Content Marketing News for the Week of April 7

April 7, 2016 Uncategorized No comments
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You might just be happy making a video.  Whoo-hoo, look at us, we made a video!  But there’s a video for every part of the funnel according to Jonathan English at Skeleton.  At the top, do brand films that convey your values or mission.  Do educational or How-To videos ‘cause people love to learn stuff.  Do videos that tweak emotions cause that’s the kind people will remember.  For middle of the funnel, put videos in emails to nurture leads.  Do product or service videos so people can “try it on.”  Do case study or testimonial videos to show how others were helped.  Do About Us videos cause people like to deal with people they like.  At the bottom of funnel you can do FAQ videos to solve lingering doubts, instructional videos to show them you’re there to help, and if you can, personalized videos, which have been shown to raise conversion rates about 1.7x.

 

I guess the only reason to invent a new kind of content is so that that kind of content can quickly be used to make ads.  And that’s what’s happening with virtual reality.  Facebook has executed the first VR video ads for the likes of Samsung, Nescafe, Corona, and others.  The Albany Daily Star, where you really should get all your technology news, reports they show up as sponsored posts and are made with the tool Facebook rolled out that lets brands put 360-degree clips on their pages.  Ritz Crackers puts you inside a holiday party, and AT&T puts you in a race car.  Facebook’s also got VR masters like Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin of Vrse giving us production advice on a how-to microsite, and they’re working with 360 camera makers to put “publish to Facebook” buttons on their gear.

 

As a champion of putting out entertaining and informative content, you know that’s a nice part of attracting new prospects but a really big part of keeping existing customers connected to the brand.  So don’t let anyone tell you the customer retention benefits you’re bringing aren’t worth their weight in gold.  Savino Longo writes it’s 7x more expensive to get a new customer than keep one.  Why?  Because trust must come before purchase, and existing customers already trust you.  And they didn’t get their trust overnight, winning it was expensive so you’ve made an investment in that customer.  If your Cost To Acquire a Customer is higher than the lifetime value of your customer, you’re dead meat on toast.  A study by Earl Sasser of the Harvard Business School shows existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more compared to new customers.  And they talk about you and help you recruit those new customers.

 

Is the world even ready for all the content marketing that’s coming?  No mistake it is coming.  Streetwise Studio’s Kyle Gibson points out 2% more B2B marketers will use it this year than last, and it should be a $300B industry by 2019.  So here are the problems that creates.  “Content Shock” or higher volume of content you have to compete against.  Rising ad volume on ad networks like Facebook Ads, which has to happen or cost-per-reach will keep soaring.  And I say “keep soaring” because Nanigans says the average CPM for Facebook Ads went up 142% in a year.  If content sucks, ad blocking will continue being an issue, that’s another problem.  But check this out, one of the biggest problems is there’s not enough of you.  There’s a content marketing talent shortage.  I’m talking about people who know and are experienced in what they’re doing, not people who just want to be in content marketing.  A CMI study shows 32% of marketers have trouble finding trained content marketing pros.

 

Let’s dive into the wonderful world of metrics.  Don’t go away cause we’ve all heard that we have to prove the ROI of content marketing.  So Erik J Martin does a great job on eContent’s site of getting us thinking about which metrics can actually do that.  Site traffic, click-throughs, downloads, all that’s great but is it possible to track what happens after content is consumed, all the way to a purchase?  Daniel Burstein of MarketingSherpa spells out the root problem.  “Content marketing is a mix of branding and direct-response, with a little word-of-mouth thrown in.  Most customers take complex, multichannel journeys to purchase, and it’s difficult to get a complete picture of steps that happen before the one that leads to final purchase.”  Amen my brother.  So we’ve got to get the tools and platforms that show us how many leads were collected, did it bullseye the target segment, did it score awesome in search, did it convert, what’s your share of voice, and did it contribute to pipeline?

 

That’s right, Erik did such a good job with his article it warrants a second Content Marketing Quickie story with actual, real life tips for getting to content that has a visible ROI.  Daniel Orseno of PartyCheap.com says work with sales and agree on what’s worth tracking that will help them.  Jodie Shaw, CMO for The Alternative Board says do downloadable content for email addresses because that speaks to lead capture.  Do focus groups says Company Cue’s Paul Parreira, and find out exactly what content makes them engage.  Customize and personalize and get rid of content that’s disposable and quickly forgotten.  And Mike Porter of Print/Mail Consultants says not all content can be tied to revenue so just accept it.  He says, “If I learn no one’s listening to my podcast, I’ll know to change the content, promote it differently, or abandon the channel.  There’d be no way for me to assign a revenue value to the podcast.”  See?  I’m capable of reporting bad things about podcasts.

 

Ever do one of those Where’s Waldo books?  Well that sumbitch is a piece of cake to find compared to finding every time somebody posts a picture of your brand on social or online.  You want to stay on top of that, right?  Of course you do because as Justin Lafferty writes, the people posting those are influencers…good and bad.  A little image recognition could help.  Peppercomm CEO Ed Moed says with 1.8B images shared daily on social, they can use image recognition to see if sponsorships and events are working, see if logos are being misused, and they can tell if a brand is being mocked…usually not a good sign.  Todd Grossman of Talkwalker says up to 80% of posts feature brands in images but not text, so they’re hidden when it’s probably a conversation you should join.

 

Way too many things to learn about dynamic content from the “Following the Trends – Is Your Content Ready” survey from Data Conversion Laboratory and the Center for Information Development Management.  There are two company holiday parties you want to go to.  eContent reports 45% expect to move more content to dynamic publishing, up from 33% last year.  And when that happens, it bring base HTML publishing down.  58% of content developers don’t publish to the cloud.  And while most customers are searching for learning videos and mobile content, 63% of survey responders said searchable content remains a problem for them.  The number of pros who say their content is ready to support business requirements in the next couple of years is actually going down.  And not everyone feels user generated content is the end all be all, 58% say their customers can’t contribute.

 

What’s the best way to tap into human emotions?  With algorithms and automated machines of course!  Persado uses equations and natural language processing and machine learning to grind out content they hope converts.  Somebody believes they’ve got the magic formula.  They just scored a $30M Series C round their CEO says will be used to improve channel offerings and expand sales headcount.  Persado says they can generate just the right words and images for display ads, social, email, landing pages, and texts to get people to react, at scale, in real time.  A/B testing is fine, but what if both A and B suck?  Persado wants to get rid of that bad vs. terrible dilemma.  Stewart Rogers writes they’ve gathered up data from over 40B impressions and got a 49.5% average uplift in conversions and a 68.4% improvement in CTRs.

 

I think it was Michael Jackson who first said, “Heal the world, make it a better place.”  So I’m happy to report Facebook is doing that by helping sight challenged people get more out of the photos on Facebook.  Jordan Novet writes about their new feature called automatic alternative text.  Screen readers that describe what’s on the screen can now get summaries of what’s in Facebook photos.  Don’t expect lengthy descriptions, Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence thingies will probably just say “outdoor, tree, sky.”  That’s better than the robot voice just saying “photo.”  Facebook’s Matt King says, “We’re making it possible for people to feel totally included in the social interaction and be able to feel part of it without having to feel awkward.”  Well, unless the screen reader says “Dad.  Shirtless.  Bathroom mirror.”

 

That’s it.  Commit an act of following @mikestiles.

Content Marketing News for Week of March 31

March 31, 2016 Uncategorized No comments
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Want to know how to entertain young people using video?  Well I’m sure it involves skateboarders falling on rails and getting racked, that always works.  But Defy Media’s Acumen Report lets us know you should probably put that solid gold video on YouTube because that platform rules for Millennials and Gen Z.  Geoff Weiss reports on Tubefilter Netflix was a distant 2nd, followed by TV then Facebook.  TV is still watched by youngsters, but it’s becoming increasingly less important.  36% said they couldn’t live without it, but 67% feel that way about YouTube.  They are more than willing to cord-cut, most saying it’s because of cheaper options, but 24% said they just aren’t interested in what’s on TV, like Two Broke Girls.  Here’s what you brands should know, this audience greatly prefers branded intros or outros over pre-roll ads, and 87% are fine with product placement.

 

Rohan Ayyar is trying to make us think.  And we don’t like that.  We like really quick, catchy, instant shallow answers.  That’s his point.  He thinks clickbait is destroying the world, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it because it just works so darn well.  He says don’t blame BuzzFeed, it’s us, our brains are wired to respond to maybe discovering some big secret.  But it’s never a secret is it?  It’s the same no-information, massively repetitive, just common sense crap.  And that includes crap from so-called “thought leaders.”  Rohan says here’s the price we’re paying for rewarding clickbait; our capacity to read long and complex sentences is shot, we’ll have less thought-provoking content, mind-challenging work will be ignored, more crap content will be created because only the headline matters, and we’ll accept lame garbage even when our questions are valid.  He hopes we as content makers stop following the herd and being slaves to formulas.

 

Michael Brenner poses an interesting poser; maybe B2B marketers aren’t happy with the performance of their digital marketing because they’re looking at B2C metrics, you know, the wrong metrics if you’re B2B.  Demandbase and Wakefield Research prove these people aren’t that happy.  71% say their digital programs often fail to meet expectations.  89% don’t think what they’re doing is working, and 96% say they’re wasting ads because they aren’t hitting the target.  But 33% are judging success by conversion rates.  That’s so B2C.  Michael says this might be why Account-Based Marketing is on the rise.  When you do that, you’re lining up the marketing and sales teams to target and convert accounts, get more revenue from accounts, and win accounts or at least get them in the pipeline.

 

I don’t have to go on and on about how mobile is a thing now, and an important thing.  Soon it’ll be the same story with podcasting.  Marketing Tech Blog points out that the world is shaping up nicely to facilitate the ongoing podcast explosion; a focus on mobile, better streaming capabilities, and audio interfaces in cars with podcast listening in mind.  Impressed with how people binge watch Netflix and spend enormous amounts of time on the platform?  Long commutes, which will be with us forever unless there’s a transportation revolution in the world – don’t hold your breath, set up binge listening very nicely.  Edison VP Tom Webster says the myth our attention spans are shorter is being subverted.  Some current podcast stats for you: the average podcast is 22 minutes and updates once a week.  The most popular categories are Christian, Music, Comedy, TV & Film, and Literature.  And 22.2M minutes of podcasting are produced per year.

 

More video metrics for you publishers on Facebook.  Jordan Novet writes that up now all you could get were number of views, number of unique viewers, and number of minutes a video was watched.  Facebook’s Anaid Gomez-Ortigoza says now you’ll get to see how many minutes a video was watched on a particular day, the number of video views for a day, and how many times people saw at least 97% of videos shorter than 10 seconds.  Facebook thinks that’ll give you a better feel for when your audiences are watching your videos.  As for getting the daily video data in the Insights API, you won’t get that until an officially vague “later.”

 

I want to stay on top of the news, but I’ve only got 3/4 of a second to devote to it.  Then maybe I should get my news over chat apps.  Don’t scoff oh ye fans of what journalism used to be, it’s happening.  And publications like the New York Times, Washington Post and the Economist are doing it, although in different ways.  The idea is to hook ‘em with a chat news bite that links to more info if, God forbid, the reader wants to know more.  Ron Miller writes okay, maybe you don’t get the analytics you get elsewhere, but messaging app consultant Eytan Oren says, “There are now more people using messaging apps than traditional social networks, so it’s a matter of going where the audiences go.”  The Economist’s community editor Denise Law says even though they’re known for writing in depth, smart stories, chat is helping them diversify their audience.  They use the chat app LINE by the way but Atlantic Monthly built their own.

 

Happy first anniversary to Periscope.  The first anniversary is the emoji anniversary isn’t it?  The people who work there probably have some job security because VentureBeat reports its owner, Twitter, is really counting on it for growth and revenue and a host of good things.  Why else would CEO Jack Dorsey but Periscope’s head on his executive team?  The focus is on live events with new features including GoPro support and viewing streams inside of tweets.  Fun fact!  110 years worth of live video is seen daily on the apps, up 91% from August.  Like celebrities?  Of course you do, they’re your Gods.  Stars like Jamie Foxx and John Mayer broadcast on it.  Blumhouse even did a live horror movie on it.

 

Okay, John Miller is from Scribewise and he wants you to buy their service, but a recent post of his had some pretty helpful stats for you if you’re wondering what it costs to get content made.  Are you paying too much?  Are you getting too little?  Nobody wants to feel like they’re getting ripped off.  And it’s hard to pin down what content costs because it’s all over the board, a very big board.  John points out that if you want articles that suck, you can get those from a content farm for 5 bucks, same as a foot-long sandwich at Subway.  Other firms want thousands, for one article.  Good articles but really?  Thousands?  Freelance writers usually charge by the word, but entities like a PR firm will charge you by the hour – up to $250/hr.  So they’ll want to take as long as possible while you want fast turnaround.  It’s tough for a content shopper out there these days.

 

You know those cool videos from BuzzFeed’s Tasty, the ones that show you step by step how to make something incredible, usually involving chocolate?  Pinterest wants in on that game, cause those are really, really popular.  They launched a new kind of rich media pin called How-To pins.  If you’re in the US, France, UK and Germany, you can get step-by-step directions for making what’s in the picture.  Home Depot, Style Me Pretty, ELLE, and Delish are among the first brands to dive in and naturally certain verticals are more perfect for it than others; think DIY, food and beauty.  And you might need this new angle if you want to stand out on Pinterest in those categories because right now there are 1B hair and beauty pins, 4B recipe pins and 4B DIY pins.  Really we should all be beautiful, full and perfect by now.

