How to Make Physical Event Content Stand Out

Ben (00:01.226) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Hannah. Hannah, welcome to the show. Hannah Cameron (00:07.376) Hey, thank you for having me. Ben (00:09.694) Awesome. Hannah, you're joining us from up North. I'm super jealous of the snow quantities that you get. I feel like some of the funner sports with sledding and snowmobiling and stuff like that are in full force, but thanks for taking the time today. Before we dive into the subject, maybe share a little bit about yourself. Maybe set the stage, love to hear your background and passions in marketing. Hannah Cameron (00:24.21) Oh yeah. Hannah Cameron (00:34.196) yeah absolutely. So hi everyone I'm Hannah. I've been in content marketing for about 13 years now. It feels a lot longer. But this is my passion. This is what I've meant to do. I took a brief stint in hospitality management, but when I found marketing, I fell in love. I love telling a story. I love companies helping them tell a story. I just knew I was here to do that, help them speak and explain and influence and tell people why to buy from them. And that's what I fell in love with. So I absolutely have loved journey working through PR to content. I've done IPOs with companies. I've done go-to-market strategies. I think my favorite thing is just managing newsletters and blogs and content strategies and helping companies that are about you know 100, 200 people get to a thousand. I think that's my sweet spot is scaling B2B companies. But I can't imagine I'd ever do anything but content marketing and it's wonderful to know that especially at my age that this is what I'm going to be doing. Ben (01:37.07) I love it. That's awesome. So there is an interesting viewpoint that we're gonna go through this. And in just a few minutes, I think Hannah has convinced me that this is the right way of doing things. So what we're gonna talk about today is the content brief and why or why not it may not be the right thing to do for your business. So Hannah, you have some thoughts about the brief. Why are you... Hannah Cameron (01:51.401) Awesome. Ben (02:06.85) thinking that maybe there's a better way than using the age old content brief method for writing and requesting content. Hannah Cameron (02:13.84) Yeah, I think I'm on a complete opposite end of a lot of people on this debate, but back in the day, this was the way that everything had to be done. And I kind of grew up knowing that everything should be processed and automated with a brief. And here you go. And recently I've just been kind of learning like it's really not working. Feedback cycles are now much longer. We're hearing from other teams, this is not what I asked you to create. Teams don't wanna fill them in. It's just actually causing a lot more problems. And what I notice is the creativity and the human aspect is completely gone from content creation, where we're not actually speaking with people requesting things. We're saying, read this doc and go do it. versus having an actual conversation and maybe going off on a little tangent or beating it up, like there is no human creative spark. And what I'm getting from creative briefs is just regurgitated content that's very kind of SEO heavy and basically my brief rewritten in a different way. It's not what I'm actually looking for, which is take the brief and go tell me a story. So I have not seen them work well, but I have seen the other side where when I got rid of them at multiple places, content suddenly was able to flourish. And it was more human and connected content that was coming out. And we were actually delivering what people needed versus what they thought they were requesting. Ben (03:40.958) I love it. So in the wild, you're in a business and you've said, okay, we're done with briefs. Maybe walk us through how your method is different and how it would look, what would it look like in a typical business setting to use the non-content brief methodology of Hannah. Hannah Cameron (03:51.796) Sure. Hannah Cameron (04:01.008) Yeah, so you're not just throwing your freelancers to the wolves being like, figure it out. Uh, what I did was when I had my freelancers, I always had a writing for guide, whether it was, you know, writing for my current company or writing for a past company, it was there to just explain what the purpose of this blog was, who I thought the key audience was the three or four pillars that we always talked about, what those kinds of pillars meant. So I was at an e-commerce company as a great example, and the pillars were creator marketing, why we talked about influencers, Ecom company success stories and then the third one was just industry news. And under each of those I gave examples of what topics could be talked about and I shared stories that I loved that other companies had published because they were just spot on what I was looking for. Tone, voice, all that jazz was in there and then what I would do is say pitch me stories. I have 13 slots every month for this blog and I want you to pitch me stories. I will publish as many or as little as gets approved so if you want to steal all 13 spots have 13 amazing pitches. You know if you want a few make sure you send in more I'm not going to approve all of them but go out get hungry you know what I'm looking for you can see it here you know what we've published before. go find me stories that are going to be incredible for this blog. And there wasn't any, ugh, I'm not doing that, or oh my god, the worksheet. They were excited, like the joy and the spark and where can I source stories from? Anywhere. Social's a great place. Go to the news. Go anywhere. You can source them anywhere. I would love if you could include people in them, if there's quotes or things you can pull off the internet, great, but source them anywhere. overwhelmingly I was getting like 20, 30 pitches from each of these people and consistently every other day, hey I've got another pitch for you, hey can I talk about this idea? And they would send me incredible pitches because they were deep in Reddit and this is blowing up with like 572 upvotes and you're gonna miss the boat if you don't talk about it. Hey did