One of the sneaky things about blogging is the treadmill of content you have to produce. You may think you know a lot about your niche, but when you have to produce 1, 2, or 5 pieces of content every week you may soon find the well running dry fast.
There are plenty of tips out there to solve this. You can use tools to find out what other people in your niche are writing about. You can go to Quora and browse question topics. You can go back and update an old blog post. But where do really creative and new ideas come from?
I’d like to offer a suggestion on how to force creativity out of your brain. It’s called Parkinson’s Law. The formulation is “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” This originally referred to bureaucracies and their tendency to expand over time in the book that formulated the idea, but we’re going to leverage it a different way.
If you give yourself five hours to write a blog post, most likely you will not focus hard for the entire five hours. Instead you will find other tasks to fill the time and spread out the work over the time span. Even if you do focus the whole time the focus will be half-hearted.
However, if you limit your deadline to something short, most people can get a lot of work done very quickly. College students know this all too well, rushing to get their papers done before deadline. But you don’t have to set up your time so that you’re writing things at the last minute. Instead, give yourself two hours or even one hour to write the best article you can in a focused burst.
The key to making this trick work is to drop the task as soon as the time is up. Do not go back to it and tinker. Save that for another day or for a few hours afterward. You have to make your brain think that you only have so much time to finish an article before its due. If you really want to be brave, go ahead and push it to the deadline!
Not only will you be able to get your work done faster, but forcing your brain to work faster can have a very curious effect on creativity. If you know the deadline is coming up and there’s no way around it, you can discover new ideas and connections far faster than you thought you could.
So, instead of letting your work drag out over a long time, force yourself to complete tasks in a very short amount of time instead. You’ll find that you’ll be able to get far more done than you thought and you may stumble upon the next big idea.
This is a guest post by the guys from Adficient, an SEO and PPC management agency. Check them out.
Digital games has become one of the biggest activities on the internet. Games are in fact the biggest driver of revenue on both the iOS app store and Google Play. This rise of mobile gaming has even changed the demographics and consumption habits of an entire industry. Did you know that 52% of women are gamers?
The user base of Candy Crush is over 60% female, with 42% of these players between 21- 35 years old and almost 40% above 35 years old. However, a lot of bloggers have not capitalised on the digital games opportunity by earning advertising dollars from games advertisers or within games.
The huge shift in demographics has opened up a massive opportunity for bloggers, allowing them to monetize a much larger audience and therefore maximize their revenue potential.
There are several effective ways to monetize your traffic with digital games. Below is a list of 3 highly effective ways to do this, with guidance on how to do each.
1. Have a Games Portal on your Site.
A games portal is an area of your website that users can see a list of games and can play them within your website. Having a game portal on your site is a great way to engage your users for longer, helping to convert your site into a hub where users can spend more time.
Having a selection of popular and familiar games will help to engage more users which translates into increase repeat visitors and higher advertising revenue. These same users will then also visit your core content more frequently as well.
2. Embed Games into your Articles.
Inserting games into an article on your site has many benefits. In exchange for providing your users a free game, you can show them video pre-roll ads. Typically, a video ad would earn you a multiple of 5 times the CPM of a banner ad, so this is a highly monetizable ad unit which contributes highly to boosting your eRPM.
Additionally, users that play games will increase their time on page and your average user duration. This will increase the likelihood of them clicking on other ads on your site such as Google Adsense. A combination of both higher ad clicks and higher eCPM ad units can make a massive impact to your overall RPM.
There are 3 options to embed a game into your site. You can either custom build, license or white label a game. It’s important to get a HTML5 game as these can be played across all devices. To get a game custom built for you will cost around $10k per game. Acquiring a license costs around $999 per game, which is usually for a single site license. To white label a game you either pay on a usage basis, like pay as you go, or on a revenue share on advertising revenue generated.
Developing a custom-game is expensive but can be a good solution for a very large publisher like Yahoo. It requires a lot of time and technical expertise. Using a white label provider on a revenue share basis, such as AddPlay is free and is profitable from day 1 which is generally the best option for bloggers.
3. Generate Free Users and Traffic
Social media sites like Facebook are used by most people for entertainment. This makes for a great fit to engage users with any type of entertainment content, which is why a lot of entertainment sites get lots of traffic from Facebook.
If you have a Games Portal, not only can you drive your existing followers back into your site, but you can post on your social channels to engage a new audience of users. A percentage of these new users will then go onto read your core content, therefore, helping you to generate new users and increase your advertising income.
Have you monetized your site with digital games? Which of these strategies have worked well for you or would be most interesting to test?
With the increased use of content curation (the best marketers use a mix of 65% created, 25% curated, and less than 10% syndicated content), some unique challenges need to be addressed in a content marketing measurement strategy, including:
Marketers who are curating content are selecting, organizing, and contextualizing third-party assets.
Target audiences are not necessarily consuming content within branded experiences.
Content curators also are redirecting traffic to external sites and distributing content across multiple channels – including email, social media, and feeds in addition to branded sites and blogs.
These factors lead to two questions:
How can marketers demonstrate their success in using curated content to become a trusted authority on particular topics?
What are the relevant metrics for a content curation initiative?
Here is a guide to the metrics you should be tracking for each channel where you curate content, as well as the metrics you should ignore.
Page views and visitor growth – Building an audience over time is important. The metrics for websites and blogs featuring curated content are comparable to those featuring original content. It is still important to track overall activity.
Count of visits – Measure how frequently customers return to a curated site and/or blog. If customers consider the curated content relevant and useful, they are going to return time and again. Frequent returns demonstrate that the collection is a trusted source for the topic.
Days since last visit – When a content curation program is successful, customers return periodically to access the updated content. Not only can you learn how many times they revisit, you can see when they revisit. With that information, you can identify trends. For example, how many visitors return daily, weekly, or monthly?
