This information is for you and you only you and if you listen you’ll have knowledge that gives you an advantage.  Okay that was a lot of pressure, but I had to get you interested in this story as quickly as I could, because HubSpot says users decide in under 15 seconds, maybe way under, whether or not content is worth consuming.  Joshua Nite gives us the key questions potential audiences ask to render their decisions.  Is this talking to me?  And a maybe is a no.  What’s in it for me?  I’ve got a lot of Google results to consider so the one that tells me exactly what I’ll get will win.  Who’s the source and are they credible?  And how hard will this be to consume?  C’mon, you know yourself if it’s long blocks of copy you’re like nah.  Or if this were a 90-minute podcast you’d be like, “I sure wish this were a quickie.”

 

Ah Europe.  The culture, the sights, the food, the utter and complete low regard for online video advertising.  Say what?  (Which is French for “it is what?”).  How many consumers there think change is needed for better viewer experiences?  Only 92%.  A Brightcove study found the top three annoyances are ads that are too long, irrelevant ads, and no interactivity.  Let’s go back to length cause it’s not the size of your ad, it’s how much you can piss people off with it.  Around 3/4 think an ad on phone or tablet shouldn’t go over 30 seconds, 45 seconds for smart TVs or laptops.  And 66% say if the content they’re trying to watch is really short, they’re not willing to watch an online ad to get it.  The ad-to-content ratio doesn’t make any sense.  51% struggle with how many online video ads there are, but they do think it’s fair to get some ads in exchange for free content.  Still, over 50% are into ad-blockers.

 

Hear ye all ye who are trying to sell your organization on doing a podcast, because a new report from Tom Webster and the Edison Research crew has some stats you will want to use.  Overall the trend is more listenership, more viability as a channel.  Longtime champion of podcasting Jay Baer has his favorite study results.  Podcast awareness has for the first time crossed over half of Americans 12 and up, sitting at 55%.  21% of them have listened to a podcast in the last month; that’s about 57M people.  Monthly podcast listening went up 23% over the year.  65% of podcast listeners are more willing to consider products and services after hearing about them on podcasts.  63% of podcast listeners say they feel more positive about a brand when they hear it mentioned on one of their fave podcasts.  And 45% of podcast listeners did go visit a sponsors’ website.  Check out my post where broadcast radio legend Walter Sabo gives his best advice for podcast hosts.

 

Hey.  You’re starting your marketing when it’s too late.  This is true of B2C and B2B.  Why?  Because we marketers love to stay totally disconnected from how the public actually behaves.  David Dodd introduces us to the term “casual learning.”  And what it means is thanks to info being so easy to get, research on a business issue actually begins quite casually, and quietly, way before there’s any kind of visible buying intent.  We think everything starts after a company has decided to launch a buying process.  Bzz!  Wrong.  And that’s why we’re way too late a lot of the time with our content.  Plus, it’s the wrong kind of content.  Relationship-building content for casual learners makes your brand a first-in-mind buddy when they do get serious.  Or do you not want a competitive advantage?

 

When you publish a nice little piece of native advertising, how do you let people know that it’s content that somebody paid to put there?  You don’t let people know?  For those who aren’t livin’ that Pablo Escobar life, a Polar report shows over half of publishers use the word “sponsored.”  Tobi Elkin reports that’s playing it super safe since the Federal Trade Commission says that’s the word they prefer.  But 18% used the word “promoted.”  The rest used some other word like, just guessing here, “lies”!  Polar’s Greg Bella goes on to educate us that if you put the advertiser’s name in the disclosure, it can increase CTR 2.2x and it helps even more on mobile.

 

Everybody in your content strategy team might get super excited about those amazing tools that show the search volume for key phrases.  Yay, data that tells us what to do!  But Vertical Measures is suggesting you don’t get too excited about search traffic estimates.  In fact, they say they’re pretty darn faulty indicators of future traffic.  Brad Kuenn explains that first, they’re what you might call, inaccurate, proven to be up to 50% off the mark.  Next, Google spilled the beans that up to 15% of their monthly search queries are searches they’ve never seen before.  Next, they don’t take into account content’s evergreen nature or the fact it’ll rank for related phrases.  Their point, let keyword research guide, not dictate and keep you from making content that will work for you.

 

This is one of those things that you probably already know instinctively, but your brand might not be doing much about it.  They’re not capitalizing on your natural genius.  OpenMarket surveyed US millennials and guess how they prefer to interact with brands.  Text.  It’s not that interruptive, because they’re already texting over 10 times a day at least.  It’s convenient.  It’s fast.  And over 83% open texts within 90 seconds of getting them, so isn’t that the kind of attention from your target you’d like to get?  eContent goes on to write that 60% want to text with businesses, but 20% get zero communication from brands that way.  And real time customer service?  Fuggedaboutit.  80% want to do that with text rather than call and sit on hold listening to Neil Diamond for 20 minutes.

 

How are you feeling today?  Laughy face?  Red angry face?  Wow face?  That’s how Facebook wanted us to show what we think of posts when they brought Reactions to the world earlier this year.  SocialTimes reported the reaction to them out of the gate was meh.  But a new study from Quintly tells us a different story.  And that story is…okay it’s not that much different.  Reactions count for less than 6% of post interactions, and about 77% of them are good ol’ fashioned Likes.  Still, use of Reactions almost doubled, so that adoption’s good, just slow.  What seems to be helping adoption is these miserable and tragic times in which we live.  The sad cry face saw a 48% increase.  And here’s an interesting non-Reactions finding from the study, there are almost 5% more shares than comments.  Yes, people would rather spread your content than say anything about it…unless they’re adding a comment when they share.

 

That’s it.  I don’t have fake followers because you’re nice enough to genuinely follow me @mikestiles.