you see this LinkedIn post that's blowing up by that industry influencer? Like it just happened last night, I want to turn around and I want to have it to you by the end of the week. Can I get an approval? Hannah Cameron (06:07.38) I was now getting stuff that like even if I had everyday free, which I don't as a director, I could not source all of this on my own. I was unleashing a mini army of content marketers to go and find the absolute best stories sourced from people who were talking about these subjects. And it worked. It really, really worked. Ben (06:15.223) Yeah. Ben (06:30.35) So the quality obviously, like it sounds like there is a massive difference. How would you explain the difference in quality of the actual content in a pitching environment versus a brief environment? You talked a little bit about like it's, it feels a little bit more journalistic, but quality of content. Did you see people enjoying it more? Did you like you noticeably tell a difference? What did that look like? Hannah Cameron (06:55.24) They loved it so much more. So my boss would, he'd consistently talk to them to see, you know, was I good at managing them and were they happy? And he said, they're overwhelmingly so happy writing for us that they are pitching writing for us. Like they're encouraging other people to come write for us. A big thing for us was to find freelancers. I think any good content team, even with in-house writers, you need to have a roster of freelancers. It's hard to be a one-off team. I was lucky that I now had an unbelievable roster because they kept nominating and recommending come write for this company. Quality wise it was exceptional. You got to give freelancers credit and a lot of people don't. They don't need the brief to be a good writer. They know how to write and craft a wonderful, well written article. That's why they freelance. They're a writer. But what I would get before with a brief was my brief regurgitated into an article. It was just my opinion and my view, which might not necessarily always align with what's going on in the industry. And they were kind of, okay, yeah, that's okay. It's fine. And sure, maybe that's on me. Maybe I should have done more research. But again, director overseeing not just written, but video and social and PR. Like, I'm trying to come up with the things that I know are the topics we want. But because they were pitching, the stories hit. They were relevant. They were very, very like in tune. with what was happening in that moment in the news. And they were also resonating with the audience more because they were sourcing them from where the audience was. Slack communities, Reddit forums, LinkedIn, just really creative. And they were so excited. Oh, I'll read my pitch. And I would turn pitches down and I would tell them there's gonna be pitches that I just don't think align and don't work. And sometimes they'd come back and fight for that pitch. And it was unbelievable to be on a call with them where they were fighting for this story about why they believed it was the right story. overturn my decision sometimes because their passion and their explanation of why I was mistaken for turning this down made me rethink it. So I'm putting the human aspect back in content. It's not here's my brief go write it great here's some grammar spelling edits okay. It's let's have a real conversation and convince me that this is what we need on this blog and because of that we published exceptional content. Hannah Cameron (09:11.528) that other people were digesting and resharing. And I've now copied this motto at a ton of other companies. And you should see new freelancers who've never had this. You should see their reaction when I tell them this. Oh my, I have so many ideas for you. Okay, give me those ideas. Oh my God, I will. And overnight, I get a document with like 32 ideas. They've, they're never asked their opinion. And that is a huge mistake. For anybody listening, any company, you are missing your biggest resource, to you because they have really good ideas that you don't have the time to come up with. Ben (09:47.034) I agree, especially if you're lucky enough that your writers are actually subject matter experts as well. You know, if you want, we've used this term before on the show, but what I call content market fit. You know, if you've got your ICP subject matter experts and they're the writers for you and they're just head over heels about a specific subject, odds are you're going to find that product or sorry, content market fit a lot quicker. Hannah Cameron (10:14.387) Yes. Ben (10:14.398) and a lot better because it really resonates with that specific audience and their interest at that point in time. Hannah Cameron (10:20.14) 100% and I have found subject matter experts in multiple industries because I can hear that argument coming from some Well, I'm in a pretty technical field all I'm currently in IT dev ops for the first time in my life And I have four freelance X IT devs and their pitches are fucking incredible. Sorry. They're amazing I've had influencer marketing experts. I've had edtech healthcare. They're out there Ben (10:32.014) Hehehehe Hannah Cameron (10:46.116) you can find them and then just trust in them to find what you need to find. If you can find ex journalists, they don't have to be from your field. They know how to become from your field. They will know my famous talking point to anybody writing for me, including in-house is I don't expect you to be the expert, but I expect you to go find the experts. So if you're not the subject matter expert, go and make your story about an interview with someone. So I've had people at my influencer marketing company, who were not from this background, but what they would do is they would interview the people who were, and they would put together a compelling story that was their voice. And I was like, that's what a journalist would do. They would find the expert to support their story. So I think sometimes we just don't give freelancers credit and we make a lot of assumptions that they need a bunch of handholding. You're not gonna get the best content doing it like that. Ben (11:36.558) Yeah, I love that. How does