On June 6, along with several other participants we were able to take part in a workshop led by two experts in content marketing, which was held at Google Campus Warsaw – a new interesting venue at the Warsaw conference map.
Rebecca Lieb and Stephanie Losee, invited by our CEO Ula Radzińska, came to Warsaw from the United States. They both have amazingly rich knowledge and experience in the area of content marketing (which you may already know if you’ve read our interviews with Rebecca and Stephanie), but each of them in a slightly different dimension. “There’s still a deficit of strategic thinking in Poland. That’s why I decided to invite Rebecca and Stephanie to lead the workshop. I wanted them to show how to build strategy, which is a key element of content marketing but which is still problematic here. It was important to me that the meeting has the form of a workshop, so that participants can interact, ask questions, solve problems together and – most importantly – that they all get back home at the end of the day with a ready-to-use strategy for their business. I believe Rebecca and Stephanie were the right people to assign this task to,” says Ula.

Rebecca deals with content marketing mainly in theory. As an analyst, strategic advisor, and most importantly a researcher and author, she has published more on content marketing than anyone else.
Stephanie, on the other hand, deals with implementing ideas into real life. Currently head of content at Visa, previously occupied the same position at Dell and Politico. She has to face the challenges of a huge, global company that Visa is every day, so she has a lot of practical experience that she was able to share during the meeting. Such diversified and complementing skills of the speakers guaranteed that the workshop would be able to offer ample of theory, supported by research carried out by Rebecca, as well as real life examples provided by Stephanies. And so it was.

The meeting started with a question to each of the participants: What would you like to gain at today’s meeting? The expectations and problems varied. Most of the participants were people who deal with content marketing in small and big businesses, but there were also people from content marketing agencies, like us from Aude. Some were just starting to develop their marketing strategy and wanted to create a strong content marketing foundation for their company, while others, more advanced, wanted to learn what they can improve, feeling lost in the overflow of content created and received every day. There were also people looking for a way to fix the image of one single product that they’ve been fighting with for years. Each participant came with a different problem, and Rebecca and Stephanie had to address them all.

The workshop was divided into two parts. The first one was a presentation by Rebecca about content marketing: what content marketing really is and how is it different from a content strategy? Why does it continue to become more and more popular? What is content marketing maturity and who has managed to reach it (only a few so far!)? Why do we call traditional advertising a push type while content marketing is a pull mechanism? These are just a few topics that we discussed. Everything was backed up by examples from Rebecca’s research and from Stephanie’s work in large corporations. We then turned to building a good content strategy. According to our hosts, this is the key to all content marketing issues and most failures are the outcome of an undocumented or unplanned content strategy. Step by step they discussed: where to begin, what to focus on, how to build a strategy skillfully and consequently. Technologies, tools, organization of work, building a team – it was all in there.

In the second part of the workshop we worked in groups. Divided into two teams – advanced and beginners – we were to answer several, seemingly simple, questions about the functioning of our companies. Based on that, we were to determine five elements that we wanted to improve, streamline, which for various reasons do not work. We discussed it together and Rebecca and Stephanie advised on how they would solve the problem. This was one of the most valuable parts of the meeting, as we were all able to learn from one another, regardless of our level of knowledge and insight.

There were plenty of issues discussed for one day, but one thing that touched the nerve for me as a participant was this: while creating loads of content – and no doubt we’re all creating it all the time – we should be able to use it wisely and, most importantly, multiple times! Content following one event can be used in many different ways and if you plan it well – you can serve it to your readers even all year round, in different forms. According to Rebecca: “Content is like… a turkey. You roast it once, but then you eat leftovers for another five days, so that nothing gets wasted.” Let’s stick to that!

Thank you, Rebecca and Stephanie, for the day we spent together. It was worth it!

What do the participants think about the workshop?

Bożena Makowska, Managing Director, Aude:

The workshop helped me realize what we at Aude can improve, what to work on. As a content marketing agency we focus mainly on our clients and their problems, in the multitude of different tasks we tend to forget about improving our own image. The meeting has helped us organize our knowledge, take a look at what we do from a distance, and notice the shortcomings that need improvement.

Magda Kozińska, Managing Editor, Aude:

For a moment, we were able to look at our business as we do at our clients’ companies. This gave us a fresh look at Aude. What’s more, among the participants were representatives of our clients, which is surely going to streamline our further cooperation, as well as internal communication. From what Rebecca and Stephanie were saying it appeared what’s happening in the USA is not that far away from our Polish reality. Each market – whether Polish or American – has its large challenges, so it is important to use wisely the available tools in order to achieve the best results possible.