To track “count of visits” and “days since last visit,” log in to Google Analytics, click on Audience, then Behavior, then Frequency & Recency, as shown:
Under Distribution, switch between Count of Sessions and Days Since Last Session, as shown:
If your site is like most others out there, the vast majority of visitors viewed it once. To better analyze your results for returning visitors, add a segment and filter by returning visitors:
Don’t care about these metrics:
Curated content is different from original content in one key respect. Customers may click through the curated content to third-party assets. Consequently, engagement, bounce rates, and total time on site may not be particularly good metrics for assessing success since you are directing readers to leave the site.
In addition, curated sites focus on specific topics for target audiences. Total number of site visitors may not be a useful metric (e.g., even a relatively few number of customers may indicate relevance and popularity if they are of a high quality based upon your target criteria).
Email lists
Email newsletters are another way to distribute curated content.
Care about these metrics:
Subscriber growth – Assuming there’s a sign-up form on the site, the steady growth in the number of subscribers demonstrates that visitors are interested in the curated content collection. They are going to value updates via an email newsletter. This metric should grow steadily over time.
Opt-outs and unsubscribes – Similarly, watch the opt-out and unsubscribes – the number of people who are losing interest in the curated content. This number should generally be low (e.g., less than 0.2%). If there is a rising number of unsubscribes and opt-outs, then consider:
– Changing the frequency of distribution
– Segmenting the list by topics so the curated content is more relevant
– Improving the quality and insights of the content you are selecting
Click-through rates. Track click-through rates to help gauge content relevance. The higher the rate, the more frequently readers are viewing the articles referenced in newsletters. However, the flip side can be misleading: Low rates do not necessarily indicate a lack of interest. Rather, customers may simply be skimming headlines and summaries without clicking through to the individual articles.
Don’t care about this metric:
Open rates on newsletters can be misleading. Typically open rates are only computed for readers who click on links or disable images, and do not capture readers who skim the newsletters themselves. The number of readers viewing titles and summaries – and benefitting from a curated collection – may be higher than the open rate.
It is important to track the distribution and promotion of curated content through social media.
Care about these metrics:
Followership or fan growth over social channels such as Twitter or Facebook – the increased number of social shares and people viewing collections as they browse Twitter can lead to more views on a curated site or blog, as well as an increase in the number of newsletter subscribers.
Retweets – Another social media metric to track is retweets. While this is a good metric for any content marketer, curators can employ this little trick to better track the spread of their curation efforts. When you share third-party articles on Twitter, retitle the headline. This not only allows you to share your perspective and make it more appealing, but also to more cleanly track retweets.
To assess the success of an RSS feed, monitor both the consumption and retention of content collections.
Care about these metrics:
Use feed analytics tools such as FeedBurner and FeedBlitz to measure views, click-throughs, and subscriptions.
Conclusion
While many of these metrics are similar to the usual content marketing metrics, curation does change things quite a bit by providing a different content consumption experience.
Of course, metrics are only one aspect of a content curation program. To better understand their role within an overall content marketing strategy, be sure to check out Curata’s e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
You’ve heard of millennials, but have you heard of Gen C? They are on Facebook; they are watching YouTube videos; they are networking with their online communities.
Google Think dubs this Gen C, a “powerful new force in consumer culture … people who care deeply about creation, curation, connection, and community.” While Google states it’s not an age group, it does say that 80% are millennials.
Gen C does business differently – they’re smart and savvy, and reject the hard sell. As content marketers, if you connect well with Generation C consumers, you also connect with their communities – that is huge – because they rely on each other for recommendations and information. On the other hand, if you don’t connect well with this audience, you also risk rejection from their communities.
Here are five practical aspects to consider as you target Gen C in your content marketing strategy. This is not a generation that you just funnel onto your site and convince to push those call-to-action buttons.
1. Gen C thrives within online communities. They want to engage, not by forceful and pushy methods, but rather by being invited into conversations.
Apply it: Be prepared to be everywhere they are – research when and where they are online, including social media, forums, and blogs. Have conversations with them, comment on their comments and posts, provide expert advice, ask questions, etc.
TIP: Gen C is too large to encompass as a single audience. Before you can be where they are, you need to develop a persona for your target consumer. Analytics helps, but so does some good old-fashioned grunt research and smart employment tactics. How many members of Gen C are on your team? Where can you find Gen C members to survey?
In real life: A good example of a company that does this well is ModCloth, which was founded as a retail clothier for millennial women. Its team conducted lots of research, not only on fashion and style, but on exactly where those females hung out online. The brand focused on the two most-used platforms – Facebook and YouTube.
On its company page on Facebook, visitors see photos of ModCloth clothing worn by models of all shapes and sizes and of customers sporting their latest acquisitions. Comments from customers are abundant – they are really engaged.
Relative to engagement, here are just a few of the things that ModCloth does:
A style gallery allows customers to upload photos in their new outfits. Other customers comment – a lot. (And, smartly, a viewer can click on any part of the outfit and immediately be taken to its spot in the catalog for purchase.)
Customers are asked, both on the website and on social media, to vote on whether items should be sold by ModCloth. They also have the chance to win an item by naming it. Here is a sample of a winning entry:
Conversations are really encouraged on social media, and it shows. Individuals in Gen C conversing with one another and making recommendations to one another is key to an important behavior in this group.
All of these activities inspire an emotional attachment and a conclusion that ModCloth is really an authentic, trustworthy retailer. In 2014, sales topped $100 million. By the way, the company has just adopted a mobile-first strategy as well – again, being where their customers are.
2. Gen C loves to share content when it is appealing – funny, poignant, relevant, shocking, and so forth. This gives them credibility and validity within their communities. They want responses and reactions to what they share. They only spread truly “shareable” content.
Apply it: Give your Gen C audience that something worth sharing – content that meets their emotional needs. Make it funny, entertaining, surprising, personal, and begging for interaction; offer surveys and opportunities to have conversations with you. Don’t forget to include content that makes them look savvy, clever, and cutting-edge within their communities.
In real life: Jack Daniel’s does just a great job in engaging its audiences in unique and entertaining ways, and asking them to participate in the conversation:
Jack Daniel’s Bar Stories, a microsite (also referenced on Facebook), invites users to submit their funniest bar stories and publishes their tales for all to enjoy.
