Leaving my desk and heading to conferences isn’t usually my style. But I make an exception for Content Summit Australia.
It’s organised by the really decent bunch at Brisbane-based marketing agency The Content Division. They attract great speakers and organise a slick AF conference. You’d never guess that 2025 was only its third year.
The summit is
- A day of talks and panels delivered by marketers and creators
- A buzz, attracting a 600-strong audience, largely made up of marketers and marketing teams
- Held at the Brisbane Powerhouse (proper nice)
- Kinda pricey but the ticket includes as much free coffee as you want, all your food, and drinks at the post-summit networking event.
(Just the two coffees for me, but I made the most of the beer and wine in the evening. While staying professional, of course.)
Bear Bones Coffee keeping all attendees energised at CSA.
There’s a lot to take on board in a single, stimulating but hectic day. Then there’s figuring out how to apply the lessons to benefit my business and yours. In fact the summit was in March and I’m only publishing this several weeks later. That should give you an idea of how long I needed to mull over everything.
So here we are. I listened, I learned, and now I’m ready to share the eight marketing lessons I took away from this tip-top day of talks.
All of these things can make a difference for small business marketing. And so you can test them for yourself, I’ve included a simple yet practical way you can implement these marketing moves in your business.
1. Real experiences sell
People buy from people and this is proving ever-truer in the AI-era.
Opening speaker Toni Westlake from Redballoon, presented a case study describing her team’s real-life approach to marketing the company’s product: experience days. You know, stuff like hot air balloon rides, track days, helicopter flights, and diving trips for people you love. (Or subtly want to bump off.)
Instead of only showing polished ads and photos, Toni and her team took a candid camera approach. They asked the Redballoon team (and some selected social influencers) to live the experiences and capture them however they wanted. Here’s an example.
‘Showing real people actually doing the thing, increased engagement and sales,’ said Toni. Besides that, brand memorability increased beyond key sales dates—Christmas, Mother’s/Father’s Day, summer holidays etc. Redballon’s visibility remained steady over the entire year. It no longer peaked in prime holiday and gift giving periods, then dropped off a cliff.
🤘 Make it work for your business 🤘
Show you and your team using your products and services. Get plenty of candid, genuine behind-the-scenes content—actions, events, commutes to work—so more people can see what you do. Share these moments in your blog, email newsletters, or on your social channels.
2. Don’t put too much stock in audience personas
I like Toni Westlake’s take on this, but it’s controversial.
Audience persona work is very useful. Especially for new businesses. Creating an imaginary profile of your ideal customer or client—the one you’d love to attract to your business all of the time—is a great way to focus your marketing. But. But… Maybe it’s better to use them as a starting point only.
Here’s how Toni phrased it.
“Personas lead. Customers inform.”
Deciding where and how to allocate your marketing efforts and budget needs insights from real customers to inform and verify those decisions. As Toni explained, the best way to do that is to find effective ways to hear from and really listen to (not at all the same things) your customers. Do that by
- reading their comments on your social posts
- reading and responding to their reviews on review sites
- picking up the phone to speak to them
- spending time reading (or watching, or listening) to the media that holds their attention.
🤘 Make it work for your business 🤘
Read your reviews. All of them. Then create a document that captures these three things from each review
- how the customer felt before they found you
- the quality of their experience with your business
- how they felt afterwards.
Does what they’re saying match up with your customer persona? If not, you might want to edit or expand that persona to reflect your customers’ perspectives and the reality or their experience. Next, hunt down the channels and media your ideal customer is reading and commenting on.
What do you notice about
- the type of media being published?
- the language used?
- the pain points being discussed?
Not got any reviews yet or don’t regularly collect them? Download my review request template. It’s free.
3. Always know what you’re trying to achieve …
… and for whom and why this should matter to them
Erin McEniery, product manager at the Natural History Museum, London (NHM) dedicated her talk to this single and highly-important marketing question.
Why though?
It’s a memeable question.
To get your best business outcomes and meet the needs of your customers, keep asking, ‘Why though?’ And don’t settle for what looks like the obvious answer or the first solution.
