This week, Robert ponders the nature of choosing and pursuing your true talent. In the news, Google buys HTC, talent is drying up in advertising, and the Mayo Clinic finds a way to dominate Alexa’s voice search results. Our rants and raves cover predictive analytics; then we close the show with a This Old Marketing example that’s full of Fluff.
(00:01): An advertising blast from the past: “I’m a Toys-R-Us Kid.”
(00:30):Robert muses on this week’s theme: Are you talented?
(06:55): Welcome to Episode 202: Recorded live on September 25, 2017 (Running time: 1:02:46)
(09:48):Special offer for Content Marketing World video on demand – You may have missed the show, but don’t miss out on all the insights. Videos of 100+ sessions from Content Marketing World 2017 will be available for a limited time through our video on demand portal. Register for access and use the coupon code CMIFRIENDS100 to save $100.
(10:37):Content Marketing University – Fall enrollment for Content Marketing University ends today. Don’t miss out on the industry’s premier training and education program. Register today, and use code FALL100 to save $100 off a year’s worth of access.
Content love from our sponsor: Ahrefs (11:32)
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool set that has many amazing tools for content marketers who’re looking to grow their traffic from Google. With Ahrefs tools you can easily find out what people are searching for in Google, so you can create content around the most popular search queries. You can also discover content that got the most shares or earned the most backlinks, so you can piggyback from it and get the same results. And finally, you can easily research your competitors and find out which content brings them the most traffic from Google.
Here’s an exclusive opportunity for PNR podcast listeners: Any listener who tweets using the hashtag #ThisOldMarketing between the dates of September 30 through October 28 will be entered into a drawing to win an annual Ahrefs account plus a signed copy of Joe and Robert’s new book, Killing Marketing. One randomly selected participant will be drawn each week – four winners in total.
The quick hits – Notable news and trends
(14:01): Google sets its sights on the iPhone with HTC deal. (Source: The Verge)
(22:30): The ANA warns of an ad industry talent crisis. (Source: Adweek)
Content love from our show sponsor: SnapApp (40:40)
Today’s buying committees are diverse: Millennials are already taking their seats among Generation X and Baby Boomers at the buying table, making navigating the already complicated buying environment even harder, thanks to their different preferences. Though this shift might seem minor, it greatly impacts how marketing teams operate, sales teams engage, and how purchase decisions are ultimately made.
SnapApp and Heinz Marketing recently conducted research to answer the question: How do different generations like to buy? Their report, “The Millennials Are Here! How Generational Differences Impact B2B Buying Committees Today” looks at the differences between the rising Millennial buyer, their Generation X and Baby Boomer counterparts, and how B2B marketing and sales strategies can address the gaps between them. Read the report.
Rants and raves
(42:54): Robert’s rant: Robert has long been searching for an article on predictive analytics that doesn’t make him want to roll his eyes. Unfortunately, after reading this article from Business2Community, he is still struggling with the idea that we need to get better at analytics in general before we can hope to start thinking about how to use them in a predictive capacity.
(45:43): Robert’s commentary: Despite his disappointment with the predictive analytics piece, Robert was encouraged to find a measurement-related article in The Wall Street Journal that he considers to be a marketing must-read. He completely agrees with the article’s assertions that marketers are missing out on a tremendous opportunity by overlooking the growth potential and spending power exercised by the Millennial and Gen-X “cord-cutters,” whose activities aren’t being adequately tracked by the current incumbent TV planning and measurement tools.
(51:11): Joe’s commentary: Last week, I gave a presentation at a mid-market consultant company near Cleveland. It was a joy to see that all their senior marketing players were present, including their CEO. Our session ended with the question I’ve been asking lately: What if everything we know about marketing is wrong?” After our discussion, we concluded that the absolute worst thing that can happen from taking a strategic approach to content is that you’ll come away with a greater understanding of why your company is spending so much time creating content.
This Old Marketing example of the week
(55:44): Marshmallow Fluff: Robert has long been a fan of Fluff – that ubiquitous marshmallowy spread that has lent its gooey sweetness to fluffernutter sandwiches and other tasty treats around the world for the past 100 years. But after discovering this profile piece on the Skyword blog, he has gained a new-found respect for the company’s skill at creating sticky content efforts, too. According to the company’s official history, H. Allen Durkee and Fred L. Mower purchased the recipe from its original owner and began manufacturing Fluff in 1920. The business did reasonably well for years; but its marketing efforts hit a real (sugar) high once it entered the golden age of radio. Instead of creating standard radio ads that interrupted programming, Fluff decided to create its own music-and-comedy variety show centered on three sisters, called the Flufferettes. Furthermore, in each episode of the show, a fictional “Boston scholar” named Lowell Cabot Boswell would mention that he had a very important book coming out, which listeners at the time believed to be a historical text. However, it ended up being a Fluff cookbook: The Yummy Book – which featured recipes for cakes and other sweets made with Fluff, and is still available today.
