementing Gartner’s vision.  Here are some of my key take-aways from the event:

• “Content Creation and Management is the #2 Digital Marketing spend area for marketers based upon Gartner’s latest research.” No doubt that content marketing is here to stay.  The question is, how will companies best leverage their investment in this area?
• “As you execute your content marketing strategy to deliver content to your audience, don’t just think like a publisher; think like a journalist and artist to rise above the noise.” [Sorofman] Not an easy feat, no doubt.  However, this is what is needed to stay ahead of the competition and capture your audience’s attention. I’ll take this a step further and say that you need to think like an analyst, especially as you’re contextualizing content for your audience.
• How do you ensure your content engages your audience?  Tips from Gartner. . . make it Human, Neutral, Simple, Visual, Curated and Conversational.
• As expected, Gartner offered up a good framework to help us get to content marketing excellence:  The 3 C’s of Content Marketing: Create, Curate, Cultivate (read more here) But the 3 C’s are just the start as the Sourcing part of content marketing.  Sourcing needs to be followed up with Manufacturing (optimizing internal and external resources) and Distribution (reaching the right audiences). [Gartner]
• “If content is king, than context is God!” [Afshar]  Well said by Vala. The bottom line is that we need to produce content that is not just high quality, but also highly relevant to our audience.  Best-in-class marketers have taken this a step further.  Not only do they produce their own content, but they curate and contextualize other people’s content to add more value for their readers and to reduce resources needed for their own content creation engine. (refer to STOP Egocentric Marketing)
• “A good curator adds value as part of the content curation process – providing annotation, contextualization.” [Deshpande] (read more about content curation annotation methods)
• “To deliver compelling and inspiring content, you need to struggle. . . . to push yourself to be interesting.” [Afshar]
• What’s your favorite example of great content marketing?:  HubSpot; IBM’s Big Data Hub; Green Data Center News (by Verne Global)
• What’s your content management outsourcing strategy?: “Your own marketing team should develop the content strategy and the high value content (e.g., eBooks, important posts), and you should outsource the lower value items.” (read more)
• What about content governance?:  “You must not let control stifle innovation, real-time response, and content relevance.” Craig Dowley

Check out Jake Sorofman’s post for additional take-aways from this event, and certainly contribute any of your thoughts below.

To read more about content marketing, check out Curata’s resource area.