Bar-goers were asked to send photos of the weirdest bars – the winner will be featured in a new ad for Jack Daniel’s.
Amateur mixologists are periodically asked for new drink recipes using Jack Daniel’s. Gen C is happy to participate – remember, they want to appear savvy and clever to their friends.
3. Gen C doesn’t have a lot of time to conduct the research for trustworthy products and services, so they depend upon people they trust for information, advice, and recommendations.
Apply it: Share who you and your team are. Personalizing users’ experience with you and your brand will pay dividends. Become a community member, one of those trusted advisers and contributors. Give them content to chew on and share their responses. Remind them that you are an expert in your niche through the content you provide. Do not offer to put them on your email list – they see that as a sales gimmick. Do invite them to your blog if you have great things to share. Do provide teasers to that great content on your social media pages.
In real life: There is a reason why Apple is a leader in the phone industry. First of all, of course, it has an excellent product. Other than that, however, Gen C has come to trust the brand in part through the power of Steve Jobs. He was clearly an expert in his niche, his personal story was compelling, and every time a new product was introduced, he did it. Videos of those product introductions went viral. If Jobs recommended it, it must be good. And, as people bought each new product, all of its wonders were shared with their entire communities.
4. Gen C wants to do business with companies that make their customers’ interests and problems the primary focus, not profits.
Apply it: You should personalize content and see your content (and your brand) as a problem solver. Tell the story about how you got into business to make things better for your customers and their needs; share great photos of yourself and your team with happy customers whose needs were met. If your story resonates, they will share it.
In real life: The founders of Etsy get this. Their story is attractive to Gen C for several reasons. First, the founders are millennials like most of Gen C, and they formed the company to solve a problem for a specific community. When crafters and other small vendors complained about the treatment they received from eBay (no support, high fees), the Etsy founders decided to do it differently with significant support, including online labs and workshops, minimal fees (stores are free to open), personalized shop owner profiles, and more. Etsy’s executives want the shop owners to be successful and will help them get there. Obviously, the business model works, Etsy is now a public company valued at $2 billion.
5. Gen C is interested in personal development and in businesses that have principles and causes. They want integrity, honesty, and commitment from a company that gives back.
Apply it: Develop an emotional connection with your audience by taking up a cause. Provide videos of you and your team participating in events supporting that cause. Sponsor campaigns related to that cause.
In real life: One of the best examples of this type of marketing is Toms. The shoe company was a relatively profitable company when it decided that it wanted to reach millennials and, in so doing, “give back.”
For every pair of shoes sold to a consumer, Toms donates a pair to a needy child. The company expanded its philanthropy into raising money for maternity health issues and clean drinking water. Sales totaled over $250 million in 2014. Here is an example of how Toms uses its philanthropic reach to generate sales for the 2015 holiday season:
Conclusion
Understanding Generation C better will allow you to develop content that will better engage them. You can implement interaction and activity that they will see as meaningful and shareable. Just don’t ask them to push a call-to-action button too early.
If you can engage Generation C consumers successfully, you will have loyal customers – customers who will share your brand everywhere. If you are seen as a disingenuous opportunistic company, however, you will have forever lost them (and their communities).
Want to be a brand of connection with your audience? Strengthen your content marketing skills bysigning upfor two free courses from CMI, then complete CMI’s online training program.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on bothiTunesandStitcher.
In this special Thanksgiving episode of #ThisOldMarketing, Robert and I discuss the amazing new content marketing launch for Y Combinator called “The Macro,” and explain the benefits it’s likely to provide to its innovative publisher. Next, we’re not surprised that 20 big publishers are having trouble generating revenue from Facebook Instant Articles. Our solution? Syndicate their content to Facebook. After that, we disagree with a Gerry McGovern post about quality content versus content marketing and ponder the implications of Ad Age’s data-driven content predictions. Rants and raves include a seminal book on business strategy and an article that claims to highlight examples of content marketing – only many of them aren’t. We wrap up the show with an example from U.S. Military Hospitals.
Y Combinator launches The Macro (3:44): Y Combinator, a boot camp and accelerator for start-up companies, has launched The Macro, a digital magazine that contains candid advice for people planning to start a new business. It helps keep past start-up founders and mentors up to date on the program’s successes and failures, and is also a powerful recruiting tool. Robert and I think it’s a brilliant idea that should serve the organization well; he shares another powerful benefit it’s likely to provide to Y Combinator.
Facebook Instant Articles (9:06): Facebook is experimenting with new advertising approaches for its Instant Articles platform because publishers encountered challenges generating ad revenue from it, reports The Wall Street Journal and Engadget. Robert and I are shocked that publishers didn’t anticipate this problem, considering Facebook’s strict ad guidelines. We explain why syndicating their content makes more sense.
Less content marketing, more quality content (19:00): Unless marketers focus on quality content that is helpful, explanatory, and supportive, the practice of content marketing will descend into a morass of irrelevancy and waste, warns Gerry McGovern. In his blog post, he makes the case that content marketing is bad, but producing more quality content is good. Robert and I agree this is yet another example of categorically condemning a practice based on a handful of bad examples.
B2B data-driven trends (29:17): Data-driven, programmatic technology has been transforming brand advertising over the last five years, but it’s only in the last year or so that B2B marketers have really been able to leverage it. The widening availability of quality B2B data means that business marketers now have the opportunity to target and optimize campaigns with incredible precision and efficiency, claims Ad Age. Robert and I agree these trends may be accurate – but they won’t happen in 2016. Robert shares one capability that’s available today that most brands are underutilizing.
2. Sponsor (37:38)
CMI University: Winter enrollment for CMI University’s online training curriculum is now open through December 31, 2015. Enrollment will be limited to the first 500 students. CMI University includes over 20 hours of specialized content marketing training, from planning to measurement. If you sign up before December 31, you will also get free Content Marketing World 2015 video on-demand access (a $595 value) and free Content Marketing Show 2015 video on-demand access (also worth $595). For all the details, visit http://cmiuniversity.com.
