Key Takeaways From The 7 Best Sessions of Content Israel 2015

You didn’t need to visit the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv yesterday to extract some of the amazing insights and takeaways uncovered at the one-day conference which is Content Israel.

We were there, as industry leaders from publishers, agencies, brands and startups took a detailed look at the strategies, technologies, and platforms used for content marketing.

And thankfully, we captured all of the great info for you.

With some amazing speakers, including our very own Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Yaron Galai, and an amazing itinerary, let’s dig into our favorite moments!

Favorite Sessions

1. Would You Rather Be Right or Liked? A Look at Advertising vs. Content

Speaker

Eli Pakier, Group Strategy Director at MRY

Description

Advertising is hard-working, smart and persuasive while content gets a hall pass. Designed to not interrupt, content measures soft metrics like engagement, sentiment, and maybe perception change.

As marketers, we make false delineations to balance what we think will work for us vs. what other people will value.

Instead, both have a role, and they must become one.

Notes

• 62% feel branded content makes them more connected and loyal to the brand
• 58% of marketers still feel like content is ineffective
• MRY conducted a poll and found audiences don’t know how to classify content from advertising, but that they know whether they like it or not based on these describers:
  • Content: long, liked, educational, cool
  • Advertising: interruptive, immediate sell, disliked, mass marketing, short
• Content marketers should embrace:
  • Objectivity in painting the full picture and not just the brand’s narrow perspective
  • Tapping into human emotion, identity, and social motivation
  • Strategy and thoughtful planning
  • Bridging the gap between brand desire and consumer needs
  • Predicting consumer needs and how / when to be there
  • Not obsessing over storytelling, but instead orchestrating the story and making it happen in real life (e.g. Share a Coke campaign)

2. Inbound Marketing: How Content is Your Secret Weapon

Speaker

Matthew Barby, Global Head of Growth & SEO at HubSpot

Description

1. How inbound marketing and content is relevant to your business
2. Why you should be putting it at the forefront of your marketing campaign.
3. Marketing efforts across large organizations

Notes

• 65% of European customers research before purchasing
• Inbound marketing = content + context
• Correlation found between volume of blog content created and number of leads generated
  • More content, more leads
• It’s not all about volume, it’s about the right content
• Understand the buyer persona -> Write a piece of content -> Tie it to the product
• Potential process:
  1. Define your buyer persona(s)
  2. Map out the interests and problems facing each of your personas
     • Browse Quora and speak to your sales team
  3. Group the info collected into clusters that reveal your users main issues
  4. Perform keyword research across topic clusters
  5. Find both broad keywords (2 words tops) and long tail keywords (3 words or more)
  6. Group the keywords and you now have clusters of keywords that represent user issues
  7. Develop content ideas based on the keywords
  8. Validate your ideas and see what’s working on Reddit and in the SERPs

3. Make Your Community Come to Life with Video

Speaker

Sarah Snow, Leader of Community and Content at Glide

Description

Glide’s Sarah Snow uses video to communicate with the app’s millions of users. Over the past few years, she has learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t when using video content to engage the user community.

From her personal experience, she has developed some tips that others should know about how to utilize video storytelling as a means of enhancing brand awareness and engaging a community.

Notes

• Step out of the box and out of your comfort zone by doing things other brands aren’t
• Create a clear message
• Film a lot of b-roll (extra footage captured to enrich the story you’re telling) and add dimension by cutting away to other images instead of just featuring talking heads
• Capture things you love and feel passionate about and share them
• Content quality beats video quality
  • Don’t worry if you don’t have fancy film equipment, your smartphone will do
• Optimize your video to get maximum reach:
  • 3-4 min video is best distributed on YouTube
  • Ask viewers to comment and subscribe
  • Trim it to 1-2 min for Facebook use
  • Ask viewers to share and like
  • Use captions
• Don’t end your videos with “The end.” — use the opportunity to activate the viewer towards your goal (download your app, watch the next video etc.)

4. Five Ways to Create More Profitable Content Today

Speaker

Chris Moody, Director of Marketing, Content and Social at Oracle

Description

You’re still relying on white papers to drive all your leads. Lots of people are. Unfortunately, you’re probably missing the boat on the easiest types of content for converting customers.

You need to harness the power of user-generated content when you’re back in the office. You may even laugh along the way.

Notes

• Profitable content converts and creates revenue
• 65% of SMOs can’t measure ROI for content marketing in 2014
• 3 Types of Content:
  • High effort – owned and created (e.g. blog posts)
  • Medium effort – Q&A section
  • Low effort – User-generated
    • This type has the best visit to lead and lead to customer conversion
• The 5 Ways
  1. Brainstorm with entire staff on questions they get asked, especially sales
  2. Interview colleagues and partners on camera and turn them into short videos
  3. Host your first company blogathon where you set time to answer top questions
     1. Can result in 100 blogs in three days
  4. Stop trying to hit home runs – surround your hit blog post with a full campaign, including webinars, banners, downloadable content
  5. Turn your support email into content – when you give a thorough answer to a client’s question it can be easily turned into a post

Favorite Quote

5. The Difference Between Product and Brand is the Story

Favorite Topic

What makes for good native content?

6. Creating a Contented Customer: How and Why a Brand Can and Should Make Good Content to Capture an Audience

Speaker

Graham Nelson, Director Content Strategy and News at Huffington Post

The Answer

• Transparency
• Authenticity to the publication
• Editorially sound
• Timely or timeless
• Distributed at scale
• Tied to the brand story, but not chained to it

*Bad native = advertorial and has no inherent value to the reader*

Favorite Deck

7. Content – The Future of Marketing

Speaker

Alex Cheeseman, Head International Strategy at Newscred

On the value content brings to businesses:

Favorite Swag

Obviously!

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Did you attend Content Israel 2015? If so, and you have some notes you’d like to share, feel free to leave them in the comments sections.