William Tyree: Welcome to the brand intelligence podcast, the show where we pull back the curtain on some of the world’s smartest brands. I’m your cohost, William Tyree, and we’re here with my cohost, Tessa Court, who is founder and CEO of intelligence bank. Today, we’ll discuss our new 2024 content marketing trends report based on amalgamated data from 800, 000 users in 55 countries. Tessa. Welcome.

William Tyree: I’m so excited for this Tessa. There’s so much in this report. I think for people to glean,

Tessa Court: I can’t even believe, yeah, I can’t even believe we’re able to like, get that out in time because there was so much data there that was just so rich and with so many great insights. yeah,it’s exciting to, share that with our clients and also perspective clients of intelligence bank about what’s the state of content marketing as well.

William Tyree: It’s incredible, actually. when you consider you’ve got represented are some of the world’s biggest brands, it’s a global audience. And I would just say that the data size really is staggering because typically when you see a report like this and you dig in, you find there’s 12 data points, right?

William Tyree: But, this is truly massive. And I think it comes at a really important time because marketing is just changing so damn fast. It is amazing. it’s changing faster now than at any time in my lifetime. so before we dive into the findings of what it means, let’s talk a little bit about what marketing and brand leaders are feeling at this time.

William Tyree: I know, as CEO of Intelligence Bank, you spent a ton of time talking to customers, most of whom are marketing and brand leaders, PR leaders, marketing ops, you name it. what have you been hearing the last 12 months? What’s the state of marketing in their mind?

Tessa Court: Yeah, I think everyone’s talking about AI, and doing a lot of experimentation and we’ll get to that later. But I guess there’s three themes that really stand out for me. one is doing more with less and, this race for efficiency. and I think what’s interesting about. a lot of our clients and what they’re feeling and even, if you read, the Gartner CMO study and, other sources of data as well, is that the quantity of projects are not going away, but the team sizes are, so it’s, how do you use technology to really amplify your presence?

Tessa Court: So we’re seeing as an example with some of our clients who manage brand portals as an example, like they used to have a team of 10, now they have a team of four, but they’re using technology to amplify. their presence across the organization as well. So I think that’s one thing. and I would say also, as spend is still increasing, but budgets overall for marketing is decreasing.

Tessa Court: So again, it’s like more ads, more AB testing, more projects, but fewer people to do that. So that’s a real challenge. And that’s where I think MarTech does come in. the other one is that teams are still really great. marketing teams, especially are flirting with agile and are going agile and are using that.

Tessa Court: So I think, McKinsey must have made a small fortune on advising companies on how to do that. But, when you have a fragmented marketing team, it’s hard because brand creative, quality of creative quality of messaging, usually works best when it’s a more hierarchical structure. But then when you have, marketing leaders embedded in brand teams or embedded rather into this project teams, it’s really easy.

Tessa Court: To do mediocre work. So I think one of the challenges that I’m hearing from a lot of our clients, especially who are agile is like, what are the systems and processes we can put in place to make it easy for marketers to do a great job every time, as well. and then I guess last but not least, brand is King.

Tessa Court: in increasingly commoditized markets, when information is so freely available. your brand has to stand out. You have to differentiate as well. and we’re seeing more and more of our clients not only using brand hubs, to educate people on, things like kerning and colors and fonts and things like that, but more importantly, to tell brand stories.

Tessa Court: So what are we about as a brand? What do we care about explaining brand values? And, we had one client who shared a quite hilarious story Really about the importance of brand education throughout an organization that, not a lot of people understand brand. they understand, colors, fonts, logos, those sorts of things, but they don’t understand brand value, brand sentiment.

Tessa Court: And that’s really where the magic happens, if you get every piece of creative representing that.they did this, thing where they went around and they evaluated their creative kind of every quarter and looked at if it was more or less on brand and kind of where things were sitting. And it is a spectrum, right?

Tessa Court: And you don’t want to squash creativity to narrow your focus so much that everything looks the same. But like you want to have a brand can expand. But, one of this particular client, one of their brand values was surprising. And an interpretation of that by one of the, more obscure business units was a donkey drinking wine in the ad.

Tessa Court: Now one could argue that is surprising, but it’s still not our brand. Yes, I guess to recap brand is king. King spending on brand is important, even if it’s not always measurable. and also ensuring that you’re explaining your brand to your team and also to your external partners is really critical at this point.

Listen to the full episode to see even more great conversation between Tessa Court and William Tyree…