Dave King
Percolate
Dave King, VP of marketing at Percolate, thinks content marketers ought to adjust their focus. “The question is how do I not just create more content, but how do I create content that people love?” he told me in our recent interview. “Marketing should really be a gift. I want to create marketing that people love to consume.”
Percolate offers a software platform for managing multichannel marketing activities. Among King’s “gifts” to his customers is this week’s Transition conference, a series of TED-style talks that don’t mention the Percolate brand at all. Investing in such difficult-to-measure brand-building activities is critical, he said: “Long-term brand investments are what make many great companies great, and they didn’t happen by accident.”
King also invests in developing the younger members on his team. “I think this generation is going to be an incredible group of marketers,” he said. “Millennials want to believe—they don’t do something they don’t really believe in, and I think that makes a better marketer.” At the same time, he recognizes that there is wisdom in experience, so “at our company, every marketer gets paired up with a peer mentor from a different company,” he continued. That way young marketers can learn from someone a little older or at a more mature company.
Highlights from this week’s Marketing Superstars podcast include:
The struggle to meet the increasing demand for content (3:00)
Producing content people love (6:55)
The importance of brand storytelling (7:55)
Why marketers need to develop content systems as well as campaigns (9:05)
How to convince the CEO to back efforts that are effective but hard to measure (16:08)
How will the next generation of marketers shape the way marketing is done? (18:08)