3. Rants and raves (39:56)
Robert’s rave: Robert is thankful for Rita Gunther McGrath, who wrote an awesome book titled Discovery-Driven Growth. It recognizes that planning for a new venture involves envisioning the unknown, rather than simply extrapolating from the present. Discovery-driven planning acknowledges that at the start of a new venture, little is known and much is assumed. Her approach is integral to the technique of story mapping, which Robert and his co-author Carla Johnson discuss in their book, Experiences.
Joe’s rant: Marketing Land recently published an article titled Content Marketing Done Right: 8 Examples You Can Learn From. Unfortunately, several of the examples it highlights are ads, not content marketing. The author even includes Share as Image, which is a product. This article is very misleading, because the author doesn’t have a clear understanding of what content marketing is.
4. This Old Marketing example of the week (48:35)
U.S. Military Hospitals: Between 1918 and 1919, at the end of World War I, dozens of U.S. military hospitals produced magazines designed to lift the morale of wounded soldiers recovering in these facilities. They served as “safety valves” to help relieve the stress experienced by frontline soldiers and their caregivers. Endorsed by the Surgeon General’s Office, these publications contained a variety of entertaining articles, jokes, poems and illustrations; most of the content was contributed by veterans. During the holidays, the content of these magazines was especially festive. Bombproof, the magazine of U.S. Army General Hospital No. 18 in Waynesville, North Carolina, describes the festivities as wounded veterans enjoyed their first “Thanksgiving dinner deluxe” in many years. These magazines are awesome examples of #ThisOldMarketing.
You often write blog posts that talk about or even promote events that you are planning and hosting. Events can involve either one or several venues, but either way location is usually a big factor. You may or may not have heard of Mapme, but you should probably look into it if these types of blogs are up your alley.
You may also just be discussing a topic or piece of content that has to do with places and locations.
Nowadays (and often in the olden days), readers gravitate towards visual content over written content. For blog posts, that means you want your content and the information it involves to be all the more visual, and less ‘texty’.
But to achieve this, you need visual tools that are super appropriate for your subject matter, and that engage people with your discussion topic uber clearly.
Mapme is built for just that. Mapme tackles content by segmenting location categories and themes, and creating personalized, “smart” maps in a very simple way.
How it’s Done:
a. Think of a map idea that would up your blog post’s engagement factor
b. Sign up for map creation on Mapme.
c. Begin the 3-stage process:
Create a map
Choose the borders of your map (the default zoom of your map)
Choose categories that describe your different places. Label them with a name, icon, and color, all of which you can go back and change whenever.
d. Embed the map on your blog, or wherever you want to engage people.
Other cool features that users can choose to take on:
-Opt to make the map content crowdsourced, so that those interested can directly and add location to your map. You can moderate the locations before they’re added.
-Make reviews available for your map locations, to make your map into a community forum and not only a knowledge base/guide.
-Choose which information fields you want to hide or display with each place: URL, phone number, logos, e-mail, etc.
At CMI, we’re in the thick of planning, and there is one theme that surfaces repeatedly: We need to double down on what is working well – and stop doing what isn’t.
There is no simple way to figure out what is effective. However, the first step is to start thinking about effectiveness when you start creating the content. Read on to get some tips from the community at large as well as our panel of B2C research roundtable participants:
Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping and Town Inc.
Julie Fleischer, senior director, data + content, Kraft Foods Group
David Rodgers, senior digital marketing manager, ShurTech Brands
Buddy Scalera, senior director, content strategy, The Medicines Company
Allen Gannett, CEO, TrackMaven (moderator)
Recognize that customers and prospects want different things
Simply asking what content marketing is effective isn’t sufficient. You must ask it twice – what content is effective for prospects and what content is effective for customers?
A lot of marketers are so focused on making the sale that they forget about retaining their customers (which is a key difference between inbound marketing and content marketing). You simply can’t have the same plan and expect to satisfy both prospects and customers. Buddy explains:
Once they’re your customers, they need different content. I think what you need in an analytics plan is to understand the actual customer. There are fewer of them but they’re more valuable.
I liked the easy-to-understand example Buddy shared. As someone who owns a Honda vehicle, he’s looking for information that will help or improve his Honda experience. That perspective is a lot different than someone who is looking to purchase a car and considering a Honda.
Look for patterns
If you want to double down on what is working, you, of course, need to understand what is working. David shares one example of how ShurTech does it:
So, one of the things that we do regularly – it’s actually a part of our weekly meetings – is seeing what social content worked.
We see the most effective ones and the least effective ones. We look at them and we say, ‘What is the common denominator here? What are they not responding to? Is it because there’s too much of a heavy call to action or is there a certain lifestyle imagery or how-to imagery? Is it the way that we even positioned and styled the images or the copy, even the tone?’
So, when we start to see over and over again successful pieces of smaller social content, we can say, ‘OK, maybe this makes sense for some broader content marketing programs.’
ShurTech’s approach to social content review also can be applied to your website pages and blog posts. This recent tip from Neil Patel is excellent:
… decide which category each of your top posts belongs to. I’d look at your top 10-30 posts, depending on the number of posts you have all together.
You’ll notice that one or two categories get way more views on average than all the rest.
If you simply focus more attention on those categories, not only will yougrow your email listbut you’ll also grow your overall site traffic.
Explore the patterns in the way you promote the content too. Is certain content more widely shared on certain social networks than others? Even great content can’t be effective if the target audience doesn’t know about it.
Think beyond topics
Now, how do you craft these stories more effectively? This is a super-simple construct from one of my recent favorite books, Out on the Wire by Jessica Abel:
I’m doing a story about X. [This is the topic.]
And what’s interesting about it is Y. [This is the story.]
As Jessica explains:
The topic is just part of the story idea, it’s the first half of the XY story formula. ‘I’m doing a story about X.’ X can be a person, an event, or even an idea. But if you haven’t got a Y, a pretty engaging, surprising Y, you never leave topic-land and arrive at a story. Work out a good Y, and you’ll identify your hook and you’ll have your story.