If you’re like me, you’ve had a moment where you thought your content was outstanding, in the true sense of the word – you really thought it stood out above the competition.
Then you looked around and discovered your unique, original, and unmatched ideas were run-of-the-mill. Suddenly, you felt like you were attending the fourth-grade talent show and realizing your kid was just one of 30 equally precious snowflakes with misguided trombone aspirations.
Let’s say you do produce original and engaging content. If so, you’ll likely discover an insane pace of imitation. The minute you create a standout piece, your competition is only three months away from turning that originality into part of the clutter. Your content is only as good as its ability to consistently stand out as original and engaging – and stay that way.
These realizations inevitably lead to a recognition that your team’s creative engine is the real competitive advantage for content marketers. As the marketing lifeblood, it needs to be in peak shape, primed to furiously churn out unorthodox taglines, compelling visuals, and innovative angles that will keep you ahead of the pack.
Yeah, your creatives have your brand’s marketing life in their hands.
Here are five essential steps to prime your creatives – designers, videographers, writers, etc. – to crank out outstanding, clutter-busting content that keeps your content ahead of the competition.
1. Lose the productivity vs. creativity paradigm
Tension between productivity and creativity is real, but the either-or mentality is a paradigm in need of a shift. It’s not a zero-sum game. You can have more of both productivity and creativity.
Don’t make productivity & creativity an either-or mentality, advises @MarcusWorkfront. Click To Tweet
Adobe’s State of Create: 2016 study found that 83% of U.S. respondents felt increasing pressure to be productive rather than to be creative. This reflects a false trade-off many perceive in the professional world – that productivity and creativity are mutually exclusive and somehow counter each other.
In the same study, 81% of respondents said investing in creativity increases employee productivity – overcoming the either-or paradigm. Although more than 75% recognized the value of creativity to society and the economy, only one-third felt they were living up to their creative potential. Take all these stats and you start to see how destructive the productivity vs. creativity paradigm can be to productivity, organizational effectiveness, morale, and retention.
81% of U.S. respondents said investing in creativity increases employee productivity via @adobe. Click To Tweet
While Lean Sigma Six project management is a popular option for cutting costs and inefficiencies in businesses, it doesn’t quite work for creative pursuits. In fact, business psychologist Craig Knight explained to us how research shows lean work spaces depress key work variables – including productivity. “No animal, not just homo sapiens, thrives in a psychologically impoverished, high-surveillance space,” he said. “A rat in a lean cage, a chimpanzee in a lean enclosure, and a human in a lean office are all beasts at their lowest ebbs.”
Certain types of distraction can contribute to the creative process. An illustration professor of mine was fond of saying, “You cannot create in a vacuum.” While I know some physicists would argue the scientific validity of this statement, it is certainly true for creativity. “Good” distractions lend inspiration, give your hardworking brain a break, and provide material from which to draw inspiration for your next piece of content.
Certain distractions lend inspiration & can help the creativity process, says @MarcusWorkfront. Click To Tweet
If you visited the work spaces of the special effects artists who fuel the top-grossing sci-fi summer blockbusters – perhaps the most insanely talented but unrecognized creatives on the planet – you might think you took a wrong turn into the studio’s junk closet. The walls are plastered with movie posters, album covers, and disembodied ghoul heads. Shelves overflow with latex appendages, action figures, clusters of paper clips, and modelling clay transformed into miniature monsters in moments of boredom.
Just like rats are happier “scampering under the floorboards, living in a nest of old socks, than living in cages,” humans are happier, and more productive, when given freedom to define their own creative environment. Knight summed it up, “Allow humans to develop their own space and – compared to a lean space – well-being can increase by up to 40%, productivity by up to 32%.”
Bad distractions should be identified and eliminated in order for creativity to flourish. Which are the bad ones? Choose any of the squares on this Un-Productivity Bingo card we created.
Hardwire your processes to head off unproductive distractions, like dropping in unannounced for status updates, making creatives manually enter information into spreadsheets, or holding regular meetings where everyone takes turns reporting.
Map your workflow in detail and eliminate the unproductive, non-creativity-inducing tangents. Incorporate into your workflow the tools to automate manual communication and reporting tasks to free up time and space for creativity.
How does the old saying go? “Necessity is the mother of invention?” Creativity may want to run free, but it produces its finest material within established parameters and with specific problems to solve.
Creatives produce their finest materials w/ parameters & specific problems to solve. @MarcusWorkfront Click To Tweet
Constraints drive genius, according to David Sturt, executive vice president at O.C. Tanner, an employee recognition and rewards solution firm. In a study of 1.7 million award-winning people, he found those “who create new value on the job are often inspired by their constraints.” He explains that constraints provide “a starting point and some blocks to work with – a problem to solve, an innovative twist to be revealed, or a person to please.”
Delivering well-defined requirements up front minimizes frustration once the creative process starts – as long as you don’t pull the proverbial rug from under your creatives by changing project goals, vision, timelines, or scope. Embrace the creative brief and stick to the plan.
