Lessons from BuzzFeed and NewsCred’s webinar, “Creating Content for Millennials: Why It Matters + Strategies for Success”

Beyoncé wasn’t built in a day—neither was BuzzFeed. And both began their ascents around the same time.

It was 2005 when Bey realized there was only one, true Destiny’s Child. And it was 2006 when Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti launched BuzzFeed as “an experimental lab that focused on tracking viral content and making things people wanted to share.” Score.

More marketers are spending time, money and resources on content marketing than ever before. In fact, 42 percent of businesses now publish new content at least weekly. However, the majority of these efforts continue to fail. Why is this? While the reasons are wide-ranging, I see some mistakes happening over and over again:

A recent study by Ascend2 revealed that 53 percent of marketers feel a lack of internal content creation resources is their biggest content marketing challenge. If content marketing is part of your job description, you may feel 53 percent is a little low, given all the researching, writing, editing and image searching that goes into creating a single blog post. Luckily, your audience can appreciate content you share that isn’t necessarily penned by you. Sharing content with your prospects and customers that you didn’t create to build trust and credibility is called “content curation,” and it’s an important tool in the content marketer’s toolbox.

Lessons from Copyblogger CEO and Founder Brian Clark 

No matter how much game you think you have, your relationships start off cold.

Over time, they heat up (or should, if it’s in the cards). Some faster than others—some slower.

The same goes for brands’ relationships with their audiences. And do you know where the relationship is at its coldest? At the social media touchpoint.

I’ll admit it. Before I started my own marketing firm, I worked in other advertising and PR firms and often hated what we produced: pithy, uppity ads that sounded super clever and trendy, like a bunch of skinny, uber-hipster millennials wearing tight jeans and thick-rimmed glasses came up with them while drinking their fifth nonfat soy green-tea lattes and smirking ironically. I think this actually happened. A lot.

To me the ads, brochures, taglines, marketing “collateral” and other “stuff” we produced seemed vapid and clever for the sake of being clever — like we were trying to impress ourselves and other marketing people. Plain language, simplicity and directness were dismissed for their lack of creativity and artistic flair.

When scrolling through Vine the other night, I came across a ton of videos with the text overlay “dubsmash.com.” How? One of my favorite celebrity Viners, Eric Stonestreet of Modern Family, was re-vining tons of these videos showing fans acting out one of his character Cam’s hysterical scenes.