Decide on your format
So now you have your story. The next question to ask is how will you communicate the story? Will it be a post? A video? An infographic? A combination of several formats? Here is a quick approach.
1. List all the formats you could create – blog post (with or without images), podcast, infographic, video, webinar, etc.
2. Rate each format based on how feasible it is to create based on resources available to you. For example, use a scale of 0-5, with 0 being “no brainer – we have all the resources and time” to 5 being “few and far between – we don’t have the expertise or budget to create on a regular basis.”
3. Identify the most likely way your audience will consume each format. Content is more effective when it is delivered in ways the audience wants to consume it. For example, if your audience spends 60 minutes a day commuting, they are more likely to consume a podcast than a video.
4. Add available analytics for each format, incorporating your track record on which ones work better than others.
Remember, you don’t have to limit your story to a single format. You can repurpose it into multiple formats as long as you do it thoughtfully and deliberately.
While this is a simplified process, it covers the basics of how to think through what you should create more of and how to iterate on what you have. What other suggestions do you have? Let us know in the comments.
View the other B2C and B2B research videos in these roundtable discussions:
For those in the United States who celebrate, Happy Thanksgiving!
While we at CMI are thankful every day to be part of such an amazing community of content marketers, today we give a special thanks to those who graciously share their expertise, insights, and experiences with us and our audience.
We truly couldn’t do what we do without our blog contributors. Not only do they help us keep our content engine well-fueled and humming along, they also help our team stay informed on everything that’s happening in our industry – and everything we need to do to succeed in our own content marketing jobs.
To express our gratitude, 19 members of the CMI team have shared a few of their favorite posts, along with the reasons they consider them to be indispensable resources.
While this list includes just a small fraction of the amazing content marketers we admire and appreciate, we hope you’ll find something to be inspired by — and that will help guide you on your path to greater content marketing success.
Why I’m thankful I read it: I love this story about how EMC has gone “all in” with video. EMC found a way to tell fascinating stories about a not-very-sexy topic (data storage). It was so successful with its video efforts that it built an amazing production studio and created its own EMCTV channel. The article also offers some great tips to help others to get started with video – even those of us (CMI included) who don’t have slick video production setups of our own.
Why I’m thankful I read it: This article offers some great practical tips on integrating your company’s PR strategy with your content marketing efforts. It’s advice that many PR pros might overlook, but it offers great ways to help amplify the content your company is creating. There are even a couple of ideas I’m looking into for our own PR plan.
Why I’m thankful I read it: I think that people are looking for great examples to follow, and there are not always a lot of resources available to help. This is a great breakdown of what made some of the biggest names in content marketing successful, and serves as an excellent reference.
Why I’m thankful I read it: This post gives a very understandable breakdown of the differences between content strategy and content marketing strategy – essential information for any content marketer.
Why I’m thankful I read it: I knew “intelligent content” wasn’t just smartly written text. As a non-tech person, though, I struggled to understand the true meaning of the strategy and its components. This has become my go-to post for learning what it is, how it’s used, and how important it is to scaling your content marketing.
Why I’m thankful I read it: Even if you document your content marketing strategy, it’s useless unless it’s easily understood and can be shared with all involved in your company’s content marketing process. George explains how to create a simple content marketing strategy, shares a template, and offers tips on how to involve your executives and content team.
Why I’m thankful I read it: There are so many brands – nonprofits especially – that are so rich in user-generated content, internal communications, incredible histories, and so much more; but they are unsure of how to qualify it as “content marketing” and create a documented content marketing strategy from all of their assets. By highlighting the efforts that charity:water has taken in this regard, I hope this post can spark other nonprofits to do the same.
Why I’m thankful I read it: CMI’s email list makes my marketing world go ’round. By having smart strategies to increase our subscriber base the right way, we’re giving our audience what they want while collecting both email addresses and good intel on our customers. The strategies we learned from this article really helped us fine-tune our efforts.
Why I’m thankful I read it: This post offers a great example of using mind maps to set up a workflow to track the status of your blog posts in production. It’s an approach that offers some distinct advantages over tracking your content with a spreadsheet.
Why I’m thankful I read it: Roger C. Parker does an excellent job of exploring the benefits of serialization – developing and sharing content in a short series of blog posts organized around a common theme – and outlining how to do it.
Why I’m thankful I read it: Michele writes great roundup posts, and this one is a nice introduction to the basic elements of content strategy – and the reasons why marketers should pay attention to it.
Why I’m thankful I read it: For those marketers who are churning out new content every day, this is a great reminder that you can build momentum and a story arc with just a few “big ideas.” It’s like engineering-think for creatives.
Why I’m thankful I read it: Buddy Scalera is a savvy marketer with a visual background (in comics!). I am always intrigued by his breakdowns on graphics and data (in this case, The Washington Post’s coverage of a missing Malaysian airliner). His constructive critique made me revisit how I work with some of my visuals.
Why I’m thankful I read it: Chuck did a wonderful job of tackling some of the important questions related to creating visual content. With this post, he identifies some of the most critical issues that creators struggle with – and then takes it a step further by asking industry experts to share their advice on how to address them.
Jodi Harris, director of editorial content and curation
Why I’m thankful I read it: I’m always looking for advice that will help me conquer my numero-phobia. Not only does Pawan Deshpande’s post outline the most informative analytics to collect for the most popular content marketing channels, he includes a handy visual chart that I use to help me keep the information top of mind.
Why I’m thankful I read it: I’m obsessed with efficiency – if there’s a tool or tip out there that might help me free up more of my time, or eliminate tedious or redundant tasks, guaranteed I’ll want to give it a try. Sujan Patel’s post doesn’t just offer up a list of handy productivity helpers, it provides pro tips and suggests specific ways these tools can be applied to address a relevant content marketing challenge. I guess that makes just reading the post a productivity hack in and of itself!
Why I’m thankful I read it: I love this article because most marketers simply don’t have a clue what content strategy really is. More marketers need to read this, and commit it to memory.