The responsibility to define parameters falls squarely on the shoulders of the content manager. Gather information on project background, goals and targets, audience, timelines, and core messaging at the start and force requesters to commit to those requirements before any creative work begins.
Like the rest of us, most creatives are not satisfied with merely creating a great-looking or well-read project – they want that content to do its job. Perform its purpose. When they know how well or poorly their work is doing, they are driven to make tweaks and adjustments to help it succeed.
In fact, feeding your creatives performance data on the work they’ve done has a similar effect as defining parameters and guidelines (Step 4). The more well-defined the challenge, the more they focus their creative powers on overcoming that challenge.
Harvard researchers even identified that the single most important factor to drive creative and productive performance is making progress in meaningful work. A focus on progress also increases employee engagement – and with a 2017 Gallup poll showing that only 33% of U.S. employees feel “engaged” in their work – a vital responsibility for managers.
If you want your content to stand out and actually do what it is meant to do, then prime your creatives to produce clutter-busting content with these five steps. Fuel the creativity and engage your team to produce content. Who knows, you just might hit it out of the park, like the lone fourth-grader who stole the talent show with one as original as Darcy Lynne’s singing ventriloquist.
Editor’s note: We appreciate Workfront’s support of Content Marketing Institute as a paid benefactor. This article was reviewed and edited independently to ensure that it adheres to the same editorial guidelines as all blog posts.
Spur creativity and productivity every day through CMI’s newsletter with tips, trends, and insight to help your content marketing programs.Subscribetoday. (If daily is too often, try the weekly digest.)
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
What’s the next best thing to having Google sit down next to you at your desk, gaze over its glasses at your screen, and tell you how to improve the visibility of your web pages? Listening to Searchmetrics founder Marcus Tober.
A pioneer in search-analytics software, Marcus has watched search engines get better and better at figuring out which web pages people will find relevant. He has seen search engines evolve from reading people’s text strings to practically reading their minds. Based on what he has learned from big data about SEO visibility, Marcus urges companies to do three things with their content:
Develop a niche
Get rid of redundant, outdated, trivial content (ROT)
Update the remaining content to address people’s intentions
Marcus’s advice is not new, but he backs it up with data. His numbers reinforce the importance of doing these things that we all know we should be doing.
Though he isn’t sitting next to you, read on for what this European Search Personality of the Year has to say.
Develop your content niche
A sprawling general-interest website – a Goliath that produces tons of content about all kinds of topics – may see strong search visibility for a while, but that kind of performance may be knocked out by a smaller site that comes along and addresses people’s information needs in a more targeted way.
Take About.com, for example, a site that, as Marcus puts it, “invented mass scalable content online” in the mid-1990s. Over the decades, About.com has published millions of articles. At the time of Marcus’s talk, this site still had over a half-million pages indexed by Google. Yet, despite the site’s size, “in the last two years they lost almost all of their SEO visibility,” he says.
(SEO visibility – as shown in this chart – is a metric Marcus developed taking into account several relevant search factors to calculate how visible a website is in a search engine’s organic results, providing a single, universal index for measuring and comparing the online performance of different domains.)
Marcus wondered how the About.com visibility stacked up against a site specializing in one topic area. Because he likes cooking, Marcus singled out the recipe pages on About.com – the 17,000 or so pages with the word “recipe” in the title – and compared them with the much smaller site TheKitchn.com, which had 5,400 recipe pages.
In other words, he pitted an e-David against an e-Goliath.
He found that during the same two years (April 2015 to March 2017) that had seen the SEO visibility of About.com drop to nearly nothing, the SEO visibility of TheKitchn.com, with its focus on recipes and food-related health information, had grown by 53%.
Overlaying the two charts on the same SEO-visibility scale, Marcus found that, despite its relative lack of heft, the more specialized TheKitchn.com had overtaken About.com in terms of search performance.
Marcus says, “This means that if you specialize in something and make it really good because you understand the user, you can have great search performance” compared with a huge site that produces content about everything.
He points out that About.com has taken this reality to heart, spinning off specialized content brands with their own domains, such as ThoughtCo.com (lifelong learning), TheSpruce.com (homemaking), and TheBalance.com (money management). Each domain has its own set of subject-matter experts; and in each case, SEO visibility has taken off.
Find your content niche, and do that one thing well. “If you isolate what matters and then improve it, the user is going to be happier,” Marcus says.
For better #SEO visibility, isolate the content that matters, says @MarcusTober. Click To Tweet
Get rid of ROT
Big data analysis has also taught Marcus the importance of cleaning up the ROT (redundant, outdated, trivial content) on any website. “Think about your house. We’re all a bit messy and a bit lazy. Likewise, I can imagine that you have a lot of content that maybe you should get rid of or should merge with something else you have,” he says.
Allow plenty of time to get rid of old content – 12 to 18 months – to be sure you do not get rid of something that will likely bring in traffic, especially if you have seasonal traffic.
