Content Matters

Marketing is a continually evolving practice, and content marketing is a major element of that practice. Brian Piper, a marketing consultant and the co-author of the upcoming second edition of EPIC Content Marketing, joins us on the Content Matters podcast to talk about content marketing, the upcoming Google Analytics 4, getting better at SEO, and the impact of Web3 on brand marketing. If you want to understand how to evolve your markeing training or where to focus your marketing efforts, this episode is a must-listen. A few highlights: How Brian got started in content marketing thanks to a book called EPIC Content Marketing. How to prepare yourself for GA4 Why brands are getting involved in the creator economy. Why brands should be thinking about Web3 Content marketing in higher education. Where You Can Find Brian: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianwpiper/ Website: https://www.brianwpiper.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brianwpiper The book: Pre-Order Epic Content Marketing, 2nd Edition Purchase

Alex Lee is the Partner Success Manager at Diginomica and an experienced communications consultant. They refer to themself as a “Comms consultant who loves data analysis.” Alex joined us on the Content Matters Podcast to share their insights and expertise on building and implementing a social media strategy. The conversation focused on organic social media marketing but also included their view on social media advertising. Some of the topics discussed: What brands should and should not be doing on social networks today. The role employees play in building the brand voice on social media The newest social media tactics, including Twitter threads, LinkedIn Posts, the 3-2-1 method of engagement. How brands should deal with negative feedback on their posts. The difference between social media marketing for a media brand vs a product/services brand. Analytics and the importance of measuring performance. Her take on social media advertising and how to make it work.  About Alex Alex started her comms career managi

Andrew Sevillia is a customer advocacy and marketing professional with over 15 years of experience working for companies like Sage Intact, NetSuite, and Juniper Networks. Andrew joined us on the podcast to help us better understand what customer advocacy is and why it’s so important for companies to create advocacy programs. He also shared insights on how to build a customer advocacy program and Some of the topics included: Understanding customer advocacy and customer marketing. What a customer advocacy program looks like and some of the key elements of a program. Who needs to be involved in the program and some of the challenges of running a program. How a customer advocacy program collaborates with and helps other departments in the company. If you want to build a truly customer-centric company, this is a great way to get started. About Andrew Sevillia: Andrew Sevillia is extremely passionate about nurturing customers into advocates! Over the course of his 15 years in Customer Advocacy, Andrew has intervi

We often think of marketing operations and content strategy are distinct elements of a marketing strategy performed by different teams. But there is a relationship between the two and you can’t be good in one without a solid understanding of the other.  Moni Oloyede, Director of Marketing Infrastructure at Fidelis Cybersecurity and a digital marketing expert and speaker, joined us on the Content Matters podcast to talk about the interrelationship between these two areas of marketing and shared some guidance on how you can bring them together to create successful customer experiences. Here’s what you’ll learn: With all the tools and technology available to marketing today, how do move past the complexity to create a martech stack that works? Why marketing operations and content strategists need to work together and how. How she got into marketing operations and where she sees its future. The problem with marketing attribution today. The role of women in marketing operations today. About Moni Oloyede: Moni Ol

Jennifer Allen has taken on the role of Chief Evangelist in her company, Challenger. It’s new role, one that she worked hard to achieve. She joined us on the podcast to talk about the role, what it involves and how it helps a company build a strong presence. She also shared her experiences working in Sales and talked about how the role needs to evolve to better support customers, including acting more like a marketer than a traditional salesperson. Here’s what you’ll learn: What the role of the Chief Evangelist is and how she came to take it on. Why salespeople need to think and act like marketers and how to change the traditional mindset to selling. The best way for salespeople to approach social selling. How a podcast and webinar have helped Challenger create awareness of their approach and how it has helped Jen personally. How she has adapted to her new role and her vision for how it will evolve. Her advice for others, especially women, who want to become a Chief Evangelist in their company. About Jen: J

There is so much to understand about content strategy, and Hilary Marsh, Chief Strategist of The Content Company joined us on the Content Matters podcast to talk about some areas that are not as widely discussed.  The focus for our talk was more on content strategy for intranets and for companies where content is their primary offering (like associations and non-profits) but you could apply much of what Hilary shared to all content strategy work.  Key topics included how content strategy has evolved, what organizations are doing well and not so well and much more, including: How to think about content as an investment. How content strategy for an intranet is different from content strategy for a website (or isn’t). Why content strategy is an HR issue and needs to be a part of everyone’s work. How to operationalize content strategy. How content management technology supports content strategy. The audience engagement journey (you have to listen to learn what this is).  About Hilary Hilary Marsh is president a