 

Scripps Networks Interactive just couldn’t be getting anymore serious about branded content.  They own Food Network, HGTV, DIY Network and Travel Channel, and claims to reach 190M “affluent and engaged” US consumers monthly on TV plus 40M weekly on social.  Scripps has its own branded content division of course, Scripps Lifestyle Studios, with clients like US Cellular and Lowe’s.  Brands get things like title sponsorships, product placement, custom digital videos and co-branded content, spreads in magazines, staged in-store demos.  Chief Content Officer Kathleen Finch says, “Food Network looks different on Snapchat than it does on Facebook or Apple News and we deliver nearly 1B video streams across platforms.”  Kelly Liyakasa of adexchanger tells us Scripps uses Facebook to amplify branded videos and guarantees x number of social views using its own amplification.

 

That’s it.  Follows rule @mikestiles.

Content Marketing News for the Week of Mar 24

March 24, 2016 Uncategorized No comments
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Banners.  How much can you realistically expect to get from a banner?  Chris Boyles says the answer is more than you used to.  You know how Facebook Instant Articles lets publishers publish direct on that platform?  There’s an ad unit equivalent for you brands called Facebook Canvas.  The new format adds similar bonuses as Instant Articles do, they load really fast, and instead of blah images you can incorporate video, huge photos, interactivity, GIFs and all that fun stuff.  And people like fun stuff.  They tested it with Carnival Cruise Line and people spent almost 3 minutes with their ad and scrolled all the way through to the end.  They tested it with Wendy’s and 39% who clicked on their ad saw the whole thing and engaged with it over a minute.  These are not your grandpappy’s banner ads.  As for luring people into clicking the ads in the first place, Canvas has been getting twice the clicks.

 

I have a degree in journalism, which I mostly use as a placemat.  But with the definition of journalism being something quite different now than it used to be, Brian Ekdale, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, wanted to study a mid-sized Midwestern newspaper to see how the new journalism is being embraced, or not.  Ben DeJarnette of MediaShift reports that for the most part, reporters are down with technology changes.  They no longer feel publishing on their site scoops their paper editions.  Most know you’ve got to do social.  The problem is the duties tech brings just get added onto their existing jobs and they don’t have the time.  They have the audacity to think they should be spending their time, you know, getting stories.  More than half say their companies don’t train them in things like social either.  Also, they don’t mind interacting with and getting info from the general public, but they are not so down with “citizen journalism” or user-generated journalism.  Only 14% think John Q. Public should be reporters like them.  One even said, “Just because you’re a teacher doesn’t mean you can be an education reporter.”

 

If you didn’t mind the algorithm changes to Facebook that sank your organic reach to zero and made it pay to play, then you won’t mind what’s happening to Instagram.  Posts will no longer show up in the order they were posted.  Instagram will sort them for you after figuring out what you’re most likely to be interested in.  CEO Kevin Systrom says, “People miss about 70% of the posts in their feed.  What this is about is making sure the 30% you see is the best 30% possible.”  Well that sounds customer focused and charitable doesn’t it?   But Steve Feiner of A Better Florist thinks it’s about monetization, and small business might not be able to foot the bill.  It’s hard for Facebook to keep its revenue growth up, so the growth potential going forward is sitting there in Instagram.

 

We talk a lot about reaching people so they can consume our content, no matter what device they’re on.  But it might be interesting to know which devices those are, especially now that Apple has rolled out the iPhone SE.  Looking just at iPhones, do most people rush right out and get the latest version?  AppLovin analyzed global iPhone usage to get that answer.  Turns out most of us are using the iPhone 6 at 32%.  The 5S is next at 19%.  When you add all the 6’s together, the 6, 6S, 6 Plus, and 6S Plus, that makes up 63%.  AppLovin’s John Krystynak mulled over 3 reasons people may not want phones with screens any bigger than 4 inches.  They learn they don’t like the mega-phone and go back to the old one.  Or they put off upgrading because they know full well they don’t want a bigger phone.  Or the older models don’t cost as much.  Cheaper AND you aren’t trying to stuff a TV in your pocket.  Localytics analyst Caitlin O’Connell says, “Since the biggest differentiator may be that the iPhone SE has the upgrades of current models but in a compacted form, there’s a big upgrade opportunity for consumers holding onto older models and reluctant to change to a larger device.”

 

There are things we marketers think, or hope, doesn’t bother consumers.  One of those things is when experiences across multiple devices aren’t synced, don’t recognize the user, and are disconnected.  We hope they don’t mind this, that’s why only 28% of marketers polled by Adobe have ever used cross-device identification.  But the study shows 66% notice and get frustrated when that happens.  And if you’re targeting Millennials, you really better stop the wishful thinking.  90% of them switch devices while doing activities, and they expect device 2 to pick up right where device 1 left off.  34% of Millennial consumers switch devices while shopping.  Social Times says Millennials have 7.7 devices, using an average of 3.3 daily.  Ryan Dietzen, analyst at Adobe Digital Index adds digital marketers are challenged knowing a Web visitor who shows up on a smartphone is the same customer 4 hours later on a tablet, or 7 hours later on a desktop.