One company Marcus worked with provides information to seniors at Pflege.de, a German site similar to Care.com. The content team was afraid to get rid of old content because they didn’t want to lose all the internal links, and they thought some people might still want to see their old content.
When they finally weeded out the ROT, they found themselves getting rid of 95% of their content, leaving them with only 243 pages indexed in Google. Within months of doing this weeding, their SEO visibility had grown 240%.
“Removing old content can lead to awesome growth,” Marcus says.
Removing old #content can lead to awesome growth, says @MarcusTober. #SEO Click To Tweet
Update remaining content to address user intentions
Cleaning up your content includes not just getting rid of ROT but also updating the content you keep. “You have to make what’s left really good,” Marcus says.
What does he mean by content that’s “really good”? He means content that addresses people’s intentions – content that meets the information needs underlying the keywords and phrases they use.
Big data can help you do this. For example, Marcus points to the site called Answer the Public, which uses machine learning to create an on-the-fly visual of questions related to a given keyword phrase. (If you read this blog regularly, you may remember that Wil Reynolds also spoke highly of the Answer the Public site in his ICC talk.) This passage from that post shows questions people typed in search boxes about The North Face jackets.
Big data can help you update the #content you want to keep so it addresses user intentions, says @MarcusTober. Click To Tweet
Click to enlarge
Try it. Go to the Answer the Public site and type in a phrase. A dandelion of questions – real questions that people have typed into search boxes – instantly appears.
Use @answerthepublic to create on-the-fly visual of questions related to a given keyword phrase. @MarcusTober Click To Tweet
Marcus’s company Searchmetrics also provides sophisticated questions in its suite of services. The questions are cleaned and filtered so that writers can use them out of the box. Search volume also is shared for users to see the demand behind each topic.
Here is a screenshot with questions about “content marketing”:
Click to enlarge
If you want to know what people want to know, an intelligent search site like this can tell you.
Here’s how Marcus puts it:
When you understand the questions, the problems, the concerns – when you understand what the user really wants – you can become super-successful. You don’t have to be a well-known brand. Everyone can do this.
When you understand what searchers really want, you can become super-successful, says @MarcusTober. #SEO Click To Tweet
You probably already knew that you could improve your site’s SEO visibility by doing the things Marcus recommends: Develop a content niche, get rid of ROT, and update the remaining content to address people’s intentions. Sometimes, what you need isn’t the advice but the motivation. If that’s your situation, Marcus’s numbers may give you just the motivation you need.
What kind of big data is your team analyzing? What are you learning from your numbers?
Here’s an excerpt from Marcus’s talk:
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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).
It’s my favorite time of the year – time to report on the findings of the annual content marketing survey. Now in our eighth year partnering with MarketingProfs on this research, I never stop getting excited about sharing the new insights with you.
I’m thrilled that, like last year, nearly 65% of B2B marketers surveyed report more success with their overall content marketing compared with one year ago. How can marketers keep that momentum? How will you take your content marketing to the next level?
Nearly 65% B2B marketers’ #contentmarketing programs are more successful than a year ago. @cmicontent #research Click To Tweet
To provide some answers, we looked at how the “most successful” of the survey respondents do things differently than the overall marketer population. What kinds of things set these self-described “extremely” or “very successful” content marketers apart? As we’ve found each year, these marketers are more likely to:
In the 2018 results, however, some additional characteristics appear in the picture of the more successful marketers. Consider how you can use these insights to make your content marketing programs more successful.
Across the board – at all levels of content marketing success – the research shows more marketers concentrate on building audiences. Among all respondents, 80% say they are focused on this (versus 92% of the top performers), representing an 18% year-over-year increase.
80% content marketers are focused on building audiences, representing an 18% YOY increase. @cmicontent Click To Tweet
This is terrific news to see more marketers doing what CMI has been urging them to do for years. Why is audience-building important? Because your audience can be one of your organization’s most valuable assets. Content marketing gives you a way to build a subscribed audience, which is what differentiates content marketing from other forms of marketing. The intent of content marketing is to offer valuable information so people want to hear from you … so they sign up to receive your content.
How to use this insight: Distinguishing between leads and subscribers is important for B2B organizations that want to differentiate.
#Contentmarketing lesson: Distinguish between leads and subscribers, advises @LisaBeets. Click To Tweet
A lead is someone who discloses information in exchange for a piece of content or something else of value. This doesn’t necessarily mean they want to have an ongoing conversation with your business. In fact, the lead may not have an active interest in your products or services at all.
A subscriber is someone who signs up to receive regular communication from a company because the subscriber believes you have something valuable to offer him or her— and you’ll continue to provide this value beyond the initial engagement. In other words, the subscriber signs up in anticipation of the value expected to be received.
Think about building an audience through subscription, then mining that subscription list for leads (as the audience engages in your pieces of content). But don’t ignore the possibility of the reverse situation. As Kim Moutsos, CMI’s vice president of editorial, points out, “If your lead-gen piece is great, you could earn a subscriber at the same time you earn the lead. You can also mine leads for subscribers, just as you might mine subscribers for leads. For example, offer an opt-in to your newsletter on the thank-you page of a download or from within a PDF, infographic, or video.”
