You have an internal marketing team, and you manage a team of freelancers—writers, designers, editors, etc. Email and Google Docs are your go-to forms of communication and collaboration. Unless your freelancers don’t have Gmail accounts, then the system breaks down. Freelancers can’t access your documents, so you have to email company assets. But those documents are constantly being updated, and you never remember which version you sent to which freelancer. So, you have to search through countless email threads to find the right one.

Now, instead of doing important work, you’re just retracing your steps to determine who knows what and what needs to happen next.

Alright, our journey is over, and you’re safe and sound now back in good old 2024. While this scenario was typical for marketing teams in 2010, many who haven’t discovered the wonder of content marketing platforms still experience these headaches. Perhaps you’re whispering to yourself: “Shoot, that’s me! What is a content marketing platform?” If so, that’s okay, we’ll bring you up to speed.

What are Content Marketing Platforms?

A content marketing platform (CMP) is an online software solution that allows businesses and marketers to collaborate across teams to strategize and streamline their content marketing processes.

I know what you’re thinking: That sounds a lot like a content management system (CMS). Sure, they both deal with content, but they serve different purposes in the overall content lifecycle. Here’s a quick breakdown of their differences:

Content Management Systems (CMS)

A CMS is a broader tool used to publish and distribute marketing content. It allows non-technical users to easily publish content across channels, edit webpages, and manage layouts (e.g., platforms like WordPress and Magento).

Content Marketing Platforms (CMP)

A CMP is a more specialized marketing tool designed for the entire content marketing process. This includes planning content strategy, creating content, scaling content production, analyzing performance, and distributing content across various channels.

Essentially, the biggest difference is that a CMS is primarily for publishing content to your website, while a CMP is for planning, strategic alignment, content creation, and optimizing content performance.

How do Content Marketing Platforms Work?

CMPs act as a central nervous system for your marketing efforts, helping your team streamline the content marketing process from strategy to results. Here are some of the specialized tools CMPs provide to improve your content marketing process:

Strategic insight: Develop a data-driven content strategy with features like keyword research tools and competitor analyses. Easily identify content gaps and potential audiences.

Organizational alignment: Store, update, and distribute your marketing strategy in one centralized location, effectively breaking down silos between internal and external teams, like freelancers and full-time employees.

Content calendars: Visually map out your content plan with dynamic, drag-and-drop calendar features. Keep your team aligned and organized with a unified calendar to schedule content creation, distribution, campaigns, and project deadlines.

Campaign management: Create and manage multi-channel campaigns within your CMP. Ensure all marketing activities (blog posts, social media posts, email blasts, etc.) align with overall strategy.

Workflow management: Assign tasks, track progress, and set clear deadlines for content creators, editors, and other team members.

Collaboration tools: Share documents, provide feedback, solicit feedback from company executives, streamline legal review, and communicate with your team using built-in messaging, text editors, and task management tools.

Our new dual-editing feature is a real-time collaboration tool that boosts the speed and ease of collaboration when several people are working on a document. Contently is the only CMP that enables real-time collaboration in-platform.

Content performance tracking: Analyze content performance across various channels using detailed analytics.

Team coordination: Keep your team aligned with notifications on project progress, campaign performance, and team activity.

Why Do I Need a Content Marketing Platform?

Every business and marketing team is different. So, is it fair to say they all need a CMP? Yes. Yes, it is. You just need to find a CMP with the right features for your team. So, let’s talk about the benefits of CMPs and what you should look for when shopping for a CMP:

Increased Bandwidth

Marketing teams are always spread thin. But what if you could double, triple, or even quadruple the size of your team? With a CMP, you have access to a powerful network of vetted writers, copy editors, designers, art directors, photographers, videographers, and much more. Suddenly, your marketing team is able to focus on strategy while producing more content.

Without a CMP, marketing teams are forced to pause content creation and publishing while they focus on strategy. But CMPs allow teams to maintain their momentum and continue operations while finalizing their marketing approach.

What to Look For:

Not all CMPs offer a talent network. While some CMPs integrate with freelance marketplaces or offer features to collaborate with external contributors, a built-in talent network of freelancers is not a standard feature.

But the best enterprise content marketing platforms will provide trusted freelancers within their platform. For example, Contently has vetted and trained each of their 160,000+ freelancers in their talent network.

Gain Strategic Alignment

Every good campaign starts with a good strategy. With a CMP, you can document your strategy upfront, create alignment within your team, and provide visibility to your in-house team and freelancers. With custom analytics, you can track each of your audiences, determine how your content is performing, and measure your progress against key performance indicators (KPIs).

What to Look For:

Look for a user-friendly platform that allows each of your team members to customize their dashboards. Whether it’s your CMO or marketing manager using the platform, they can create a dashboard that shows the information and metrics most important to them.

You also want a platform that allows users to provide story briefs or specific instructions to individual freelancers and internal team members. Share insights into audience personas, voice, and strategy without having to attach a 70-page brand book to every assignment. Contently also allows users to templatize their story briefs, so they don’t have to start from scratch with each project.

For your freelancers, use a CMP with a quick link to content strategy, so they can quickly reference goals, audience, and tone with a click of a button.

Scale Content Creation

CMPs can function like growth serums for marketing teams by eliminating repetitive tasks, like scheduling social media posts or resizing images for different platforms. Content templates and pre-designed workflows allow teams to quickly create content consistent with brand guidelines and established processes.

With detailed analytics, teams can see which content resonates with audiences and quickly make improvements. This data-driven approach accelerates the optimization process and helps teams focus on high-performing formats and topics.

What to Look For:

To improve your optimizations and increase ROI, make sure your CMP allows you to test different monetization channels, perform A/B tests, and personalize your content and marketing campaigns using customer data.

For marketers looking for a way to justify their content spend, Contently offers the Content Value Tracker. It actually calculates how much your organic traffic is worth in dollars.

Achieve Brand Compliance

Streamline brand compliance and ensure consistency by incorporating legal and brand requirements into your project briefs, templates, and workflows. Even with strict brand guidelines, you can use brand management tools to flag blocklisted words and phrases and apply a uniform style and tone to each piece of content.

What to Look For:

The best content marketing platforms will include automated quality control features. These tools can scan for plagiarism, assess content for reading level, correct grammar, and optimize for SEO. The best CMPs will also provide AI-generated recommendations on writing quality, such as misused words and double verbs.

Contently’s workflow tools also ensure each team member knows what is required of them and when their tasks are due. Once a freelancer completes a task or meets the project requirements, they are paid automatically through Contently.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs About Content Marketing Platforms

How do content marketing platforms facilitate communication between external freelancer and internal teams?