 

Happy birthday dear Twitter, happy birthday to…oh I’m probably out of characters.  Anyway, Twitter just turned 10-years-old.  And to celebrate Kapost’s Director of Content Anne Murphy gathered up some fun Twitter facts for us.  It’s the 2nd most used social platform by B2B after LinkedIn.  Twitter usage appears to be going down, but B2B’s confidence in its effectiveness is actually going up.  Images help a tweet get 150% more retweets.  47% of people who follow brands are more likely to visit the brand’s site.  72% are more likely to buy from them in the future.  Watch out for those weaving drivers, users are 181% more likely to be checking Twitter during their commute.  It’s thought that 1B people tried Twitter, but only 32% of them are still using it.  And finally, 391M Twitter accounts have no followers.

 

You have a lot to say and a really impressive command of the English language.  So you might have been pretty excited when you heard the rumors Twitter was going to abandon its character limitation and let you do posts of up to 10,000 characters.  Those rumors made sense.  Why limit the platform when your social competitors don’t?  Well you’ll have to ask CEO Jack Dorsey that because even though it sounded like he was kind of open to the idea of tweeters doing bigger tweets in January, Justin Lafferty writes that he told the Today Show Twitter is sticking with the 140-character limit, forever.  Dorsey said, “It’s a good constraint for us.  It allows for of-the-moment brevity.”

 

Marketing Tech Blog did a little summing up of Black Ink’s C-level 2016 Marketing Study.  The top MarTech areas US marketers are most likely to buy this year are Business Intelligence, Marketing Automation, and Customer Interaction software.  But when you look at the tools themselves, it’s still pretty much a discombobulated hodgepodge of thousands of tools, all of which say they’re the answer to your dreams.  Marketers say advanced analytics to guide their decision-making is their biggest barrier to success across the board, and relationships between internal silos is critical, but relationship-building is pretty much being ignored as a 2016 priority.  What they are prioritizing is moving the needle on brand relevancy and customer-centricity.  And customer retention and upselling is a bigger part of the focus than customer acquisition.

 

It’s time for me to sit you down and gently, lovingly give you an eye-opening story if you feel like Snapchat isn’t worth paying much attention to in your social marketing.  Edison Research and Triton put out their Infinite Dial research, from which we can learn a few Snapchatty things.  It’s better known than LinkedIn or Pinterest, with awareness from Americans 12+ at 71%.  It has more users than LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Twitter.  Jay Baer says we act like Facebook and Twitter are the big two, but Twitter’s been replaced by Instagram and Snapchat.  Snapchat grew in one year the same as Twitter grew in 4 years combined.  Snapchat is the US’s 2nd-favorite social network based on which they use most often.  And while Facebook is still tops with people 12-24, Snapchat’s the next fave of young folk at 26%, with Instagram 3rd at 17%.  Jay points out that means in one year, 10% of US social-using 12-24 year-olds changed from Facebook to Snapchat as their main social platform.

 

VentureBeat always keeps their ear pressed to, whatever helps them hear things, and they say Google’s been working on a video livestreaming competitor to Twitter’s Periscope and Facebook live.  People don’t want to wait to see videos of your dog, they want to watch it live!  It’s called YouTube connect and it’s a standalone app available, probably, on Android and iOS.  Ken Yeung reports it’ll do most of the main stuff its competitors do, except there’s not integration with Facebook and Twitter for social sharing.  What it does have going for it is the degree to which YouTube is synonymous with video.  Google’s Manual Bronstein, told Wired, “Live has always been a part of video, and it’s actually always a very exciting part.”  If the rumors are right, there’s chat and tagging and a “news feed,” you can watch live video within the app, and you can record and store your cast so it can be viewed later by you and others.

 

That’s it.  Follows are awesome @mikestiles.

Content Marketing News for the Week of Mar 17

March 17, 2016 Uncategorized No comments
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A new app called Tagly got launched at SXSW.  And that happened because of how Facebook started treating brands.  After brands built pages, built audiences and help keep those fans on Facebook, the deal got flipped on them.  Now their content would not be allowed to compete based on how good that content was.  Organic reach hit the floor and Facebook became pay to play if you were a business instead of a person.  Mark Alhermizi built Tagly to be a place specifically for brands’ content and the people that want to see it.  Liz Bacelar writes that Brian Boland of​ Facebook Ads Product Marketing says users can be hit with around​ 15,000 stories when they log on.  You’re trying to get visibility in all of that.  Mark says, “Instead of wasted impressions, consumers pick categories they actively want to follow.  This gives all brands in the platform access to targeted engagement and 100% organic reach”.