If your lead-gen piece is great, you could earn a subscriber at the same time you earn a lead, says @KMoutsos. Click To Tweet
Effective content creation entails getting quality projects completed efficiently. Eighty-eight percent of top performers value creativity and craft in content creation and production, compared with 74% of all respondents. In addition, 70% of top performers rate project management flow of their content-creation projects as “excellent” or “very good” versus only 36% of all respondents.
88% of top B2B content marketers value creativity & craft in content creation & production. @cmicontent Click To Tweet
As you can see, most respondents value creativity and craft. Where successful content marketers seem to have an edge is that they have good processes.
How to use this insight: Process and creativity are not at odds. Process is key to enable your team to have time to be creative. While it takes time to set up processes, once they are in place, the conversation changes from “who is doing this,” or “what are the steps we need to take,” or “oh no, we forgot to include someone/something.” Then the team has time to work on the art of creating exceptional content.
For the first time, we asked respondents if they stopped content marketing activities they found to be ineffective to concentrate on those that yield the best results.
While 64% of the top performers say they are doing so, only 47% of all respondents say the same. That’s not enough. Even the top performers have work to do in this area.
How to use this insight: You and your team only have so much time to work. You need to be sure you’re working on the right things. Instead of only adding things to your content to-do lists, remove some things to make room for others.
Michael Porter, founder of the modern strategy field, says “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” CMI founder Joe Pulizzi has talked about strategy documentation for years, and it’s more important now than ever.
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do, says @MichaelEPorter. #productivity Click To Tweet
Once your content marketing strategy is documented, get hyper-focused and work only on things that support your strategy.
In past surveys, respondents picked their content marketing goals and metrics from lists, which included things for goals like “brand awareness,” “engagement,” and “lead generation” and metric items like “website traffic,” “sales lead quality,” and “sales.”
And you know what? Nearly every year brand awareness was the top goal and website traffic was the top metric. We also learned over the years that goals and metrics highly depend on the organization’s situation (e.g., its content marketing maturity level, its prospects’ unique buyer journey, its annual revenue goals).
This time, we switched it up to focus on a single question – how well does the organization align its metrics to its content marketing goals.
Only 19% of marketers rate their organization as “excellent” or “very good” at aligning metrics to their content marketing goals (compared with 54% of the top performers and 2% of the least successful) – another big disparity between the most and least effective. Again, though, even the top performers have room to improve.
54% of top performers align metrics and #contentmarketing goals via @cmicontent. #research Click To Tweet
How to use this insight: To correlate your goals and metrics, first consider the four primary reasons why you may use content marketing:
To be found by the right people (awareness)
To build an interested and engaged audience (consideration)
To increase sales with new customers (decision/purchase)
There are several more new questions on the 2018 survey – as well as a restructuring of the way we ask about the content types, distribution formats, and social media. View the report today to see the new findings, and watch for more analysis of the results – along with tips for continuously improving your content marketing – in the months to come.
If you have ideas for future questions that you’d like to see us ask, let us know in the comments – we’d love your feedback.
Special thanks to all our survey respondents and distribution partners, as well as to Kim Moutsos, CMI vice president of content, and Michele Linn, CMI editorial strategy adviser, for their assistance with this article.
To ensure that you receive the latest research when it’s released,subscribeto the free CMI daily newsletter.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute.
You don’t have to know or be a photographer to have a great web presence, but it certainly helps. Images have become the currency of social media and many forms of online news and communication. Images distill thoughts into a form that can be consumed in an instant, much faster than the thousand words or so it would take to get across the same information. While writing is still important, it’s increasingly images that get people to pay attention to the written word. If you still aren’t sure how to use images to increase your online presence, here are three of the very best methods.
1) Use Professional Quality Images.
If you don’t so much as own a camera, you can still use amazing images if you have the right source. There are countless ways to buy great images at affordable rates, with so much variety available that you can find pictures tailored to your exact needs and specifications. If you go the stock photo route, it pays to do your homework. By digging into places that present uncommon and affordable results, you will be able to avail yourself of images that don’t look commonplace or unnatural for your purpose.
2) Use Original Images Sometimes.
Content creation is the name of the game online, and this isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Platforms like Instagram are full of images created by people of interest, which can be incredibly successful even if they aren’t of the highest quality. If you have a customer or fan base, you may be surprised how many people have an appetite for images of you or your brand. All you need is a phone to make creative, candid, original images that your fans won’t be able to find anywhere else. This creates a sense of intimacy and activity that some brands are surprisingly without.
3) Invest in Images That Dazzle.
If you don’t want to go the stock photo route and you aren’t the type to throw up images on social media platforms willy nilly, you might be the type of internet personality who invests in dazzling images and video. These images are a production. Whether they are taken in a studio, in nature, or under the sea, images that amaze with their quality, subject matter, and unusual perspective help brands take a step beyond conventional branding. Drones, underwater robots, adventures photographers, and innovative video techniques – all of these are strong ways to create pictures that impress people for their originality.
