content marketing

Now that I’ve been speaking as a paid professional for several years, a lot of people ask me how to become a speaker.   By no means am I an expert on this topic and there are plenty of people and organizations that provide services and content specifically to help aspiring speakers (see partial list below.)  But I have learned a few things  about how the business works and so I thought I’d share what I know about becoming a professional speaker.

The media business used to be fairly simple. It operated on linear model, consisting of content, distribution and audience, with a small priesthood of publishers, producers and programing executives making editorial decisions for the rest of us. Stars were created by the choices they made.

Marketing used to be pretty simple. To promote your brand, you used mass media to reach large audiences and create widespread awareness about your product or service. If you crafted a powerful message, the approach could work wonders. Most of the great brands of the 20th century were built that way.

Content, in theory, should be a boon to marketers. The Content Marketing Institute says that “consumers have shut off the traditional world of marketing“ and touts content as a “strategic marketing approach that can attract and retain audiences” and “drive profitable customer action.”

Until fairly recently, the options for marketers were relatively limited. Mass media—TV especially—offered the opportunity to reach millions, but only in the form of short ads sandwiched between lots of other stuff. Other tactics, such as trade shows, offered high engagement, but low reach.

1989 was a revolutionary year. From Berlin, Warsaw and Prague to Tiananmen Square and South Africa, the world order was completely overturned. Yet probably the most consequential event happened in a quiet lab in Lausanne, Switzerland.

When asked about what makes a great ad, advertising legend Leo Burnett advised, “Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.” He wanted his work to cut through, because as he also said, “If you don’t get noticed, you don’t have anything.”

A Wall Street Journal article titled Start Early to Raise Money-Savvy Kids states:

We needn't look much further than our everyday lives to realize that the way we consume, share and produce our own media has changed drastically. The major forces in this evolution are largely a combination of hardware and software (mobile) combined with connectivity (social) all accelerated in the context of time which gives the impression of immediacy (real-time).

In a Harvard Business Review blog post titled The Content Marketing Revolution, the author writes: