Women in Content Virtual Webinar Series Was A Success

By The CMA on

The CMA’s Women in Content breakfast has been an extremely popular event over the last few years, albeit as a physical event. Adapting to new circumstances, we decided to take the event online for 2020! Not knowing what the response would be, we dived in with high spirits and were blown away by the incredible engagement, and insights provided by each of our speakers.

The plan was to provide an engaging experience for our content marketing community, and for them to take away tips to apply to their own strategy, as well as discussions on how they can support their own team to encourage more women in marketing to become content experts.

The five female content marketing experts recap their talks for you to read…

Speaker 1: Nicola Bray, The Great Reset

Nicola Bray, Founder of MAZE Media. The Great Reset: The Future of Content Marketing

“It was a pleasure to be part of the women in content series with the CMA this week. And it was great to be able to share my thoughts on the Future of Content Marketing.

It’s still very early to say for sure anything definitive as we are still in a very reactive phase but the world post Covid is going to look different. We will need to look at what motivates people, their desires, needs, wants, and pain points.

Some key questions we need to consider when thinking about our future content marketing campaigns are:

  1. How will people’s buying habits change?

  2. What will people have realised they can live without?

  3. Where will people want to redistribute money?

  4. How will social attitudes have changed?

  5. Will there be more emphasis on ethics?

  6. Will content be consumed differently

I discussed the online revolution, the advancements in platforms like zoom and our new appreciation of the ‘real’ experiences and human interactions and along where new opportunities will lie. Consumers could emerge from the crisis with some very different priorities, values and attitudes – all of which could impact how they want to spend their time and money.

The overall theme was the importance of the need for content to be created from human insight and for our future campaigns to develop creative ideas that connect with people on a more emotional, subconscious level. We are so consumed with data and insights from this that sometimes we lose sight of the real humans we are talking to.

We will need to excite and delight our future customers and prospects with our campaigns and strategies.”

Speaker 2: Rowan Morrison, What would Fleabag do?

Rowan Morrison, Founder and MD of brand purpose agency, Rationale.
What would Fleabag do?

“The gender divide in creative agencies is profound. Only 1% are founded by women and the gender pay gap in agency leadership roles is increasing.

This divide lingers because of unconscious (and conscious) bias in hiring practices and the traditional agency culture rewarding traits like bullishness, long working hours and self-promotion. To combat it, we need to adopt a new style of empathetic and inclusive leadership, which will create agencies built on compassion, collaboration and the freedom to be vulnerable. 

But don’t just take it from me, take it from some of my favourite female TV characters…

“People make mistakes. That’s why they put rubbers at the end of pencils.” Fleabag

Vulnerability is a good thing. Agencies can tend to operate a pervasive blame culture that has everyone on the back foot. Ego is also an issue. But out of mistakes comes creativity, so let’s form agencies where fallibility is celebrated, and people feel safe to try new things. 

“Even if you see them coming, you’re not ready for the big moments. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The best talent isn’t always screaming LOOK AT ME, PROMOTE ME at you sitting on top of a neon unicorn, it can be modest and sitting in a corner quietly knocking it out the park day after day. Again, empathy in leadership is what creates a culture where every person is noticed and rewarded for their value. But that won’t happen for everyone, so it’s to a degree on us as women to throw ourselves at those big moments even if we’re scared of them – these are the moments that develop us and make us who we want to be.

“I’ve decided life is to short not to be honest” Alicia Florrick (The Good Wife)

Leadership shouldn’t be a dictatorship. The best agencies are those where the wider team can instigate change. If you see something happening in your agency you don’t like – you should be able to speak up about it to your CEO – with a plan for how you intend to support in addressing it. If they’re not open to hearing this, I’d suggest you find a new place of work…”

Speaker 3: Kirsty Hulse, Lifting yourself up, build your own confidence, and use this time to have better ideas

Kirsty Hulse, Founder of training and coaching company, Roar!
Lift yourself up, build your own confidence, and use this time to have better ideas

“Having worked in content for nearly 10 years I dedicated a lot of my time in trying to do play my small part in levelling the professional playing field, primarily through offering women free presentation and confidence training. This eventually grew into a business and my sole focus now is supporting teams to be powerful creators and collaborators.