4) Bonus Tip: Don’t Forget About GIFs!
GIFs, or “graphics interchange format”, is like a self-contained looping video that shows a short period of content or action, often measured in just a few seconds. GIFs and memes are two of the most popular ways to communicate information, ideas, and jokes anywhere on the internet. You’ve likely seen them or used them before. They’re a great way to distill an important bit of video from your business, a humorous concept, or a thought-provoking message that pertains to your brand. Once you get hooked on making GIFs, you’ll use them all the time.
There are many strategies that will produce an effective imaging strategy for your career, business, or brand. The most important thing is to do it, whichever one you choose! For people who have not always used the internet, the image-first nature of today’s web may seem unfamiliar. Even so, it’s here to stay and anyone who wants to make a place for themselves online, or to expand their current reach, needs to use images that are compelling, brand enhancing, and on the cutting edge of convention, taste, and trend.
Editor’s note: You may have missed the original article on interactive content from CMI last year. We’re sharing an updated version now because interactive content is a growing opportunity for marketers.
Quick confession: More than a year after writing on interactive content, I’m more obsessed than ever with online quizzes and other interactive content tools and features.
As a marketer who always strives to remain in touch with my consumer side, I can think of no better way to uphold the interests of my audience than by placing my content in a context fundamentally designed to resonate on a personal level. (And it seems other marketers may just agree with me, as evidenced by 2017 research from Content Marketing Institute and ion interactive, which found that 46% of content marketers use interactive content.) On the flip side, even as a consumer wise to the tricks of the online marketing trade, I still find it hard to resist the allure of a chance to see a bit of myself reflected in a brand’s content.
46% of #content marketers use interactive content via @cmicontent. #research Click To Tweet
The value proposition of interactivity
Personal vanity aside, the increased potential to attract attention and drive brand engagement that interactivity can offer is a compelling reason for marketers to add quizzes, assessments, customization tools, games, and other participative features to their marketing arsenals. But it’s certainly not the only advantage these tech-enhanced content formats can offer. Consider a few more findings from the CMI/ion interactive research. Of the respondents:
77% agree that interactive content can have reusable value, resulting in repeat visitors and multiple exposures
75% agree that non-gated interactive content can provide a “sample” of the brand, resulting in a higher degree of lead nurturing
73% agree that combining traditional content marketing tactics with interactive content enhances retention of their organization’s message
68% agree that interactive content provides valuable ways torepurpose their organization’s passive content
Of course, there’s an additional way interactivity can pay off for your business that might be even more valuable: It generates critical audience data. For consumers to customize their interactions with your interactive offerings, they typically need to share a little personal information, thus providing deeper insights on their needs, interests, and preferences that your business may never have gained using more passive content techniques.
Interactive content can pay off big for your business. It creates critical audience data, says @joderama. Click To Tweet
Because of these, and other benefits interactive content offers, the CMI editorial team thought it was a good time to revisit our discussion on the topic. For those who might have missed it the first time around, I’ve recapped the essentials of working with this powerful content format – what it is, how it works, and how it can be best applied to achieving your marketing goals. And because the techniques and technologies of interactivity continue to evolve and expand at a breakneck pace, I’ve also shared a few more examples to get you excited about the possibilities of working with these formats.
Interactive content enables users to personalize and participate in the content presented to them. By helping consumers see themselves in the brand’s experience, the technique offers the potential to deepen engagement and drive greater satisfaction.
Common interactive formats
Enterprise marketers who are looking to make a big splash with their audiences can tap into a host of compelling content features, ranging from the simple to the surreal. Here are just some of the most popular interactive formats, along with a few usage suggestions:
Calculators and configurators – Frequently used by e-commerce companies and automotive brands, these tools can help your customers estimate and compare the costs of various product features, as well as evaluate the benefits of purchase options they may be considering.
Quizzes, polls, games, and surveys – Use them to test your audience’s knowledge or opinions on a relevant topic and then generate a shareable report card so they can compare their results to those of their peers.
Multi-touch photos and videos – Creating interactive image galleries and look books that give consumers a 360-degree view of the goods, services, or experiences you offer (think cars, clothing, or resort vacations) can help them virtually try before they buy, making the experience more tangible – and potentially leading to greater satisfaction with their purchase decisions.
Interactive e-books – If you publish long-form content, such as white papers or research reports, creating a navigable version can help readers locate the most relevant sections more quickly.
Live chats, diagnostic tests, and troubleshooting tools – These techniques can be used to enhance online customer service, increase a brand’s ability to respond to customers’ inquiries and issues, and reduce wait times for technical support by phone or in person.
Assessments – Particularly well-suited to moving prospects through complex sales processes, these comprehensive surveys can be used to offer personalized information and benchmarks that your audience can use to track their progress toward a relevant goal.
