In this episode, John and Chris discuss a roundup of the most commonly identified content marketing trends. Which trends are real, actual trends and which trends are simply recycled advice? What are the trends marketers are not paying attention to? Tune in to find out!

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In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie is currently down with COVID.

She’s getting better though, which is, which is good.

So we’re John’s here to sub in.

And we’re talking about content marketing trends.

So John, when you look out at the landscape of content marketing, and all the stuff that people are doing, what do you see as the content marketing trends that are that are worth paying attention to? What what do you think are the content marketing trends right now of 2022? And as we start into the back half of the year, start thinking about 2023.

Yeah, I mean, you can’t ignore Tiktok.

I mean, that is just the 800 pound gorilla or whatever tired metaphor you want to use for big large thing that is taking up space.

And I, you know, it’s tough, I have a lot of issues with it, and a lot of problems, but you just can’t get away from the fact that there are people that will just sit down and veg for like, three hours just streaming through these videos.

And it’s very, they’ve done a perfect job in making it completely frictionless.

So obviously, Tiktok, at the top of the pile video, in general, completely gaining momentum on a ton of fronts.

Yeah, there’s a ton of stuff going even over the top video, too.

I mean, the fact that we, you know, basically, TV is all on demand streaming services.

So that’s giant.

And yeah, I guess those would be the big three.

And then of course, the explosion in automated content to is also crazy.

It’s complete pandemonium, basically.

It’s interesting, because I was looking at these roundup articles that were written at the beginning of calendar year, everyone’s saying, here are the content marketing trends to pay attention to in 2022, I went through about 40 of these.

And what I found sort of interesting was that there’s not a lot that’s substantially different from year to year, because we’ve looked at these lists from you know, 2019 2022, and so on, and so forth.

But other than the pandemic, being kind of a big deal.

There hasn’t been a ton.

So there, I put them into three buckets, themes, formats, and tactics are sort of the things that we’re looking at some of the themes, these are the major themes that people will call out in their articl

In this episode, Katie and Chris discuss personal branding considerations and challenge the notion of what a personal brand is. Do you have to be the loudest person in the room? How do you build a personal brand without being perceived as arrogant and full of yourself? Tune in to find out!

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## Christopher Penn 00:16

These days with as many new social causes or existing social causes needing amplification people, and companies needing to be out there more than ever, because digital advertising is getting harder, and SEO is getting harder.

We need other ways of reaching audiences.

So we’re going to talk about personal brand and how that plays into your marketing and everything else.

Katie, where do you want to start when it comes to personal brand?

## Katie Robbert 00:48

Because when we talk about personal brand, a lot of times what we’re talking about is your ability to, you know, change careers, find a new job, that kind of thing.

And so, when I’ve heard you speak about personal brand, before you talk about it in the sense of, it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you.

The reason I want to respectfully challenge that a bit is because I feel like that only works for certain people, and certain industries.

And so for the marketing industry, I can see where that works.

The idea is that you’re supposed to be out there and loud and known, but like, let’s say you’re a bookkeeper, you know, that doesn’t necessarily translate into who knows you.

Because you balance the best checkbook.

Like it doesn’t it doesn’t quite translate.

The other side of that is.

So let’s just, you know, as an example, a few years back, I spoke at an event.

And they had there were so many people in the session, that they had an encore of that event of that talk that I did.

And it was one of the events that drove the most downloads for us, you know, from a session, and I got really rave reviews.

And so when I hear you say it’s who knows you that to me, says, Let the work speak for itself.

Well, if I just sit back and let the work speak for itself, I do really great work.

However, nobody cares.

Because there are other people who are louder.

There are other people who are not female, there are other people who people just, you know, the event quarters, just like better.

So that’s where I struggle

Analytics is inherently rearward-looking, looking at what happened. Yet if we want to increase the value and impact of analytics, we have to look forward, to help plan. How do we do this? In this episode, learn 3 different approaches for improving the value of analytics.

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## Christopher Penn 00:17

One of the challenges that we have with analytics is its very nature analytics is inherently, a look in the rearview mirror, what happened right as the fundamental purpose of analytics to understand what happened.

And the challenge that we have to deal with is, you shouldn’t drive the car looking at the rearview mirror only right, you have got to be looking at the windshield.

And so Katie, the question I would put to you as a decision maker, as an executive is, how do you use something that’s a rearview mirror? How do you balance that with looking forward with deciding what to do with it being proactive? And how can people who are using analytics who are data driven, can provide proactive value with their analytics data?

## Katie Robbert 01:15

And so one of the things is making sure you’re not waiting too long to look at that data.

So if you only sit down and look at your data, once a year, at your yearly planning, things could have gone, you know, six ways to sideways, and you will never know.

And there’s nothing you can do about it.

