It’s become a bit of a cliché. “Hire folks who are better, smarter, and more creative than you, and you’ll be successful.” I do often wonder, however, how many people actually have the nerve to follow through on this advice? I will never know the answer to this question, but I can speak from my own experience that this approach has been the secret of my success so far. I have no interest in being the smartest person in the room; in fact, it’s a huge red flag for me if I feel that I can do someone’s job on my team better than they can.
Why did I spend the first paragraph of this post discussing this? Well, because one of the greatest benefits of my approach to building teams is that I am constantly learning from the people on themm. They are constantly striving to be better and in turn they are always making me better. This year, as we have worked to build and launch The Customer Edge, it’s been a wild and crazy ride full of learnings and lessons. I’d like to share with you some of the most important, tangible lessons I’ve learned this year about content marketing from my team:
1. Content Over Swag
My team decided to challenge convention this year by doing some content marketing in the conference expo at Content Marketing World 2014. It was a bold idea: to use our booth at the conference as a “genius bar”, where we would host some of the brightest minds in content marketing for some live engagement with the audience. Then, we turned the insights gleaned from these conversations into content (eBooks like this) that were shared with folks who gave us their information at the booth.
What I learned: Sometimes giving away content can provide even more utility to your audience than swag!
The Five Most Important Things My Team Taught Me About Content Marketing in 2014