Interactive infographics and data visualizations – Creating an animated, navigable infographic or other dynamic visualization that drills down to stats can help you position the data in a context that will be easier for your audience to understand and internalize.
Interactive content is a better way to make data easier to understand & internalize, says @joderama. Click To Tweet
Content wizards and recommendation engines – Acting as an online tour guide to your content library, content wizards use an initial assessment to understand your site visitors’ needs, and then serve up the content that’s most likely to satisfy them.
Interactive timelines, heat maps, and map overlays – Authoritative and influential brands can lend their events some added gravitas by placing them in the context of relevant geography or history (like the Art Gallery of New South Wales did – click the image to see the full timeline).
Virtual reality and augmented reality overlays – Use these technological advances to take your audience into a world of your brand’s unique creation and enable them to experience life in a way they may never have imagined would be possible. (See the Qantas virtual reality example below.)
Leveraging high-tech advances like scrolling video or virtual reality can certainly help your brand break through the noise of a crowded content landscape. But “cool factor” aside, interactive content doesn’t have to be flashy or feature-rich to contribute to your top content marketing goals. With a little ingenuity, even the simplest of these formats can be instrumental in helping you identify and address key consumer pain points, guide consumers through a complex purchase process, or increase sales.
Leveraging high-tech advances helps your brand break through noise of a crowded content landscape. @joderama Click To Tweet
Brand awareness
As I mentioned, interactive content doesn’t have to be high-tech to contribute to your marketing goals. But it doesn’t hurt to add a little pizzazz when it comes to associating your brand name with the powerful, memorable, or exclusive experiences that you are uniquely qualified to provide.
Editor’s note:You will need a VR headset to experience the video as it was intended.
The official airline of Australia created a virtual-reality-enhanced app that provides potential visitors with 360-degree video tours of more than 13 tourism experiences they won’t find anywhere else on earth. For example, the airline was granted permission to capture aerial views of sacred sites at Uluru and Kata Tjuta, including areas prohibited to the public such as Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. And, after virtually hopping on a helicopter to see ancient Uluru or view the spectacular sights of VIVID Sydney, armchair travelers who want a more up-close-and-personal experience can book themselves a flight through the app.
Providing key insights and advice that help consumers make more informed decisions always reflects well on a brand’s value proposition. Interactive content tools like assessments, configurators, and recommendation engines are ideal for helping your prospects explore available options, select their personal priorities and preferences, and truly experience what life might be like as one of your satisfied customers.
Meal-kit delivery services have become a booming segment of the growing subscription commerce industry. They are hot commodities, indeed; but with so many similar services on the market, it’s also difficult for these retailers to distinguish themselves from their competition. U.K. retailer HelloFresh rose to this challenge with its Flavour Generator. This interactive content tool lets consumers select the flavors and ingredients they are in the mood for and then sends them meal ideas along with easy-to-follow recipes to prepare on their own – whether or not they choose to order the HelloFresh meal-kit version.
Lead generation
With the help of the right copy, a landing page, and a carefully constructed call to action, information-driven formats like quizzes, infographics, and e-books can help you provide tangible value that will draw in leads and prospects, so you can further entice them into forging a more meaningful connection with your brand.
Orbitz for Business created a quiz that shows business travelers how compatible they really are (or aren’t) with their travel service provider. Users whose results indicate dissatisfaction are served a message that’s personalized to the pain points they provided and a little encouragement to consider Orbitz as a solution to improve their travel-planning experience.
Lead nurturing
Done well, interactive content can also offer marketers invaluable information about their user base, which can be instrumental when applied to the lead-nurturing process.
Interactive content offers marketers invaluable information about their user base, says @Joderama. Click To Tweet
SnapApp was looking for a fun, yet data-driven way to educate its B2B audience about the impact of interactivity while introducing them to the advantages of working with its platform. Thus, Content Land (a version of the popular children’s game Candy Land) was born. SnapApp began the development process by working with its sales team to identify key pieces of information it wanted to learn about prospective customers. Game questions and talking points were then crafted to speak to each player’s own marketing role based on the information revealed moving across the game board. According to SnapApp, the effort was a remarkable success, achieving a 55% click rate, 70% mouse-over rate, and 49% lead conversion rate – not to mention earning the company a 2017 Content Marketing Award for best use of interactive infographics.
Sales
You may think of interactivity as little more than a fun, attention-grabbing feature that has little impact on a brand’s bottom line. But don’t discount the lower-funnel benefits these versatile tools can offer, particularly when it comes to bringing consumers to the last, vital step in their purchase process. Content like interactive catalogs, solution planners, and configurators can help consumers select products according to their personal preferences, reconcile any last-minute cost considerations, or even complete the desired transaction with the confidence that they have found exactly what they’ve been shopping for.
When menswear brand John Varvatos debuted its spring 2016 collection, a traditional look book wasn’t enough. The collection was accompanied by a “shoppable” video powered by Cinematique, a platform that enables “touchable” video. As customers watched the video, they could click or tap on the items worn by the models. When the video ended, everything they had clicked or tapped appeared in a tab to the right. Customers could view product information then click a buy-now button and be sent to the item on the John Varvatos website. The immediacy of campaigns like this helps turn consumer interest into sales at the moment of discovery, striking while the iron is hot.
