Re:Think Innovation author Carla Johnson warns content marketers about brainstorming without doing anything to prime the work.

Omitting the critical preparation step, she says, prevents fresh inspiration. It can also lead to ideas that lack the proper audience focus, don’t align with your content strategy, and fall outside execution capabilities.Continue Reading

All marketers aspire to create that memorable moment – one that gets people talking and thinking about their brand well after they first see it.

Historically, the National Football League’s Super Bowl showcased many of those moments – from Apple’s signature 1984 spot to Old Spice’s The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.Continue Reading

Google’s stay of execution for third-party cookies in Chrome won’t last forever. Even if they push the deadline beyond the expected second half of 2024, the tracking tool’s demise is on the horizon.

In the no-cookie era, you will still possess vital customer insights from your first-party data – the information people share directly in exchange for valuable content and experiences. However, you won’t have access to their actions and behaviors outside your brand’s content ecosystem.Continue Reading

As Generation Z emerges from their older millennial siblings’ shadows, they expect brands to play by their rules.

Appealing to this digitally savvy and empowered audience requires reevaluating your marketing strategy to better connect your company’s content with them.Continue Reading

You learn about a C-suite decision that will have a transformative impact on your content marketing team. Perhaps, the announcement included one or more of these directives:

• “We must produce more content and manage multi-platform distribution with greater agility. We plan to add ChatGPT to our editorial capabilities and implement a headless CMS.”
• “We’re updating our three-year business strategy and need all teams to align their operations around achieving a new set of goals.”
• “We’ve been acquired. We will be merging many of our business units and will need to relaunch our website so we can tell a more unified story.”

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Does anyone enjoy job hunting regardless of the circumstances?

But if you’ve recently lost your content marketing job or fear the ax might fall soon, you feel pressure to do it – and like you have no time to waste.

The good news is that excellent content marketing jobs are available for the taking (or the making if you’re entrepreneurially minded.)Continue Reading

Engaging, informative e-newsletters can help achieve many content marketing goals. Yes, even now, multiple decades after email’s heyday as the shiny, new thing.

I can give you the statistic on how many content marketers use email newsletters from our latest B2B research – but do you really need it to be convinced? (It’s 69%, by the way.)

You already know this from your own experience creating or receiving e-newsletters. Think of the ones you get from brands – especially those you open and read regularly. The best ones offer reliably interesting, inspiring, or helpful content that rewards you for opening, right?

That’s the opportunity a great newsletter represents – an ongoing relationship with readers that makes your audience look forward to hearing from you. To capitalize on that opportunity, you have to consistently entertain, delight, inspire, help, and otherwise make the attention they give you worthwhile for them.

While their potential has remained constant, newsletter strategies, designs, and engagement preferences evolve all the time. Emails that once worked well may now sit unread in subscribers’ cluttered inboxes – if they get delivered at all.

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It’s no secret: Building your content strategy around the buyer’s journey won’t clarify what you need for effective content decision-making.

Consumers simply don’t follow a reliable, linear purchase process anymore. Too many research channels, feedback loops, and competing messages mean too few opportunities for your content to exert influence – if they could even find it – before they make a buying decision.Continue Reading