We talk a lot about customer experience, but the employee experience is equally important to get right. When employees don’t feel valued and aren’t engaged in a way that makes them happy and content in their work, the customer experience suffers. But a lot has changed in terms of employee experiences and we’re talking with Chantelle Nash to understand how they’ve changed and why it’s important to consider employee experiences as one element of a company-wide perspective on digital experience. Chantelle is the Learning Systems and Innovation Leader at Baker Hughes, but she’s also done some fascinating work for GE that we’re going to talk a little about today. Chantelle has over 10 years of experience in global learning and development and HR Technology. She’s working in everything from design and development of programs, communications, digital marketing, data and analytics, social learning, and community management. Here are some of the things we talked about: How do companies address the learning and develop

We are fortunate to kick off our fourth season with Val Swisher, Founder and CEO of Content Rules, a consulting firm that delivers content strategy, development, transformation, and optimization services. Val joined us to talk about something every company wants to do – provide personalized experiences at scale. She’s authored a book on the topic - The Personalization Paradox: Why Companies Fail (and How to Succeed) at Delivering Personalized Experiences at Scale with Regina Lynn Preciado, a senior content strategist with Content Rules. We talked about the need for content standardization to enable personalization at scale and what organizations need to do from a content strategy and technology perspective. Here’s what you’ll learn: How Val defines personalization What is the Personalization Paradox? What is content standardization and how you achieve it? What needs to be standardized? What are the biggest challenges to providing personalized content (at scale)? How should a company think about personalizing

Sara Feldman is the Director of Member Engagement at the Consortium for Service Innovation, a non-profit alliance of service and support organizations that focus on innovation around customer engagement, productivity, and success. Through her work as a Consortium member and now working for the Consortium, Sara understands the importance of customer support experiences in the overall customer experience. She joined us on the podcast to talk about the work the Consortium does, but also shared her views on content strategy, how to create successful customer support programs, and more. Key topics included: What is the Consortium for Service Innovation and how does it companies? Sara’s role as Director of Member Engagement Understanding Intelligence swarming and Predictive Customer Engagement The best support success is the one that never happened Success content is for more than your customers. Rethinking how we generate content in the organization. Where You Can Find Sara: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/i

Andy Crestodina is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media, a web design and development agency located in Chicago. Andy is a wealth of marketing knowledge and is one of the experts to talk to about SEO and content strategy. He regularly shares in-depth insights on his blog and presents regularly at conferences. He joined us on the podcast to talk about these topics, along with demand generation, account-based marketing, and more. Key topics included: What is Orbit Media’s content strategy and why do they share so much great information. Working on SEO today – what's working. Balancing storytelling, creativity, and tactical structured content strategy. Why lead generation isn’t dead. How to do ABM on a budget successfully. Where You Can Find Andy: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andycrestodina/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/crestodina Orbit Media: https://www.orbitmedia.com/ Additional Resources: ABM: https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/account-based-content-marketing/ Book Content Chemi

Episode Summary: Mark Lewis is a content engineer and the co-founder of the intelligent content consultancy, Caliper Content Services. Mark joined us on the Content Matters Podcast to talk about a topic near to his heart, and a source of frequent frustration – metadata.  You think it’s simple to create metadata on your content, but there’s a lot to think about to build your metadata model and we cover it all in this episode.  Key topics included:  What is content engineering  What is metadata and why it’s so important  Why you can’t design metadata as an afterthought  His advice for content strategists  This is the first time we’ve gone deep into a discussion on intelligent content and Mark takes what could be a complex topic and explains it in easy-to-understand terms.   Additional Resources: Presentation: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/alignment-understanding-objects-mark-lewis/  Book: Object Technology: A Manager’s Guide  About Mark Lewis: Mark is

Katrina Wong is the VP Marketing for Segment, a business unit of Twilio. She joined us on the Content Matters Podcast to talk about the evolving customer data landscape, including what the end of third-party cookies means for customer experience and why it’s not such a bad thing that marketers are easing their reliance on third-party data.We also talked about customer data platforms (CDPs) - of course, and how they help bring together all a company’s first-party data to enable truly personalized – and hyper-personalized customer experiences. And we talked about what the API economy and the idea of building blocks has meant for creating custom solutions that differentiate brands. And those are just the highlights.Inside this Episode: The difference between first, second, third-, and zero-party data What the end of third-party cookies means for marketers The benefits of a customer data platform (CDP) and how it brings together first-party data The API economy and building blocks for custom solution development