Retention/loyalty
After consumers have made their purchase, you want to provide content to extend their engagement, provide support, and ensure that they are satisfied with your brand experience over the long term. Interactive features like diagnostic tools, trackers, and chatbots can be instrumental in helping customers learn more about working with the products they’ve purchased, troubleshooting any issues that may arise, and staying connected so they can share the positive experience they have had with your brand.
In 2016, Delta became the first major U.S. carrier to grant passengers the ability to track their checked bags through a smartphone app. Using radiofrequency identification (RFID) technology, Delta made every part of the routing process visible to the luggage’s owner – from the moment the bag is dropped at check-in to the moment it arrives on the luggage carousel at the traveler’s destination. Using push notifications and visual maps, the app lets passengers know when their bags have reached each handling checkpoint; and because the tracking system uses a RFID chip loaded with the traveler’s contact details, should a bag get mishandled on route, it can be located more easily and delivered to the owner with fewer delays.
What to consider before incorporating interactivity
If interactive content is so versatile, powerful, and immersive, why don’t all content efforts incorporate these techniques?
For starters, interactive features can be more expensive and time-consuming to produce than their static content counterparts. Yet, this isn’t always the case: For example, some interactive elements – like quizzes, polls, or heat maps – can easily be generated with the help of online software tools and templates.
In addition, some of the most innovative or tech-forward interactive techniques may require specialized coding and design expertise to develop and deploy or specific equipment to create and manage – resources that not all marketers have at their disposal. Again, third-party software and services may be able to shoulder some of this burden; brands looking to go big or go home should carefully consider whether it will be best to build or buy the capabilities required.
Then there’s the user side of the equation. Interactive features often have longer load times than simple text or static images do, which can suck up more bandwidth than your audience may wish to devote to your content. Not to mention that some features may need to be optimized for use on a specific browser, device, or platform, which can create a frustrating or disappointing experience for users accustomed to accessing content in any way they choose.
Interactive features often have longer load times than simple text or static images do, says @joderama. Click To Tweet
And while consumers likely enjoy playing around with interactive bells and whistles from time to time, these content efforts don’t necessarily guarantee increased or sustained interest in your content, let alone improved marketing results. For example, some users may just be looking for a straightforward experience or a specific piece of information. Requiring these consumers to click, swipe, give personal information, or jump through a bunch of hoops to get what they want can have the opposite of the intended effect – driving them away instead of increasing their engagement.
Tips for getting the most out of interactive content
Make sure you have a compelling reason to use interactivity: Interactivity should enhance the natural appeal and longevity of your message – not serve as a substitute for real substance. If these features won’t give your brand an advantage – like making it more relatable, engaging, useful, memorable, or distinctive – it may not be worth the extra time and expense.
Match the interactive format to its intended function: When planning to work with interactivity, ask yourself what attributes of your products/services are most useful for helping your customers address their pain points. Then, work backward to select an appropriate interactive format based on how well it suits your message and fits in with your content mission and strategic goals.
Find one area to optimize first – but prepare for eventual integration: If working with interactivity seems too intimidating, consider starting with a small pilot program. Focus on optimizing one specific area of your buyer’s journey, but make sure you are prepared to tie your efforts to your other content marketing initiatives down the line – a point that Robert Rose stresses in his recent white paper on interactive content. Spend the time and budget to make sure that, regardless of the size of your initial interactive experiment, you’re able to connect subsequent experiences with the data you collect. In other words, plan to create an interactive platform – not just random acts of interactive content.
Don’t invent if you can iterate: Interactive content efforts don’t always have to be built from scratch. Instead, take some of your top-performing blog posts, white papers, or images and repurpose them as interactive versions.
Take advantage of interactivity helpers: Third-party software can make these features more cost-effective to create and easier for marketers to manage. For example, Google Maps’ JavaScript API enables users to create custom map overlays and provides step-by-step instructions for doing so.
Consider working with interactive content platform providers: Not only can third-party tools help with the heavy lifting in developing tech-enhanced content, some platforms can be configured to integrate the performance data with your marketing automation systems, CRM tools, or other content management solutions.
Plan ahead for how you will measure the impact of your interactive content: Downloads, social shares, and data generated through Google Analytics (e.g., bounce rates, time spent on page, traffic sources, and conversion rates) can help you set initial performance benchmarks. But for a more fully rounded view of performance, you may want to set up more sophisticated analytics capabilities, like click tracking, engagement scoring, and behavioral tagging.
Conclusion
Interactive content is a powerful, versatile way for marketers to enhance their content’s reach, impact, and performance. But with higher-than-average resource requirements and a vast array of formats and functionalities to consider, businesses will want to carefully weigh the pros and cons against their content mission and goals before incorporating interactivity into their marketing mix.
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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).
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