Did you know you might be killing yourself in search because you’re doing things the old way, faithfully believing what you always heard about SEO is still true?  Charles Dearing thinks it’s time you knew, and came to terms with, what’s changed.  For instance, since 2009 search engines stopped paying attention to Meta tags.  Now it’s kind of a way to tell your competitors what your SEO strategy is.  Keywords will only help you if they’re relevant to the content and your business.  Why would you want traffic from users who would never convert in a million years?  Help your SEO with things like social presence, social proof, influence, content quality, and amount of visuals.  Also, we all like a link back to our site but did you know if it’s a low quality, low authority site that does it, that’s going to hurt you instead of help you?  In fact if your brand enemy is a complete dick, they might be making bad content and linking to your site to drag down your ranking.

 

There’s some evidence, at least on the B2B side, that content marketers are kind of overestimating how awesome they are, and certainly how effective they are.  Walker Sands studied buyers of marketing technology and discovered where the influence really happens at each stage of the journey.  Jeffrey L. Cohen reports in the discovery phase, peers and colleagues bring the most influence, followed by publications and blogs.  Sales reps are at the bottom of the list by the way, what are those guys doing during their martini lunches?  So the top answers are at least influenced by content.  When they know they need a solution and are researching, again, peer recommendation is on top.  But vendor content is very or somewhat influential.  When it’s time to pull the trigger and buy, only 5% say blogs close the deal.  But Jeffrey points out company posts, at least the good ones, aren’t about selling the product, so it’s not meant to be the closer.  The most influential thing in the buying phase is product demos.  You can content market your brains out, but the quality of the product has to be the closer.

 

You’d be beside yourself watching yourself getting tickled pink if you could prove your content is having a positive effect on the business that cannot be denied.  But some brands are going beyond that, and trying to make their brand content a new source of revenue.  Shareen Pathak tell us about the gym chain Equinox, which launched a publication called Furthermore that tries to bring in some dough from display ads and affiliate links in its content.  That might sound bold but editor Sheila Monaghan says the first advertiser is Smartwater, with more to come.  And she’s not alone in starting to think this way.  Chubbies, they sell short-shorts, has a popular, funny email newsletter and co-founder Tom Montgomery could see selling ads in it.  And food delivery startup Maple writes about the food they serve, but throws in brand content from La Colombe coffee.

 

Another change to Facebook’s News Feed, whaaaaaat?  It’s true.  Let’s see what they did this time.  They’re using the feedback they get from surveys about NewsFeed experiences to put the most relevant posts in front of users.  The survey takers are called the Feed Quality Panel, pretty much just like The Avengers, and they make suggestions daily.  Engineers Cheng Zhang and Si Chen say people said they have a better experience when the stories at the top of their feeds are ones they’d BOTH rate highly and would engage with.  So Facebook made an algorithm to figure that out.  David Cohen reports it shouldn’t hurt your page but your referral traffic could go down if the rate your stories are clicked on doesn’t match how much people say they want to see those stories high up in their feeds.  So basically don’t bother aggressively encouraging clicks.

 

Time to learn from Kelsey Loughman what’s happening in the world of customer experiences.  She has some stats for us.  By 2016, 89% of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience.  4 years ago that was just 36%.  However, only 23% of B2B marketers say they’ve got a customer-centric org structure, as opposed to a channel or product-centric setup.  Only 17% said their company has fully integrated the customer data they have across all areas of the organization.  Half of C-suiters said their place doesn’t have and thus doesn’t use any consistent measure of how good or bad an experience their customers are having.  81% percent of C-suiters expect more digital interaction with customers by 2020.  Now why should companies get on board the customer experience train?  Customers are 5.2X more likely to buy from companies that have a great customer experience.  And case studies show integrated customer journeys, in some cases, doubled sales in a year.

 

Content marketers talk a lot about putting out great content across all devices, so we may as well keep an eye on which of those devices is rising and falling in popularity.  A couple of reports show the number of tablets shipped in 2015 went down.  Strategy Analytics said it was down 8% while IDC said no, it’s worse, 10.1%.  Sarah Perez writes the studies show Apple still in the lead but it’s a lead that’s slipping.  Samsung is #2, but their numbers fell too.  But when flat computer shoppers look at tablets, they’re apparently looking at detachables, with shipments up 379% year-over-year.  Why?  IDC’s research director Jean Philippe Bouchard says that’s what people are replacing their PC’s with.

 

NPR’s been a real leader in the podcast space and now they’ve made a choice as to which company is going to be the ones to monetize their podcasts.  Triton Digital’s Tap Podcast tool is on…uh…tap to help shows like “Serial,” “Fresh Air,” “This American Life,” and “TED Radio Hour” make more money and get wider distribution.  The tech dynamically stitches ads right into episodes, either multiple podcasts at once or several campaigns in one podcast.  That’s what the press release says and who am I to argue with a press release?  NPR’s also getting analytics and forecasting tools.  Triton’s head of publisher development said, “Given the size of NPR’s podcast offerings, they needed to insure our offering was not only capable of handling their volume but also had the feature set they needed.”  According to Infinite Dial, monthly audio podcast consumption grew from about 39M monthly users in 2014 to around 46M in 2015.  That’s nearly 1 in 7 Americans.

 

Does your brand Snapchat?  Narativ wants to help, and the content marketing platform Narativ just raised $3M Series A funding.  They’ve been around since 2014 and Justin Lafferty reports that at the moment, their network gets over 16B views a month and has had over 1B branded views.  The companies getting these views include Fox, Coke, and Freeform.  Freeform used to be ABC Family and Narativ helped that show Pretty Little Liars gain 1.5M followers.  For Disney’s Force Friday event, they did a campaign for Sphero that got 10.3M views.  Naritiv was nominated for 2 coveted Shorty Awards for that one.  Now, how are they going to use this new cash they’re so flush with?  They’ll be adding people and further developing out their tech.

 

Guess what you can do now?  You probably already guessed correctly so I’ll go ahead with the story.  Instagram lets you run 60-second video ads now.  They did some testing with brands like T-Mobile USA and Warner Brothers, they were pushing their new movie How to Be Single, and as it turns out, marketers like having a full minute to sell their stuff.  Kinda takes the “insta” out of Instagram.  Instagram said they’re aware advertisers have the resources to make different kinds of ads in different lengths and formats so they wanted to expand the ad choices for them.  And the platform thinks it’s especially good for building excitement around upcoming events.  Events like the new motion picture How to Be Single.

 

Simon Berg, CEO of interactive content software company Ceros, guess blogged for the Young Entrepreneur Council 10 trends he thinks we’ll see in content marketing this year.  They include there’ll be a dedicated designer on every content marketing team.  Creatives will have a seat at the decision-making table, yaaay!  Ad blocking and obfuscation will force marketers to start abandoning push marketing and commit to valuable content.  Big brands will invest in creating real-world, in-person experiences, like Red Bull does already.  Add to those on-staff designers, on staff user experience specialists to the content team.  Brands will figure out how to make use of the live-streaming apps like Meerkat.  And more brands will dabble in augmented reality and virtual reality.  We’ll check back in with Simon in December.

 

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