I’ve spent the best part of last week learning from some of the world’s best communicators, marketers and PR professionals at the PR Institute of Australia’s national conference. From getting the low down on the social media strategy for Obama’s election campaigns to insights into how the Boston Police Department became the single, most trusted and timely source of information behind the Boston Bombings this year, it was all completely fascinating for a communications nerd like me!

The word ‘content’ is getting bandied around in marketing spheres a lot right now.  But what exactly do us marketers mean and how, when you’re so close to your own brand, or are your own brand, do you keep the spark alive and create meaningful info, imagery, video, etc that will engage, inspire and drive people to your website to buy?

Here are my top three picks from the conference which might reignite that spark and inspire you to shake things up a bit and get creative:

Are you following the 4 C’s of engaging content?

The Crescenzos were a whirlwind from America’s windy city, Chicago, giving brilliant examples of the good and the bad of corporate communications.  One of the main takeaways were their four Cs principal.  When writing a blog post, social media content or web copy for example, always ask yourself whether it fits the following framework:

• Concise
• Conversational
• Compelling
• Creative

And the last ‘C’, are you being courageous?  Can you say you’re challenging the status quo, doing something a bit different and differentiating yourself within your niche?  Don’t just churn out the same old stuff, keep it fresh and they’re advice was to read Cosmopolitan and try and compete with their page turning imagery and text.

Go visual or go home!

Yianni Konstantopoulos, was part of Obama’s social media team for two election campaigns, and focussed on social media and digital, talking about how these rapidly growing and changing platform are disrupting whole industries.

His advice was to keep content relevant, timely and light-weight.  Ensure you use technology and the data it generates to constantly test and learn what your audience likes and doesn’t. And the most important takeaway, that content is moving much more visual, spearheaded by platforms including Vine, Slideshare, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr and Snapchat.

He used the excellent example of multi-award winning marketing campaign The Daily Twist by Oreo to illustrate how brands are using social media, graphic design, PR in a timely way to engage their audiences to drive sales.

What I love about this example is that I just think it’s so relatively easy to do. Okay, they would have spend thousands on the campaign, and yes its slick, has an expensive creative agency behind it, but look at the content. What they did was they listened to what was relevant, newsworthy and what people were already talking about and then created a nice sharable image, based upon their product, and shared it through their social networks. No distribution cost, some graphic design costs, but millions were not spend on an expensive advertising budget.

Data is your friend

Douglas Nicol at The Works was also an interesting bloke.  Did you know Australians are the heaviest user of Facebook on this planet??

His advice was to use as much data as possible to test and refine your messages using MailChimp, Google Analytics, Facebook insights… and the list goes on.

On Instagram, brands doing it well are those who post authentic, real, beautiful shots eg Sharpie, Brisk and with regards to what imagery is the most popular for sharing on Instragram in order of popularity food, portrait, artistic, scenic, weird shit.  For more information on how Australian’s are using social media click here.

And for those who dabble in the occasional ‘selfie’ here are three top (tongue-in-cheek!) tips:

1. If you’re doing it more than once a month you’re a try-hard
2. Over 25s shouldn’t be doing it, full stop
3. Develop a signature pose

As small business operators there has never been a better time to create something new, disrupt and old industry and create some content or a marketing campaign that will bring clients swarming to your door. Think about it.