Contently Named Best Overall Content Marketing Company

Aspiring to be a customer-centric company may sound obvious, but it takes a lot of work to maintain that status on a daily basis. I’ve found that the key to serving your customers is distinguishing between ideas that are good and ideas that are right for the business. Plenty of brands can come up with a solution that’s interesting or entertaining or creative. But will that solution ultimately help your clients perform better?

Contently was named Best Overall Content Marketing Company for 2018 by the MarTech Breakthrough Awards. We beat out over 2,000 entries for the honor, and I believe focusing on what’s right for our clients was a huge reason why. We’re always mindful of how changes to our product and services affect the way we service our clients. Will a new feature really help marketers create better content? What aren’t we thinking about? Where can we do better? Where can we grow?

Our biggest move this year was the release of ContentlyOne, the marketing industry’s first all-in-one content solution. We wanted to make sure we were practicing what we preached on our blog and at events, so building it required a lot of communication with our customers. Early results have already been promising. RBC, for example, has scaled content across 22 different teams. Walmart, meanwhile, found an approach that consistently connects its content to revenue.

I’m thrilled that the work we’re doing is receiving recognition, but it’s important that we don’t get complacent. We still have a lot of work to do, and our core values—accountability, curiosity, empathy, and candor—exist to make sure we continuously improve. We want to keep speaking openly and honestly to both our customers and the content marketing industry at large. We want to understand their challenges and find ways to address them. Most importantly, we want to help them achieve their goals and own the customer experience.

While we’re on the subject of customer experience, Mark Cuban has this quotation that I’ve always appreciated: “It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help, than it is to try to mend a broken customer relationship.”

From day one, that’s how Contently has operated. And as we look to build on awards like this, that’ll continue to be our philosophy.