 

Thank goodness Tom Edwards of Epsilon was at the 23rd edition of SXSW Interactive because that means we didn’t have to find a hotel room or chase down a pedicab.  He gives us the hot 5 topics that dominated the big show.  Like virtual reality, which is not longer a curiosity, it was really at the forefront with virtual football, VR storytelling and Cinematic VR.  Social media giving way to social messaging as people want more intimate sharing and narrowcast networks.  AI and emotive robotics, you know, the ones that “get us” and know how we feel about thing (they know how much we’re afraid of them).  Dark social, which is sharing that’s right now analytically invisible.  Radium One says 59% of all online sharing is in the dark and 72% of sharing is just copying and pasting URLs into email or text.  And of course, the Internet of Things.

 

The global consumer media spend is going to hit $2.01T in 2019 according to the newest stuff from PQ Media, you know, their annual Global Media Intellicast Series.  If they’re right, that’s double what it was in 2009.  Here’s how they define things.  Digital media and technology is media you get over the Internet on wireless and digital.  Traditional media and technology is that which was originally developed in analog.  Who’s the world’s biggest consumer media content & tech market?  The US of course and it also leads in per-capita user spend at $1,160.  However, while that spending went up 6.8% in 2015, that’s a bit slower than the 7.8% growth it had in 2014.  Apparently, spending on long in the tooth Internet media like PCs and broadband slowed down.

 

We’re so proud of ourselves, the way we do targeting.  You know who’s not impressed?  Our targets.  And it’s not just that they feel that way, they’re showing it by not being responsive to our whiz bang marketing efforts.  Yahoo, Audience Theory and Ipsos numbers tell us Millennials are probably your best friend because they’re most likely to interact with ads that target them: 37% would click, 34% are more likely to buy from brands that target them.  But Kimberlee Morrison writes they still aren’t happy.  34% say advertisers don’t really recognize their generation.  Seriously, is it even possible to recognize Millennials enough?   As for Baby Boomers, you’re not sweeping them off their feet.  Only 23% even click ads.  The lesson, gotta move past demographics and personalize based on interests, which marketers struggle with.

 

It is so super rare that you hear any bad news about Instagram, so how could I not tell you when it happens?  Quintly studied the platform and out of their numbers, as Quintly’s Julian Gottke said, “Most surprising was the distinct drop in the interaction rate.”  The average interactions per post are about 40% lower than before.  Stewart Rogers points out yeah, you could make the argument it’s because Instagram is maturing, but he thinks it’s got something to do with the changes it’s made over the past year; changes that made advertisers happy but maybe not so much users.  60-second ads, carousel ads, ads served up once every 5-6 photos, in fact brand post frequency has gone up 116%.  Stewart’s research shows 6 out of 10 users are unhappy about all that.  So not only is interaction going down, follower growth is slowing.

 

Time to announce another brand content studio.  This time the USA Today Network.  They’re calling theirs GET Creative, and it wants to connect people with ad partners locally and nationally no matter what the media.  Gannett’s VP of branded content Kelly Andresen will lead its efforts to come up with original stories to put on USA Today Network’s platforms.  Kelly says, “With the flagship USA Today and our 92 local properties, we’re poised to have an extremely strong impact for our partners.”  GET also plans to use real-time data to help max out reader engagement.  And it’ll buddy buddy with local and national media properties so marketers can deliver content all kinds of communities.

 

Publishers publish.  So who’s most successful at it on social?  Tania Yuki of Shareablee reports US publishers got 1.5B total social actions in February.  Most, 707M, were on Instagram, 702M from Facebook, and 61M from Twitter.  Overall the top publishers were National Geographic, Tasty by BuzzFeed where you watch someone else make delicious things quickly, Bleacher Report, E! Online, BuzzFeed Food – which saw the highest growth of the 10, BuzzFeed, Complex, Tip Hero, Billboard, and National Geographic Travel.  AskMen saw the most growth of all publishers at 597%.  So what kind of content is clicking?  For BuzzFeed Food it was some chocolate ball video recipe.  And Billboard killed on Instagram around Taylor Swift’s Grammies.

 

If you’ve had it right up to your limit with people stealing your intellectual property, I feel your pain.  Scarface, The Brady Bunch, the Constitution…all my ideas.  The issue is it takes a lot of time and money to really protect yourself and register everything you make with the Library of Congress.  And that’s what you’ve got to do if you really think someone is going to steal from you and you’re really going to want to sue them.  So here’s Nathan Lands with his startup Blockai.  Drag and drop and your work is registered and you get a certificate!  Will that certificate really protect you?  Who knows?  It’s never been tried in court.  But Anthony Ha writes that Blockai uses blockchain to create proof you did something in a public database, which Nathan says is better than nothing.  Fun fact, he learned from a personal survey only 10% of SF area artists are registering their work.  They don’t really believe in themselves.