Why I’m thankful I read it: I believe this is the way we need to start thinking about content marketing – positioning our approach to content as if we were building products and building audiences as an asset that can continue to appreciate in value over time.
Karen Schopp, director of business development and media sales
Why I’m thankful I read it: This post provides simple, straightforward advice on the types of videos to consider, based on a variety of circumstances, and offers great suggestions on possible use cases. Even better is that Gary maps the video types to specific stages in the sales funnel. A lot of brands think creating videos is a daunting task, but the author provides great information and ideas that prove that it doesn’t have to be.
Why I’m thankful I read it: Content marketing should begin with good storytelling – not a pitch. Companies need to create long-term customer relationships; and creating the backdrop with a story, rather than a pitch, helps build those relationships.
Why I’m thankful I read it: I am a science nerd at heart, and this piece combines that with storytelling to offer the best of both worlds. The videos in this campaign are entertaining and educational, and the post helps showcase Emerson’s achievements over the past 125 years.
Why I’m thankful I read it: I am always looking for tools and platforms that can help us improve our traffic and user experience. This article offers tons of great ideas, and all the tools described are free, which allowed me to get a better idea of what analytics solutions might be most useful to me before committing to a paid option.
Why I’m thankful I read it: I loved this article. As part of the team that is responsible for CMI’s website and email subscriptions, this article gave me a lot of great ideas to test out, both on-site and on our forms – particularly the “happy” and “painful” buttons idea. It also validated that we are doing things right, as CMI was highlighted in quite a few of the examples.
Lisa Dougherty, director of blog community and operations
Why I’m thankful I read it: I am always looking for ways to improve the quality and value of our CMI blog content and to grow traffic. This article by Neil Patel is chock-full of linking techniques that will help me do just that.
Why I’m thankful I read it: As a person who manages a busy blog, this article by John Hall is my truth. Anyone who is thinking of guest blogging should take the time to read this post and follow its advice.
Why I’m thankful I read it: The marketing team at the University of Utah Health Care system is reusing its web content in technically savvy ways to get health-related information out to more of the people who need it – with hardly any extra effort. I hope that this instructive, inspiring article will reach lots of content marketers who wonder what on earth intelligent content is, how it might apply to them, and what kind of difference it can make.
Why I’m thankful I read it: This article offers a practical, nearly foolproof way to select business-smart content ideas. Follow these four steps, and you’ll avoid wasting time creating content for customer needs that have no connection to business goals (like attempting to sell cat food to people who Google “black cat” at Halloween). Haven’t we all done that?
Why I’m thankful I read it: One of the most common challenges I hear from marketers is that they lack time. While I am positive people have too much on their to-do lists, this approach from Brian was a game changer for me in that it shows how to uncover where time is unnecessarily being spent – and how to improve your editorial processes in general.
Why I’m thankful I read it: I remember reading the tip below from Rand Fishkin and immediately copying it into Trello (where I store the ideas I want to try out). This is a great exercise from Rand – and one that is certain to help you uncover some ideas of your own.
“Look at the list of websites (not social media or search engines) that have sent you the most traffic. See what the top 20 to 50 are writing about, to whom they link, and what their writers or founders are sharing on social. Use that intelligence to create content that you can feel confident is up your referral viewers’ alley. Chances are that you’ll be much more informed about the types of stuff that will earn you amplification, links, traffic, and mentions from influencers.”
Why I’m thankful I read it: As someone who is relatively new to the content industry, I struggled with the difference between content marketing strategy and content strategy. Amy’s galaxy metaphor succinctly describes content strategy and easily explains how it focuses on content reuse and repurposing.
Why I’m thankful I read it: Until recently, I was a critic of social media automation. As a community manager, I believed automation was the antithesis of all things social. Slowly, I have come to appreciate the merits of automation, and this post by Jonathan brings more perspective to the table.
Why I’m thankful I read it: I love to read books – the good old-fashioned paper kind (preferably while sitting on a lounge chair in the summer or under a blanket on the couch in the winter). And while I often prefer to get lost in fiction, I make concerted efforts to mix in some nonfiction, too – generally of the content marketing variety. So I was thankful to read this post by Roger Parker, which highlights some of the latest books to hit the content marketing space. While I haven’t read them all, the variety was impressive, and his synopsis on each one was compelling enough to help me make two satisfying selections.
Why I’m thankful I read it: Sometimes it is easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of content out there – as well as by the amount of advice being given on how to do content marketing successfully. Arnie Kuenn reminds us of some key points – including that content does not have to be perfect, and that you can’t measure everything. And, for each of the ways we might be wasting our content resources, Arnie offers a great tip to help us put those resources to better use.
Why I’m thankful I read it: There are three reasons I love and appreciate this article:
Michele focused on a form of audio content that is not only a podcast, it started off as a terrestrial radio show.
This article nicely presented a real-world example of how marketers can become more intelligent in their use of content and still deliver content that the audience needs, at the moment they need it most.
Michele’s detailed analysis of This American Life as content shows that this (podcasting) is work. It’s not easy to get the right content in front of the right people or to do so on their terms. But, when it’s done well, it is very much worth the effort.
Why I’m thankful I read it: As a publisher, I often find myself gravitating toward other publishers at industry events. One of the points that seems to always come up in our discussions is native advertising and the role it plays in today’s content marketing landscape. I think Joe cleanly tackles the key differences in a way that’s easy to decipher; I often reference this post when trying to hammer home the point that native advertising is NOT content marketing.
For more on the team that makes us thankful to be part of Content Marketing Institute, check out ourMeet the Team e-book on SlideShare. And don’t miss out on getting first-hand access to insights from these contributors and others.Subscribeto the CMI newsletter.
Too few marketers truly use a data-driven content marketing strategy. Setting clear goals and using data as your guide ensures that you are developing the right type of content, getting it in front of the right audiences, and understanding its impact in a way that lets you continually optimize your strategy. I refer to this three-step framework as the three Cs: context, connections, and clarity – all of which are grounded in data.
