Meghan Graham: Build It And They Won’t Come—Learn What To Do Next

Meghan Graham, Executive Strategy Director, T Brand at The New York Times spoke at JumpCon on audience and content strategy. She opened with a mention of the goldfish stat. You know, the one that says humans have an 8-second attention span? Spoiler alert, it’s not true. Segwaying, Meghan gifted us with several stats proving quite the opposite. People spend their time listening to 150M podcasts monthly, 94% of top execs read newsletters, and long-form content (2,000+ words) gets the highest clicks on the internet.

Here’s where things get confusing. Meghan’s said that content marketing generates 3X the leads that regular marketing does and 82% of consumers have a positive opinion about a company after reading custom content. However, only 20% of marketers say that their content is very successful.

“Anything that’s in a box that can be identified as advertising is ignored. The thing that we’re not thinking about, is that if you’re treating content like an ad, people are going to ignore that too. And too often, brands are too busy talking about themselves in their content which ends up being a really long ad, which is not what people want to see.”

-Meghan Graham

So, what’s the deal? People have developed banner blindness. Watch the video of Meghan Graham speaking at JumpCon below—learn what it takes for people to see your content.

If you’d like to click through Meghan’s slides while watching the video, you can download the slides here. I’m biased as a content marketer, but Meghan Graham’s talk is the one to watch if you’re in the market for a content strategy.

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