Erin illustrated the importance of ‘Why though?’ by describing a marketing dilemma that her NHM team had to fix.
The problem: Low ticket sales for a carefully curated, family-friendly bird exhibition. The missed ticket targets were ruffling management’s feathers.
The desired outcome: increase ticket sales and make up some of the shortfall before the exhibition ended.
The solution: well, therein lies the lesson.
Unable to fathom why people—particularly families— weren’t flocking to see the exhibition, called for a meeting. Ideas flew. (Sorry, I’m done with the bird puns now.) They could print more flyers. They could spend more on ad campaigns. They could rewrite the whole site, get posters done, run more out of home ads…
And so it went on.
Erin took a deep breath. (Probably.) And encouraged the team to slow down and ask “Why though?” In this case, why weren’t people coming? And the only people who could answer that were the museum visitors. So the team got out there and asked them.
Families already visiting the museum were asked if they had tickets to the bird exhibition. Many didn’t. And the reasons? They didn’t understand what was in the display. They worried that just birds wouldn’t hold the attention of their kids for long enough. They didn’t want to spend money on something they didn’t think they’d get good value from.
Once the team understood what the problem was, (addressing parents’ concerns about kid-friendliness and value for money) they knew how to adapt their marketing to fix it. Asking, ‘Why though?’ saved them time and, I bet, budget.
🤘 Make it work for your business 🤘
Before you invest time and money in creating marketing materials to fix a business problem , always ask “Why though?” Why are we making this and what are we trying to fix by doing so?
Dig deeper into the issue rather than fixating on obvious problems and time-honoured solutions. Talk to your target audience. What they say may well surprise you and give you the insight and impetus you need to refine your marketing successfully.
4. Feed your creativity by reading great marketing books
Russel Howcroft has worked in advertising for 35 years and is often on Aussie TV shows and podcasts discussing the industry. In his keynote talk he conceded that AI is useful for “data and crunching numbers” but it can’t compete with human ingenuity and creativity. (I agree. AI copywriting will never match what people can create.)
Russel urged anyone needing to be creative and market their business to build a library. Reading a range of legendary marketing books—from Ogilvy to Russel’s publications—will help you stay ahead of Arseifical Intelligence.
🤘 Make it work for your business 🤘
Russel suggested 10 books, but I listed five that I think are most useful for small business owners. Buy or find them in your local library, and get reading.
- The Want Makers: The World of Advertising, by Eric Clark
- Brand Failures, by Matt Haig
- How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know, by Byron Sharp
- The Right Brain Workout, by Russel Howcroft and Alex Wadelton
- Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders, by Adam Morgan
5. Show up consistently
Social media managers’ mantra is ‘to succeed on social, you must show up consistently.’ But this message isn’t just important for social marketing. According to Russel, it matters for any kind of marketing.
His message was that spending big on one dazzling campaign is tempting and might give you a spike in success. But beyond that, you increase the chances of fading and fizzling out because you’ve blown your budget.
A better approach? Divide your marketing budget in 12 and spend the same each month. Showing up consistently keeps you in front of your ideal people for longer.
🤘 Make it work for your business 🤘
Look at what you can spend on marketing—in dollar value, resources and time. What does that look like if you divide those things evenly over a 12-month marketing period? Now structure your content marketing plan around ideas and campaigns that you can achieve within your monthly timeframes and budget this year. Don’t panic if it doesn’t seem like much. It’ll be different (hopefully bigger) next year.
6. Don’t be a brand burden
Rachael Sarra is a Goreng-Goreng Indigenous artist who collaborates with brands wanting to support and elevate First Nations art. In her session about art and allyship she highlighted how brands unintentionally place extra burdens on the communities they want to champion.
Stocking a product or working with someone from within that community isn’t enough. (It’s the greenwashing, rainbow washing, DEI on face-value washing that many brands fall prey to.) To be a true ally it’s up to you, the brand, to educate yourself and your customers. That’s not the role of the artist or creative. Putting forward a clear case for how your brand benefits the community, and vice versa, is on you.
This talk really made me think about the work I’ve done with the sex work community and how I use my business as part of my allyship to support the community.