In my work as a coach I’ve seen people struggle to stay confident amongst such uncertainty, in low energy environments where our sources of validation have been depleted and we are without the direct, face to face support of our teams. In my talk I shared some tips on how people can lift themselves up and build their own confidence within these parameters and how to positively use this time to have better ideas. Research has shown that true creativity happens offline, so if we make some small tweaks to how we work this could be an optimal time for tapping into our most powerful ideas.”

Speaker 4: Olivia Lott, Effective communication with your teams, and how to make sure your objectives suit your team members

Olivia Lott, Outreach Manager at iProspect.
Effective communication with your teams, and how to make sure your objectives suit your team members

“I took part in this event to share why it’s so important to cultivate a way of working that suits individuals’ personalities and plays to their strengths and ambitions. Making sure professional objectives suit your team members is essential to helping them flourish (which seems obvious, yet so many one-size-fits-all blanket policies still persist!).

One of my favourite methods for discovering more about what makes our personalities tick is the Myers Briggs framework, because it’s so much more insightful than many other personality matrixes out there – and there’s a great website which helps to guide you through it. The ‘Workplace Habits’ section is particularly useful, and breaks down how our qualities come through in different lights depending on who it is we’re interacting with, i.e. our bosses, our colleagues or our direct reports. I’d encourage everyone to give this a go to learn more about themselves, but also to encourage your teams to do the same.

When setting professional objectives, it’s vital to recognise that qualities your team has don’t always have to sit in the ‘strong’, ‘loud’, ‘proud’ realm. Being able to confidently present to a room full of people is not a measure of your intelligence, capabilities or contribution to the bigger picture; it’s simply one thing that a certain type of person can do well, and that’s ok. But setting an objective such as ‘present back to the company three times a year’ for someone whose qualities, talents and ambitions are so far away from that is not productive. We need to fall out of love with qualities like ‘authoritative’, ‘competitive’ and ‘dominant’ being the only path to successful leadership – and we can only do that by challenging unconscious bias.

There are different types of unconscious bias which have a particular impact on workplaces, and it’s so important to make every effort to recognise these within ourselves; if we don’t recognise it, how can we ever challenge it and learn to see things differently? Harvard’s Implicit Bias test is a great tool to help you identify what biases may be clouding your own thinking (be warned: the results aren’t always flattering, but that’s kind of the point!).”

Speaker 5: Stephanie McGrath, Stop Looking for Unicorns, Start Looking for Potential

Stephanie McGrath, Vice President of Strategy at VERB Interactive.

Stop Looking for Unicorns, Start Looking for Potential

“In 2015, marketing star Seth Godin proclaimed “You need editors, not brand managers, who will push the envelope to make the thing go forward,”.

This call to arms signified a content marketing tipping point; a wider realization of the importance of content to any solid, integrated communications and marketing program. But, with no specific post-secondary degree or official training program track, many brands and organisations understood the need for content marketers, but not necessarily where or how to find them.

Having worked directly in the field for many years, I’ve been able to determine how to recognize talent, pull from appropriate backgrounds, and identify how to train these candidates.

PR/Communications, Journalism and Marketing backgrounds are all good places to start as each background provides one or more foundational skills required to become a content marketer. However, liberal arts degree graduates with a proven passion for content creation and fine arts graduates can also be talented team members. Additional screening can look for the following attributes:

  • A fresh perspective
  • Creativity
  • Curious in technology, content and digital trends
  • Fast and deadline-driven
  • A talented writer
  • A multi-tasker
  • Empathetic
  • Articulate and convincing

Ideally, the path of a content marketer (in my opinion), moves from Content Creator, to Strategist to – finally – the ability to envision the big picture and the path forward, along with all the moving parts and team members required to build up a full content marketing program. And from there? Our fully formed talent hunts for new potential hires to bring into the fold.”

The CMA’s Marketing and Events Manager, Natasha looked back on the morning and said, “We had five varied talks which were really engaging, about different areas in content marketing and women in business that we don’t usually get to hear about. We had plenty of questions put to each of our speakers, with lots of chatter between those joining us and some following each other on LinkedIn, and they all joined in to thank the speakers for “insightful” and “inspiring” talks.

We are delighted that we were still about to provide a great networking opportunity for our community, as well as provide a space for them to learn something new which they can apply to their own strategies. Thank you for all the brilliant feedback, and thanks so much to our five fab female speakers.

If you weren’t able to join us, you can watch the full event replay:

The CMA are continuing to put on free webinars as part of our CMA Learning series, to help up-skill your content marketing whilst we are all constrained to working from home. Take a look at the upcoming schedule.

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