Context
At the crux of data-informed design is a solid understanding of your target customers. The more you know about your audience, the better you will be able to develop relevant content that reaches and resonates with them at the moments that matter.
This means gathering as much information as possible – including your customers’ online and offline behaviors – to determine their interests and how they act upon those interests. While it may not be feasible to develop true one-to-one content at scale, you can use this data to pinpoint common characteristics and habits of individual audience segments, and prioritize your content development accordingly.
One of the most intriguing aspects of digital marketing is the data trail customers leave behind during their online journeys. Marketers are able to piece together this information in hopes of understanding the true context and intent of people’s interactions. These puzzle pieces come in many different shapes and sizes, including your customers’ search queries, social media conversations, digital media interactions, and more.
Don’t undervalue the competitive intelligence at your fingertips. Invest time to understand what type of content your competitors are developing, and across what media. What areas are already saturated within the market? Are there certain keywords or topics that will give you top billing in search engine results? This will give you insight into whether you want to compete in those areas, or whether you can find some more open space to creatively stand out and win the heart of your customers.
These are just a few ideas to get you thinking about creative ways to collect information, all with the goal of understanding the context of your target audience. As you continue to gather data, consider how your brand will use it to add value to the equation. An informed approach will allow you to create more relevant, timely, and differentiated content that will delight your customers. Your data is telling you an important story; make sure you’re listening.
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New Global Research – Rating the Content Quality from 170 Companies Download the full report to learn:
–How 170 brands rate for content quality and consistency
–What is the connection between content consistency and performance
–What types of content (product, support, blogs, etc.) have the highest (and lowest) quality
Connections
Through your data gathering, you should have a pretty solid understanding of what your target audience wants, when they want it, how they want it, and where they want it. Once you’ve developed content based on that understanding, the next phase is to distribute it in the most high-impact and efficient way possible. Just pushing the post button on your corporate blog isn’t going to cut it. No matter how relevant a piece of content is to your audience and how well you’ve matched it to their interests and needs, if they never see it you’re wasting your efforts.
Now is the time to think through creative distribution methods outside of your owned channels. This may include leveraging advocates both inside and outside of your organization, or partnering with influencers whom your consumers trust. You can also use paid social or display ads to target the right kinds of customers based on the same contextual information you used to develop your content. Additionally, simple remarketing techniques can guide customers to relevant content at the time when they are most receptive.
This final, data-driven step is an important one. Evaluating the success of your content’s performance not only informs the first two phases of your strategy, it also lets you prove the value of your investment.
Study how to map your content to various stages in the customer journey. Traffic and shares are great places to start, but dig deeper. How are customers interacting with your information and how is it being used to advance or accelerate their next decisions? Through this analysis, you’ll identify key insights, such as whether your content is driving a shorter purchasing path or more frequent purchases. Consider setting benchmarks against certain segments and audience areas.
For some brands, it can be difficult to assign ROI figures to content, in which case you might consider using proxy metrics to illustrate impact. I’ve seen marketers use different scoring systems to assign value to various areas of engagement and test pieces of content against each other. For example, a click on your brand’s content may be worth one point while further engagement with your site is two points, content sharing is three points, and a content download (such as a recipe or guide) is four. Then, assess the buying propensity of different score levels. This can be adjusted based on your goals and the types of content you are creating, but, ultimately, you are looking to show correlation between the scores and sales.
The most successful content marketing campaigns don’t just happen by chance. Marketers have a wealth of data at their disposal. Knowing how to harness and leverage this information appropriately can be the difference between developing content that simply looks nice, and implementing a content marketing strategy that leads to engagement and conversions.
Content marketing has been said to be difficult, costly, and hard to measure. But do it right and there is an opportunity for outstanding payoff.
Some of the basic free tools to guide your content marketing strategy include:
Google Trends helps you identify trending topics and see the popularity of various search queries over time.
Google AdWords Keyword Planner gives you insight into the searches your customers are performing, including linguistic opportunities you may not have otherwise uncovered.
BuzzSumo enables you to research specific topics and see what articles about those topics have performed particularly well, giving you purview into how various pieces of your future content may perform.
Pew Research Center and other data-rich research sites provide access to demographics, media analysis, statistics, and more.
Your own first-party data, such as web analytics, can give you a wealth of insight into your audience and content performance.
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
This article originally appeared in the October issue ofChief Content Officer. Sign up to receive yourfree subscriptionto CMI’s bimonthly, print magazine.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
In a content-cluttered world, could podcasting be the next big play for content marketers? Maybe “big play”’ is a stretch – a survey from Edison Research and Triton Digital shows consumer awareness about podcasting is flat. Yet the same research also shows podcasting holds broad appeal. Men and women listen with equal frequency, and there is no age barrier among listeners – all age groups are equally represented.
Podcasting is particularly appealing for marketers because regular listeners tend to be better educated and have higher household income than the general population. What’s more, podcasts have particular appeal among commuters. Consider that high-wage earners in London commute for over an hour on average. And in major U.S. cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston, commute times are 30 minutes on average … the perfect amount of time to make podcasting a daily habit.
And perhaps the most attractive quality of all: As a channel, podcasting isn’t super-saturated … yet. Only 3% of marketers say they use podcasts as a content marketing tactic.
Only 3% of marketers say they use #podcasts as a #contentmarketing tactic via @globalcopywrite Click To Tweet
Craig Price, host of the Reality Check podcast and a producer of three additional shows, says podcasting is becoming a medium trusted by consumers. “The president was just on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast and that gave podcasting a lot more credibility,” he says. “Obama actually sought out a podcast to go on.”
How to get in front of the trend
Prepare to commit
Podcasting pioneer Todd Cochrane has recorded more than 1,000 episodes of his Geek News Central podcast. He’s also the CEO of RawVoice, a media company providing services and podcast media statistics to 30,000 audio and video content creators. Cochrane advises aspiring podcasters to question whether they’re prepared to make a yearlong commitment to creating a successful podcast.