 

It’s already not that easy for a lot of us to sell our bosses and organizations on doing content marketing, because they’ve got an easy out.  All they have to do is lean back in their chair and say “show me how this is going to move the needle on our Tier 1 business goals.”  Well you need metrics to do that.  And to get metrics around content you have to, I know you’re way ahead of me, DO content.  But Fairfax’s Managing Director for Content Marketing, Simon Smith says we better figure out our industry’s measurements and measurement tools.  In his humble opinion, you can’t measure content marketing like you do digital ads, saying, “As an industry we’ve got to create some benchmarks.  We’ve got to say, ‘This is what good content looks like, this is what brands should aspire to do with their content.’”  Simon says, see what I did there, brands are “obsessed” with their owned channels, the appetite to create content is unreal, and they’re starting to realize they should own an audience instead of always be trying to reach one.

 

Woe is LivingSocial.  You may have gotten an email or two from that company, right?  Well they’re going to lay off another 280 employees.  That’s 160 of theirs plus 120 that’ll go jobless when they’re customer services place in Tucson shuts down.  They’ll outsource to a company in Jersey for that now.  Ingrid Lunden reminds us in her report they just laid off 200 in October.  So here’s CEO Gautam Thakar’s task; try to stabilize the daily deal biz they’re in so they can’t shift to what they want to do now, card-linked offers for verticals, starting with restaurants.  They tested this in Atlanta and it worked okay.  Customers use payment card details to reserve an offer at establishment that gets redeemed when they go and use that same payment card.  Their competitor Groupon, however, has NO problem with the daily deal business model and are super sticking to it, rolling out a refurbished merchants platform that includes a new iPad app that helps them make, promote and redeem deals.

 

That’s it.  Follows are so validating @mikestiles.

Content Marketing News for Week of Mar 10

March 10, 2016 Uncategorized No comments
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You have a choice, 30 minutes of traditional commercials or brand content.  Which would you rather have put in front of you?  BuzzFeed thinks it’s the latter.  That’s why they hired an executive creative producer and that’s why they’re working with American Express and NBC to make just such a trade out around Leap Day.  Tim Baysinger reports in AdWeek BuzzFeed made social content that’s on BuzzFeed and the NBC shows’ digital platforms, including over-the-top apps.  What kind of content are we talking about?  A little documentary on a winner from The Voice, fan theories about Blindspot, and Kathie Lee and Hoda do something, probably taste test wine.  AMEX’s VP Global Media Joe Bihlmier seems happy with it.  He says, “We’re partnering with NBCUniversal in this first-of-its-kind campaign to provide viewers with relevant, exciting content to reinforce our message: American Express gives you more.”

 

As we build out our content marketing organizations, corporations are starting to come to grips with a hard, cold, truth.  One they’ve been slow to accept frankly.  Many have wanted to deal only with strategy and tech, but orgs now have to care about finding, getting and keeping creative people.  And wow, we’re different animals.  Ian Mills of Magicdust tells us what to do to make creatives happy.  Orgs with senior micro-management, unreal deadlines and budgets, and creative stifling is a non-starter.  Think more about health related perks like quick workout areas, relaxing collaboration areas, letting them work however they work best, OPTIONAL team building events, and training & development so they can get somewhere.

 

There are still some challenges to podcasting success, but what are some of the ways the top producer in the biz is approaching those challenges?  I’m talking about New York’s public radio station WNYC.  They jumped in eeearly, 2004.  Ricardo Bilton reports problem 1; most podcast listening is on somebody else’s platform.  WNYC is teaming up with other podcast companies to make one platform.  Problem 2; the Web is visual, not audio-oriented.  Chief Digital Officer Thomas Hjelm says WNYC is putting static images on episodes, uploaded to social as video.  Problem 3; no standardized measurement.  WNYC put out guidelines to make metrics more consistent.  Chief Content Officer Dean Cappello says they’re also operating like Hollywood, where a few big-budget hits fund the riskier niche podcasts.

 

In the old days, and if you don’t know what those looked like, watch Grease or something.  In the old days you would go to this big field, park your car, hang a speaker on your window and watch a movie through your windshield.  They were called drive-ins.  Now we’re talking about how you can watch a movie in your car, while it’s moving, and while you’re in the driver’s seat.  Lindsay Friedman writes in Entrepreneur that Ford has filed a patent for an “autonomous vehicle entertainment system.”  When the car’s self-driving, everyone can watch hit movies like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on flat-panel displays.  If, God forbid, you actually need to be in control of the car, the screen goes up into the car’s roof while the movie keeps playing on other screens for passengers in the back.  The point of telling you all this is, the car will soon be another place for captive video audiences.