Content marketing platforms often provide features like built-in messaging, task management tools, and collaborative document sharing to facilitate communication between internal teams and external freelancers, ensuring seamless integration regardless of the tools they use.

Can content marketing platforms assist in identifying and filling content gaps in a marketing strategy?

Yes, content marketing platforms typically offer features such as keyword research tools and competitor analyses, allowing users to identify content gaps and potential audiences, thereby aiding in refining and filling gaps within the marketing strategy.

Do content marketing platforms offer functionalities for brand compliance and legal requirements within content creation?

Many content marketing platforms integrate legal and brand compliance requirements into project briefs, templates, and workflows, while also offering automated quality control features such as plagiarism detection and grammar correction.

If you’re ready to make your work life immeasurably better and add a CMP to your content marketing process, start your search here.

The post What Are Content Marketing Platforms and Why You Need One appeared first on Contently.

The latest seminal research from Les Binet and Peter Field, titled Effectiveness in Context, analyzes hundreds of campaigns from the IPA Databank (with a focus on marketing effectiveness) and clarifies the dual model. I want to focus on the role of content strategy within an overarching marketing strategy, and how content will contribute to a common alignment across the different natures of marketing.

The last few years have seen short-term sales activation become the first priority of most enterprises, especially in the B2B domain. Enterprises invest most of their money into short-term, bottom funnel campaigns driven mostly by online paid media programs and related content, in the hope that they’ll lift sales for the next few quarters. I had a similar priority when I led marketing for a division of a large enterprise in the energy industry—brand was simply a minor focus. I keep seeing this appear as a common practice in many of the enterprises I advise. Short-term activation campaigns and sales programs were successful in most of the cases. At least, this is what I—and most marketers—thought.

According to Binet and Field, marketing effectiveness is in decline and “short-termism” is, in many ways, the mother of all marketing problems. What exactly happened? As I have mentioned, marketers have become increasingly short-term in their focus. They spend money on immediate sales activation rather than longer-term brand building. But in one of the most important sections of their research, the two authors demonstrate that over the longer term, this short-termism will rapidly deteriorate the overall impact of marketing.

Too much time spent picking the low-hanging fruit means less time watering the tree. Eventually the tree stops growing.

In most cases, a solid and documented content strategy was not even requested nor was it ever put in place. You don’t need a content strategy for executing short-term sales activation campaigns.

But things are changing—marketers are beginning to adopt an integrated model. “Brand communications create enduring memory structures that increase the base level of demand and reduce price sensitivity,” Binet said in the report. “Sales activation triggers these memories and converts them efficiently into immediate sales.”

Brand building and sales activation are not choices or alternatives—they are mutually interdependent and both are essential to long-term success. Sales activation marketing is best served by tight targeting and relevant messages, and it should focus on building your customer’s physical, tangible understanding of your brand. In contrast, brand awareness building is about increasing a consumer’s internal conception of your brand, and it is primarily driven by content that expands audience reach through stories, educational and informational content, inciting emotions, and making associations.

I have seen this play out with the clients I consult and work with, which are mostly large enterprises in the sectors of tech, finance, and energy. While in the past my strategy workshops were mostly attended by brand and content leaders, I’ve found that my audience has expanded to a vastly diverse crowd of marketers from many different domains: performance marketing, paid media, social media, and PR teams. They all share a primary challenge: securing alignment across a common audience and buyer journey.

I’ve found that this audience of professional communicators also shares the following across their different industries:

• Business and marketing goals – Marketers may pursue different micro-goals (eg. brand lift or number of leads), but they always share common macro-goals
• Common audience – They’re targeting the same people, but their approach targets different phases of the buyer journey. Brand and content focus mostly on awareness, and performance marketing targets consideration, decision, and inspiring purchases.
• Common buyer journey – Again, marketers target different stages and they clearly have different needs. Marketers focusing on brand/content need to design a centralized audience-centric content strategy. Performance marketers need to understand what resonates with their audience in the decision/purchase phases of the journey, and use good content for their activation campaigns. Field marketers need sales enablement content which spans across different stages. Social media & comm marketers need to secure alignment with the previous functions in order to lend support with solid content distribution.
• Common strategy – Built around audience and buyer journey, top funnel content and storytelling will fuel brand awareness and build enduring memories. Medium and bottom funnel content will feed the immediate need for sales activation programs.

Overall, the role of content marketing is evolving. What was once an individual and isolated rebel approach when Joe Pulizzi wrote his first books is now a consolidated mainstream role within the overarching marketing strategy.

The post How a Common Content Strategy Unites Marketing’s Different Natures appeared first on Contently.

Some people loved the Looney Tunes and others loved DC Comics, and they all wanted to talk about them their entire shift. In fact, Six Flags’ internal messaging was so thoroughly on-brand that everything from napkins to bathroom signs in the office building to email signatures were adorned with the Looney Tunes, the Justice League, or the Wiggles.

Brand saturation was so complete that any piece of content, even shared internally, made some reference to these characters. It was just a part of the culture and it radiated positivity in an otherwise difficult work environment.

For that reason, I believe that every company can benefit from developing an internal mission as succinct and recognizable as the one at Six Flags. The benefits were obvious because we all worked in hospitality and entertainment—happy, purpose-driven employees are more likely to go out of their way to make guests’ days brighter—but the same equation can be applied to a company in any industry.

Even if your products and services aren’t as fun as, say, Batman and Robin, you can give your brand a boost by ensuring a few things about your internal communications are in place. After all, content within an internal audience is still content, and that means it needs a strategy.

Develop a schedule and stick to it

No matter where your staff is along the corporate ladder, they’ll appreciate a sense of routine in your communications. Nothing makes company leaders look worse than last-minute meetings or announcements that aren’t followed up on at all.

Resist the temptation to make your internal content flashy and funnel everything through your marketing or editorial team, the same way you would a blog post. Are you ready to commit to each part of an announced pivot, for example? Do you have a contingency plan if a new initiative goes off the rails?

When in doubt, go evergreen

Create a collection of documents your team can refer to in the future—that’s the simplest way to use internal comms to your advantage. Contently, for instance, runs an internal blog of updates on employee events, benefits, thought leadership, educational opportunities, sponsored clubs, and networking events. It’s become something of a joke around the office that we’re not supposed to approach anyone with a question unless we’ve first studied Inside Contently, the internal-facing blog.

Compiling internal content can be extremely helpful in the on-boarding process, especially if your middle managers don’t have time to give every new hire the full run-down of your company’s history, business structure, value and goals for the current quarter. I watched taped presentations from our company leaders my first week, and was given a pile of reading assignments from the internal (and external) blogs to get me up to speed. Not only did I learn historical stuff, I was able to develop an ear for the Contently voice through immersion.

