A good line up at the B2B Marketing Belgium Conference ‘The Culture of Content’ last week, where speakers with different backgrounds gathered in Antwerp. It was the first of its kind so I was very curious and I can say I wasn’t dissapointed.
Here are some of the things I learned.
Marketers have to get emotional
Joel Harrison, editor-in-chief of B2B Marketing was the first one to mention this new trend at the conference. He said: “It is time to get emotional in your marketing. If you can’t make them feel it, don’t do it.” A message that was shared by Bob Oord, managing director of Heliview Online: “We focus too much on the message and too little on the emotion”.
Newsroom
Jeroen Wils, managing partner at Bepublic and former journalist, promoted the idea that every company should have a newsroom. He backed this up with statistics from a survey with 97 per cent of journalists claimed it’s important for a company or organisation to have a newsroom. “We need to think more like publishers, and not like marketers”, he said. News jacking is an important part of this; smart marketers wait for the perfect moment and connect their content to current events.
Greater value
The idea that less is more was also something that came up multiple times at the event. Tom De Baere, founder of HappiFish, mentioned it in a clever way: “Content marketing is not about creating more content but about creating more value”. Or as Harrison said: “We have to be better at storytelling because sometimes less is more.”
Customer is the centre
“The key to content marketing is putting the customer at the centre of your strategy” said De Baere. Oord added: “Strategy is very important in content marketing and you have to put the audience first, before the product.”
Manu Matthysessens, owner of Solvint, added in some interesting information from the buyers’ perspective: “Marketers need to be more proactive in bringing content. They also need to be more open meaning they need to communicate more about the value for the customer.”
A very interesting day, I look forward to more B2B Belgium events in the future.