 

How’s that employee advocacy going for you?  Are your people sharing your company news on their social channels?  Krzysztof Kazibut, GM of Bambu by Sprout Social gives us 6 things that could be getting in the way.  4 of them are 1: counting too much on incentives.  You’ll train them to expect it and you probably won’t be able to keep it up.  2: forgetting to curate content.  All your company content isn’t relevant…shocker I know.  So target messages to the right employees at the right time.  They don’t really owe you anything.  3: not letting employees write their own messages.  Yes, some companies actually do that.  And 4: not promoting the program.  They do okay when it launches but then kinda drop it.

 

If WordPress is your publishing tool of choice, getting into Facebook Instant Articles is about to get a whole lot easier.  If you remember, Facebook said last month Instant Articles will be available to all publishers April 12.  But that wasn’t the only announcement it had up its sleeve.   There’s going to be a free plugin for WordPress.  After shaking it down with a little group of publishers, Chris Ackermann & pals decided it’s ready.  So if you use standard WordPress templates you can activate the plugin as is or customize it.  David Cohen goes on to report the plugin is open source and can spot images in articles and render it for perfect showcasing in Instant Articles, you know, instantly.  It’ll also handle social, interactive graphic, and auto-play video embeds.  Fun fact!  WordPress powers over 25% of sites on the Interwebs these days.

 

Now it’s time for me to tell you about how important mobile is.  You probably really need me for that.  But Yesmail put out a report for Q4 of last year, and it’s got something to say about the Tinder, spelled with an I, relationship between mobile and email.  Douglas Karr interprets it as brands are making a big mistake not making sure the guest trip from opening an email to conversion looks and works good on mobile.  The benefits of responsive design are pretty well known by now so the mobile experience is a good’n, but the survey shows only 17% of marketers make sure all their emails are responsive.  And to make mobile matters worse, people are getting more used to buying stuff over mobile.  In fact, the average order value is going up faster than desktop, and while desktop click-to-open went down 29% in the last 2 years, mobile clicking to open went up 26% over the same time.

 

If you’ve got good brand content, where’s it going to be more influential at driving a purchase, mobile or desktop?  Mode Media commissioned a Nielsen survey that gives us the answer.  It’s mobile, 24% to 19%.  Apparently being able to reach people and give ‘em a good nudge right there while they’re on the spot gives mobile the edge.  People thought branded stories were interesting, exciting, and natural, while only 34% found them excessive and 31% thought they were forced.  People are spending about two and a half minutes with branded stories, that’s 8x more than with traditional rich media advertising.  21% were more likely to buy brands they were exposed to, but for less established brands it was even higher at 41%.  ¾ said they’re likely to view more sponsored stories, and 63% would share them.  Conagra’s Media Marketing Director Heather Dumford says, “We see great opportunity in reaching our consumers with better content that does not disrupt their experience but enhances it.”

 

Pinterest wants to be your ad machine.  So if you’re a small or medium business, you’re getting some new ad management tools that used to only be available to partners.  Matthew Lynley reports it gives you bulk-editing campaigns, closer monitoring of campaign success, and lets you buy ads with credit cards.  Monetization Product Manager Nipoon Malhotra says you’re also getting some new ad targeting tools; more interests to target against (420 of them, did you know there was so much for you to be interested in?), and keyword targeting.  In fact, you can do customer database targeting, creating profiles to advertise against your existing database.  That’s a lot of cool stuff but my favorite part is Pinterest has dedicated teams that have nothing to do other than make sure the quality of ads doesn’t suck.  That’s what I want to do, I want to be on a non-suck team.

 

Facebook bought Masquerade so you can make videos of yourself with a monkey face superimposed over you.  I don’t know how you’ve made it this long without being able to do that.  It works on Android and iOS.  Masquerade is certainly excited about this because it’s going to remain a standalone app but it will now get exposed to Facebook’s user base.  And that’s a lot of potential monkeys.  But Paul Sawers writes it’s not all about silliness, Masquerade’s co-founder Eugene Nevgen says it can be used for bidness, applied to videoconferencing and live video customer service.  Maybe customers want to be helped by Ironman.  Masquerade also says they’ve got pros working on stuff like face detection and tracking and facial expression recognition.  Are you smiling about that?  I can’t recognize what you’re doing.

 

That’s it.  Follows @mikestiles are always cherished.

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