this work, if at all differently, for in-house versus freelance? Is there any difference? Do you approach it in any different way? Hannah Cameron (11:47.604) So I don't have like my PMM pitch me articles, but it does change in house because so recently I've had this discussion with a VP, a CMO of marketing who said, this isn't working. Like why are your feedback loops so long? Like it is taking weeks for you guys to get something reviewed and approved. Your briefs aren't working. I'm hearing lots of complaints. So I did an audit and I asked everyone tip to tail and the overwhelming feedback was, I hate your briefs. They're too long. You're not doing anything that I told you to do in them. completely misinterpreting what I said, and then my writers, my in-house team said, these briefs are a disaster, they're seven and a half pages of bullshit, I don't understand what they're asking, I also don't think they understand what they're asking. It's not working. So after some discussions, it just made the decision, like these aren't working, we're pulling them. At the end of the day, we should just be having a conversation, and everyone overwhelmingly agreed, including my CMO who said, you're missing the human part of this, and saying, hey, I see you requested an article about X. Can I just ask a few quick questions? These are not hour long calls, they're 10 minutes. What's the goal? What is it you're trying to achieve? What should the user do at the end? Okay, so what you're actually looking for is this. It'll take us about this much time to get it done. Great, thank you. That is working way better than the creative automation brief process. I know we have this weird, let's automate everything in content and make it easier for requests to come in, but it's not. Because now you're getting overwhelming automation requests, people just firing off stuff, and you're missing that human conversation point. At multiple companies I've been at in the last five years, not one automation process had a step that involved content talk to the requester and ask them what is it they're actually looking for. This has, getting rid of it has reduced our feedback loops, which were astronomical by the way. The feedback was like, this is not what I requested. Well, it's verbatim what was in the doc. And that's the problem. Everyone just verbatims creative briefs. And it's not really what they're looking for. So you gotta bring the human aspect back into this content creation, or it's not gonna go well at a business. Ben (14:01.134) I love that. Have you found that in my career, I've noticed a lot of content requests are from materials that have already been made, but people don't know how to find it. With those discussions, have you had a difference in the amount of times you've gotten content requests for things you've already produced? Hannah Cameron (14:20.792) 100% that's the other reason why it's like maybe if you just talk to people you'd be able to Avoid this but this happened like last week where you know, we need this one pager It has to be done. Let's get going and we got like two weeks into this and then finally someone went You know, I actually think we did this already and I went hmm awesome guys, like how are we just finding this out now? Because it eventually got so far down the line that someone else got brought in who then went, I think we have this. So getting rid of these automated requests and automated tasks would save us because we'd have that conversation with the right people early on to say, we already have this. But that is a huge problem that we're trying to solve as well of just stay visible with the content you've produced because you are getting requests to do the exact same thing over and over and over, sit with them and go, what is it you're actually trying to achieve? Cause I bet you we have something that will do that today. And I bet it's not actually what you're looking for because other teams are not as well versed as we are just like how we feel right now. We're like, I really wish they would come to us as experts and ask us what content to create. That's how your freelancers feel when you give them brief. I wish they would just come to me and treat me like an expert. So it's a double edged sword here. It's all come in full circle. We want companies to treat us as experts. We should also be treating freelancers as experts, and all of that in my mind revolves around getting rid of that brief and making this a more human-connected experience. Ben (15:49.834) Very cool, I love it. Well, these conversations always go way too fast, but Hannah, I have learned so much. Thank you for taking the time. I love the approach. I think it is absolutely genius. 100% gonna be something that I'm gonna try out and use in my everyday work life kind of scenario. If anyone wants to connect with you or pitch to you or do anything like that, how do they connect with you online? How do they continue the conversation? Hannah Cameron (15:58.819) Oh, thank you. Hannah Cameron (16:09.596) Thank you. Hannah Cameron (16:19.792) Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn for sure. I am very, very active on there. So Hannah Cameron on LinkedIn, or for anyone who wants to spell it out, it's Hannah C, C-E-E. But yeah, you can find me there. I'm always happy to bring new freelancers on. I love having a large roster. So if anybody wants to pitch, I talk to IT DevOps now about data backup. So if you have some great ideas there, by all means hit me up on LinkedIn. If you want me to dive deeper set up a pitch process, what worked, what I learned, what maybe didn't work, hit me up. You can check out how it worked if you go to hashtag paid. Their blog called bank notes was entirely built and run on this process. And I believe it's still run that exact same way today. So really successful, great metrics there. I highlighted all of my LinkedIn so you can take a look at how well we did with this process at hashtag paid. Ben (17:15.374) Fantastic. Well, again, thanks for the time and thanks for sharing your insights. Hannah Cameron (17:20.804) Hey, my pleasure. This was wonderful. Thanks for having me. Ben (17:22.87) You bet, thanks for coming.