🤘 Make it work for your business 🤘
If you’re a business that looks to support causes that matter to you, rethink how you’re approaching your allyship and how you help the community. Beyond stocking and selling products are there other proactive ways you could educate yourself about what the community wants and needs?
7. Question the data
I picked this up from Rachael Sarra’s talk, but it was reiterated by several presenters. And the point was this.
Data is only useful if you dig deeper into it and ask questions about it.
It’s just one part of how a story is formed and told.
I loved the way Rachael Sarra phrased it. “Data gives us what we already have. It doesn’t encourage new questions or curiosity.”
This view paired well with a talk from Analiese Stitt from the Australian Bureau of Statistics about how they have a crazy amount of data to work with. But figures alone don’t tell the whole story. (Or enough of a story for it to be engaging and interesting.) But being curious about how those figures came to be, that really makes for interesting stories. This approach links to the earlier lesson of always asking “Why though?”
🤘 Make it work for your business 🤘
Look at your business data. Pick out three interesting points. (Examples: most sold product or service, how people hear about you, data that compares your early business days to now.) Question that data. How and why does it show the results it does? What does this say about your business and its story?
8. Speed and impulsive decisions can outperform careful curation
The final lesson comes from the creators of the Betoota Advocate (BA). Annoyingly, it contradicts most of what I’ve been peddling throughout this entire article—take your time, question, and think about what you’re doing—this leads to strong marketing results.
Antony Stockdale and Wendell Hussey, the BA creators, gave a resounding, “Yeahnah, she’ll be right” to that idea. Apparently, articles written in 15-30 minutes can (and regularly do) outperform ones that take hours, weeks, or months to research and pull together. That kinda blows my time tracking real talk out of the water.
If you’re outside Australia and aren’t familiar with the Betoota Advocate, it’s a satirical news site. A bit like Private Eye in the UK or late night shows in the US. But with a lot more swearing.
Anthony and Wendell also made a powerful case for resharing content. Sure it saves time, but repetition also builds on thein-jokes that help cement your community. They cited a post they share year-on-year and even get heckled by their audience if they don’t share it fast enough. (Tried to find the one they meant, and couldn’t.) The message: once you’ve published something it’s not done and dusted. There’s still more you can do with it.
🤘 Make it work for your business 🤘
Veer off your structured content marketing plan from time to time. If a juicy story or event crops up that you know your audience will enjoy, write something up. Take a ‘done is better than perfect’ approach and see how that flies. You can always fine-tune it later. (And even reshare/republish.)
The printable version of all eight lessons
Told you it was a big day with a lot to take in. So here’s a recap. Using my best brevity copywriting skills, I’ve created a quick-look version that you can print out and stick to your whiteboard (or desk, or pinboard).
The eight points are:
- Real experiences sell. Show yourself and your team using and doing ‘your stuff’ as much as possible. (Authenticity and colour and movement matter more than ever in the age of Arseificial Intelligence.)
- Create audience personas but verify them by listening to your actual audience. Note how people feel before, during, and after working with your business. The two should match up.
- If something isn’t going to plan, don’t rush to create a solution. Take a moment. Ask, “Why though?” to uncover any missed or mysterious problems before you select or settle on a marketing action.
- Stay creative by reading great marketing books about advertising and brands.
- Swap spending all of your marketing budget on one big bang moment, for showing up consistently. You’re more likely to remain memorable if your audience sees less of you, more often.
- If you hope to be an ally to a community or a cause, make sure you’re a benefit, not a burden. Educate yourself and ask how you can serve them, not the other way around.
- Data can help tell a story, but always question the numbers and dig into how that data came to be. That’s where you’ll find the really good stuff.
- Veering off script from time to time can produce some surprising wins. Speedy, impulsive decisions and the marketing materials they create can outperform carefully curated pieces.
Successful marketers are talking about and doing these things now so their businesses and the brands they work with are making money.
If you liked this post and want more tips and marketing insights, sign up to my Copy Quickie—a fortnightly email that takes about three-minutes to read and includes one copywriting tip, one link to a useful bit of content, and one chance to grab my time. (For when you fancy hiring me to write your copy.)
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