Author Archives: Derek Phillips
It’s conference season (when isn’t it?) and as the leaves turn to brown and travel budgets get squeezed we all have to carefully consider where we’re going and what we hope to get out of the experience. It’s not all trays of banana bread and drink tickets, so what makes for a good conference experience? For me it’s a focus on emerging trends and creative problem solving shared with your peers.
I was lucky enough to sit on a panel titled Managing, Measuring and Evaluating Distributed Content: Video, Webinars, White Papers and More, where we discussed the challenges and opportunities that distributed content models offer. Joining me was my partner on the client side, Kelly Turner, who is the content strategy lead at AT&T and provided perspective on what a large organization faces when it comes to distributed content and maintaining a strategic vision.
Kelly and I recently discussed what we brought home from the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver.
Derek Phillips: So, what did you think of the IMC? Was it what you expected?
Kelly Turner: Let’s see, I expected a big conference room, people with name tags, aroma of coffee and cologne, weird haircuts, hipster glasses…and on that front I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Other than that I had absolutely no idea what to expect. But I will say that overall it was definitely one of the cooler things I’ve gotten to do in my professional career. And remember, in my life as a journalist I saw open heart surgeries and interviewed criminals, many of whom were not elected officials, so I know what I’m talking about.
Derek: Were there any “ah-ha!” moments? Did you learn anything?
In our webinar, “A Marketer’s Guide to Thinking and Acting Like a Publisher” earlier this week, we talked a lot about the importance of developing and managing content that meets customer needs as well as your brand and specific business objectives. One tool publishers use to maintain timely, relevant and useful content is an editorial calendar. To continue the conversation started in the webinar, here are four inputs businesses should consider in developing their editorial calendars: Customer, Marketing, Merchandising, and Seasonality.
Customer inputs:
What are your customers talking about? What are they interested in? You can find out by simply reviewing your internal search logs for keywords your customers are using, or you can dig deeper (and wider) by employing digital listening tools like Radian6 and SM2 that scour social media channels and compile data on the conversations going on. These tools allow you to not only get a better sense of what people are talking about, but the sentiment around those topics. All of which can help you develop content that will resonate with your target audience.