So that’s, you know, sort of the first thing and so we were talking earlier, Chris, about, you know, setting up automatic notifications for anomalies, for example.

So even if you can’t be in your analytics system, every minute of every day, you can set up some notification to say, if it goes above or below this threshold, let me know, so I can do something about it.

So I think that sort of the first thing in terms of providing value, the other thing is, you can’t just rely on your data to make decisions.

And I mean that in a way of like, if you’re only ever looking at your Google Analytics, and nothing else outside of that dashboard, you’re probably making very limited decisions.

Because you’re not talking to your customers, you’re not paying attention to the conversations people are having online, you’re not looking at Google trend data, for example, you’re not even just doing basic exploration of what people might be interested in the next couple of weeks.

And so I feel like your analytics is a good starting place.

But if that’s the only thing you

Read More... from {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Increasing the Value of Analytics

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss the value of professional certifications. What are certifications like Google Analytics IQ, Hubspot Academy, Udemy, Coursera, and LinkedIn Skill Tests worth? Do they help you get hired? What do hiring managers think of them? Tune in to find out!

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In this week’s in your insights, let’s talk certification.

Let’s talk about all things certification.

There are, I’ve lost count of just how many different certificates there are.

There’s official ones from vendors like Google with a Google Analytics Individual Qualification.

There’s Hubspot Academy and all the like 30 or some different certifications.

And then you have certificates in from courseware companies like Skillshare, and Udemy, and Coursera.

And now even have LinkedIn skill assessments that get added to your LinkedIn profile if you pass those assessments.

So Katie, when you are looking at the landscape of certifications, particularly as someone who’s a hiring manager, how do you think about certificates? How do you think how relevant are they when you’re making a decision about somebody because a lot of these vendors say, if you get this, you’ll increase your pay $10,000 A year or whatever? What’s your take?

You know, I don’t necessarily know that that’s true.

The increase in your pay $10,000 here, but I won’t say that it’s not true.

So when I think about, you know, from a hiring managers perspective, you know, I look at certifications as someone who is motivated to learn.

So someone who is not waiting to be told, okay, you need to go do this.

Now you need to do this.

It’s someone who’s a little bit more self managed, who can manage themselves, and they have that motivation to seek out information.

So I look at it that way first, and it’s like, okay, this person is eager to learn.

That’s great.

That’s a great skill that I want, then I start to actually dig into what their certifications are.

Because to your point, Chris, there’s no shortage of certifications.

And that that’s where I start to run into some challenges because there’s very reputable companies that offer you know, certifications and training like let’s use Hubspot as an example.

They have a lot of different courses, some of which you and I have also taken and have our certifications and and so when I look at Hubspot certifications, like okay, this person is really trying to learn about this particular thing.

Hubspot been doing it for a long time.

So there’s someone wh

Read More... from {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: The Value of Professional Certifications

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris talk through some of the latest data in marketing technology from Scott Brinker’s MarTech 9000. How much marketing technology is too much? Do we really need hundreds of options for CRM software? What lessons should we take from all this data. Tune in to find out!

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In this week’s in your insights, we are starting to take a look at the data published by Scott Brinker and the MAR tech conference on the MAR tech.

It’s called the MAR tech 9000 9000 different vendors in the marketing technology space offering all these different solutions to your marketing problems.

And we thought we’d take some time today talk about just how many of these solutions there are.

So I’m gonna go ahead and bring up our very, very quick analysis of the top 40 categories, the number of companies in the martec 9000.

These are the top 40 categories.

And the way you look at this, for example, on line one, sales automation enablement and intelligence, there are 508 companies that offer software to do something in that space, you just go down to line six CRM, there’s 336 different CRM companies.

So Salesforce, Hubspot, and so on and so forth.

So Katie, when you see this buffet of marketing technology, what comes to mind?

It’s too much, it is too much.

That is the first thing I thought when we started talking about this last week is, these are too many.

There’s too many choices for people.

And what I can’t wrap my head around is, if there are 508, sales automation enablement and intelligent platforms.

What’s that? What’s the difference between all of those things, you know, aside from, they’re not going to tell you the price or the features on the website.

So they’re gonna force you to get on the phone with a sales guy to do a demo to find out within 30 seconds that you don’t need this thing that it doesn’t answer any of your questions.

Like, to me this is bonkers.

9000 different pieces of software.

To solve a problem, it is to like, as a decision maker, I sit here and I’m like, Well, how do I know if what I’m currently using is the best of the best? How do I stay up to date.

So if we just pick one category, one category still has over 50 options, there is nothing on here that has less than 80 options to pick from.

And it’s overwhelming.

So that’s my takeaways it is overwhelming, Chris?

It is.

And in fact, Scott and the team have this really fa