Content Marketers: 4 Things to Learn as You Move Into 2021

Change is happening all around us whether we want it or not – and plenty of us are waiting for a return to something like normal. But there’s a better way to reflect on the changes content marketers experienced during the “dumpster fire that is 2020,” as Robert Rose said in his opening keynote at ContentTECH Summit last week:

How do we create something new, something evolved, something to get us to where we want to be?

How can we use what we’ve been forced to learn to relate to customers differently, to work better despite distance and other obstacles, and to use new technologies and existing systems in new ways? Which should we keep doing after the crisis passes?

The 2020 ContentTECH Summit speakers offered plenty of ideas. Here are a few takeaways.

Just say no

This advice may sound strange after Robert’s counsel to hang on to the good that comes from change. But saying no was a precursor to dramatic (mostly positive) changes for Meg Walsh’s content services team at Hilton, the multinational hospitality company.

“We could not grow and change the team and build new skills if we were still doing content marketers work because we’d always done it,” said Meg, senior director of content services at Hilton.

In late 2018, her role expanded from managing the digital asset management and adaptive content platforms to include managing content operations, including all hotel imagery and website content.

The newly combined team of more than 70 people really got things done. In 2019, they published content to 26 websites in 23 languages. And though they had to use different content management systems (CMS) to do it, her team members were generally happy.

Why change? Meg said she realized two things:

• The team processed more than 107,000 content tickets throughout the year. She thought that volume could mean they may be doing work that might be better handled by other teams, an automated solution, or not done at all.
• The team was considered by others in the company “solely as doers, the people who processed tickets, but whose opinion was rarely requested by either tech or marketing.”

She began to make intentional choices “for us to become the team we believe we can be.”

They dug into …

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