Creative Content Marketing in the UK – Winning Hearts, Minds & Wallets

In just a few weeks, I’ll be making the pilgrimage to London where I will be speaking at the SES London conference about integrated marketing and content, two very hot topics right now.

As the internet marketing industry evolves with innovations in platform technologies and consumer behaviors changing right along, marketers and brands are trying their best to keep up. This is as true in London as it is here in Minneapolis or New York or San Francisco.

Top of mind these days is “content marketing” and a study from Econsultancy and Adobe reports that content marketing is a top digital marketing priority in 2013 for companies worldwide. Another study conducted by Econsultancy & Responsys shows that UK companies are budgeting accordingly with 99% stating they will increase or maintain their content marketing investments in 2013.

Along with a spike in desire to capitalise on such trends, I think a lot of marketers are finding that beyond the hype and into implementation, there are challenges with the almighty content marketing religion.

One of the most pressing is the ability to create content on a continuous basis. Even so, there are numerous solutions and advice for that, as numerous as the ubiquitous red phone booths and double decker busses in London. There’s a pressing realization that as companies mature in the content marketing field, they’ll find that the need to stand out has even deeper challenges.

Sustaining any kind of content over a long period of time involves strategy and inspiration, but it’s mostly mechanical.  It can be tough, but not impossible. I’ve been doing it myself for over 9 years. However, sustaining meaningful content over a long period of time is another thing entirely and that is where the talent pulls away from the pack. Creativity, innovation, customer focus, platform and analytics savvy, ability to use data for creative insight and the ability to simultaneously grow networks and amplify content to those networks are all essential skills to stand out.

With the SEO industry now chasing content marketing expertise like a pack of wolves after piece of meat, digital marketers are going to need all the advantages they can get.

In the U.K. there are a few agencies that stand out to me in when it comes to a blend of creativity, tech savvy and ability to amplify:  Zazzle Media and Velocity Partners. Both are “walk the talk” content marketing consultancies that serve as aspirational examples for the many, many other UK based digital marketing agencies getting into the content marketing game. Velocity’s work with the Salesforce Social Success site which is a hub of useful content using a variety of media types is particularly good.

A few other UK focused creative content examples include:

Innocent: January campaign. Shared by Luke Brynley-Jones Founder & CEO of Our Social Times.

Innocent has a very active social presence (plus a sense of humor) and appears to appreciate both a variety of content types and enabling interactions with that content on Facebook (Fruit Picker Game), Pinterest and others.

T-Mobile: Life’s for Sharing campaign. Shared by Omar Kattan, Chief Strategy Officer Sandstorm Digital.

The video above is from several years ago, but this campaign is a classic when it comes to examples of creative content marketing.

Of course I think the UK Online Marketing Influencers and Bloggers list we did with Traackr was fairly creative as a c0-created content object, especially since we’re not done with the content part yet. I’ll be sharing details of how we went about that project from planning to implementation to continued repurposing.

There are many other examples of course, (including these case studies from the CMA) and in my presentation at SES London I’ll be sharing many more examples, digging into what worked, what didn’t and opportunities to be even more effective. I’ll be addressing the importance of how to be smarter and more efficient about creativity with content marketing as well as being focused on inspired action that leads to business results (not just winning creative awards).  

Here are the full session details. I hope to see you there.

Creative Content Marketing – Winning the Hearts, Minds and Wallets of Today’s Distracted Consumer (details)

Investments in content marketing are on the rise, but few companies have fully realised what the best practices are for creating high quality content over a long period of time. Developing ideas for effective marketing can be a challenge and this session will help delegates to:

• Develop a framework for creative and efficient content creation
• Find resources and ideas where others cannot
• Leverage a mix of evergreen, repurposed, curated and co-created content for better marketing results
• Apply SEO and social media optimization principles to amplify content reach and engagement

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