Increase transparency between the C-suite and employees

Keeping in mind that high employee morale leads to high performance, one way to increase your staff’s sense of dedication and fulfillment is to simply tell them what’s going on above their heads. Whether it’s delivering less-than-stellar news about the company’s performance one quarter or explaining a new cross-department project, that communication requires content.

It may seem frivolous to care about the framing or aesthetics applied to internal content, but humans are visual creatures, and if every presentation and email looks as on-brand as it sounds, that will communicate to your team that things are going according to plan.

All in all, it’s easy to dismiss the content shared between employees and managers at a company as low-tier importance, but making it a part of your brand’s overall content strategy will only help you in the long run.

The post Are Your Internal Comms Doing Enough for Your Brand? appeared first on Contently.

Content and marketing actually require very different skills; putting a content creator in a marketing role, or vice versa, is like mixing vodka and milk.[note]There’s some debate, in the context of Mobb Deep’s “Survival of the Fittest,” as to whether “mixing vodka and milk” results in a negative or positive outcome. As in “We’re a VERY volatile combination, and likely to shoot you” or “We make a delightful pairing, like a White Russian.” For the purposes of this article, we’ll be going with option A.[/note] The people in these roles speak different languages: ROI and go-to-market vs. TKs and Oxford commas. Most of the marketers I talk to—and as a marketer at a marketing company, I talk to a lot of them—have some kind of horror story about trying to repurpose a junior marketing manager into a content marketer.

Another issue to consider is the traditional separation between creative and business functions within a company. Who among marketers hasn’t complained about the output and inscrutability of creative teams, and which creatives haven’t rolled their eyes at annoying requests from the front line? (I usually do both things on a daily basis.)

When you think about it, the larger challenge isn’t just marketing against content marketing, it’s how marketing and content support the front-line teams in general. How do you know that your content drives results? What does the feedback loop look like between marketing and sales? How can you create teams that support the middle and bottom of the funnel while still prioritizing top-line goals like reach, brand awareness, and lead generation?

As Contently has grown from a small startup with a well-read blog into a 120-person-strong company with a robust marketing operation, we’ve had to confront a lot of these dilemmas. We tried different systems, organizational structures, goals, and even different managers—none of which worked as well as we wanted.

It wasn’t until we took a page from agile product development that we finally saw the light.

How agile applies to marketing

Agile is a project-management process typically used by developers to break down a big project into a more manageable schedule that prioritizes different tasks. Instead of siloing different functions, you combine them. The point is to structure a team in a way that allows for fast iteration and efficient cross-departmental collaboration.

On Contently’s product team, this means engineers, UX designers, product managers, and data analysts work together on small teams to build and refine a new software feature. Each group has the personnel to complete a project without having to pass it off to anyone else.

Adopting this approach in marketing made us way more flexible. We could ideate, write, edit, design, and publish based on data and feedback. With fewer dependencies, we got more work done.

With fewer dependencies, we got more work done.

Now, each part of the marketing funnel gets a cross-functional team that includes a content creator, a marketer, and a designer. There’s often a member of the front-line teams assigned as well, as a kind of sponsor, to make sure the original idea behind the project doesn’t get lost. Since we already have “teams” within our marketing department (content, marketing, and design), we ran into a nomenclature issue, so we decided to christen these working groups “squads.”

Here’s how we visualize our agile squad structure:

Agile has allowed us to solve two of the biggest problems marketers face:

1. The unicorn problem

Marketing leaders obsess over finding that special creature good at both content and traditional marketing. Fun fact: Those people are really hard to find. Squads have solved that problem for us because people get to focus on their specialized skills.

This model could work even better for larger companies that have bigger pools of talent. Pairing a marketer with an editor allows you to get the best of both worlds. After enough time, each person will learn about other disciplines without needing to pretend like they’re already experts.

2. The “creative at scale” problem

Brands, especially big ones, need a steady stream of content to empower their various divisions and lines of business. But that need also leads to a situation where these companies not only have too many cooks, but they have too many kitchens as well.

Companies are building “content centers of excellence” or “brand newsrooms” so they can have a centralized place where people handle all creative work. Adding representatives from each teams that plan to use that work means you execute faster (because you’re not sitting around waiting for 900 approvals), but, more importantly, you don’t wind up with pieces of content that never get seen.

The nice thing about this structure is how it can grow as the company grows. Once we ask marketing and sales to provide more specialized functions, we can deploy our creative talent within squads that service those functions. We can have disparate teams pull together to take care of crucial projects. In the long run, that process will make our organization smarter, more harmonious, and more effective.

It may not be simple, but then again, neither is making a decent White Russian.

The post How Agile Thinking Can Transform Your Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

According to Randy Parker, founder of Facebook marketing tech company PagePart, Facebook’s value to your business will depend on how much leverage you get from the social graph. In other words, as long as your business relies on building long-lasting relationships with a reasonably large audience that you can target, Facebook ads are worth a try.

Industry concerns?

That idea even applies to industries with smaller audiences, such as B2B companies. We at Contently are a great example. We use Facebook for targeted paid distribution of our content—the specificity of the targeting and relatively low CPC allow us to reach potential leads and grow our audience effectively.

MetLife has seen similar success on Facebook. According to Facebook’s case study, the insurance company saw a 2.4x increase in lead-to-sale ratio compared to the next best-performing channel, and a 49 percent decrease in cost per lead.

This is true for B2C companies as well. Banana Republic (retail), Zynga (gaming), and Verizon (telecommunications) have all seen success. Your industry shouldn’t determine how much you value Facebook.

Part of a cohesive strategy

Even though it’s effective across industries, Facebook shouldn’t be your only channel. Using it in chorus with the rest of your marketing repertoire is critical.

“I don’t think it’s the most important marketing channel,” said Deacon Webster, CCO at digital agency Walrus. “It completely depends on what your brand is. There’s some brands that I would say one hundred percent shouldn’t be using Facebook. But more and more people are spending time on mobile devices, and if you need to get in front of those people, Facebook’s a really good way to do it.”

Using Facebook in conjunction with other channels is a key part of understanding the platform’s overall place in your marketing plan. For big brands, using Facebook as one part of a larger media campaign can be a valuable way to take advantage of the network’s unique capabilities, while some brands may be better off creating Facebook-only campaigns.

“It’s always good to have a mix of different mediums happening,” Webster said. “People have a different reaction to seeing something on their phone compared to TV or interacting with outdoor or wherever else. I think it’s part of the mix, but it’s not the whole mix.”

