I love big disconnect stories.  Classic tales of marketers doing what they think is right and what they want to do, as opposed to making stuff that their targets actually want.  Happens all the time.  Today’s illustration is from a LinkedIn study of B2B buyers.  What do they want?  What content helps them actually move toward a purchase?  Who cares?  Because marketers have their own idea about what’s most effective.  Ayaz Nanji reports 35% of B2B buyers are looking for info about product features and functions.  24% of marketers agree with them.  31% of buyers think product demos work great.  All except 18% of marketers say no, you’re not right about that.  The study also shows buyers’ like search & social for awareness, then as they go deeper into their evaluation they want internal info-sharing content.

 

Dim the lights and put on some soft music, because I’m about to tell you about a content maker’s fantasies come true.  What if your client told you, “you know, you’re the creative guys, you know what you’re doing and we trust you.  Just go ahead and make stuff for us and publish it.  We don’t have to approve everything.”  I can hear your collective “yeah, right, like that happens.”  But it has.   Folio Mag says Chevrolet told Condé Nast’s branded-content arm, 23 Stories, to develop a year-long, multi-platform, multi-channel campaign for the new Malibu, with no content approval required.  23 Stories SVP Josh Stinchcomb says content debuts as publisher columns in mags like Self, Glamour and GQ, then a mix of branded content will go on the brands’ digital platforms throughout the year.  Chevy’s car marketing director says it’s the best way to message Condé Nast subscribers.

 

Yeah you might be a content strategist, but what does that mean?  What KIND of content strategist are you?  Because Ann Rockley says there are two distinct kinds, both important, both requiring specific interests and skills, and both needing the other to make anything good happen.  Type one is front end.  They’re all about the content itself and the customer.  They do things like define customer personas and journeys, determine what topics to address & when, pick the best mediums and do SEO guidelines.  Then there’s the back end kind and they love the technology, structure and scalability.  They id how content can be automatically surfaced to meet customer needs, define the CMS structure to support authoring and content retrieval, and deal with tagging for dynamic content retrieval.  And now you know what you are.

 

If you want all my personal info, and I understand why you would because I’m secretly interesting, you have to win my trust first.  And a Syniverse report has revealed that just as brands and mobile operators are asking for more secret info, consumer trust in them is dropping.  Around 50% say their trust is going down and 70% don’t trust organizations to protect their info.  Only 20% will share data like location and shopping habits.  And the hard truth about this is the same survey shows people WANT more personalized experience if they could trust you.  And Chris O’Brien writes that this decline is at a time when device sales are no longer skyrocketing.  Syniverse CMO Mary Clark says, “Success assumes consumers will willingly share personal data for more personalized services and more relevant offers.  This assumption is wrong.”

 

Sometimes we go around pretending to know things we think we should know, but we don’t really know it.  Such is the case with people who claim to clearly know the difference between content marketing and native advertising.  Do you know the difference and can state it eloquently?  I know you can because you’re special, but for those who can’t, PulsePoint’s Andrew Stark helps us out.  There is overlap, it’s all about experiences that are less interruptive and disruptive than your granddad’s ads.  But here’s the difference.  Content marketing is where a brand entertains or informs people with articles and media like a news or entertainment company would.  The idea is it helps the audience build a relationship with the brand.  Native advertising on the other hand, is a method brands use to distribute their content marketing.  Content links get posted in feeds of popular sites so their readers see it in an organic place and way that fits in with the experience.

 

Content marketing is important for business but they should keep the true purpose of content marketing in mind.  So says Benjamin Ehinger on hostingnews.com.  It’s for developing leads by establishing trust and fostering relationships.  Do that right and the sales come later.  Some content marketing stats that he’d like you to know…For whatever reason, companies with under 100 people tend to have a content strategy manager while big businesses are less likely to.  The most successful B2B content marketers are participating on an average of 6 social networks.  If you go by statistics, blog posts should be about 1,600 words.  Why?  Because the reader’s attention span for posts is about 7 minutes and that’s how many words can be consumed in that time.  I need to work on my focus because my time limit is much lower than 7 minutes.  And 79% of businesses that blog say it does have a positive ROI.

 

This is a short story but hey, maybe it’s short enough I can tweet it.  It’s about influencer marketing and how our industry goes back and forth about how much emphasis should be put on it.  SocialTimes reports a new study by Collective Bias shows consumers view content from influencers an average of 2 mins, 8 seconds.  That’s 7x longer than the digital display ad average.  Ad 13 more seconds to that if it’s during the holidays.  Brands that were asked told the survey they see a 1.5x ROI on their influencer campaigns.  And now there’s this time spent with the content metric to factor in.

 

The Wall Street Journal says advertisers will spend $35M in podcasting this year, up 2% over last year.  Radio Ink magazine loved writing about the Wall Street Journal article because it was largely critical of the new audio medium.  The journal did list things holding back advertising on podcasts; hard to measure how many people tune in (they said that, they actually used the term “tune in”), how many hear the hosts promote sponsors, relatively expensive ad costs, and an evolving process of buying & selling ads as pointed out by Performance Bridge.  Having come from radio I could say a bit about its own ratings accuracy, and podcast ad rates are a premium because trusted, authentic hosts interact with engaged, niche communities.  The Journal also pointed out just 10 podcast publishers get 40% of all monthly podcast listeners in the US.  They did not mention how few radio companies control the radio stations in the US.

 

The days of ads on Instagram being cheaper than they are on Facebook are over, and why wouldn’t they be?  Instagram just announced they’ve got over 200,000 advertisers now, and they only started taking ads from a limited number of advertisers in June.  Yasmeen Abutaleb of Reuters says hold that up against Twitter, they’ve been selling ads for 5 years and have 130,000 advertisers.  Of course, Instagram has advantages Twitter does not have and that is a little parent company called Facebook, which already had a pretty darn successful ad technology in place.  Plus both platforms are offered up as a package.  Instagram’s head of global advertising says, “People can be creative in using the two together.  That really hasn’t existed much in the marketing world.”  98 of Facebook’s top 100 advertisers also ran ads on Instagram.

 

When you’re trying to have a mobile experience, it’s hard to feel like you’re mobile when it takes a page so long to load on your device that you just give up and skip it.  Google wants to help.  Romain Dillet reports Google added AMP-enabled pages in mobile search results.  What is AMP you say?  Accelerated Mobile Page, and what makes this extra cool for you content marketers is WordPress.com is one of the first to support the format.  Any site on WordPress.com is now AMP’ed up and the focus is on news articles for now.  If you’re a self-hosted WordPress.org kinda person, you can get AMP going with a plugin.  If you do, word on the street is AMP-enabled pages load 4x faster, and let you make optimized ad tags with your favorite ad network pals.

 

That’s it.  Would love to have you follow @mikestiles.