Kim Moutsos leads the talented content team at the Content Marketing Institute, where she is vice president of editorial. Having worked in content marketing for enterprises and startups for more than 20 years, Kim enjoys exchanging ideas and lessons learned with other content marketing practitioners. You can follow her on Twitter at @KMoutsos or connect on LinkedIn.
If your content went away, would anyone miss it?
That classic question should keep every content marketer up at night – or at least occupy a healthy portion of gray matter during strategy and planning sessions.
But what if your job is to market a content product – to make sure the audience develops such a deep relationship with it that they will certainly miss it – only for it to be canceled? How do you keep the audience and turn their attention to new shows?Continue Reading
If your content is for everyone, it’s for no one.
No one would accuse AARP of ignoring that truism. The association’s massive-circulation magazine and bulletin offer pitch-perfect content for the over 50 crowd. They go further by recognizing the differing needs, interests, and experiences of the Gen X, baby boomer, and silent or greatest generations who make up that group.
And they’ve gone even further in the last few years, including the 2018 launch of the e-newsletter and website, Sisters From AARP for Black women over 40. Originally, the site simply served as a home for the articles in the newsletter lineup.
“I remind Sisters From AARP’s multigenerational contributors that the organization touches every generation,” explains Claire McIntosh, editor-in-chief. “The younger you are, the more you need AARP. Sisters’ outreach and strategy takes that into account.”Continue Reading
Ever look at an organization’s content and think, “How do they do it?”
Same here. So we asked a group of admired content leaders – 2021 Content Marketer of the Year finalists – for a peek behind the curtain of what makes their award-winning projects work. (Each nominee this year worked on a winning entry in at least one category in the Content Marketing Awards.)Continue Reading
How do you summarize the takeaways from a conference packed with great ideas and advice?
That’s a familiar challenge for every conference attendee who’s struggled to share their experience and learnings with managers and colleagues who couldn’t attend. It’s hard enough to boil down all the notes you took, tweets you shared, and pictures you snapped. But what about all the sessions you couldn’t watch because you can’t be everywhere at once?Continue Reading
Updated May 27, 2021
You have a documented content marketing strategy. You’ve outlined your quarterly plan, aligning your messages and goals with demand gen, sales, customer success, and other teams. But you still have slots to fill in your editorial calendar.
Most marketers have experienced this moment. You generally know what you need to produce, but specific story ideas seem just out of reach.
When this happens, you have two choices: Wait for inspiration to strike or develop a system to find stellar ideas to fill the calendar.
This post is not for those who choose to hold out for a flash of creative inspiration. It’s for anyone ready to do the dirty work of finding hidden content opportunities to shape and polish into something brilliant.Continue Reading
Updated May 3, 2021
So your content failed. You’re not alone. In between those pieces that clearly hit the mark, we’ve all published a few – or more than a few – that missed.
There’s plenty of advice on content optimization techniques to apply to articles that are already pretty good. And there’s even more on how to reuse, republish, or repurpose your highest-performing content. It’s a sure-win tactic to include in your content marketing strategy, we’ve run many articles about how to do it.Continue Reading
Updated April 15, 2021
Have you ever heard a sales leader or business exec disparage content marketing as “arts and crafts” or wonder about its business value? You aren’t the first.
The myth that content marketing is some nebulous, feel-good, unmeasured thing gets told all too often.
But why?
The business purpose of content marketing is literally written into its definition:
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Has there ever been a year in which marketers felt so compelled to respond to headlines – and so conflicted about whether and how to speak up? 2020 may have been extra intense, but the pressure on brands to take a stand won’t disappear in 2021.
Self-described “professional troublemaker” Luvvie Ajayi Jones offered useful advice for navigating these impulses in her keynote presentation, Speaking Truth to Power, at Content Marketing World 2020.Continue Reading
There’s no shortage of advice about how to measure content success. CMI has published plenty of it. Yet every year, we hear from content marketers struggling to understand the impact of their content marketing.
One stumbling block may be applying general advice to a living, changing, content program. No one-size-fits-all solution exists. Every team must tailor its measurement to its business goals and, often, to how well each piece of content contributes to the content marketing mission.