Ubisoft, the Montreal-based gaming company, took this to heart in a recent campaign to increase the reach of a TV ad for the launch of its new game. Because its core user base, 18- to 34-year-old males, tends to be less active on TV, Ubisoft used Facebook to extend the effectiveness of its expensive TV ads to the digital sphere.

Brad Goldberg, vice president of of advertising operations at OrionCKB, believes that Facebook should also only be one part of a digital marketing strategy.

“I don’t know if I would say it’s the most important,” he said. “Obviously, you have to have the right mix of different digital strategies because Facebook is still very much a social channel, and is about building a brand. That’s opposed to something on the search side, where people are typing in exactly what they are looking for. You have to have a good kind of mix between the two.”

Goldberg sees Facebook as “top two” in terms of digital importance for marketers, but it’s not necessarily more important than that other behemoth, Google.

Facebook for mobile, targeting, and video

For mobile, targeting, and digital video, it’s hard to beat Facebook. If your marketing goals are tied to those elements, Facebook is your place. Its vast reach makes it appealing for any campaign aiming at a broad audience, while its targeting features make it worthwhile (though somewhat expensive) for a campaign aimed at a very specific one.

As TV slowly dies, Facebook has been positioning itself as the next platform for TV ad money.

Facebook’s video ad push is an excellent example of how these kind of campaigns—targeted, mobile, video-based—are an excellent fit for Facebook, whether you’re using the platform as a supplementary or primary marketing channel.

As TV slowly dies, Facebook has been positioning itself as the next platform for TV ad money. Socialbakers revealed that marketers plan to spend more ad money on Facebook video than on any other platform.

Lexus, for example, recently ran a campaign with an astounding 1,000 unique video ads in order to utilize Facebook’s granular audience targeting features—something that could never be done with a traditional TV ad. Campaigns like this one, which make explicit use of Facebook’s unique features, are worth experimenting with, but otherwise it’s likely best to keep the platform within a larger marketing mix.

Again, this all depends largely on your brand’s idiosyncrasies. Once you understand both Facebook’s evolving model and its place in your marketing strategy, it’s time to start building your Facebook presence.

This is an excerpt from “The Marketer’s Guide to Facebook.”

The post What Role Should Facebook Play in Your Marketing? appeared first on Contently.

While YouTube’s advertising is best known for its skippable pre-roll ads, the platform offers myriad ways for brands to get their video content out there. Lucky for us, WhoIsHostingThis has detailed everything a beginner needs to know in the shiny infographic below.

For example, brands can position their videos in-slate (where viewers are given the option of choosing between three ads before watching a long video) or in-search (where a video is provided as a suggested search result). And best of all, they can choose to only pay when viewers choose to watch the ad.

The infographic cites some impressive numbers that should convert those who still think of YouTube as a hub for fuzzy cell phone videos. Did you know that YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine after Google? Or that it attracts over 1 billion unique users each month, and reaches more US adults than any cable network? And for those looking for ROI, consider this: Businesses that use YouTube ads see a 20 percent increase in website traffic, and 43 percent of brands’ new customers buy something they saw in a YouTube ad.

Check out all of those seductive stats in the infographic below.

The post Infographic: The Beginner’s Guide to YouTube Advertising appeared first on Contently.

A once-obscure image board platform with a mere 5,000 users, Pinterest has taken the social web by storm. In just three years, 70 million people—80 percent of whom are female—have pinned over 30 billion items. With these numbers, Pinterest has become the discovery platform that brands have always wished for.

One brand that has found major success on the platform is Tiny Hands, a super-small business making big noise with its food jewelry. Founder Mei Pak has proven that she knows Pinterest, successfully using the platform to build an audience and sell her quirky creations.

For those still trying to get a grasp on that perfect Pinterest strategy, Pak shares what works for her business on a platform that is just beginning to realize its earning potential.

1. Pinterest is your virtual storefront

While Facebook and Twitter offer brands a voice, Pinterest helps them craft the perfect image.

“Pinterest serves as a visual display of your brand’s culture,” Pak says. “My pins are what I would be proud to have on display if Tiny Hands had a brick and mortar store.”

This rings true even for brands with a large physical presence. Last year, Target launched an “Awesome Shop” designed to highlight their most popular pins. In addition to Awesome Shop, Target regularly maintains over 40 boards, with categories ranging from seasonal products to the latest fashion.

2. Likes are irrelevant

In a social world dominated by Facebook, Likes have become the standard signal of success for brands. While Pinterest does allow users to Like pins, placing weight on this metric is a mistake. Much like favoriting tweets, “Likes on Pinterest are an acknowledgement, not an endorsement,” explains Pak. “Repins are your goal.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the best practices on getting repinned, don’t sweat it. First and foremost, focus on your content. If you are sharing images of beautiful jewelry, make sure the images only display that beautiful jewelry. Once you’ve found the perfect image, add a description that is relevant and includes popular keywords.

For more helpful tactics, check out what’s popular on Pinterest.

3. Mobile matters

With an estimated 75 percent of Pinterest’s traffic coming from mobile devices, it is a safe bet that horizontal images will fare poorly. By using vertical images, you’ll be taking full advantage of screen real estate and will not break the flow of the user experience on the Pinterest app.

Additionally, images should not include block descriptions. Keeping descriptions crisp is essential to respecting a Pinterest user’s browsing time.

For further tips on optimizing for mobile devices, Rocket Post has a number of excellent tips to make sure your images are ready for mobile.

4. Pin consistently

Gaining followers on Pinterest takes serious commitment. In three months, Pak grew her audience by 300 followers by sharing nearly 50 pins a day. “Followers on Pinterest value regular activity,” Pak says. For power users, this number can sometimes reach an upwards of 100 pins per day.

While posting regularly is essential, users should also be aware that their pins need to be relevant to the Pinterest community. This means making photos pop with color, posting at opportune times (between 2 and 4 p.m. EST), keeping up with what categories are popular, and maintaining a diverse set of boards.

For a detailed overview on how to optimize your pins, check out the Pinterest scientific guide by Buffer.

5. D.I.Y metrics

Currently, Pinterest offers few tools for brands to track the success of their campaigns. As with Pak, for a one-person operation with limited time and resources, committing to Pinterest can be taxing when its competitors offer in-depth metrics and sales data. To make matters worse, what little data Pinterest does offer tend to be unreliable, according to Pak.

While this issue is being worked on at Pinterest, it’s a factor to consider before diving in.

6. Run a contest

“If you want content that sticks, run your own contest on Pinterest,” Pak says. “Unlike other social networks, content that I’ve used for contests has a long shelf life. I’m still getting repins months later.”

