image courtesy of business2community.com
Content Marketing World 2013 concludes tonight in Cleveland, Ohio. The event is put on by the Content Marketing Institute and a reported 1,700 marketers attended, and got to hear William Shatner give the closing keynote tonight. If that doesn’t show content marketing is red hot, I don’t know what does!
Eloqua’s All About Revenue blog has a good report out with what they call the ten essential takeaways from the show. My favorite was one too many companies forget — the value of strategic listening, though eavesdropping was the term used. Then acting quickly to get back to prospects.
In a powerful example, the company Hilton Suggests responded to a tweet within 30 minutes with an offer to assist the attendee on her next trip:
A startup called InBoundWriter.com used the show to announce the results of a survey questioning the effectiveness of content marketing. According to a story in Forbes, 80-90 percent of content marketing fails to deliver traffic to a corporate site. Sounds pretty bleak, until you take a harder look.
The company was using the story to lay the groundwork for a new release of their product that — surprise — would allow companies to beat those odds and use content marketing effectively. Even more importantly, in my view the criterion of success — web traffic — was the wrong metric. The metric should be sales, not traffic. Content touched by prospects, prospects moved through the sales funnel, clients retained due being engaged by high quality content, etc.
Content marketing for B2B and B2G companies is a quality over quantity play. If you start playing the “I’ll get you 500 leads this month” volume lead generation game, you’re on the road that leads to content farms, spam, social media banishment and failure.
If this story reaches any attendees, I’d welcome your first hand take on the highlights of Content Marketing World 2013.