I've had the luxury of working with some of the brightest minds in marketing and business throughout my career. With every interaction, every completed project, every successful campaign and product launch, I grew as a person and as a professional. I learned early on from an incredible leader at the biggest software company in the world at the time to "speak up, command respect and be heard." He empowered me to be the expert in the room as it relates to our social and web presence, a liaison or bridge if you will to those people in our organization who were stubborn in their traditional approaches to marketing (events, telemarketing... boring - ineffective - annoying).
In the days of social media's infancy there was a school of thought that still exists today as archaic as it sounds "we should be on social, it's cheap and we just need to be there" and my favorite "we need to go viral."
Those sentiments always bothered me.
As a digital marketer and storyteller, I thought deeply about content and the importance of what it was we were trying to convey in the B2B world. We weren't selling shoes, Yoga services or fitness equipment. There was a lack of "social" in most of the content businesses were sharing and for the most part the result was a lack of interest from followers and little to no "real" engagement.
Why are we posting boring data sheets, side by side product comparisons and our same company video to the same group of followers week after week? They don't care.
While every company should be proud of their corporate "Who We Are" videos, and they are in fact an essential part of foundational content that every company needs (leveraged by prospective clients and employees), they are just that, a foundation. In order to grow your brand awareness, engage your followers and hopefully create some new opportunities for your business, you need to care about what your customer cares about and your content needs to be about them, not you.
After coming to that realization, I had an incredible opportunity to become the Director of Marketing at a well-funded Healthcare IT startup during the exciting digitization and accountable care movement in healthcare (still in progress). Leveraging the genius of our product managers, engineers, industry analysts and leaders, we developed a strategy to educate our audience on aspects of accountable care in a meaningful way and through visual content. We created infographics with insightful statistics that highlighted the urgency of why healthcare needed a digital overhaul, we developed animated videos that explained population health which was a new phrase with no defined meaning at the time.
The results were spectacular.
Instead of being seen as a cost center (which is a stigma most marketing departments face within their organizations), we were getting placements in all the leading healthcare IT publications and being cited as the source of this publicly available information. What might cost our PR department months of relationship building, pay to play greasing and countless hours redlining, our marketing team was able to accomplish with this content strategy. Our content helped the company and our experts be seen as thought leaders in a burgeoning industry which led to speaking engagements, new opportunities and shorter sales cycles.
Why? We delivered value.
By delivering engaging content that was also educational, our reach was much greater then it could ever have been with messaging about our products. People remember stories and statistics, they don't care about spec sheets and glossy leave-behinds.
Today, content marketing is more of an established process, however, marketing teams and organizations across all industries are still struggling to understand the critical importance of having a defined content marketing strategy. And if they do, they are overwhelmed with the amount of content need to be successful or simply don't know how to get started.
According to industry experts, video will account for 80% of all internet traffic by 2019.
Do you have a video and content strategy?
And so, Envijo was born.
Our passion for creating content and our experience working at and with the biggest brands in the world over the past 15 years brought me and my co-founder together to create a new kind of marketing company. One that focuses on content.
We are here to help you shift your priorities to developing sustainable content marketing strategies and telling engaging stories that feed the insatiable appetites of the social consumer.
If you don't make that shift... it was nice knowing you. Say hi to Kodak and Xerox for us, just kidding... not really. The content marketing wave is here and it's only getting bigger.
Either ride it or get crushed by it. Surf's up.
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