Content Marketing World is Finally Here and this Long Time Strategist is Excited!

Stephanie Mansueto
Ion by Rock Content
4 min readSep 5, 2017

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A few months ago, I received an email from one of ion’s founders that had a really exciting subject line: “Do you want to go to Content Marketing World?”.

It took everything in me to not send my boss an expletive-laced but excited response. Of course, I wanted to go, heck yes, I wanted to go! Content Marketing World? Count me in!

Within a few hours, my hotel was booked, my flights were arranged, and I was ready to hit the road to Cleveland, where I would rub shoulders with Content Marketers from all over the world and every vertical.

A Summary of My Professional Life in Content

My career in digital marketing started in the late 2010’s as a member of an email marketing team at a daily deals company, but for nearly a decade before I dabbled in blogging. As an email marketer, I was obsessed with crafting the right message that encouraged clicks. I wrote subject lines and product descriptions and obsessed over CTA placement and copy. As a blogger, I wanted to tell the right story to capture an audience. I thought about blog titles and introductions, and photography. While blogging and email are considerably different marketing tactics, they have a few things in common. Both email and blogging are highly dependent on copy to tell a story and encourage users to take action: make a purchase, subscribe, contact, for example. And they both are a form of content marketing.

“Everything is copy.” ― Nora Ephron

The late Nora Ephron believed that everything that happens to you, everything that you learn, everything is a story worth writing about. Everything is copy and copy is content.

After I spent a few years losing sleep over bounce rates and click-through-rates, I decided that I needed more. My career progressed into copywriter, ad writer, staff writer, product blogger, and eventually content strategist. When I started working as a content strategist in late 2012, the role was a new “old” thing. Content Strategist’s had been around for decades, working in the background at publishing houses and agencies to sort out the content mess that came with the birth of the internet. I dived head first into content strategy — learning everything that I could about wireframes, copy, web content, responsive design, SEO, and brand storytelling. I was a sponge that never felt full. Five years later — I am still hungry for more knowledge.

Inbound Marketing Stops the Interruption

Before I became a content marketer, I had no idea what interruption marketing was or that my behavior to it was common. Interruption marketing is essentially when a potential customer has to stop what they’re doing and pay attention to an advertisement. Television commercials, radio spots, telemarketing calls, these are all considered interruptive forms of marketing that almost all of us are unhappy to receive. For example, every time a commercial plays during my favorite TV show, I will turn the volume down.

When content marketing became part of my life, I found that most people (myself included) respond positively to marketing that we have permitted to receive. Blogs, email, product pages that we found in a search, and social media are becoming just as important as traditional advertisements. Content is the future of advertising.

Do you want to attend Content Marketing World?

Yes, I do. Why? Because I am still hungry to learn more and I know that at Content Marketing World, I will know more than I know today.

Stephanie Mansueto is a Content Strategist at ion interactive and blogs about interactive content at medium.ioninteractive.com.

The ion interactive enterprise SaaS platform empowers modern marketers to produce data-driven interactive content at scale and without code. ion’s marketing technology and services deliver measurable business value for hundreds of brands and agencies. ion’s platform launches, customizes and tests all types of engaging interactive digital experiencesinfographics, ebooks, assessments, quizzes, lookbooks, interactive white papers, calculators, wizards and configurators. The platform delivers competitive differentiation, conversion performance and lead quality for in-house and agency teams. Connect with ion interactive on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Medium or visit ioninteractive.com.

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👋🏻 Head of Marketing at @athennian | Fueled by content & coffee. ☕️ ✈️👩🏻‍💻