While running a contest on Pinterest can be a lucrative tactic for your brand to employ, it should be done with a plan. In an attempt to maintain high-quality pins and posts, Pinterest has a list of contest rules brands are expected follow. For examples of brands with great contests that play by the rules, High Point Market is one to take note from.

Each year, “Style Spotters” at High Point Market pin their latest take on trends and fashion. Each Style Spotter is awarded points based on the number of repins and likes they receive. Once the competition is over, the winner receives a free trip to one of High Point Market’s events. This contest encourages quality pins, and makes the community feel directly involved. HubSpot points out some other awesome contest ideas.

Success on Pinterest is becoming important than ever for brands as the visually driven platform nips at the heels of social networking behemoths once deemed untouchable. Prevent being stuck on a supplanted social network and get your brand active on your mom’s favorite social network now. It’ll even give you something to chat about with grandma at the next family event.

What’s the deal with The Content Strategist? It’s something we created at Contently because we believe in a world where marketing is helpful and where businesses grow by telling stories that people love. Learn more.

The post Want to Dominate Pinterest? Follow These 6 Tips appeared first on Contently.

Tip #1: Know how to outsmart your competition

By challenging them to a real-life chess game on the top of a mountain. Hire an accredited potions master to sneak up behind the other marketers and transform them into pawns. Leap to the top of the tallest piece/former person. Clients will see that you are clearly the dominant—and only human—option.

Tip #2: Highlight your client’s growth potential

By making a giant upwards arrow out of leftover balsa wood from your neighborhood karate studio. Ideally, hire a middle school shop student to create this for you. Stand in front of it and pose dramatically for a few minutes. The longer you hold the pose, the more committed you will seem to clients.

 Tip #3: Surround yourself with the latest news

By filling your office with pieces of paper that say only “News” and “Stock Market” on them. Keep them on your mind at all times by placing fans in all four corners of your office to create a news tornado. If anyone comes in for a meeting, they’ll be impressed by your commitment to staying on top with the market and grateful for the fans. It’s freaking hot out.

Tip #4: Always be searching for new trends

By pushing yourself around in a grocery cart with a telescope. Trends are often shy and will stay at a distance. You’ll be able to see them more easily if you have some kind of magnifying device. The grocery cart is—obviously—in case the trend is hiding at the bottom of a hill and you want to reach it at top speeds.

Tip #5: Have the know-how to become a marketing fat cat

No, really. Remember that accredited potions master from before? Once you’ve spotted a certain number of trends and gained a specific number of clients, you will be transformed into a mildly obese cat wearing a suit and a gold chain. Your life will be magnificent. You will be feared by all. You will have orange jellybeans.

The post How to Be a Marketer, According to Stock Photography appeared first on Contently.

It’s a common scenario that typically plays out as follows:

• Your marketing team spends thousands of dollars on blog posts that generate buzz.
• The buzz takes a wrong turn when “SideThorn” joins the conversation. Two short words—”this sucks”—stop your editorial team dead in its tracks.
• Corporate chaos ensues. Your marketing director wants to delete the comment, while your community managers want to let it stand. Meanwhile, your PR team wants to hire a team of specialists to draft a formal redaction or apology.
• Your company wastes an entire day dealing with one malcontent who, quite possibly, never even read the blog post.

Sound familiar? Here’s a game plan for dealing with inevitable criticism.

1. Embrace the fact that consumers are in charge

Content creation is the Pandora’s Box of the marketing world. Regardless of what your brand publishes, people may take jabs.

That vulnerability is out of your control. But you can accept that, like it or not, consumers are in charge of defining your company’s influence. Maintain a sense of emotional maturity, and don’t let the virtual punches escalate into a media scandal.

“Brands need to realize that social has created a two-way conversation,” says Suzanne Baran, a content strategist who works on branding campaigns with Fortune 500 companies.

Readers are savvy about that two-way conversation, and they’re not new to the world of online comments. They can tell when someone is unfairly trolling a piece of quality content, and when they’re making a valid point. Either way, if you believe in the quality of your content, trust that it will stand up to the criticism.

“Social comments should remain live,” adds Baran. “It shows character when a company doesn’t rush to delete a comment and instead, addresses it head on.”

Address a comment head on, and you might find someone invested in your brand—like the response to this article from Dell’s Tech Page One magazine:

2. Bring them to your side

Competition for consumer eyeballs is incredibly fierce online. Audiences bombarded with marketing messages have to constantly choose what deserves their attention.

And then there’s “SideThorn,” who cared enough to reach out and offer his feedback. It may sound counterintuitive, but “this sucks” can actually be a sign your marketing is working.

“A Negative Nelly or Dougie Downer sees this an opportunity to get attention, or they generally had an unpleasant experience and want to know that they have been heard,” Baran says. “This complainer obviously has some sense of loyalty, so show them that you care.”

Let’s revisit the Dell example from above. Rather than spark a backlash, the negative comment sparked a healthy debate about the content from the article. It brought respondents out of the woodwork that were pleasant, genuinely interested, and engaged within the content.

Let the conversation flourish, and some commenters may even gravitate back to your your side organically.

3. Repurpose the inspiration

Take a negative situation and turn it positive. A negative comment can inspire an entirely new conversation thread—especially if “SideThorn” isn’t a troll, but someone who genuinely cares.

“Feature the commenter in a new blog post,” recommends David Murdico, managing partner at Supercool Creative, a PR and social marketing firm that works with Pizza Hut, IBM, and T-Mobile.

Here is a recent example from FreshBooks, a cloud accounting platform that recently published an article about the Affordable Care Act. Here, the writer (me) encourages an angry commenter to elaborate upon his perspective—even in a new blog post:

Don’t bury an angry comment or extinguish a heated debate. Keep the conversation going, and own it. Facilitating a debate about criticism on your site is much better than wondering why nobody is talking about you at all.

“Be sure to let the commenter know about the new post so they can leave a new comment,” Murdico says.

4. Stay hands-off

Don’t worry about responding to every comment; spirited communities will self-direct their own conversations.

“Companies that have built vibrant online communities will often find that engaged advocates will respond to negative comments on the brand’s behalf,” explains Keva Silversmith, director of public relations at Starmark International. “These advocates will be a powerful, independent voice.”

Take a lesson from The Next Web, a tech-focused publisher that works with brands to publish sponsored content. A recent article about responsive design vs. native mobile apps generated a debate about whether or not the piece was outdated. The author stayed out of the conversation, which ultimately evolved into a healthy, tactful debate:

Consumers don’t want a biased forum; they want to be able to express themselves authentically. The best PR strategy for brands is to respect these wishes.

“When a brand does decide to respond, the message needs to be friendly and non-confrontational,” Silversmith says. “Express a commitment to work with the poster towards the best solution.”

