Parna Sarkar-Basu, founder of Brand and Buzz Marketing, hosted an executive panel to discuss how companies can build engaging content that’s also risk-free. This virtual event brought together the best and brightest minds to approach this topic from the perspective of marketers, entrepreneurs, and leaders who build products and technologies that enable the world to create and access content. Speakers included CEO of Topos Labs Christopher Stephenson, Chief Marketing Officer of Acrolinx Christopher Willis, Vice President of Global Content at Fidelity Investments Dan Schutt and CEO of Bredin Stu Richards.

Parna kicked off the session by saying 90 percent of the world’s data was created in two years, from 2011 to 2012. And in 2018 alone, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were generated each day. In other words, the volume of data generated daily was equal to 330 roundtrips to the moon. In 2020, before COVID the prediction was that 44 zettabytes(that’s 21 zeroes) of data would be generated daily. And as marketers, we are probably the biggest contributors to this data deluge – in the name of content marketing.

Here are some key takeaways that the panelists shared:

  • Chris Stephenson highlights that content-related risk can come in many forms, from the ‘digital swamp’ created by volumes of digital content to the general lack of efficiency and difficulty to locate content. Additionally, since everyone is a publisher these days, the technology, software, applications, and devices provide opportunities to disseminate data, and it also highlights how easy it is to unintentionally offend or say insensitive things if an organization does not have appropriate regulatory circuit breakers in place.
  • With more users online now than ever before, Stu provided tips on how marketers can remain relevant: “Creating engagement boils down to creating individual, one-on-one relationships with everybody that you’re doing business with. And being able to personalize that experience, at scale, across multiple personas is a huge challenge, but is the differentiator.”

To Parna’s question on what advice can the panelists offer to young marketers, here’s what they had to say:

  • Stu shares that “The best thing that a young marketer can bring to an organization is an understanding of the audience that they serve. And I think that we as more senior leaders and marketing organizations rely on that. I can’t be in touch with everything.”
  • Dan said, “Don’t box yourself in. Diversity of thought is important and the traditional definition of a communicator or marketer is changing.”
  • Chris Stephenson’s advice was “to really know your audience, their industry, company size, how well are they capitalized, and how well do they know about your offering. All of these data points contribute to content that will be more engaging if you just ‘think twice and cut once concept.’”
  • Chris Willis said, “The best thing that a young marketer can bring to an organization is an understanding of the audience that they serve.”

To learn more about these tips, view the complete discussion  here.

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