Who should content aim to reach; an audience or a customer?  Well, who’s asking?

The classical ‘publisher’ should quickly answer audience. Having started my career in newspapers, I love a good and healthy ‘circulation’. For brands seeking to harness content as a marketing tool, the end play is sales.   Therefore, for content marketing the quest is for customers and a strong focus on metrics is pretty much the only way to ensure success. Continue Reading..

Content is not new for most organisations anymore. It isn’t the shiny new tool that it once was. There are plenty of companies who jumped to it, producing content with eager and genuine enthusiasm but after a year they asked the question ‘has this worked’ and whatever the benchmark was for ‘worked’, they hadn’t met it. Content with all its promise had failed.

In a recent webinar by the Content Marketing Institute on Top Content Trends for 2016, they describe a new challenge for content marketers called ‘The Big Push Back’. This phrase refers to the above scenario where companies have tried and failed. Apparently we will hear more and more stories like this but frankly, I feel that I have already heard my fair share and it is certainly true that once burned, twice shy.Continue Reading..

As a ‘content marketer’ I often hear that I’m part of an emerging trend. Or a vague movement or a flash in the pan. It depends on who is speaking. I’ve never been trendy so I’m always flattered. However, I’m afraid that despite popular opinion, I’m not trendy and content marketing isn’t new. I think the industry might be suffering from a simple case of misclassification.

Social Media Today (SMT) did something fun with some statistics they received from a study by Smart Insights and Get Response. SMT made an infographic of ‘Email Marketing Excellence’ based on results from the Smart Insights/Get Response survey of 1800+ email marketing. Continue Reading..

I’ve made some delicious food in my day. Specifically, I’m thinking of an apricot chicken that I made just last week. I took apricots that just weren’t softening up (probably because they had to take refuge in the fridge from autumn fruit flies), combined with white wine, onions, peach juice and chicken, they turned into the most delicious family meal. Too bad I’ll never be able to make it again. Continue Reading..