Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute gave the opening presentation at Intelligent Content Conference 2014. It was refreshing to see a content angle from a marketing standpoint at a technical conference.

Content, Carlin, and “Stuff”

Pulizzi considers all the things that organizations publish on the web as stuff. Corporate stuff, customer stuff. It’s all stuff.

It’s like the George Carlin bit about the reason that humans exist is to collect stuff and put it in a receptacle. Pulizzi emphasizes that the same thing is going on in content creation from a brand perspective.

Website: the place to put corporate content stuff? Social Media: A NEW place to put our stuff!

“We gotta take it and throw it up on the web!” -hypothetical CEO

And then, content stuff surged into popularity. This content is typically things to position the organization as experts, thought leaders. It eventually becomes corporate stuff.

Relevance Required

As Pulizzi states, “everyone loves graphs that go up, and to the right.”

Even with graphs that show positive outlooks, if the content is not useful, those page hits mean nothing. According to his research, about 42% of brands believe content marketing is successful.

Pulizzi believes relevance is the missing ingredient with many content marketing campaigns. Relevance can help push that 42% to something more favorable, if Content Strategists are up for the challenge.

One recommendation is to apply a mission statement to any content-driven campaign or initiative.

For example: The Home Made Simple site (by Procter and Gamble) enforces the mission statement, “Enabling women to have more quality time with their families.”

The mission statement becomes the litmus test for all content before publishing. It embodies the goal of converging what you know with what your prospect cares about.

Takeaway: A Content Strategists’ Job

Pullizi requests that Content Strategists teach marketers how to produce and govern content properly. Many marketers will always be all over content generation, but unaware of the intelligence behind it.

“Content Marketers are lost without Content Strategists,” said Pulizzi.

Pulizzi believes that while Content Marketers focus on the “why does this matter?,” Content Strategist need to take charge of how it gets to the customer.

His closing remarks pushed the agenda of questioning marketers on their content creation and whether or not they are using a sound strategy. Also, to be advocates of enforcing that any content-driven initiative requires content intelligence for sustainability as well as targeting key organizational metrics.