Content Marketing News for Week of Feb 25

February 25, 2016 Uncategorized No comments
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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.

Content Marketing News for Week Ending Feb 18

February 18, 2016 Uncategorized No comments
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Making content for mobile?  Good, that’s very smart of you but that content will get a lot farther if you understand how people are using mobile, especially your Millennial target.   Invoca’s Amber Tiffany gives the results of a study they did and learned if you want Millennials’ total focus, uh good luck with that.  A big majority check their mobile often, even if they’re with friends & family.  38% check it even while out on a “good” date.  Such true passion, for the phone.  Messaging and calling are the top activities, which means yes that beats out social, videos, photos, and email.  In fact, when asked which method they prefer for contacting businesses, 66% said a phone call.  Only 22% said social.  52% of Millennials buy using their phones at least a few times a month so move toward one-click checkout if you can.  And 84% don’t mind you gathering their data, but they expect more relevant ads.

 

You’re not alone if you’re not quite sure whether or not your organization is organized best for today’s marketing.  There’s all this shifting to customer experience and that means integrating with other departments, some of whom may not even like you.  @CreativeKatrina gives us the rundown from a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit, and over 80% of marketing execs say yep, they need a restructuring alright, 29% say they need that like, urgently.  75% of marketers say in the next 3-5 years, they’ll be responsible for the whole customer experience across the whole customer journey.  The top skills for marketing people are marketing operations & tech/digital engagement, strategy and planning, and demand gen, in that order.  Creative comes in 5th, you know, cause that just happens magically.  80% also think in 3-5 years, marketing will be classified as a revenue driver, not a cost center.

 

Ever been held hostage by an agency?  Or felt that way?  Sure you have, we all have.  They’re expensive and aren’t doing that great a job but you’re already in too deep financially and they have the creative assets.  Douglas Karr advises in MarketingTechBlog don’t make that deal.  Make sure you know right from the jump who owns the domain name because some agencies register it but keep ownership.  What happens if the agency is doing the hosting and you want to quit them?  Will you have to move your site somewhere else?  Then there’s the matter of the raw assets used to make media outputs.  If you don’t own or have the assets, you can’t repurpose them or have someone else do edits.  Again, it’s not that agencies are evil, but some will charge the lower prices you want in exchange for them keeping ownership of the assets.

 

Were you in social marketing 7 years ago?  Remember how thrilling it was?  It was a revolution that had the potential to change almost everything.  Back then 5.6% of marketing budgets went to social.  In the next 5 years it’s supposed to be around 20.9%.  As they say, whoo-hoo.  But you know how many marketing leaders say social contributes very highly to the company’s performance?  3.4%.  That’s it, 3.4% say social is doing anything big.  Christine Moorman and the CMO Survey offer up a few reasons why this might be happening.  1. Social efforts aren’t integrated with other marketing channels.  2. Social customer data isn’t being combined with other customer info.  And 3. Quantitatively proving social’s impact is STILL elusive.  There’s a feeling it’s doing something but…who knows?

 

You got some really swell content and now it’s time to distribute it on social.  Which network is going to do the best job of it?  The answer is always “it depends,” but TrackMaven did some analysis across 50M pieces of paid and organic content that will give you a little head start.  They learned brands got 3x the engagement for content they shared on Facebook as compared to what they put out on Twitter.  Amy Gesenhues goes on to report Pinterest took it right on the pin, or chin, with a 49% engagement drop over the course of last year.  The king of average engagement rate where brand content is concerned…Instagram.  Although, that ratio with Instagram videos and pictures dropped 31% and 36%, respectively.  LinkedIn pretty much was a steady Eddie, not much change.  Now, where are brands putting their content?  On the platforms that are falling in engagement!  Pinterest and Twitter are seeing the highest increases in content volume.

 

If you think new parents would be way too busy and pressed for time to spend a lot of time posting things on Facebook.  No, they’ve got plenty of time.  And the evidence is all those posts about baby that rival puppy content.  In fact, a Facebook IQ study with Sound Research and Ipsos MediaCT tells us Parents around the world post 2.3x more photos, 2.9x more videos and 1.8x more updates than the rest of us.  David Cohen writes that you know how you might think the public gets tired of posts about little grownups?  Well they don’t.  Those posts get 37% more interactions from relatives and 47% more from friends.  Friends care more than grandma does!  And here’s one for you “when is the best time to post” obsessives.  If you want to reach new parents, try 4am.  That’s when they start accessing Facebook on mobile and it peaks at 7am.  Some little fella isn’t seepy.

 

Instagram continues to be a big marketing power player, so if you’re posting videos on there you might like to know how many views they’re getting, and now you can!  Likes are great, you can Like photos and videos but there’s value in impressions.  Or bragging rights, value or bragging rights one or the other.  So content makers like brands will be able to see in a couple of weeks how many times their videos were seen.  If that sounds familiar, you get a cookie, because you’ve used YouTube and Vine.  Instagram’s internal data shows that in the last 6 months, eyeballers spent 40% more time watching videos on the platform.  And they’ve got 98 of the Fortune 100 using it so they’ve got to start giving them more and better metrics.

 

There’s nowhere I won’t look for content marketing tips and advice, and that includes the Medical Marketing & Media website.  Dammit Jim I’m a doctor, not a marketer!  Well recently they were talking about how to get people to share and amplify content…only they call it propelling content.  I mean if medical marketers can’t make something go viral, who can?  Philip Chin of Langland says it’s overly simple to think “good” content is “good enough.”  It has to be emotionally compelling and those opportunities are rare.  Rob Bean of Burns Marketing says if you empathize with your customer, you’ll know what content they want and need.  And John O’Brien, VP at Merkle Health, says connecting through and having the same personal values as your customer will have them propelling.

 

Let’s talk about my old industry of radio.  I know you’re getting ready to place that big broadcast radio ad buy for your brand.  But radio sells digital too, and a new report for the Radio Advertising Bureau by Borrell Associates says the industry grew digital ad revenue 11.4% last year, to $550.8M.  Digital Content Next reports the average station made $231,210 in 2015.  By the end of this year, digital ads should make up 6.5% of a station’s overall revenue.  And it’s not just banner ads and online stream audio ad insertions, they’re selling website design, SEO service, getting into all kind of things beyond traffic reports and bad seats at sporting events ticket giveaways.  Is radio a threat?  How much of locally spent Internet advertising does a cluster of stations pull in?  .26%.  And now you know, the rest of the story.

 

Facebook Instant Articles, they’re so instant!  They load so fast and look so good and clean that users are far more likely to click the link and read the content.  And they open in the Facebook app environment, not in a web browser.  You’re smart, so you know what they’re doing, keeping people on Facebook.  But they’re protecting the user experience because ads have to be separated by at least 350 words or can’t exceed 15% of the content.  Josh Constine points out that also, the design prohibits links that do things for publishers like recirculate traffic and get people to act on CTAs.  So it’s a real trade-off and publishers have to figure out what’s best for them.  Anyway, they’re moving beyond their publishing partners and making it open for all publishers April 12th so start figuring out if it’ll help you or hurt you.

 

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

Content Marketing News for Week of Feb 4

February 4, 2016 Uncategorized No comments
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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.

 

That’s it.  Here’s where you can subscribe to the Quickie.

Content Marketing News for Jan 28

January 28, 2016 Uncategorized No comments
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Podcasting is awesome, at least in my experience it is.  But there are some problems surfacing as everyone tries to figure out the best business models for monetizing them.  Now me, I’m so smart I don’t have ads or monetize at all so I got nothin.  But one issue is how do you make an ad that’s inserted into a podcast relevant for people who don’t discover it until much, much later?  How do you make ads evergreen?  Well, you don’t.  You have to be able to switch them out, even in your archived episodes.  Slate’s podcast biz Panoply thinks they’ve figured it out.  They’re launching Megaphone, which used to be Audiometric when they first bought the technology from a couple of Aussie brothers last summer.  Podcasters have ad challenges.  Jeremy Barr writes it can do one-click ad insertion, geo-targeting to specific podcast consumers, and A/B testing.  And yes, Panoply Chief Content Officer Andy Bowers says it’ll put new ads in back episodes.  Director of product Joel Withrow says they’re trying to give advertisers live access to a podcast campaigns progress report as soon as Q2, which will facilitate metrics beyond just download totals.

 

I can’t see what your face is doing while you listen to this podcast but if I could, I’d probably get a better idea of what you really think about it.  The BBC feels the same way, so they had their Storyworks content marketing arm test consumers’ “subconscious reactions” to content on BBC.com using facial coding and recognition.   Sarah Homewood writes in AdNews faces were recorded every second and coded into 6 emotions: sadness, puzzlement, happiness, fear, rejection and surprise.  Sounds like that Disney movie “Inside Out” to me.  BBC Worldwide’s SVP Alistair McEwan thinks there hasn’t been enough evidence to show if people really enjoy content marketing so this face thing is good.  Okay what’d they learn?  63% think content-led marketing is an innovative way for advertisers to reach people.  And 64% are happy to read content-led marketing if it’s clear which brand it’s from and if it’s clearly labeled.  Unless these people are so good at lying their faces can lie.

 

I hesitate to say this considering that some of you brands are still debating whether or not it’s worth it to create blog posts on a regular basis, but there’s a whole new medium shaping up now, and that, of course, is virtual reality.  Samsung makes the Gear VR headset so it’s become clear to them now they have to also make sure really cool content gets made for it.  So they’re opening a VR studio in NY to do just that.  Well Richard Trenholm reports that actually they’re putting it inside some existing office space of theirs where some marketing functions are.  Samsung USA’s CMO Marc Mathieu says that’ll work because marketing will be right there to promote what gets made.  The announcement was made at Sundance, which worked out all nice and tidy because they also announced a year-long partnership with the Sundance Institute to foster creative talent.

 

Okay, nobody’s saying a company shouldn’t try to make money.  But sometimes you can get so eager to do that, well, your customers can’t help but notice.  Instagram isn’t trying to be sneaky, they said back in June they were going to serve up more ads.  In August they put out an ads API so 3rd parties could sell ads for them.  So just how many more ads have been added?  Kurt Wagner writes that it’s kinda hard to tell since Facebook doesn’t break out the Instagram numbers.  But one of Instagram’s ad partners, Brand Networks, let a little bit of the cat out of the bag.  They alone served up 50M ad impressions in August, then 100M in September, then 670M in December.  If you left your abacus at home, that’s a 13x increase in 5 months.  Now what I would have thought is that this explosion of ad inventory would drive down value.  I’d be wrong.  Cost per thousand stayed about the same.  More ads, same price.  You people must REALLY love Instagram.

 

What are we content marketers always saying?  Great content will increase brand affinity, deepen relationships and make customers more loyal.  But why are people so loyal to the brands they get attached to?  Why am I a Coke guy who gets genuinely upset when restaurants sell Pepsi products?  Matthew Foster reports that International telecom provider Toll Free Forwarding surveyed US consumers and 75% of them think you brands could be doing a much better job of winning and holding their loyalty, and here’s how you can.  Have values and be an accountable corporate citizen.  Be available on social for great customer service.  Tap into nostalgia, if your brand has a long history, use it.  Build trust with useful expertise.  And the #1 loyalty driver cited by respondents, treat customers right and special with discounts and offers.  If they feel they’re getting a deal for their loyalty, why go anywhere else?

 

Um, anybody know what’s going on over at Twitter?  Several senior executives are making use of the exit door at the same time.  That includes SVP of Product Kevin Weil, SVP of Engineering Alex Roetter, VP of Global Media Katie Stanton, and VP of Human Resources Brian “Skip” Schipper.  Stanton and Weil said it’s so they can spend more time with their families.  Ah but wait, we’re not done.  Vine chief Jason Toff is also leaving.  He’s headed over to Google to work on their new virtual reality stuff.  So there’s all that, plus rumors Jack Dorsey will be dealing with turnover in the board of directors next quarter, plus rumors of a sale based on the fact the stock price recently sank well under the offering price.

 

Skyword did a study, as it is wont to do, this time about content marketing staffing at enterprise companies.  Ayaz Nanji reports the results.  27% of said companies developed a global content strategy last year, and a lot of them now have at least one employee who does nothing but oversee content creation.  1/3 of them put an editorial manager in the marketing department, and 28% have what they call a content marketer.  Most on staff content marketing leaders got hired between 2012 and 2014, and 82% of those lucky folk came from a media background.  And no, binge watching Netflix does not count as a media background.  Anything going on outside of marketing departments?  Uh, yeah.  2% say almost all employees at their company produce some kind of content.  I bet they’re counting PowerPoints.

 

Platforms platforms, who doesn’t love a platform?  Investors sure like them because business video platform Vidyard just scored a $35M round of funding bringing their total to $60.7M.  But since it’s so uncouth to talk about money, we’ll talk about what they plan to do with it.  Stewart Rogers talked to cofounder Michael Litt, who says to keep the growth going, it’ll go to marketing, sales, and customer experience.  Also he says phooey on vanity metrics.  He didn’t say phooey but his point is you’ve got to go beyond tracking clicks and downloads.  They try to get to intent data and turn it into actionable insights.  And by the way, video now makes up 64% of all Internet traffic and Cisco thinks it’ll be 80% by 2019.

 

I’m going to try to get you to do something at the end of this podcast.  That’s called a call to action.  And lucky me, Danielle Bilbruck just wrote some of the more tried and tested ones for Kapost.  “Reserve your spot now—space is limited!” can stop people from not pre-ordering.  “Download our eBook for more information” is fine but that gated info better be really good.  “Claim your offer while supplies last!” again creates a sense of limitation and urgency, as does “Use your discount before it expires!”  “For more tips, join our email list” promises additional value, that you better deliver on.  And “To see the rest of our blog, visit our website” is a good ol’ tease tactic where you show them maybe the first paragraph.

 

Ad bots are the traffic that never really was, and they hurt everybody because legitimacy, accuracy, it all goes out the window.  Rande Price reports what is actually good news, fraud overall hasn’t really changed much since last year but when you take into consideration that digital ad spend should grow 15%, the total loss to advertisers could go up to $7.2B this year.  That’s what the Association of National Advertisers says.  And some things were more vulnerable to ad fraud than others, like the higher the cost-per-thousand impressions, the more vulnerable to fraud traffic.  Programmatic ad buys, especially video, had more bots than average.  Programmatic buys with Hispanics as the target were almost twice as likely to pull bot traffic.  And those getting traffic through 3rd parties were exposed to a higher level of sophisticated bots.  ANA advice for marketers includes maybe state in insertion orders you won’t pay for fraudulent impressions.

 

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Content Marketing News for Jan 21

January 21, 2016 Uncategorized No comments
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You’ve heard the dream.  You’re walking down the street, you pass a store and your phone starts freaking out.  Pants!  2 for 1 pants today and we’ll throw in the underwear for free.  It’s the digital version of walking through a 3rd world bazaar.  Nevin Jethmalani co-founded an app that launched last week that does that very thing, but he realized the experience can be annoying so his is crafted to deliver much more relevant content.  Notify Nearby does what they all do, uses beacon technology and location data to throw something at you, but with Nevin’s you choose the brands you want to get notifications about.  It’s not so random.  He says promotions do best but product launches and exclusives work too.  The beacon stuff is in NYC right now but the rest of us country yokels can still use Notify Nearby to get brands’ latest content.

 

Did you have a lot of trouble coming up with a name for your baby?  Oh you didn’t know you had a baby?  Sorry about that.  Well Verizon might have a similar challenge because they own AOL, and it might need a new name.  Why?  Well, what do you think of when you hear AOL?  The most disastrous merger in history?  Screeching dial up sounds?  Sappy Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movies?  CMO Allie Kline says AOL has a lot of great brands under it, like Huffington Post and TechCrunch, but there’s a disconnect between those and AOL.  Jillian D’Onfro writes even Google changed to Alphabet.  Do you ever call it Alphabet?  I don’t.  Anyway, brand expert Mark Ritson says this is tricky because AOL has great awareness, but a challenged image.  Let that be a lesson to you brands that play fast and loose with your image.

 

A lot of people use Amazon Echo.  It’s a cylinder-looking thing that can play music, answer some questions and control smart devices in your house like the lights if the devices are connected, just by telling it to do those things.  The robot assistant, Amazon’s version of Siri, in it is called Alexa.  So you’d go “Alexa, dim the lights cause, I’m hiding from the police.”  What’s this got to do with content?  Kevin Tofel writes in ZDNet she can now read your Kindle books to you.  You say, “Alexa, read Green Eggs & Ham,” and she does it for no additional fee.  And a lot more Kindle titles are supported than you might think.  The only thing is, you’ve got to be cool with Alexa’s voice.  Again, what does this have to do with content the way we talk about it here?  Imagine a day probably soon when every one of your blog posts is also a podcast – automatically – because it can be read to people by virtual voices.

 

When I was working and writing for Oracle Social years ago, I often wrote about how few CEO’s were establishing a presence on social.  Okay but now it’s 2016 and…few CEO’s have established a presence on social.  They don’t seem to especially want to communicate with you.  A report from software provider Domo and CEO.com says 61% of F500 CEOs aren’t active on any of the major social networks and only 195 of them are active on at least one.  Kimberlee Morrison writes that LinkedIn’s the one they seem to like most, maybe because of the Influencer program.  There are 1.7% more CEO’s on Twitter, but usage went down.  They tweet on average once every 5 days.  YouTube is the fastest growing, but mostly because PR and marketing teams are putting CEO’s in videos.  It’s not like they’re authentically dialoguing with the public.  But Domo founder Josh James says give it time, a new breed of younger, social-savvy CEO is coming.

 

For every cap and limitation, there’s a way around it, as long as you’re willing to pay.  Verizon Wireless will let you content providers be exempt from data caps placed on its customers so you can get your stuff to them without eating up their usage.  It’s called “FreeBee Data 360,” and it even puts a picture of a little bee on sponsored content that won’t cost them any data.  If your brand sells honey you’re really in business.  You’ll get charged for each gigabyte you serve to people, whether that’s video, audio, an app download, ads, website usage, whatever.  But, there is a length limit of how much data you can sponsor, like 30 seconds of video or 30 minutes of audio.  AT&T’s been doing this same thing since early 2014.  Now, is this fair?  Jon Brodkin writes that the FCC’s crystal clear net neutrality rules don’t forbid this kind of thing but they do look at these things on a case-by-case basis.

 

For years and years, newspapers were able to license content from the Washington Post.  And they still can.  It’s just that, with newspapers kinda struggling these days, relying on them as customers isn’t as attractive a proposition to the Post as it used to be.  Don’t get me wrong, newspapers and news sites are still the main customers for The Washington Post News Service and Syndicate that handles that part of the business, but editorial director Alan Shearer says they’re starting to see more interest from foreign organizations and digital only sites.  To accommodate them, the Post, now owned by Jeff Bezos in case you need a reminder, has a super slick new site.  It’s fast, and it lets you really drill down to find content and images from the Post, Bloomberg News and Japan News.  Michelle Manafy reports the next thing they want to do is get ecommerce going so subscribers can track their items, pay bills, and open the door so anyone, not just subscribers, can pay for and use their content.

 

WhatsApp is up to 990M users if estimates are to be believed.  So you may want to advertise on it except there’s one problem, back when Facebook bought it for $2B both pretty much made a commitment that there’d be no ads.  Now, in addition to no ads, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced they’re dropping the $0.99 annual subscription fee.  Ingrid Lunden writes that what they’ll try now is commercial services for B2C so you can message customers.  How much will that cost you?  No clue.  And it’s not like you can do this tomorrow.  Jan says not one line of code has been written for such a service, but there’s an alleged 10-30 brands working with them on this.  Maybe you’re one of them, you tell ME what’s going on.  One thing that’s got to be at least a little awkward is parent Facebook’s other messaging app Messenger, which is ALSO working on services brands can use.

 

I don’t think Skyword thinks too many metrics is a bad thing.  They just announced a new integration that combines data its content marketing platform gets, with data from Google Analytics.  You’ve heard of Google.  Founder Tom Gerace says now you can get a simpler view of how your content’s doing by combining channel, referral, engagement, and goal conversion metrics from Google Analytics with Skyword’s story and storyteller performance data.  So you can go beyond page-level metrics to look at conversion goals and which creators are getting what you want out of your audience.  See?  I told you it was simple.  Rohit Roy reports that Lauryn McLaughlin at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia likes it, they’re using it.  Tom says, “Brands need a full view of the audience’s experience through the scope of stories consumed–only then, will marketers succeed in creating a content marketing program that motivates audiences to take action.”

 

Want to hear some content marketing stats that are flying around?  Jeff Cohen put some together so stew on these.  Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing says 40% of your prospects are qualified, but not yet ready to buy.  Meagen Eisenberg of MongoDB says for best in class companies, 53% of marketing qualified leads convert to sales-actioned leads.  ANNUITAS CEO Carlos Hildalgo points out that CMOs expect marketing budgets go up 5.5% in 2016.  And Emailmonday’s Jordie van Rijn tells us companies that combine strategic vision and digital marketing do 26% better than average.  Here’s some advice, if you ever run into Jeff Cohen, you might want to have a quotable statistic ready to give him.

 

Congrats should go out for this happy European union. London’s Seven is joining up with German’s C3.  Seven does social and C3 does digital.  It’s C3 that acquired Seven by the way and the first thing they’ll do is use that winning combo of tech and creative to set up a new specialist content network.  The client list stars brands like Porsche, Weightwatchers, Fujitsu, and VW.  The 600 strong combined team includes 40 developers; and 20 digital visual specialists.  C3 Managing Director Lukas Kircher says he’s especially excited about doing socially-powered campaigns, using highly targeted content to deliver audiences at scale.  Seven’s Chief Strategy Officer Kevin Sutherland is aware of the challenge of doing content marketing when consumers are getting more and more squeamish about brands using their personal data and continuing their apparent love of adblockers.

 

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