Final thoughts: Don’t beat yourself up

It’s okay to be wrong sometimes. It’s also fine to laugh at yourself. Brands aren’t always perfect, but those who successfully navigate controversy know when to take the heat out of the situation.

“Joke around with the angry commenter,” says Murdico. “See what reaction you get. Make the comment feed entertaining for your readers in the process.”

Don’t take yourself too seriously, and you’ll be fine. We’ll all make it through, “SideThorn” included.

What’s the deal with The Content Strategist? It’s something we created at Contently because we believe in a world where marketing is helpful and where businesses grow by telling stories that people love. Take advantage of our tools and talent and come build that world with us.

The post 4 Ways Brand Publishers Can Deal With Haters appeared first on Contently.

It’s easy to see why. SlideShare experienced impressive growth in 2013, and it hasn’t slowed since. With surging popularity and preferred status on LinkedIn, brands showcased as “Featured” or “Most Popular” on the site have gained exposure to a host of new prospects and consumers. But all too often, brands’ SlideShares fall short.

Here’s what you have to do to effectively lure in leads and makes people hungry for more.

1. Finding a SlideShare-friendly topic

According to HubSpot writer Ginny Soskey, people are ultimately drawn to slices of shareable information instead of bloated chunks of text. “Quotes and stats are bite-sized,” she says, “Making them super easy to fit within the character limits of certain social platforms, and they help position the person who shared it as smart.”

One way to follow this strategy is to appeal to general interests. For example, mobile-app platform Kinvey selected a hackathon as their topic of choice for a slideshow, instead of exploring something more complicated and hyper-specific like the nuances of a programming language. Hackathons are relevant to developers, potential organizers, sponsors, and event coordinators, so Kinvey’s presentation appealed to a broader audience. Even if only one part of your audience will be potential leads, drawing in people indirectly related to sales will be crucial for generating future buzz.

If you have no idea where to begin, start with a story you’re already comfortable telling. “We’ll start writing a piece for the blog and realize a SlideShare could be an excellent addition,” says Soskey.

Marketo Senior Manager of Content Marketing Dayna Rothman seconds the idea of using existing material: “I usually base a SlideShare presentation off of a larger content piece to repurpose the content and tell a slightly different story. Some people like to read ebooks, and others like to view slide decks.” Rather than diving right into the design of a SlideShare presentation, start with a general outline that can simply be a point-form structure with three or four takeaways. The key is to make the takeaways direct and actionable.

2. The devil is in the details

The difference between good and bad SlideShare presentations comes down to vital design details that can be easily overlooked. “In addition to including our standard webinar decks in our SlideShare strategy, we also create highly customized and visual stories designed for SlideShare specifically,” Rothman says. “We find that these decks are the most likely to get featured.”

The opening slide must be punchy and well-designed, since it serves as the visual headline for the entire presentation. Rothman advises not to overdo it: “Don’t put too much on your title slide, both text and images, or you will immediately turn people off.” At Marketo, every presentation gets a second opinion. Rothman lets multiple colleagues examine the design before completion.

Wordiness is also a deal-breaker. In 2013, the average SlideShare slide contained 29 words. Achievers, a workplace software company, limits each slide to 15 words.

Lastly, ensure you have a “catcher’s mitt” for presentations. Achievers only released their decks after they had five SlideShares ready to go, so anyone checking out the company’s profile could view a substantial amount of content. And according to social media manager Katie Paterson, the strategy produced a 247-percent increase in social media leads in just the first quarter after launching.

3. One-click social sharing

“One of my favorite SlideShare features is its ability to have clickable links after the first three slides,” says Soskey. “We definitely take advantage of that feature to increase social sharing — we’ll add Twitter share links on slides with punchy soundbites.”

HubSpot eliminates as much clutter as possible so viewers will be more likely to share content. Much like how Amazon removes barriers for shoppers with one-click ordering, Soskey enables readers to share HubSpot SlideShare presentations on Twitter with one-click linking. You can use tools such as Click to Tweet to set up easy social sharing.

Closing thoughts

On SlideShare, your task is simple, but not easy: Pick a wide-reaching topic, follow design patterns and details, and make social sharing easier. This new distribution channel is a great place to build an audience—a virtual space where consumers and prospective clients congregate to read new ideas and find interesting stories to share. Brands may be used to text, but thanks to the benefits of SlideShare, they’re starting to see the big picture.

What’s the deal with The Content Strategist? It’s something we created at Contently because we believe in a world where marketing is helpful and where and businesses grow by telling stories that people love. Take advantage of our tools and talent and come build that world with us.

The post 3 Tips for Dominating SlideShare appeared first on Contently.

Read these articles instead. They’ll make you feel super smart.

‘Ads That Can Compete With the Best Material Out There’: An Interview With Jay Rosen on the Future of Native

In his first interview on native advertising, Jay Rosen, the godfather of public journalism, lays out a bold and ambitious vision for the future of sponsored content. It’s a must-read.

3 Content Formats That Are About to Take Off (And Be Abused)

Everyone is afraid to be left behind. That’s why most brand publishers and marketers try to pay extra attention to trends and predictions. No one wants to be the last to know about that new technology that could be a game changer, which hot new tool can help them “go viral,” and what bells and whistles can help them gain more social shares.

But that’s also why they fail. We examine three cutting-edge content formats that are destined to be used for good and evil in the coming months.

One Year Later, Is Coca-Cola Journey a Success?

A little over a year ago, Coca-Cola ditched their corporate site for a brand magazine, Coca-Cola Journey, with much fanfare. Has it lived up to the hype?

‘Teen Pinterest’ We Heart It Gives Brands Some Love

Considering how much revenue and traffic Pinterest drives, and how hard Millennial teens are to reach, “Teen Pinterest” should be music to most marketers’ ears. WeHeartIt is welcoming them in by droves.

Are Brands Ready for Jelly?

On the adult side of “hot new social platforms,” we have Jelly. The image-based Q&A platform seems like a dream for brands trying to get their helpfulness on, but is the month-old platform ushering brands through the gate too soon?

The post Content Catchup: WeHeartIt, Jelly, and Other Trends You Need to Be Up On appeared first on Contently.

It was 1933. The company realized that the soap-buying population of America — at that time, female homemakers — was at home in the middle of the day and needed some entertainment. And this was the birth of sponsored content: The Soap Opera. Aggressive product placement and slushy drama shot P&G to the top, starting with radio and eventually making the transfer to television.

The Genesis of Cool 

Around that same time Clark Gable took off his shirt. He was staring in the movie It Happened One Night. Gable was not wearing an undershirt. According to several sources American men took note and undershirt sales plummeted by 75 percent. No one sponsored this trend but it did set a precedent: consumers learning the art of cool from Hollywood, and their purchasing habits reflecting it.

