This past week, 2,500 marketers from 50 countries descended upon Cleveland, Ohio for the hugely popular Content Marketing World conference. With 175 speakers and over 70 sponsors, attendees had the opportunity to glean insightful tips and emerging trends from companies like LinkedIn, Oracle, the Wall Street Journal and dozens of tech companies touting sophisticated marketing platforms and analytics.

Below are some thoughts and key takeaways from my personal perspective.

Key Highlights and Favorites:

• Andrew Davis, the high energy author of Brandscaping, stressed the importance of creating a prolific amount of outstanding content in order to exceed consumers' expectations and create an exponential increase in ROI. Davis also advocates for C-suite executives to fully support content marketing efforts and integrate every possible asset at a company's disposal.
• Scott Stratten, a top influencer in the social media space, offered some great perspective and skewered some really questionable tactics (like QR codes on cell phone messages). Stratten also writes a highly entertaining and insightful blog, which is definitely worth a read.
• Kevin Spacey, who recounted the shift from stodgy big studio and network productions to the more daring independent programming from the likes of Netflix and HBO. Plus, his comments were often delivered in character—usually in the form of President Frank Underwood from House of Cards, which made the session really fun.
• And, finally, one of the coolest things that I saw was a cartoonist creating real-time infographics, which captured key concepts and ideas from the sessions – certainly an example of content marketing at its best.

Best Practices and Common Threads
From a strategic perspective, there were some key elements I heard time and time again that contribute to a successful content marketing program. At the core, you need to:

• Define your goals – is it raw numbers? Warm leads? Increased sales?
• Identify your target audiences and develop unique customer personas
• Build the right internal team or outsource personnel with the necessary skill sets, including those who can provide strategic insight, tactical execution and prolific creative abilities
• Utilize delivery and distribution platforms to maximize efficiency
• Leverage your social channels to build awareness
• Apply metrics and ongoing analysis to assess and improve upon campaign performance

And, finally, commit to producing truly authentic, informative and relevant content (without the hype) and understand the objective is not necessarily impressions or clicks. Rather, it's about long-term generation of customer engagement leading toward advocacy and action.

A Final Thought
As I reflect back on all the great insight, what really struck me is that content marketing is simply the latest iteration of the successful PR/marketing campaigns that companies and brands have been executing for decades.

Alternatively called advertorial, sponsored content, syndicated content, custom publishing, native advertising and the like, content marketing is certainly receiving a great deal of attention as PR, marketing and advertising continues to merge.

In its latest form, content marketing blends well-crafted, informative, entertaining or otherwise relevant storytelling delivered to targeted groups, and incorporates sophisticated tracking and analytics to measure scope and influence. It really is the essence of great marketing and quite frankly, what we at Family Features have been doing for 40 years—placing editorially-relevant, sponsored messages in outlets across the country that reach millions of readers nationwide.

At the end of the day, no matter what you call it, content marketing -- when executed correctly -- simply blows away conventional advertising due to its incredible ROI and viral capability. Great storytelling, which is at the heart of successful content marketing, engages your customers and moves them in ways that create lasting relationships with your brands and your company.

If you attended Content Marketing World this year – what were the highlights in your opinion?