This year’s Mumbrella360 was one of the best yet, with a host of top local and international speakers.
I had the great honour of teaming up with Kate Brown, SFI’s Global Social Media & Content Manager, to host a masterclass on ‘How and why strategy is key to winning with content’.
And while I may be biased – full disclosure, SFI is one of our favourite clients – Kate rocked and was one of the event’s savviest speakers.
The bulk of the deck we presented is below, with some key SFI strategy removed. But I thought it was worthwhile sharing a few of my favourite ‘Kate gems’.
And here’s a fun challenge. If you think you can work out which slides each of Kate’s quotes apply to, hit me with an email and if you’re right, I’ll buy you lunch.
Kate’s key content marketing insights
- All great brands have a clear mission that differentiates them, builds brand salience, and accelerates commercial outcomes.
- A question I think we all need to ask ourselves before we go any further is whether we want to lead with purpose or product?
- We’ve become a lot more sophisticated at leveraging data to better cater to the fact customers’ emotional states are different at each stage of their sales and engagement journey.
- We lead with emotional connection, utility and trust; unequivocally putting mums in the middle as the primary purchaser.
- We established key customer-led pillars, targeted to specific segments, to guide the subject matter of our content. Within these, each pillar has a sub-theme to represent stories, ideas and hooks which we could test and learn to see what people were engaging with.
- Once you understand what the key customer requirements are, and overlay them with business requirements, you can start developing sophisticated journeys.
- The engagement funnel has two parts. The first describes how a customer relates to your brand. The second describes the ideal emotional state for the customer.
- Developing a content strategy is no simple task. But I believe the most important thing you can do is to identify your customers’ needs and focus on quality content, not quantity. A relentless focus on quality means you’re a lot more likely to be able to orchestrate successful outcomes!
- Our content strategy enabled us to change the conversation we were having with consumers (potential and existing) and to enhance our online customer value proposition.
- Retargeting with intent delivers so many benefits. Reengage users based on personalised interactions with content and social to make your paid media work hard, driving efficiencies.
- Let's be honest and real. I want to stand here and tell you that this (our content marketing ecosystem) is a well-oiled machine, but it takes time, and we’re still getting there. We’ve laid the foundations to build a global content operation, but it does take a lot of time, change management with internal stakeholders, and effort.
- In terms of measurement, start by benchmarking your current state to pick the most important goals to work on.
- Paid, owned and earned are all important. Although each element has its own role, using all three together will make the strategy significantly more effective.
- Start simple then scale up – it’s best to have an actionable content plan or strategy that is reflective of the resources you have available and can actually execute against, rather than a terrific strategy that gathers dust.
