A big thank you to our brilliant speakers Izzie Kalajam, Luke Wheatley, Alissia Oddi and Sarah Mak for sharing their expertise and valuable knowledge at our recent event. This article aims to share some key points made at the event that you can take away and use.

Izzie Kalajam from Deloitte Digital

Our first speaker, Izzie from Deloitte Digital, shed some light on the importance of decluttering your content and creating content with a purpose. She shared that 58% of content is seen as clutter and encouraged the audience to 'Marie Kondo' your content. Three easy steps to ensure that your content aligns with your brand are:
  1. Set a content vision
  2. Conduct a content audit
  3. Design and test the content
Taking this approach avoids overproducing content and ensures that the content is meaningful and can be easily comprehended by your audience. Instead of asking "if this sparks joy" like Marie Kondo, ask "does this content align with our content vision". Also look at how much it's costing the business to create a single piece of content, a very important question for marketers to keep in mind.

Luke Wheatley from Flight Centre

Our second speaker Luke Wheatley shared Flight Centre’s unique content strategy. Despite, the rise of influencer marketing, Flight Centre’s content strategy focuses on the idea of ‘For travellers by travellers’. Some of Flight Centre’s most successful campaigns such as, The 48 Hour Destination TV show, showcased real Flight Centre consultants travelling to global destinations. This strategy was highly effective in increasing sales as the content was inspiring and resonated with their audience. Flight Centre have very high brand awareness and Luke stressed that awareness doesn't necessarily translate to sales so marketers need to be very clear about their brand DNA to appeal to both the head and the heart. Luke also spoke of the "filter bubble" that consumers are now influenced by. That is, that people only follow brands that appeal to them and support their beliefs and opinions. They only click on items that meet these criteria too and therefore social media channels select to further expose them to items that they are predisposed to like. It creates a bubble for each of us as individuals that is hard to penetrate. Brands, therefore, need to think about how we say different things to different customers, to tailor content and talk to people in different ways.

Alissia Oddi from City Beach

Our third speakers Alissia from City Beach shared some tips for fast fashion businesses. Her first tip was ‘Content quality is key’. She stressed the importance of having a content calendar to keep content fresh and relevant. With a small team of just 3,  being organised helps them to priortise their content efforts. She also shared some insight into City Beach’s micro influencer strategy. From their experience, focusing on micro influencers with 5,000 to 30,000 followers can enhance engagement and increase turnaround due to the advantage of their high authenticity with their followers. Alissia spoke of how in a business which has 1500 new styles on the website every week, getting a timely turn around from influencers is key. City Beach has found an effective strategy to manage this is to take their influencers to a fun location, gift them outfits and organise to get their content on their timeline.

Sarah Mak from TheStoryBoxes

Our final speaker Sarah from TheStoryBoxes shared her belief that 'what you stand for is greater than what you sell'. Therefore you need to know your story and understand the brand DNA. She shared her insights into the process of coming up with a storytelling concept, how we should embed storytelling into our content strategy and magic of humour. Three things Sarah recommended we look at when storytelling are:
  1. Uniqueness - what's special about what you do
  2. Complexity - the individuals and products, story of your organisation, why you do what you do
  3. Desire - what are you going to do to fight for what you want to achieve
Sarah talked about how customers can be storytellers and communicate your brand values. She also spoke of how unless there is empathy, we can't connect with the brand we associate with.  

Thank you

Thank you to XCOM, Audience Group, Just Digital People, Lamb Agency and Vmation for sponsoring this event. [A big thank you to Cindy and Ha, students at QUT Business School who assisted in writing this article and in sharing social media at the event.]