Tom Cruise slid into Risky Business with statement Ray-Bans. Back To The Future attempted to teach audiences the value of a Pepsi — and even Apple isn’t too cool for product placement, with its laptops popping up in Mission: Impossible and The Darjeeling Limited. 

Although product placement has been known to resurrect struggling brands, it’s not all sales spikes and happy fans. The latest James Bond film, Skyfall, was criticized last fall when a reported $45 million marketing deal introduced Heineken beer into famed spy 007’s shaken-not-stirred, vodka-martini-only diet. And this summer, before even leaving Krypton, Superman had raised a whopping $160 million in product placement from sponsors like Gillette razors and Twizzler candy. According to BusinessWeek, the $160 million makes Man of Steel the film with the most lucrative product placements of all time. At times it was a little bit too much.

Procter and Gamble give us free drama, James Bond attempts to make beer look sexy, and Superman dictates our razor selection. Our sponsored content diet is much more than branded BuzzFeed articles, and it is coming at us from every industry.

But however commonplace it’s become over the past few decades, it’s still possible to spend a ton of money getting it totally wrong.

Enter Google

After an watching a segment about Google on “60 Minutes,” actor Vince Vaughn zeroed in on “Googler” culture as the target for his next project. And he even got Google to cooperate with its production. This seemed like a good thing at the time.

Last month “The Internship,” Vaughn’s buddy comedy about the Google internship program, opened to roomtemperature reviews from movie critics and snippy criticism from the rest of the media. The movie has failed to make up its $58 million production budget at the box office and quickly scuttled into forgettable, bad summer movie oblivion. However, its real problem was the “Google rules” theme that ran through the entire film. It was cheesy at best and frustratingly irritating at worst.

Google’s involvement with The Internship was so tight that one of its Google Street View cars showed up to the film’s premiere. (Photo credit: Joe Seer / Shutterstock.com)

Although no monetary exchange took place, “The Internship” director Shawn Levy paid a high price for an insider look: Google got creative control over all product placement. Google even went as far removing a scene in which one of the company’s famous self-driving cars crashes. According to CNN, “Google says it didn’t mind the car being in the movie, but thought that scene wasn’t appropriate because “the product hadn’t launched yet.”

The Internship’s slanted portrayal of Google is completely mismatched with what you’d expect from a company that usually knows how to laugh at itself.

In an article titled “The Internship, a $60m PR blowjob for Google that thankfully flopped,” The Guardian asks “What demographic, exactly, wants to watch Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson buffing up the search giant’s image as a groovy place to work?” The Guardian calls attention to a great point: The self-congratulatory way that Google ensured its brand was treated in the movie meant that an otherwise passable comedy became truly bad.

Indeed, all of this would have been forgivable, dismissable as just another summer flop if Google’s integrity weren’t on the table. A mediocre movie is one thing, a tarnished brand image is another. Google’s insistence on creative control was overbearing and off-putting, and audiences could easily tell.

Being so image-conscious in an otherwise comedic context is particularly incongruous with Google’s typically charming and self-effacing  style. Who can forget the company’s gaggle of April Fool’s jokes this year — including one that poked fun at the company’s occasional bad press for shutting down little-used but beloved products by claiming it was going to shut down YouTube — or the Google Doodles that delight the internet every holiday (and every random you-didn’t-know-it-was-a-holiday)? The Internship’s slanted portrayal of Google is completely mismatched with what you’d expect from a company that usually knows how to laugh at itself.

The more brands venture into new kinds of product placement, or collaborative branded content, the more important it is that they are genuine and not overly self-indulgent in their content production. Google’s mistake has, at very least, cost them credibility points and should serve as a lesson to other brands: Audiences see enough TV commercials to know one when they see one, and turning a movie into a commercial can ruin it. Make it quality, or don’t make it at all.

The post Google Has Taught Us What A Product Placement Disaster Looks Like appeared first on Contently.

“It’s no surprise, as there are signs that many of the mobile giants, including Google and Apple, have saturated the Western world,” Veremis says. “Instead, the next one billion users for these companies could very well come from emerging markets, where smartphone use is in its nascent stage and a heavy reliance on feature phone devices still exist.”

Looking at the way that mobile marketers like Veremis have been addressing emerging markets can reveal some lessons for the marketing world at large. Here are a few.

Growth in technology opens doors for brand marketers

A recent McKinsey report from Richard Dobbs, Jaana Remes, and Fabian Schaer points out that urbanization is “shifting the world’s economic balance towards the east and south at unprecedented speed and scale.”

By 2025, there will be a “four-billion-strong” global consumer class — a population that has quadrupled in size since 1990.  To ride this growth wave, brands need to look beyond the low hanging fruit of immediate sales opportunities and focus on courting emerging markets in an engaging, personally relevant, and substantive way.

In emerging markets, consumers may be in the beginning stages of forming their opinions on products and services that are now commonplace in the western world.

Veremis explains, “Emerging market users are very different than those in the West; their desire to use smartphones is driven by more basic services.” Yet availability is growing fast, and consumers in emerging markets are more than sufficiently connected. They’re tapped in, and often know what to expect next based on what they’ve seen unfold in brands’ primary markets in terms of products and technologies.

Conversations guide brand relationships

Social networks are staples in emerging market cultures, where populations tend to live in close proximity to friends and family. These consumers are also reading local media outlets, watching local television, and listening to local radio. They rely on peer networks to decide where to shop, what products to buy, and what brands to trust.

“Word of mouth plays a more central role in the decision journeys of emerging-market consumers than for those in developed markets,” explains a McKinsey report by Yuval Atsmon, Jean-Frederic Kuentz, and Jeongmin Seong.

A core strategy for marketers to build brand awareness is to personally join these conversations. Banner ads, flyers, and advertorials are half-hearted outreach attempts that are likely to miss the mark.

Atsmon, Kuenz, and Seong point out, “Spending heavily on advertising alone is not sufficient to ensure consideration.”

Customer engagement through open dialogue, social referrals, and storytelling is crucial.

Finding the right points of connection is key

Marketing to emerging markets is not as simple as running content through a translation tool. Marketers need to develop a unique and compelling value proposition for each group that they’re targeting.

“This can also involve localizing content with specific cultural references, whether these are references to places, current affairs, celebrities, TV shows, or culturally relevant jokes,” wrote Christian Arno for Search Engine Journal.

Dobbs, Remes, and Schaer, for instance, encourage marketers to evaluate emerging markets from a city-specific rather than a country-centric lens.

