This week, we’ve been catching up on the conference wisdom from recent content events in our areas of recruitment, such as Intelligent Content (covering content marketing), the IA Summit (information architecture) and TC Europe (tech comm). Here’s our first pick of the insights from Intelligent Content Conference (ICC).
How to manage your content
Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi, who took over ownership of the long-running conference this year, says in his recap that managing content is hard, complex and often overwhelming in terms of volume. His tips and noted themes from ICC 2015 were to:
- Treat content as a product, not a project – ie, manage content through its life cycle, not as a discrete project that ends.
- Work backward from the experience you want customers to have – your content should start with the customer.
- Structure content – and teams – for intelligent outcomes. Raw, self-describing and modular content is the strategic way.
- Instigate change or follow fast (yes, you!) – tying change to business outcomes is the great persuader.
- Think big; start small – fix the biggest pain points to create the biggest impact.
What converts?
Oracle’s Nick Bell had some tips on what content is more likely to convert. According to Demand Media’s ICC recap, his survey of B2B content marketing, revealed that low-effort format creation, such as Q&As and UGC, offered a 9.1% conversation rate, while high-effort content, such as infographics, only converted at 3.5%.
Other insights from his talk included:
- You need to be the source of all of the content your prospect wants before they buy.
- Google’s Zero Moment of Truth found that 10 pieces of content are consumed before a purchasing decision is made.
- 87% of CMOs say that profitable growth is their number one priority.
- How could you possibly have profitable growth with all high-effort, high-cost content? To get to the scale you need, you must incorporate medium and low-effort content into your strategy.
Focus on the 10%
A number of bloggers, such as Dechay Watts at Sprout Media, picked up on Dr Carmen Simon’s keynote stat that audiences typically forget 90% of the content you share with them. Simon, a cognitive scientist, says that people will usually only remember 10% of what you show them, so marketers would be wise to focus on that 10% and make it memorable by tying it to something your customer finds valuable.
We hope you found these takeaways useful in your work – we hire digital communications professionals into roles across the UK, Europe and North America. Find out more on our Candidate services page.
For further insights from this year’s ICC, session content is available to purchase – it costs US$595 for one year’s access.
