Marketing Growth Conversation: Chris Gillespie of Fenwick Media
Chris Gillespie is founder and CEO of Fenwick Media, a studio for uncommonly clear writing and design – backed by research. Chris began his career in sales and marketing at B2B and technology companies, such as AT&T and Marketo. He’s a unique mix of business strategist, creative writer and entrepreneur. We sat down to discuss trends in marketing and content. We also explored how a background in sales can make for a powerful foundation in marketing and creativity.
Highlights from the discussion:
Starting in Sales gave Chris an appreciation for how companies make money and how content should operate at the front lines to support critical business development processes, ranging from sales enablement to pitches, email nurtures and thought leadership.
Over the last 10 years content marketing has made great strides in becoming a fixture in marketing plans. As Chris describes the B2B value proposition, it’s been focused on generating better relationship development through softer approaches to sales and an emphasis on informational topic authority.
Today, with all marketers and businesses feeling more pressure, there has been a focus on getting to high value outcomes with streamlined executions. Great content teams are looking at their highest performing work and examining how they can recreate it more consistently. Further, they are prioritizing the highest quality work over large quantities of low performing assets. In short, quality over quantity is even more of a priority for seasoned content marketers today.
While analytics are critical, great content marketers know that some of the most powerful outcomes from content marketing don’t show up on a performance dashboard. Striking the right balance of measurement and higher order possibilities is an active discussion teams should have. Some examples of these higher order outcomes might be sales using an asset to win a new client partnership, or a home-grown subject matter expert from your company being invited to speak at high profile conferences.
As content clients build momentum with a content engine, opportunistic storytelling moments open up that a pure advertising function would never be able to capitalize on.
As content becomes capable of showcasing the best ideas and thought leaders from across the organization it’s important to foster open and collaborative forums that recruit topics and contributors to the creative process, regularly and organically. Without steady stakeholder engagement – just like any group – content can find itself mired in politics. Creating something like a quarterly integrated editorial board can create integrated ways of working that span the marketing, product, sales and business teams.
We’ll be discussing highlights from the conversation on LinkedIn, as well as the Serial Marketers and Pros & Content communities. Excited to keep the discussions going.
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