“About 50% of podcasters who start will quit when they hit episode seven,” he says. “Then 50% of those remaining will quit by the time they hit episode 23. If they make it beyond the 25-episode show mark, they have a pretty good chance of lasting two years.”
He cautions that podcasting is work. You have to be passionate about the content, enough to speak about it for hours on end. If you don’t have enough content to carry you past episode seven, podcasting is probably not the medium for you.
Be consistent
Passion won’t help if you don’t follow a rigid publishing schedule. Listening might be on demand, but your audience builds your show into their life. They want you to drop an episode at a prescribed time.
“People begin to expect that. If you don’t deliver, they’ll go somewhere else,” says Price. “They’ll give up on it if they can’t find it. With the tools available, there’s no excuse for you not to deliver at the same time. You can schedule podcasts weeks in advance.”
Focus on the audience
Catering to your audience is essential for long-term success. They demand consistency and expect to be the center of your universe.
“If there’s one thing the BBC drilled into me, it was how to address your audience,” says James Lush, a former radio broadcaster who co-hosts the Brand Newsroom podcast and produces many more. “No matter how many people tune in to your show, you can’t address a crowd in your podcast. Speak as if you were talking to one person. That’s the secret to making every listener feel like you’re speaking directly to them.”
Avoid the perfection trap
The goal for your podcast should be authenticity, not perfection. Recording a 20-minute podcast is much faster than writing a long blog post, but newcomers to the medium often make extra work for themselves by trying to edit out every “um” and “ah.” Focus on the content and be confident your audience prefers to listen to a real person, not a highly edited humanbot.
If you want to improve your performance, Cochrane has a novel approach to making you a better podcaster. He advises, “Run a video camera while you’re doing your show; it makes you think you’re actually live, which in turn makes you prepare better. You can’t fix video.”
Don’t get wrapped up in numbers
Podcasting is not a quick medium. Too often podcasters expect huge listening numbers without taking time to build an audience. According to Cochran, the average podcast in the United States has between 3,000 and 5,000 listeners, and that audience usually takes months or years to build.
It’s an open secret that podcasters lie about their show traffic but it’s not easy to pin down the true numbers. Each podcast hosting company reports statistics differently. iTunes, the channel with the most listeners, gives little information about traffic. Subscribers download individual episodes to which they may never listen. A single listener can download the same episode on different devices and still not listen to any of them.
Cochrane provides insight to help new podcasters understand whether they’re building an audience. “Download numbers are part of a bigger picture,” he says. “The secret sauce is in the trend line.”
An active audience will show itself in the trend line of downloads and plays over a 90-day period. Determine how your podcast is doing by keeping an eye on a long-term trend. Don’t spend too much time delving into short-term analytics. Your time is better spent on preparing a great topic for your next episode.
Get with the program
As consumers hook into popular radio programs converted to podcasts, like Alec Baldwin’s Here’s The Thing, or discover original programming like Serial, they begin to look for other opportunities to program the time they spend listening to audio.
Before you jump in to this burgeoning medium, consider whether you have enough content to get past the seventh episode and beyond the 25th. Are you able to spend all day talking about your topic? Do you have a habit of reading and writing about the subjects you would discuss on your intended podcast? If so, now is a good time to get in front of the podcasting trend before the field is crowded and cut-through becomes difficult.
Learn from the experts
Interested in cranking up your own podcast listening? You won’t go wrong with these podcasts if you’re working in content marketing.
PNRThis Old Marketing: If you want to know what’s happening in the world of content marketing, Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose provide expert opinion designed to help you attract and retain customers. Each episode includes a terrific marketing example from the past and a popular rants-and-raves segment.
BeanCast: Claiming to be “the best marketing podcast anywhere,” Bob Knorpp discusses current issues and events with marketing specialists and industry professionals. A professor of marketing strategy and execution at New York University, Knorpp provides theoretical insight unavailable elsewhere.
Six Pixels of Separation: Mitch Joel focuses on “marketing with an edge,” finding marketing opportunities created by your customers. He challenges his guests to reach into their core beliefs and back up their claims with experiences and evidence to help you better understand the complex world of digital marketing.
Brand Newsroom: With a focus on content marketing and brand journalism, hosts James Lush, Nic Hayes, and Sarah Mitchell (that’s me) deliver a global perspective on content, media, and PR. This 20-minute weekly podcast offers practical advice and great tips for anyone who has a say in how companies communicate.
Marketing Over Coffee: Hosts John Wall and Christopher Penn break down the complexities of modern marketing into actionable elements. Good for both beginners and seasoned pros, Marketing Over Coffee is particularly good for search, social, and email marketing.
Push out your podcast
One of the drawbacks to audio content is there’s nothing for Google to grab to help your search engine rankings. Newcomers to the medium need a strategy to earn search results. The most successful podcasters use a variety of techniques to establish an online presence for their show, including:
Quality show notes help new listeners find you when searching topics related to your show or a specific episode. You can post these as part of an existing blog or create a dedicated website for your podcast.
Transcribing your podcast and posting it online is another great way to attract organic search results. Use transcription software like Speechpad or Dragon to alleviate the burden of doing it yourself.
Create a complementary blog post on the same topic and include an audio player of the episode in the body of your post.
Set up a Facebook page for your podcast and post each new episode along with a keyword-packed synopsis.
Use your LinkedIn company page (or create a page specifically for your podcast) to promote new episodes.
Set up a Twitter feed for your show. Include a photo for each episode in your tweets to improve engagement. Don’t be shy about retweeting your episodes as your podcast grows.
Offer relevant podcast episodes to conference organizers and networking meeting planners to help them promote their events. Everyone loves free content.
Ask your guests to promote their appearance on your show in their networks.
List your podcast in as many directories as possible. In addition to iTunes, Stitcher, Libsyn, and SoundCloud, seek out smaller directories as well.
This article originally appeared in the October issue ofChief Content Officer. Sign up to receive yourfree subscriptionto CMI’s bimonthly, print magazine.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
THANKS TO ONE OF OUR INTELLIGENT CONTENT SPONSORS:
