It’s nearly impossible to prove content marketing ROI if you don’t outline clear goals at the beginning of the year. Sure, you may be able to cherry-pick some numbers in December, throw them into a Powerpoint, and make a tenuous case to your boss. But you’ll be playing a dangerous game for two reasons:

1. The most impactful KPIs aren’t just magically measured by Google Analytics. You need to properly setup your marketing stack (GA, Pardot, Salesforce, SEMRush, Facebook Business Manager, etc.) to track the behaviors that matter most.

2. If you’re not creating and distributing content with a clear purpose, you’re basically banking on a happy accident to keep your job.

So where do you start? To prove ROI, your content goals should ladder up to the things your CEO cares about: new business (revenue generated by new clients), customer retention, and loyalty (getting your existing clients to keep spending more money with you).

This doesn’t mean your content should be full of product plugs. Far from it. It’s much more effective to build trust with your audience through helpful content than to inundate them with sales messages. They’ll be more likely to buy something from you in the long run.

But you do need to tie content to revenue. There are a couple of easy places to start.

If you’re B2B, most of your inbound business comes from demo requests or people looking to talk to sales. Track how many people first visit your site by reading or watching a piece of content before subsequently filling out a demo/sales request. Then see if those leads convert to deals at a higher rate.

If you’re B2C, track whether people who consume your content convert into customers at a higher rate, and if they spend more money. Walmart, for instance, found that people who read their content had 7% larger orders—a big overall KPI for the retailer.

Then, measure the key drivers that attract the right audience to your content. After all, you need to build an audience and inspire people to engage with your content if you want it to have an impact on revenue.

SEO: Measure gains in search traffic and ranking improvements for target keywords. (For instance, we really want to attract people searching for terms like “content strategy” and “content marketing platforms.”)

Newsletter sign-ups and Engagement: Since newsletters are the most consistent way to build an owned audience, growing that list is key. But also track your open rate, click rate, and overall percentage of engaged subscribers.

Social Engagement: How are followers engaging with content across channels? Look to metrics like video views, engagement rate, reach, social referral traffic, and comments.

Backlinks and earned media: The most effective SEO strategy today is to create content with such great original research and reporting that it earns backlinks and press. It’s super valuable to organically introduce your brand to new audiences.

The science here comes from setting achievable goals in each of these categories. The art comes in interpreting the data, figuring out which metrics are most impactful for your business, and teaching your team how to create and distribute content with these goals in mind.

This is far from an exhaustive list—I’m working on a content marketing ROI mega-post that goes into much greater detail. But we’re almost a month into the year. If you haven’t set goals already, you need to get started. Your content marketing program depends on it.

The post The Art and Science of Content Marketing ROI appeared first on Contently.

Over 700 people signed up, and we got a ton of questions. We tried to answer them all, but I spent a little too long breathlessly explaining how to work with compliance teams. So for this month’s Ask a Content Strategist column, I thought I’d dive into some of the best questions that went unanswered.

As a content team of one, I struggle holding onto the roles of creating the strategy, campaigns, assessment, graphics, etc. to avoid the chaos that always ensues. What should my primary focus be? And what are absolutely necessary technologies to invest in?

-Paul, Colorado

It’s never fun being a one-person team. No one realizes you’re responsible for 1,000 percent more than just creating content. And there’s usually that one guy who thinks he could do your job way better than you. (You may think you can write, Chad. But you can’t.)

When you’re a one-person content team, you’ll always be tempted to focus on just creating more. More content. More campaigns. When you’re overwhelmed, it’s much easier to just focus on the rote tasks in front of you.

But to be successful, you need to take a step back and focus on your content strategy. You’re one person. You can’t do everything. So it’s all about honing in on the few channels and tactics that are getting you the best results.

This is essentially the 80/20 rule. If you’re getting 80 percent of your leads through email and SEO campaigns, but spend the vast majority of your time trying to maintain an always-on social and blog cadence, you’re wasting time and effort.

Focus on the channels that work best for you, and then put all of your energy into creating a few pieces of high-quality content specially crafted for those channels.

As for the technologies you’ll need: It depends. A B2C startup focused on paid social video has a much different stack than a B2B company focused on email campaigns and partner webinars. But there are a few must-have buckets.

Analytics: The biggest key to growing your program is showing results. If you’re B2B, you need to show that your content drives leads. If you’re B2C, you need to show that people who engage with your content come back and buy something within a 90-day window.

Google Analytics is free, awesome, and can track both engagement metrics as well as basic conversion pathways. But to provide a full picture, you’ll need a good CRM as well. For most smaller companies, HubSpot is the easiest to plug in and get working.

Calendar and workflow: These tools are important for your own sanity and organization, but they also provide transparency to other teams you work with (sales, demand gen, accounts, etc.) so that they can know what content is coming. A lot of Fortune 2000 and fast-growth companies invest in a content marketing platform like Contently, but if your program isn’t ready for that yet, you can use a more general workflow/calendar tool like Asana.

Social media management: The free version of Buffer is awesome for smaller companies. For enterprise companies, Sprinklr and Spredfast are client favorites.

CMS: For owned content, you need a strong CMS that you won’t spend half your time troubleshooting. WordPress remains the easiest platform to design, maintain, and use. Plus, there are tons of great plug-ins to create different content formats (interactive, quizzes, parallax scroll, etc.) and templates that boost conversions and sharing.

What’s an example of a “big rock” asset in the consumer content world?

-Woo, San Diego

Usually we refer to “big rock content” in a B2B context—white papers or e-books that then get repurposed in a bunch of different ways: blog posts, infographics, videos, social posts, and interactive content that relies on the foundational research in the original asset.

But B2C companies create big rock content too—just look at Spotify’s “Year in Music” research, which it remixes as everything from personalized playlists to 100-foot-high billboard ads. There’s also Red Bull’s epic music and extreme sports documentaries, which the brand slices into “social cuts” specially designed for their audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

One of our customers, Silversea, creates big rock “Collections” that serve as travel guides for specific destinations around the world. Each component within them—like these awesome Planet Earth-esque travel videos—serves as a divisible piece of content.

Just look at that freaking walrus!

What are the most effective ways to track ROI for each individual piece of content you produce?

-Sam, San Diego

Here’s the truth: I really do not recommend trying to quantify the hard ROI of every individual piece of content that you create, as opposed to your content program as a whole.

It will lead you down a terrifying rabbit hole in which you have to match up a ton of web analytics and CRM data, and you’ll spend 90 percent of your time making those calculations instead of, you know, actually making cool stuff.

That being said, here’s an in-depth guide on one way to measure the full ROI of individual content pieces. And here are some key metrics you can look to in order to identify top performers.

Conversions: Track which pieces of gated content generate the most leads. For instance, in 2015, I wrote a series of five content marketing playbooks for Contently. They were extremely popular, generating tens of thousands of leads.

Each playbook was classified as an individual campaign, which we then tracked as the lead source in Salesforce. If a deal closed as a result of a playbook, it got credit. As a result, we were able to attribute millions of dollars of revenue from that campaign. (I’m still waiting for my cut…) And guess what? We’re rolling out an updated series of playbooks in the coming months to try to recapture the magic.

SEO: Three things I love about SEMRush—it’s cheap, easy to use, and tells you the monetary value of your primary organic keywords. If a piece of content is ranking for a high value keyword and driving a ton of traffic, this is an easy way to show hard ROI for an individual piece.

Here are some other ROI guides that should help:

The content metrics that really matter.

How to show the ROI content has on your brand.

One last piece of advice: Find the friendliest marketing or business analyst in your company, bribe them with booze and cupcakes, and get them to set up an automated dashboard that pulls in your most important KPIs each month. (In all likelihood, they already use Looker, Domo, Tableau, or Google Data Studio.)

It’ll mean the difference between looking like this at the end of every month…

Versus looking like this instead…

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s head of content strategy and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: What Should You Focus On When You’re a Team of One? appeared first on Contently.

“What are you talking about?” I’d say to every bartender or Lyft driver or artisanal ice cream entrepreneur who asked if I was going to the flugtag—this was Portland, after all.

Though I was still years from accepting a job in content marketing, I got a mini-education in the field each time someone brought up the stunt. It wasn’t as crazy as Stratos, everyone said, but Red Bull was helping to “Keep Portland Weird” with the marketing stunt. Though the scaffolding was obvious—it was impossible to talk about the air show without mentioning the brand by name—no one really seemed to care. If anything, they respected Red Bull’s candor.

At the time, I wondered how much money the brand was actually going to make on the stunt. Would it make any difference? (Most likely.) Was there a catch? (No.)

Now, most companies want to be like Red Bull. But we often hear from clients and prospects that their products and services don’t feel as conducive to big, viral stunt marketing like Red Bull. They see consumer-facing brands working in exciting areas like retail, beauty, and food, and many clients think, “Content works for companies like that.”

But Red Bull didn’t build its reputation just by being cool or extreme. The marketing efforts worked because the brand’s purpose aligned with what consumers wanted. That style of content marketing was also unheard of at the time.

There are a ton of companies out there waiting to benefit from content marketing, and most of them don’t sell exciting energy drinks. Here are four types of brands that can benefit the most.

A company starting a content project from scratch

Five years ago, a lot of companies were just creating content without a plan. Today, with so many helpful guides on tactics and strategy available, brands new to content marketing have more of a roadmap for success.

If you’re a marketer starting a new content initiative, you’re in a fantastic position to build a relationship with your target audience. As you’re developing a strategy, you’ll be able to see what your competitors have already done and where you can stand out.

Take California Closets, for example. The company could have aligned itself with bargain retailers in the industry, but by going all in on a new print magazine, Ideas of Order, it attracted an audience searching for high-end, luxury closet organization. It’s clear from the content that they’re not selling ugly plastic tubs for college students.

At Content Marketing World, the magazine won awards for Best New Print Publication and Project of the Year. As Stephanie Stahl pointed out on CMI’s blog, after only a month, Ideas of Order had already driven $42 in revenue for every dollar California Closets spent producing and distributing it.

A company with something to prove

Maybe your company sells a taboo product (Poo-Pourri). Or maybe your CEO has just stepped down after a series of unfortunate controversies (Uber). Maybe you’re trying to disrupt an industry and you need to convince customers to change their habits (Netflix). Look at those core challenges as a blessing. They give you the conflict you need to tell a good story.

Now, a brand doesn’t have to be in “damage control” mode to break into content marketing. But correcting a misconception in the market can be a nice place to inject some honesty or even humor. Your brand might benefit from a funny, informative video about what you do, or you could always write blog posts to set the record straight about something in the press.

One recent example of a brand side-stepping a silly product with humorous content is Steak-umm launching a rebirth on Twitter. “[Young people] might have an inkling of [our] name in their mind, but they’ve never actually seen it advertised in a modern context,” Steak-Umm’s social media manager Nathan Allebach recently told us, “So we have that innate advantage working on social, which lets us [try to be] goofy and kind of ‘out there’ with the brand.”

A company expanding somewhere new

Expansions can take many forms, but no matter what you’re rolling out, content can bolster the effect it has on the market. If you’re a European financial brand expanding into Asia, you’ll want transcreated content lining the runway when you arrive.

The last thing a marketer wants to hear from potential customers is, “Wow, I know your company, but I had no idea you guys did this too.” You’ll need well-crafted stories to prove that you understand your new market.

If you’re a Manhattanite, for example, you’re probably familiar with the men’s health company Hims. Their tongue-in-cheek, stylized subway ads were ubiquitous last summer. When Hims announced they were launching a brand of vitamins and medications for women, appropriately called Hers, it seemed like an obvious move.

The Hers product line was accompanied by a new branded blog called Savoir Vivre. The Hims blog, Savoir Faire, features content about sleep deprivation, menswear, acne, and cholesterol. The Hers blog, in contrast, is hyper-focused on women’s sexuality, which matches the brand’s primary product offering for women: prescription medication Addyi. You can see the adjustments strategists made mo the Hims/Hers copy before the women’s line launched. It’s clear the brand concluded that women were more accustomed to reading about sexual health, so they were able to skip the innuendo.

Still, the playful tone is obvious on the blogs. “it’s french,” both homepages read, “say it how it’s supposed to be said. it’ll make your mouth feel funny.”

A company solving a complex problem

Some companies just can’t cram their product marketing and brand messaging into 30-second ads. The rise of content marketing has benefitted these brands significantly, giving them enough space to answer complicated questions and address pain points that can’t be summed up with 8 words in a banner ad.

Whether you’re B2B or B2C, informative content doesn’t have to be dry. We tell clients and prospects in B2B industries that they’re still marketing to people. C-suite executives with purchasing power still need to be educated and entertained.

That’s the driving force behind everything we create on The Content Strategist. We don’t want to rely on overt promotion to sell our product. Instead, we want to answer questions about thought leadership, content strategy, and the ROI of video marketing. Without the freedom to talk through that complex story on our blog, I just don’t know how I’d explain it.

Content marketing, it turns out, is a discipline best used by marketers who have a lot to say.

The post The Types of Companies That Benefit Most from Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

But that moment also had some side effects. Suddenly, every marketer wanted to “go viral,” although none of them wanted to spend more then $5,000 to do it. Marketers also came to believe that content marketing was way easier for the “exciting” B2C brands compared to the “boring” B2B companies.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

People only want to read and watch content about their passions, and those things tend to fall into two camps:

A) Content that helps people enjoy their personal passions, like sports, gaming, wellness, fitness, cooking, travel, health, and, in my case, bouncy castles and large water slides.

B) Content that makes people better at their jobs, where they spend most of their days. These people desperately need to improve if they want to retire before they’re 85 years old and Boca Raton is somewhere under the Atlantic Ocean.

If you’re a B2C brand, you’re likely playing in the first camp. And the competition for attention there is fierce. If you want to stand out, you need to drop someone from space or tell truly unique stories—like Marriott or Dollar Shave Club—to stand out.

If you’re B2B, you still need to create content that stands out, but there’s much less competition. Condé Nast isn’t about to launch a magazine to help content marketers measure ROI. Meredith won’t start a new pub to help healthcare executives navigate the complex regulatory landscape. As a B2B brand, you likely have knowledge and expertise people crave.

B2B content gets boring, however, when people make some common mistakes. To learn how to use your content marketing advantage, spare 60 seconds to watch the latest episode of Content Marketing Minute.

And if you missed the first four episodes, check them out below.

Episode 1: Setting Content Marketing Goals

Episode 2: Building Relationships With a High-Value Audience

Episode 3: Finding Your Brand Voice

Episode 4: Building a Killer Channel Strategy

The post Video: Why B2B Companies Have a Content Marketing Advantage appeared first on Contently.

It’s easy enough to recall legitimately funny marketing campaigns. NBA on ESPN nailed its RV series. “Shaq playing Scrabble” is still one of my favorite commercials ever. And I do find myself amused by OKCupid’s winking “DTF” ads on the subway. But breaking content down into its small parts and analyzing what laughter does for a brand’s voice is a much more complex affair.

Enter Dr. James Barry, a humorist, professor at Nova Southeastern University, and co-author of the research paper “A typological examination of effective humor for content marketing.” While teaching a course on social media humor, he realized he had inadvertently gathered a sizable sample of online branded content while looking for content to show his students. From there, he narrowed the focus to study brands as they attempt to be funny.

Barry told me that infusing content with humor has a lot of potential for B2C and B2B companies alike, provided that they avoid re-inventing the wheel. “Seriously, humor works very well in B2B spaces,” he said. “As long as the creator knows exactly what type of humor strategy they’re using. Why wouldn’t CEOs want to be entertained? They’re just like anyone else.”

Though content marketers tend to categorize brands by their target audience, the data Barry collected led to a new set of classifications. “The difference between an individual making a joke and a brand making a joke is that the individual’s only aim is to entertain,” he said. “A brand has to entertain and connect the joke to their brand image. They’re using laughter to leverage brand familiarity.”

According to Barry, brands fall into three categories when it comes to humor in content marketing: red, yellow, and white industries. He recently spoke to me about why B2B brands should be funny, how to start using humor if you’ve never done it before, and when companies can go too far.

So what makes a brand red, yellow, or white? How can I tell which brands belong where, and which have the easiest time using humor?

Red industry stories are highly emotional, and using humor can come off as offensive. These are the brands asking their audience to make high-stakes decisions on luxury items like a Lexus or a diamond necklace. Maybe their audience is researching a high-cost vacation over time or they’re imagining these products being present in intimate family moments. Content in this space usually reaches for an inspirational feel. These are the tear-jerker commercials, and people don’t appreciate feeling surprised by humor.

Yellow industry content is often boring without humor. The stakes involved with a purchase are much lower. If your brand offers snack foods or beer or candy, it’s almost mandatory that you use humor in some way. Everyone is doing it, and many are doing it well.

White industries is where B2B comes in. These brands have to try to tell technical, complicated stories about their products, and they’re usually selling us a version of something we need anyway. Insurance companies, non-luxury appliances, anything that’s just a tool in your daily life. The process of purchasing these products is still really involved and there are a lot of little steps, just like a red industry product, but no one wants to hear you go on and on about a white industry product at length. That’s where humor can really help.

So humor in B2B content marketing is actually a good idea?

Yes. If simplification and audience engagement is the goal of your content, you could do worse than trying to entertain. The key is using humor right off the bat, and white industry audiences especially love self-deprecating, insider humor. Something like, “Boy, isn’t it crazy what Facebook makes us do now?” or “Most of us don’t actually know how QR codes work, right?” is going to kill. People don’t just love funny content—they love the sensation of thinking, “Hey, I have that problem too!”

If you make a joke like that early on, maybe in the first piece of content your audience sees, you’ve made yourself into an authority. You know the industry so well that you can joke about it.

Does that mean humor works best as a top-funnel technique?

Our brains respond to anything novel. In order to make that psychological experience happen, yes, it’s best to use humor to grab an audience early on in your relationship with them. All your competitors are using the same language and data to market themselves, so you have the element of surprise.

What you don’t want to do is say, “Hold on, folks, mid-way through this clip you’re going to get a surprise!” People don’t want that suspense in comic content. It works best if it’s part of your initial move, and then if it’s integrated fully into your brand messaging from there on.

What if you can’t joke about what you’re selling?

There are still a few ways to use humor, especially if your audience isn’t expecting it, but the risk of offending or alienating your audience is higher here. I’ll use insurance as an example. Before Geico introduced the “So easy a caveman could do it” slogan, insurance companies tended to avoid humor completely. People couldn’t even imagine how to make something like that funny, so all the content was Allstate’s “Are you in good hands?” or State Farm’s “Like a good neighbor” shtick.

It went deeper too. No one thought insurance companies specializing in, say, care for cancer patients could use humor, but then out of nowhere came Aflac with the duck. It trickled down from there, and Progressive came on board by introducing Flo.

But those are ad campaigns, which is a different beast than content marketing, no?

Content marketing actually has unique advantages when it comes to branded humor. Back when a TV commercial was the only viable form of content, a brand could make a joke and it only had to land once or a handful of discrete times. In content marketing, serial is the standard.

In content marketing, serial is the standard.

The fact that we’re all constantly fielding messages online means that a brand can complicate a joke once they’ve got your attention, and they can reference it as part of their story. It’s not just about getting a single laugh anymore—you want your audience to feel like an insider because they already understand the bit you’re doing. They’ve been with you for a while.

Let’s say I run a brand that has never used humor in content marketing before. How do I start?

First, there are pros and cons to trying this out. Let’s start with the pros. Our world is filled with so much noise, and your brand has billions of potential followers on social media. We considered all the content that reaches viral metrics, and about two-thirds of that work gets there because it’s funny. The other third of content that goes viral is reaching for awe-inspiring, breath-taking, astonishing. The numbers show that using humor—or even just a light-hearted tone occasionally—is the only surefire way to stand out in a crowd.

The con, obviously, is a joke falling flat, but that’s not even the worst-case scenario. Everyone’s heard a bad joke. We just tend to forget them and move on. What you really don’t want to do is offend someone with a stab at humor. That’s the kind of thing that sticks around.

Is it worth the risk? How do you make sure your brand’s humor isn’t offensive?

By not trying to reinvent the wheel. At no point in creating funny content should you be trying to do something no brand has ever done before. There are 10 types of humor as I’ve defined them in my research, and the two most dangerous types for brands are:

1. Pointing out differences and stereotyping

2. Outrageous interruptions

The first type, whether it’s parodying social norms or roasting someone, is going to play worse in homogenous populations. Americans, to some degree, are used to having differences pointed out. But in cultures abroad that value uniformity of thought, that’s going to read as offensive.

The second type does very well online, but no one necessarily wants to see it coming from a brand they trust. Incongruity humor, extreme irony, an unexpected surprise, gross exaggerations that capture your attention … these are all very effective attention-grabbers, but they’re risky for brands. Crazy images like people suddenly screaming, throwing fits, maybe authority figures bursting out into dance, that stuff is only going to play well in the yellow industry, and even then, it’s not a guarantee.

So you’ll know right away if you make a mistake?

Yes, and it’s difficult to recover from offending someone. You can see companies recasting their video strategies for content that will live on YouTube, as opposed to TV ads. The comment section is extremely important, and the last thing you want is a video that has more downvotes than upvotes.

The user comment phenomenon is a positive, though, because people tend to discuss your content amongst themselves. To a degree, that’s brand reinforcement. If an audience member doesn’t necessarily get the joke you’re making, they can always just scroll down and learn the context from commenters, which can actually help you in the long-run. We’ve never had such immediate feedback from our audiences, so it will shape what we make next.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

The post When to Use Humor in Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Jannelle, Halifax, Nova Scotia

In our weekly editorial meetings, we go around the room pitching stories. The vibe is fairly professional and even-keeled … until it comes to me. I might start out measured, but inevitably, I’ll launch into a PG-13 tirade about some content marketing topic. Editorial meetings are my safe space, and my creative process (unfortunately and unintentionally) involves channeling Gary Vaynerchuk.

Jordan, our editor-in-chief, will nod along with a smirk on his face and then say, “That’s actually a good idea.”

[Ed. note: This is true.]

Two weeks ago, my weekly rant was about content marketing design—specifically, the many Fortune 2000 brands with content hubs that look like they were designed by a half-blind fisherman in 1998… and haven’t been updated since.

Design is incredibly important in content marketing. If the design of a content site is terrible, people won’t give the words a chance—they’ll perceive it all as low quality.

According to a Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab study, 46.1 percent of people say that “design look” is the top criteria for perceiving the credibility of a brand. Design and UX impact read time, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. Just imagine if Contently looked like it was a forum built in 2000. This isn’t surprising. According to a 2012 Forrester CSO study, 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and the brain processes visuals 60,000x faster in the brain than text.

In other words, hubs that look like the image below don’t exactly scream “trustworthy” and “innovative.”

Finance brands tend to publish higher quality and more sophisticated content than other industries. But going from HBR or the Wall Street Journal to most finance brand blogs is like going from streaming Hulu to popping in a faded VCR tape you found under your dad’s couch.

Guess dad was really into Billy Banks workout videos in the ’80s

I’ve seen plenty of marketers baffled when readers don’t convert to customers. Sometimes it’s because the content isn’t very good. But more often, it’s because the site design makes it extremely difficult to convert in any way. People won’t sign up for your newsletter unless you prompt them to do so. They won’t check out products related to the topics you’re covering unless you make it easy.

One brand that does this extremely well is Marriott, with Marriott Traveler magazine. Traveler has over 40 editions around the globe, all run by Marc Graser, a former staffer at Variety and Entertainment Weekly, who refuses to publish any stories that feel like hotel ads. Instead, Traveler operates with the integrity of a high-quality travel magazine, publishing fun stories about little-known travel gems.

(Disclosure: Marriott is a Contently client. But read Traveler. It’s good.)

Even though Marriott Traveler doesn’t push product, it drives millions of dollars in direct revenue for the hotel giant. How? The site does a really good job of recommending related products and experiences to the story that you’re reading.

Take this article from Marriott about lesser-known, kind of weird things to do in Midtown Manhattan. It’s a smart addition to Traveler because it solves a common problem for tourists in New York City: Most of the hotels are in midtown, which gets boring after you’ve done the standard tourist activities. Everything seems like one giant M&M megastore—an artificial tourist trap designed to steal your money and give you diabetes. Most people figure that if you want to find anything classically “New York,” you need to head to the Village, Harlem, or the outer boroughs. This piece, however, details old-school New York attractions that fell under the radar, like a Houdini museum. Hell, I’ve lived in Manhattan for a decade and have never heard of that.

The article doesn’t plug Marriott at all, but it makes you think that maybe staying in midtown—where Marriott happens to have several hotels—isn’t so bad after all. And once you finish reading, Traveler makes it very easy to book a room or a Marriott Rewards experience with a module at the bottom of the page. Marriott essentially acts as the advertiser of its own high-quality editorial content.

And it works! Marriott Traveler would drive a fraction of the revenue for the company if the site didn’t make it so easy to book a hotel. Without that hard ROI, there’s little chance Marriott would have invested so heavily in Traveler, launching new editions around the globe every few months. Since the ad exists in a place where consumers are used to seeing advertising, it doesn’t corrupt the editorial experience. Everyone wins.

How do you create content that drives customer engagement while delivering ROI for the business?

-KL, London

This overlaps with what I wrote above about Marriott Traveler, but I’ll repeat it here with a twist of different analysis. Also, I may be a little conceited, but I’m not conceited enough to assume that you read everything that I wrote. (But if you do, thank you, I love you, and please scroll down to the next question.)

Marriott executes a strategy that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago on this blog. The best brand blogs follow the law of Poliakov’s Pyramid, which illustrates the narrow band of content that people actually want from brands—stories related to their interests and passions, and content that helps them do their job better.

In short, B2C brands should ask, “How can I help people live their lives better?”

B2B brands should ask, “How can I help people do their jobs better?”

Both groups should slap themselves with a fish if the primary answer to that question is just “our product!”

If adhere to Poliakov’s Pyramid—and if your answers are different than what’s already readily available on the web—you have a damn good chance to succeed. If you don’t, you’ll come across as the brand equivalent of the boring, self-absorbed jock villain in every ’80s teen movie.

Which tactics can be used to figure out the questions your target group is asking about a specific (read: technical) topic?

-Griselda, Stockholm

Let’s finish with a bulleted list, shall we? I promise there’s a kicker in here somewhere.

• Search data: It’s the holy grail of user questions. I love this simple overview by Moz on how to integrate search queries into your creative process.
• Internal search: What are people looking for on your site?
• Reddit/forum data: BuzzSumo recently integrated a lot of this really useful information.
• Persona interviews: Actually talking to the people you’re trying to reach might seem old school, but it’s super valuable.
• Surveys: We survey newsletter subscribers all the time to learn about their challenges and needs, which drives a lot of our story ideas.
• Help desk, accounts, sales, and other client-facing teams. These groups are a source of anecdotal data that can complement quantifiable research.
• Customer councils: Get your top prospects and clients in a room together and listen to what they’re struggling with. It’s a worthwhile way to get a bounty of valuable data. Facebook does this very well with its major agency and brand clients. In a few years, this will be mandatory when Mark Zuckerberg is named Dark Lord of the Connected Realm.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s head of content strategy and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: Why Are Brand Blogs So Ugly and Outdated? appeared first on Contently.

All that is to say that I was wary of Instagram stories initially, because I could not imagine a world in which I’d chose ephemeral posts over permanent ones. A year and a half later, I post stories on Instagram almost every day.

Some brands—usually B2C companies—create content that seems like a perfect fit for an ephemeral timeline. Birchbox, for example, posts teasers for new products, complete with user polls and animated gifs.

For B2B companies, adapting blog posts and long videos for Snapchat and Instagram stories isn’t as simple. Let’s face it, longform how-to articles aren’t exactly set up for five-second views. But don’t let the obstacles deter you. Ephemeral content can still work for B2B brands, and we may see more of it very soon.

According to Later’s The State of Instagram Marketing Report, 76 percent of B2B respondents that don’t use Instagram stories are interested in creating them this year. Ninety-six percent of brands who already use the format say they’ll be upping their ephemeral content production soon, suggesting they’re seeing positive results already.

GE, which operates as both a B2C and a B2B brand, is a great example of how a company that isn’t in fashion, travel, or food can take full advantage of ephemeral content. On Instagram, content has ranged from a walk through the six best things on GE’s showroom floor to behind-the-scenes shots of photoshoots of their products to exotic excursions. There’s also some wild employee adventures to document—like exploring a volcano. Not every B2B brand has that bandwidth, but they can still apply a few of the same principles.

So what do you do if your B2B brand, like most, isn’t descending into volcanoes regularly? Instagram stories can be a good place for quick educational content, like Deloitte Digital often posts. Deloitte’s clips of brand philosophy and AI facts can be read in the few seconds they appear on their story, and are just enough to pique an audience’s interest about their consulting expertise. Deloitte especially takes advantage of posting ephemeral content during events, which is a smart way to drum up engagement outside of a conference hall. Other companies, like NASA, are known to profile their employees via ephemeral content.

On Contently’s Instagram, I occasionally post educational content and quotes from TCS articles. For the most part, though, our Instagram presence exists to showcase the company culture. Every B2B company can use the same approach to help recruiting, regardless of what the brand sells. Think of it this way: Your social media manager can post stories similar to what an audience would find on their friends’ personal accounts. Company outings, parties, and lunchtime shenanigans make for (hopefully) interesting stories which give a humanizing look into your company’s culture.

Instagram stories might be a better fit for B2B brands than Snapchat—at least, until Snapchat finds a better way to house educational content. In the meantime, Instagram profiles allow audiences to get a better overview of your company by letting them scroll through your more permanent posts. But thanks to events like the Shorty Awards, which includes a Best Brands on Snapchat category (the winner of which is chosen by a combination of public votes and scores from the Real Time Academy), it’s worth keeping the platform on your radar and noting whether future updates can support your content distribution efforts.

Now that I’ve come around, I’m excited about the potential for more B2B ephemeral content. True, I wish more of it would include volcano jumping because we all need something to aspire to, but I like the idea that ephemeral content will make us feel more connected to brands, introducing us to the people who make their businesses come to life.

The post Now You See It, Now You Don’t: What B2B Brands Can Do With Ephemeral Content appeared first on Contently.

Ever since, I’ve developed an intense love for simple charts that demonstrate an important point. My new favorite is Poliakov’s Pyramid of Engagement, and I’m super excited to show it to our clients. Why? First, because I’m a huge dork, and second, because it demonstrates the most important part of content strategy. You need a strategy that aligns with one of the precious few things your target audience actually cares about.

If the guiding light of your content strategy is the message you want to dictate to consumers, you are going to fail. Sure, maybe some people will still click on a piece of content and subsequently buy some stuff. But you won’t build true loyalty and trust.

This chart was made way back in 2010 by Sell! Sell!, a creative shop in the UK that has the greatest agency blog I’ve ever read. I love the site because it communicates a simple message: content marketing should either help people enjoy their lives more or do their jobs better. If your content doesn’t do one of those things, it probably sucks.

Some marketers may feel disheartened, but it’s a liberating message once you embrace it.

If you work in B2B, this should makes your job easy. You just need to help your target buyer do their job better. What challenges do they face? What do they need to know to take their careers to the next level? Your job is to answer those questions honestly (which means you can’t just cram your product down their throats). Provide lessons and publish research that’ll teach them something new.

If you’re B2C, you need to focus on topics people love, which can span everything from travel and adventure to cooking and sleeping. (I’m into all of those things, depending on my mood.) If you have a viable consumer product, chances are that it relates to at least one area like that. The challenge then, is figuring out how to tell a story or offer a new piece of information that’s different than what everyone else does.

For this reason—despite popular belief—I think that B2B content marketing is easier than B2C, especially if you’re in an emerging industry or serving a specific group of people who don’t always get the attention they deserve. You have a much better chance of standing out if you’re trying to reach operations directors at large healthcare companies than if you’re trying to reach travelers or fitness buffs.

Work and personal interests don’t have to be mutually exclusive, either. Your industry may be one of your passions. (Case in point, I am writing this at 1:30 a.m. on a Friday night after sitting by the lake with some friends and debating the most promising revenue model for media companies.)

No matter what industry you’re in, though, your content strategy needs to be able to pass the Poliakov Pyramid test. Does your content truly help people live their lives better or do their jobs better? If the answer is no, you need to stop and reevaluate. Or else, your content focus groups just might feel a bit like Clockwork Orange.

The post Poliakov’s Pyramid of Engagement Will Make Your Content Strategy Better appeared first on Contently.

Turns out Peloton executives had the same idea.

Last month, the at-home fitness brand took the number one spot on the Crain’s New York Business 2016 Fast50, a list of the fastest-growing companies in New York. With a staggering two-year growth rate of 2,829,405 percent, the business is on track to increase its revenue by a factor of five this year.

Founder and CEO John Foley describes Peloton as a software, hardware, and content company. A former engineer and competitive cyclist, Foley started Peloton in 2012 because he and his wife couldn’t find the time to go to the gym but felt existing at-home workouts fell short. Capitalizing on the growth of spin classes, he paired indoor cycling with progressive technology and high-energy rides that users could access at their convenience. Customers buy the bike and then take group fitness classes delivered over video.

Peloton, which now has 20 national retail stores, currently streams 12 hours of content every day from its Chelsea cycling and production studio. “It’s like a Netflix library, but for fitness classes,” Foley said. Users can live stream the subscription-based classes or watch them on demand. Touchscreen tablets on the bikes allow riders to monitor their performance and get immediate feedback from instructors.

Those instructors, a group of elite athletes and cycling experts, are at the center of the Peloton experience. They provide motivation and support, responsibilities that come with lucrative rewards. According to Inc. magazine, some Peloton instructors earn a six-figure salary for teaching between 10 and 15 classes a week.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Peloton built its marketing strategy around its indispensable employees.

“Celebrity matters so much in this world,” Foley said. “Think about Williams-Sonoma selling a new blender from [chef] Mario Batali. Batali is all over social media. It’s effectively a co-branded sponsorship between two brands. The same goes for the New England Patriots and Tom Brady. For us, the other brand is our celebrity instructors. We try to have a balance between both.”

Social media is the marketing channel of choice for showcasing Peloton instructors. Peloton’s in-house marketers work with its internal creative, photography, and videography teams to develop content for all major social networks. On Instagram and Facebook, Peloton uploads one to three posts per day. The company blog, Cadence, gets new content two to four times per week. On Snapchat (@pelotoncycle), which is currently a priority for the brand, Peloton posts several clips of its instructors each day, along with images from special events and photo shoots.

“They have big personalities, and we like when they come out.”

The idea is to familiarize riders with the instructors and their unique personalities while also building up excitement for the classes and offering a behind-the-scenes look at the Peloton world. The channels are connected, taking riders on a content journey that helps them understand the brand’s ethos.

“A lot of what we do is focused on telling the Peloton story on different outlets,” said Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, VP of brand marketing, “and really using our instructors as brand ambassadors as the voices of Peloton.”

For example, after welcoming new instructor Ally Love, the company posted a Q&A with her on Cadence. Riders could watch a minute-long YouTube interview in which she explains her motivation for joining Peloton, tells the inspiring story of her road to fitness, and shares her musical preferences so that riders know what to expect from her classes.

On Instagram, where Peloton has 34,000 followers, the brand shared photos of Love including a group shot of its instructors taken after her “debut ride.” Many Peloton instructors have their own hashtags to help riders find their content (e.g. #LoveSquad).

https://www.instagram.com/p/BL9cNQUgFf1/

They also have their own Facebook fan pages, which Peloton’s marketing team oversees. “They have big personalities, and we like when they come out.” Foley said. “But we have close to one hundred and eighty-four thousand global members now, so we have to give [our instructors] some assistance with managing their online presence.”

That assistance includes setting up Snapchat and Instagram takeovers as well as instructor-led Google Hangouts, all of which let the rider community interact directly and ask questions, as one would in a SoulCycle class.

While instructor related content is essential, Peloton also invests in educational content that is mainly intended to help riders reach their fitness goals.

On YouTube, riders can find a collection of videos including workouts, healthy recipes, and motivational messages.

On Twitter, the company promotes its seasonal scenic rides, encouraging users to “cycle through New England fall colors” and “climb the Canadian mountains.”

Cycle through New England fall colors, climb the Canadian mountains and tour the Alps in our 5 new scenic rides now on-demand. #ridepeloton pic.twitter.com/4WIXDnYafm

— Peloton (@onepeloton) October 31, 2016

In October, the company dipped its toes into Facebook Live for the first time with “Beyond the Ride: Yoga.” Streamed from its studio, the event, also available through Peloton’s iPhone and iPad app, garnered close to 9,000 views within two weeks.

“We’re trying to be creative with new forms of media that fall somewhere between earned media and more traditional marketing,” Foley said. Other media investments include Facebook ads, retargeting, search engine marketing, email marketing, TV, and print.

Every company has an opportunity to market its employees, but because of its unique business model, Peloton has to rely on that tactic more than others. And now because of that commitment to content, nearly 200,000 customers are happy to come along for the ride.

The post How Content Made Peloton the Fastest-Growing Company in New York appeared first on Contently.

Of course, CMI loves playing up that stat because the organization can help you build a strategy. But it is legitimately a problem for marketers—or anyone in business, really—to pursue an initiative without a documented strategy. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark, not knowing if what you’re doing actually works.

CMI’s latest study, which was sponsored by the creative collaboration company Hightail, suggests that marketers are finally getting better at content strategy. Below, you’ll find out why, in addition to five other major takeaways from CMI’s reports on B2B and B2C marketing.

1. Marketers are getting better at documenting content strategy

Both B2B and B2C marketers got better at documenting their strategies this past year. In 2016’s study, 37 percent had a documented strategy, versus 40 percent this year. B2B marketers, meanwhile, improved from 32 percent last year to 37 percent this year.

In both cases, it’s still stupefying that the numbers aren’t higher. As CMI pointed out in last year’s study, more than 50 percent of the most effective marketers have documented strategies. 70 percent (for B2C) and 72 percent (for B2B) said strategy was a factor in improving their success in the past year. Creating one has no downsides yet plenty of benefits.

So what exactly are marketers including in their strategies? The number one element was “a plan to operate content marketing as an ongoing business process, not simply a campaign.”

Overall, marketers seem to find their strategies effective. Nobody said their strategies were “not at all effective,” while more than 80 percent said their strategies were either “moderately effective” or “very effective.”

That’s a testament to how useful strategies are to a content marketing program—now, the question is if the more than half of content marketers without a documented strategy will see the light.

2. Social is the most popular type of content

As mobile usage explodes and the mobile web stagnates, social media has become the best place to reach customers. Not surprisingly, companies are using more social media content than ever.

In general, marketers are planning on creating more content: Only 2 percent said they were expecting to produce less, and 73 (for B2C) and 70 percent (for B2B) said they were planning on creating more compared to last year.

3. But email is king

For B2C marketers, Facebook and email take the top spot when it comes to content distribution. 89 percent of marketers said they use the channels for their content, 26 percent above the closest channel, Twitter.

B2B marketers put email at the top for usage, at 93 percent, followed closely by LinkedIn, at 89 percent.

In terms of pure importance, however, email blasts its competitors out of the water. As the charts above show, no other channel comes close to email’s importance as a distribution channel. That makes sense since email is one of the few channels that provides a loyal, recurring audience that you own. Also, it doesn’t hurt that customer email addresses are key for a variety of martech tools, such as CRMs.

4. Content software is underused

Data collection and analysis are at the heart of digital marketing, which is why analytics tools are the go-to resources for most marketers. Implementing a content marketing program without any analytics software would be like taking a class without any feedback—it would be impossible to know if you’re successful.

However, analytics aside, it’s somewhat amazing how many content marketers don’t use critical tools such as email platforms, calendars, and CMSs. Perhaps they’re sending out email manually, or using a physical calendar tacked to the wall? CMSs are required to publish content, so the fact that only about half of marketers are using them is difficult to square.

No matter the explanation, it’s obvious that software is a big area of improvement for content marketers.

5. Promoted posts are booming

Across B2B and B2C, promoted posts saw big leaps in usage, particularly for B2C, which jumped from 52 percent last year to an incredible 89 percent this year.

Social promotion also took the top spot for effectiveness according to B2C marketers, while B2B marketers put it four percentage points behind search engine marketing (SEM). It’s safe to assume that much of these gains are a result of recent targeting improvements introduced by Facebook, LinkedIn, and their ilk.

6. Brand awareness and website traffic are still top goals

Even though some marketers are obsessed with finding one-to-one ROI, plenty of others still want brand awareness more than anything. Even B2B marketers, whose ultimate goal is always direct sales, named brand awareness a key content marketing goal.

So how are marketers tracking these goals? Website traffic, mainly: 73 percent of B2C marketers named it their top metric, versus 78 percent for B2B. Website traffic was also named the main metric for providing “truly measurable results of content marketing efforts” by both B2C and B2B marketers.

That’s somewhat surprising because website traffic can be unsophisticated and lean on the side of vanity. For B2B marketers, one would think lead generation would be tops (though “sales” and “sales lead quality” did take second and third).

Perhaps the biggest takeaway of all, however, is that a significant portion of marketers don’t measure ROI at all: 25 percent of B2C marketers and 28 percent of B2B marketers aren’t tracking ROI. It’s baffling that B2B marketers measure ROI less than B2C marketers, considering how much easier it is (and considering that lead generation was named the most-used metric).

It’s obvious from the report that—despite certain improvements—content marketers still have plenty of room to grow.

[Correction: An earlier version of this article used data from CMI’s report that was released last year. All figures have been updated to reflect data from this year’s report.]

The post The 6 Most Important Takeaways From CMI’s Annual Study appeared first on Contently.

I was sure Sam was going to give me a speech about professionalism. Instead, he offered me a job as Contently’s editor-in-chief.

As a one-person editorial team, my first instinct was to go for easy wins. One of those was this “Best of Branded Content” column, which I started over two and a half years ago. No one had been rounding up the best content marketing each month, and it was easy for me to fill that need.

But now, it’s not just me here at Contently. We’ve grown from 13 employees to nearly 130, and our office is filled with brilliant people who are as obsessed with this industry as I am. So for the next few months, we’re going to try a new format: the roundup. Here’s the branded content that people across Contently fell in love with in July:

Amtrak: The National

Kieran Dahl, social media editor: This isn’t so much an analysis as a promise that Amtrak’s The National, its not-yet-in-existence “bi-monthly print magazine and digital portal,” will be very, very good. Launching in October, the magazine will be helmed by Jordan Heller, the editor-in-chief of Rhapsody, a literary and highfalutin culture magazine published by United Airlines that, befitting of its highbrow content, is only available in United’s premium cabins and lounges. (Heller is also the editor-in-chief of Hemisphere, United’s in-flight magazine that you only pick out of the seat pocket in front of you when you’re waiting to use your phone.)

With largely the same editorial minds behind The National as Rhapsody, the nature of the two publications’ content seems comparably upscale. That’s not a bad thing. We’ve previously written about Rhapsody as the standard-bearer of high-class branded content, given the caliber of its stories—deep profiles of a diverse cast of celebrities, for example—and its award-winning writers—Joyce Carol Oates, Emily St. John Mandel, and Anthony Doerr, among others.

Alex Hoyt, the executive editor of The National and senior editor of Rhapsody, told Folio magazine that The National’s first issue will feature “all kinds of stories—travel essays, reported pieces, fiction, poetry, and fine-art photography—and a range of voices from across the country.”

As if you needed further proof that train travel is simply the best…

Wild Turkey Bourbon: “Matthew McConaughey Short Film”

Dillon Baker, associate editor: Ever since the McConaissance took hold in 2014, actor Matthew McConaughey has taken his career in two interesting directions: first by working on more obscure films and cameoing in big ones, and second by diving into the ad world. His much-parodied Lincoln ads are proving to be only the beginning for this bold pioneer. Now, he’s taken up a role as “creative director” for bourbon brand Wild Turkey.

It’s an odd choice. Wild Turkey isn’t the most well-respected bourbon brand, and it was recently bought by Campari Group, an Italian beverage company. But damn it if McConaughey doesn’t sell the brand. As a spokesperson, he seems to—almost creepily—love Wild Turkey in a way other people paid to promote brands simply can’t match. It works, though, because that’s the kind of sophisticated weirdo McConaughey is.

Dove (Unilever): “My Beauty, My Say”

Erin Nelson, marketing editor: The media is full of chatter that Unilever’s $1 billion purchase of Dollar Shave Club is a sign of the disruption of everything. But Dove, one of Unilever’s star brands, released a new campaign that proves dollar razors are not the only relevant cultural conversation in Unilever’s arsenal.

We all know Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, which was first launched in 2004 and went viral thanks to the “Evolution” (2006) and “Real Sketches” (2013) videos. The campaign encouraged women to reevaluate their own perceptions of beauty, and this month, Dove launched the next evolution. “My Beauty, My Say” challenges the media to stop criticizing the way female athletes look—a habit likely to ramp up during the upcoming Olympic Games in Rio.

To do so, Dove created three digital interactive billboards in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto to live stream commentary about female athletes’ physical appearance. The goal is to reveal the absurd way major media outlets talk about female athletes: “huge nipples,” “built like a fire hydrant,” “frizzy hair,” to name a few choice phrases. In true Dove fashion, the branded content inspires viewers to reevaluate beauty standards, but, more importantly, it puts the media on blast. The campaign is a healthy reminder that brands can serve as an unlikely check on the abusive power of mainstream media.

Jaguar: “Feel Wimbledon”

Amanda Weatherhead, sales strategist: As an avid tennis fan and one-time aspiring touring pro, it’s been a dream of mine to play on Centre Court at Wimbledon. I’m not alone. Even the most casual tennis fan feels a degree of reverence for that court—it’s the tennis equivalent of the Vatican.

This is precisely why Jaguar’s “Feel Wimbledon” campaign represents a marketing coup. By giving fans the opportunity to step inside the fabled Centre Court at SW19, Jaguar cemented their status as a tech-savvy yet human company. While the majority of its competitors worship at the altar of engineering and technical innovation, Jaguar recognized that in order to truly build relationships with people, it had to appeal to people’s emotions.

Brand partnerships can go one of two ways: epic success (like Uber and Spotify) or major disaster (like KFC and the Susan G. Komen foundation). This one is a perfect fit. Both brands have a similar ethos and fabled legacies that are as quintessentially British as the Queen herself. To truly ensure that this campaign was an advertising tour de force, Jaguar moved the VR experience around London and gave out Google Cardboards at their dealerships, maximizing exposure. Here’s to hoping they extend the campaign to the U.S. Open so I can finally live my dreams, if only for a moment.

Rapha: “Rapha Core”

Nicolas Willson, editorial intern: I think luxury cycling brand Rapha produces some of the best branded content out there. I’ve been a follower of the brand for some years now—watching their videos, drinking coffee at the stores, but never becoming a customer of their clothing. That was until this summer, when I prepared for a cycling trip in Transylvania. After consuming Rapha’s content for years, there was only one place I was going to buy some padded shorts and cycling shirts.

The quality of Rapha’s branded content is fantastic, whether it’s the brand’s landscape photography, print magazine, or emotional short films. In this particular video, Rapha mixes rural imagery with the human stories behind cycling. The film highs the beauty of the sport: the physical challenges, the mental toughness, the outdoor elements, the camaraderie and isolation.

Rapha certainly knows their core audience is avid cyclists longing to be outdoors and they know how to pull on the emotional heart strings. Even if you’re not a cyclist, the video makes you want to get up and take on the challenge of an ascent, clad head to toe in Rapha gear.

Sonic the Hedgehog: Whatever this is

(Note: Embedding has been disabled, so go to the link above and start at 35:50.)

Noah Waldman, editorial intern: This is not a choice for “best” of branded content. This is probably the worst single piece of branded anything I have ever seen. But it’s wrong in all the right ways, a perfect train wreck of terrible execution and comedic juxtaposition between Sonic the Hedgehog and Totino’s. It’s a performance art-level display of apathy and ineptitude that is probably my favorite branded thing so far this year.

There’s the constant audio buzz, the complete audio cutouts that you might suspect are planned because they happen at the exact worst time, the terrible dad-dancing of the DJs, the guy in the Sonic costume doing the Macarena, the big reveal trailer being streamed twice in a row, the lead singer of Crush 40 seemingly not knowing any of the lyrics to the songs, and the puzzling break in the middle to watch someone pretending to like Totino’s pizza products.

If you don’t have time to sit through the entire three-and-a-half-hour perfect storm, Jim Sterling made a great supercut of some of the “best” moments of this glorious example of how not to live stream. Honestly, I’m quite surprised the meme-tastic Sonic Twitter feed hasn’t already mined this for content.

Old Spice: “YouLand”

Joe Lazauskas, editor-in-chief: It probably says more about me than anything that I just spent 45 minutes on a Monday night playing a video game created by Old Spice. (Or, rather, three video games.) But I’m going to be honest: It was the most enjoyable 45 minutes I’ve ever spent researching this column.

The trio of games are incredibly retro and absurd, and use a Facebook connection to put the pixelated faces of you and your friends on all the characters. You hide from your coworkers. You shoot your boss with a stapler gun. You fight construction workers while dressed at the Karate Kid. And those are just three of many, many levels.

But the game is amazing. It’s worth playing just for the start screens. I will cherish these pictures of me forever.

Simply put, my Bumble profile will never be the same.

The narrative videos that precede each level star the infamous Mustafa, and the writing is on point. The game is incredibly self-aware and never misses out on an opportunity to make fun of itself—and you for playing it.

My favorite thing, though, has to be this.

“Choose your scent. Choose your destiny. Choose your branded video game.” If that’s not advertising poetry, I don’t know what is.

The post The Best Branded Content of July: Advertising’s McConaissance Continues appeared first on Contently.

So how does a billion-dollar company known for processors and data transfers learn to speak in a language that any consumer can appreciate? I met with the company’s global content marketing manager, Archit Mardia, to find out.

Mardia, who was born in India, educated in France, and lived in eight countries prior to age 30, is no stranger to the challenge of connecting with new people. We spoke about appealing to his customers’ passions, the internal struggle of getting ASUS executives to buy in to content marketing, and why companies need to embrace customer-focused stories.

(Full disclosure: ASUS is a Contently client.)

For people who are not familiar with ASUS, how do you explain what the company does?

I was unfamiliar with ASUS before I joined the company. I knew a little bit, but I didn’t know how big they were or what they were doing, and once I joined, I was really overwhelmed by the stuff these guys were doing. I was like, “Why the hell haven’t I heard that before?”

I tell people that ASUS is the world’s biggest motherboard company. So if you are using a laptop of any kind, there’s a 60 percent chance it has an ASUS motherboard in it.

ASUS started off as Pegasus, just a motherboard company. From those humble beginnings, it split. The motherboard business came to Pegatron, and ASUS started focusing more on consumer electronics. Today, I am supporting a billion-dollar company. We started off with a smart phone business, and in less than two years, we’ve already become No. 3 in market shares among the top players in Southeast Asia.

How do you explain content marketing to people at ASUS?

This a really interesting story. From the time I have been with ASUS for over four years now, everyone has been talking about digital, digital, digital. To me, digital is nothing. It’s what TV was 20 years back, just another means to reach the audience. But advertising is losing its purpose. You will never click on a banner ad—you are more likely to climb Mount Everest. We found that we, too, were losing purpose. We were losing this connection with the audience.

We manufacture great technology, but being from an engineering mindset, ASUS was just on and on about product, this spec and that spec. We were losing our purpose and then our brand. Consumers were looking to engage with a brand with a purpose. From that moment, it took time to evangelize this internally, but everyone is right on track now and they believe in the value of content marketing.

How did you get the executives on board with publishing content?

It took a lot. We have quarterly business reviews, and we used to spend a lot of media dollars on traditional advertising. It took some convincing, but it was clear from the start that ROI for traditional media was not good, and executives were also looking for a better solution.

We started with content marketing on a smaller scale, on regional levels, and those content marketing initiatives have worked just brilliantly. We took these good examples and showed it to the executives. We showed them the numbers—”We did this with this much”—and that’s how they bought into this whole content marketing thing.

As a marketer, what do you think are some of the most important types of stories to tell?

We address the pain points consumers have with recent technology, how they can be more relevant to their own social channels, and explain ties to basic passion points. For example, a lot of people are passionate about photography, so companies will go out there and say, “This is a great camera!” but they won’t actually go out and tell you, “Hey, look what you can do with it!”

That’s the insight we want to provide. You should talk about your camera, but you should also share examples, talk about what you can do with it. What are the tricks, what are the hacks? That’s the kind of content we are looking to create to help the lives of our consumers and make them better at what they love.

As you try to accomplish that, how do you make sure those goals are both ambitious and realistic?

We are starting off small. We want to be ambitious, but at the moment, we’re being realistic. Like I said, it took a long time to convince people internally. We had this whole re-haul within our organization for people to focus on consolidating all communications that are going on from a brand. It took a long time to set this framework and get the team going right. But once I think the team is set, and all the tools are in place, it’s from that point on where we can start to be really ambitious.

What is the biggest challenge related to content marketing that you are looking forward to taking on?

The biggest challenge is that there’s so much stuff that you can talk about but with limited dollars. You learn as you go. Right now, our biggest challenge is producing content with a strategy that seems like it would work, but I don’t have any numbers to prove it. Going down the line, I think we will learn what sort of things are working really well, what sort of things are resonating with our audience really well, what sort of tone our audience likes. Going forward, I think we can make much more calculated decisions than today.

How has the industry evolved since you started in content marketing?

We get so involved with doing campaigns, running media dollars, doing more campaigns, but really the stuff that works is a cute cat picture on social media. Those get you engagement. That just goes to show people are really attracted to things that they like, shared passion points, pain points, and if you know what they really care about, then it’s a good place to be.

Not many companies have adopted this approach, especially in the technology industry. Most of the companies that I know of do have a content hub, but I feel like they are not quite there yet. So I think within the tech industry, there’s still a long way to go.

Where do you think we are headed next?

I think big things are coming in the next three or four years, when companies will stop putting so much emphasis on traditional media buys and spending dollars on crazy events and experiential marketing. Companies are going to wait for people. People have these sudden realizations and they want to go and find out information. If you don’t cater to those those micro-moments, then basically you are losing out on that timing. This can only be solved if you have this always-on conversation, which is going to be so much more purposeful and meaningful to the consumer and the brand.

What advice do you have for marketers who might be just getting into the game?

It’s always really good to adapt. Like some people say, “Consumers change first, marketers second, and agencies will change last.” I would tell marketers to actually be close to their consumers because they are the ones who change first. Their mindset is what you want to know.

The post How ASUS’s Marketing Team Got Everyone to Believe in Content appeared first on Contently.

The brand is an integral part of both hip-hop and athletic culture, and its slogans (“Bo knows,” “Find your greatness,”) and characters (Mars Blackmon, Lil’ Penny) are easily identifiable to millions of consumers around the world. Unsurprisingly, this extraordinary brand awareness has helped Nike capture a stranglehold on the U.S. sports apparel market.

In recent years, though, a new challenger to the throne has emerged. With a gritty, honest worldview and an eye on the rapidly growing women’s market, Under Armour recently shot past Adidas to become the No. 2 player in the U.S. sportswear market.

Just as Nike established itself with the help of high-profile athletes like Bo Jackson and Michael Jordan, Under Armour is producing fresh, creative content with new stars like Cam Newton and Gisele Bündchen.

But for all of the strides the 19-year-old, Baltimore-based underdog has made, does it have what it takes to topple the sportswear industry’s defending champion? Find out in today’s Content Marketing Showdown.

Innovation

Innovation is an extremely close category to call, as both brands have put together some inventive, technology-fueled content campaigns as of late.

Last August, Nike built an incredible LED-powered basketball court in China that tracks individual players’ movement for statistical purposes and uses lights on the court to lead players through training drills designed by Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant. The video the brand released showing off the court has more than 1 million YouTube views, but at just over 30 seconds, it was a little too short for my liking. The brand also impressed last year with a microsite dedicated to showing how innovation has powered the evolution of Nike’s sneakers.

However, this category belongs to Under Armour for its stunning interactive website featuring model Gisele Bündchen, which just won big at this year’s Cannes Lions advertising awards. As part of its women-focused “I Will What I Want” campaign, the brand built a microsite that shows video of Bündchen working out in an empty white gym. People can click to see Bündchen do different exercises, but what makes the site really stand out is that it pulls in live tweets about the model and projects them onto the gym’s otherwise blank walls.

The result? Viewers are left alone with the powerful sights and sounds of a woman pushing her body to the limits, all the while she ignores the negative comments of the masses that float around her. Now that’s a statement.

Winner: Under Armour

Entertainment

For all of Under Armour’s innovative use of tech with the Gisele microsite, you would be hard-pressed to find a brand with more creative, entertaining content than Nike.

In 2014, Team Just Do It made tons of end-of-year lists with “The Last Game,” a beautiful animated short film tied to the World Cup. The five-minute video stars soccer luminaries and Nike-sponsored athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar, and tells the story of a mad scientist who tries to create world-class players in a lab, only for those players to be defeated by the creativity and boldness of the real-life stars. The video took seven months to make, and it shows in the quality of the production.

Nike has also kept people’s eyes glued to their computer and smartphone screens with its heartwarming series of “First & Long” videos produced in partnership with SB Nation, which showed NFL stars returning to visit the football teams at the high schools they attended. The brand also had us rolling with videos starring the basketball/comedy duo of Blake Griffin and Chris Paul.

Under Armour gets points for its fascinating documentary series following Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton through training camp, but Nike takes the cake.

Winner: Nike

Social Savvy

As you might expect, Nike has a huge advantage when it comes to numbers. The incumbent brand has 22 million Facebook fans compared to Under Armour’s 3.6 million, and roughly 17 times as many Instagram followers as its rival.

However, quantity isn’t everything. Under Armour maintains a seriously cool Instagram account, which features stunning photos like this one of Andy Murray taking a serve with the London skyline in the background:

https://www.instagram.com/p/4jZV6BPIqT/

The brand and its agency, Droga5, were also recently recognized by Facebook as putting together one of the past year’s 12 best campaigns on the platform. Under Armour and Droga5 smartly leveraged the social network to distribute the Gisele microsite and an inspiring, viral video detailing the unlikely rise of ballerina Misty Copeland.

By comparison, most of Nike’s social efforts are spread out across separate accounts for each of its sportswear lines (i.e., Nike Basketball, Nike Football, Nike Running, etc). While each brand does strong work, it doesn’t touch the concerted effort put in to the main Under Armour accounts.

Winner: Under Armour

Consistency

Under Armour has done a great job establishing itself as a brand for empowered women with its “I Will What I Want” campaign, which communicates a very clear message: Just because society is always telling women how to act doesn’t mean those women should bother listening. In a very short period of time, this consistent messaging has allowed Under Armour to establish its brand values quickly.

But perhaps no brand has ever been as consistent as Nike, which has turned out quality content year after year after year. The company’s advertising has been so strong for so long that all it takes is a simple symbol—the iconic swoosh—to communicate the brand’s ideals of risk-taking, self-confidence, and hard-fought competition.

Under Armour’s been doing great work lately, but until it keeps it up for another 20 years we can’t give this to anyone but Nike.

Winner: Nike

Impact

It might be unfair to competitors given its huge head start, but when Nike speaks, the world the listens. Take, for example, its epic video commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the “Just Do It” tagline, which starred Bradley Cooper, Serena Williams, and LeBron James.

Or look at its recent “Re2pect” video honoring longtime poster boy and recently retired New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. The video racked up more than 9 million YouTube views and featured appearances from New York City icons Jay Z, Spike Lee, and Billy Crystal.

The brand also played a major role in the creation of the entire subculture of sneaker collecting with its highly anticipated releases of the latest Air Jordans, and with one notable exception, the Nike brand is essentially synonymous with the word “sneaker” within the hip-hop catalogue.

At least for now, Nike wields a tremendous influence over pop culture that Under Armour simply cannot match.

Winner: Nike

Winner: Nike, 3–2

Ladies and gentlemen, your winner *Bruce Buffer voice* AND STILL champion of the sporting goods marketing game: Nike.

While Under Armour has made tremendous strides distinguishing itself in a crowded marketplace, the Nike brand remains just a little too strong to be knocked off its perch. But who knows what lies ahead for these two hard-charging companies. Perhaps a decade from now, everyone will be rapping about their Under Armour kicks.

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