Latané Conant is the CMO of 6sense. She joined us on the Content Matters podcast to discuss account-based marketing and engagement, with a focus on the insights she shares in her book: No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls. Along with over seven years in executive marketing positions, Conant is also a seasoned sales leader, so she understands well the challenge of getting sales and marketing to work well together and how things need to evolve in companies to make that happen. Some of the things we talked about: Her shift from sales to marketing and her belief that employee and customer experience are at the heart of everything. How we make it difficult for people to buy from us and how to fix it by getting rid of the three pillars - forms, spam, and cold calls. How to determine relevance to know which accounts and contacts within those accounts to engage. Why predictive revenue growth is key for CMO's to understand and implement. The difference between working an account and working a lead. The process to get

Episode Summary:Sarah Mitchell’s company, Typeset, produces an annual State of Writing survey. This is the second year of the survey and Sarah talked about some of the key insights from the survey. She also shared her experiences as a writer and content marketer.Inside This Episode: Businesses are planning to increase content development, but not content budgets. Writers are not completely satisfied with the performance of their content, yet they are optimistic about the writing process. How writers understand the customer and what to write. The lack of governance in writing projects. The type of content that performs. The ROI of content.About Sarah MitchellSarah is the founder of Typeset, a content marketing, and editorial services company, and the founder of Global Copywriting, a content marketing consultancy. Sarah specializes in developing and implementing content marketing strategies. She writes frequently on these topics and is a regular speaker at conferences talking about writing effectiveness and c

To understand content strategy in its full perspective, you only need to talk with Kristina Halvorson, co-founder and CEO of Brain Traffic, a content strategy consulting firm. Halvorson joined us on the Content Matters podcast to talk about the elements of content strategy and how they all work together to build better customer experiences. She shared her insights on content marketing, copywriting, UX writing, content marketing, content design, and much more.Inside This Episode: The complete definition of content strategy The difference between marketing writing and writing for the web and products How content impacts the entire customer journey How leadership needs to approach content design and measurementAbout Kristina HalvorsonKristina Halvorson is widely recognized as one of the most important voices in content strategy. Her seminal book Content Strategy for the Web is credited with sparking the explosive growth of content strategy and its recognition as a critical field of practice. She appears regular

If you want to understand how to create, manage, and publish your content from an organization-wide perspective, Rahel Bailie is the person to talk to. Bailie is a long-time content advocate who works with organizations that truly understand how important their content is. She joined us on the podcast to talk about her experience on content strategy, content operations, content experiences, and much more. Inside This Episode: Getting a holistic view of content across the organization The importance of UX of content and the need to understand the customer experience to properly manage content The role of technical content in the customer experience The importance of back-end content and how to operationalize it About Rahel Bailie Rahel Bailie is the CEO and Principal Consultant at Content, Seriously, UK consultancy. She has many years of experience working with organizations on their content operations, strategies, and systems. Bailie understands the complexities of managing the editorial and technical a

Robert Rose shares his insights and experience about how content marketing has evolved in terms of new trends, team composition and experiences, and its role in the organization. He talks about building experiences and architecting desire and why it’s not enough to be the FAQ of your industry. Inside This Episode: The most important trend in content marketing in 2021 What does the modern content marketing team look like? How to build experiences and architect desire The difference between B2B and B2C content marketing Where companies should focus their content marketing efforts in 2021 About Robert Rose For more than 25 years, Robert has helped enterprise marketing leaders tell their brand’s story more effectively through digital media. As the Founder of The Content Advisory, Robert has worked with more than 500 companies, including 15 of the Fortune 100. In this capacity, he has advised these business leaders on how to optimize marketing operations to build experiences that customers fall in love wit

Michael Meinhardt is the founder and CEO of Cloudwords, a globalization automation software company. He joined us on the podcast to talk about the challenges with translation management today and how automation software can help companies manage globalization processes better, improving workflow and productivity, but also accelerating the time-to-market of global campaigns. Meinhardt mentioned the globalization automation maturity curve, which helps you understand how mature your globalization processes are and how you can improve them.

Jack Molisani is the Executive Director of the LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy. LavaCon has been taking place since 1998, bringing together content professionals from across the globe to share insights and best practices and develop lasting professional relationships.This is the first year LavaCon will be virtual (like so many other conferences) and Molisani has created a conference that still feels as personal as being there live. His goal is to help people "find their tribe." We talked about the conference and the effects of going virtual, as well as the trends he's seeing across the content strategy and technical communications industry.

David Greenberg is the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Act-On Software. He joins us on the podcast to talk about marketing strategies, including refocusing on experience nurturing over lead nurturing, the role of automation, and where marketing automation fits with account-based marketing. We also talked about the rebrand of Act-On and its shift to growth marketing automation. Lots of great insights to make you think about your own marketing strategies.