“Product adoption rates often are tied to local preferences that can vary across different cities within the same country,” they explain.

Emerging Markets Can Be Local, Too

Understanding emerging markets isn’t just the domain of companies working across international boarders. More locally-focused marketers can take a look for new customers in their own backyards.

Emerging markets for new brands, mobile technology, and digital media aren’t necessarily overseas. They could be right around the block in a neighboring retirement community. They’re war vets, homemakers, small business owners, rural dwellers, and consumers who just happen to be new to a brand or technology. Publicly available data sets including the Census Bureau’s American FactFinder database can help add perspective.

Emerging markets are brimming with growth potential and energy. Most marketers have heard this already. But fewer of them are anticipating the needs of these new potential customers before the customers start looking.

The post Emerging Market Lessons From The Mobile World appeared first on Contently.

But hashtags have leaped off the internet, too, and can be seen on billboards, TV commercials, and other advertisements for everything from the latest Bravo reality show to Nike sneakers. Instead of giving their ad campaigns taglines or slogans, brands are giving them hashtags.

It might seem paradoxical: Offline, a hashtag can’t be clicked or searched or replied to. So why not separate the words out, erase the pound sign, and keep it traditional? Because, without saying it directly, a hashtag confirms ‘Yes, we are on Twitter,’ and ‘You can get in touch with us online.’ It says ‘We’re creating a conversation.’ By now, we all know that’s a smart move.

Take #HelloBrooklyn. The Nets, the flagging NBA team that recently moved from New Jersey to Brooklyn, chose the two words as a unifying point of publicity to signify their new home at the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn. Billboards around Brooklyn displayed the new logo and hashtag, and rapper Jay-Z — then a co-owner of the team — also got into the #HelloBrooklyn hashtag mania on his Life and Times site.

The Nets’ transition to Brooklyn marks a new era for the team, and in addition to the logo upgrade, their use of a hashtag reflects an understanding of their current environment. Search #HelloBrooklyn on Twitter, and you won’t find many Nets-pertinent tweets (instead, find out who’s recently moved to Park Slope!), but the hashtag, used in physical spaces, still reminds fans of the team’s new home as well as the space they occupy online.

GE’s recent TV commercials have included the hashtag #brilliantmachines in the final frame. Whether they’re talking about wind turbines or connected hospitals, the hashtag is inclusive of their entire product range, as well as unique enough so that a search on Twitter won’t reveal that thousands of Justin Bieber fans are also using the same hashtag for an unrelated reason. Using #brilliantmachines  in their TV spots also reflects awareness of second-screen trends, since (as of 2012) between 75% and 85% of TV viewers use other devices while watching. If they see a hashtag on TV, it’s likely that the smartphone or tablet on which they can look it up and search it is right next to them.

But a hashtag is a volatile beast, easily commandeered by its users. Meant to encourage tales of heartfelt community, McDonald’s #McDStories turned into horror stories about fast food nightmares. “Within an hour, we saw that it wasn’t going as planned,” McDonald’s social media director Rick Wion told PaidContent. Similarly, Starbucks’ #spreadthecheer turned into a sarcastic slogan for ’bucks haters.

The bigger problem for brands, however, may not be the likelihood of the “hashtag fail” but the fact that outside of branded efforts, social media users are getting a little too liberal with hashtags. We all know the one person in an Instagram feed who, under a Sunday morning selfie, writes, #dress #church #yay #love #laugh and of course, the ubiquitous, ridiculous “#me.” When employed with abandon, hashtags lose their meaning. As Lou Dubois wrote for NBC News, “For certain things in life, hashtags make sense. TV shows, including big live events and advertising campaigns, fit in that category. The rest of what you’re doing and talking about… forget it. #Lunch? No. #Friday? No. #GreenBeans? No, no, no.”

And that’s important to note: The overuse of hashtags by ordinary Twitter users may within time seem like layering too many scrunchies on a ponytail in the ’90s, forever becoming a gimmicky symbol of the early 2010s. They’re useful to social media power users, for sure — take a look at how they’re used to filter Twitter into topical chat channels for scheduled conversations among professionals and enthusiasts of everything from nonprofits to wine — but that may not last in mainstream pop culture. Brands that engage in the same hashtag overkill may look decidedly unhip at some point in the future.

But for now, at least, a hashtag’s unique value is that it is alive. It can be clicked, viewed, and updated in real time. A brand can keep a hashtag while still letting its messaging evolve with the times and the conversation.

Anything that supersedes it in brand marketing will have to do all this — and more.

The post So, How Long Will This #HashtagMarketingCraze Last? appeared first on Contently.

Erin Scottberg (@erins)

“Technology is creating so many interesting ways to surface data, explain information, distribute content and engage readers,” says Erin Scottberg (@erins), who’s been on both the writing and management sides of content marketing for companies like HowAboutWe, AOL and LearnVest.

She recently dug into data in an analysis for SimpleReach, which tracks analytics for content and how it spreads, finding that the top 10% of articles drive 90% of social referrals.

Increasingly, this most-engaging content is coming in newer, more creative formats, and often from brands in addition to traditional and new media outlets. Some examples of these include Hipmunk’s city guides and HowAboutWe’s “Modern Dating: A Field Guide,” a book that comes with a three month membership to the dating site.

Scottberg notes that each brand will vary on the goals it has for content, but at the end of the day, everyone from journalists to marketers is writing for an audience. Good content can serve brands and readers alike. The Content Strategist spoke with Scottberg to hear more about the opportunities in the space.

How did you first get introduced to creating content for brands?
Looking back, I think my first exposure to creating content for brands came before I even knew that this was that I was doing. My first staff editorial job at a publication that wasn’t tied to a print magazine was at AOL’s Lemondrop.com. Back then, we’d get a request from the sales team saying, “Brand XYZ wants to sponsor ABC category, we need ideas.” Then the editorial team would brainstorm story ideas to run in the campaign, which at the time meant buying the display ads in an editorial existing category. While this wasn’t brand journalism in the current sense, it was the first time I ran into the idea that brands liked associating themselves with certain ideas. It sounds quaint to discuss now, but that was my first exposure to the practice.

While this may sound unacceptable to the journalist purists out there (though let’s be honest, it’s a daily lifestyle destination blog about sex, fashion and beauty, not the New Yorker), it was really great exposure to content as business. Learning to think about web content as what sales can sell against, you’re really thinking about what’s going to get pageviews, which is what all editors, like it or not, are going after at the end of the day — at least while PVs are still our main monetization metric.

What businesses can benefit most from content marketing?
One thing I’ve learned is that content doesn’t just mean reporting and blogging. Content is everything. It’s how companies — startups and huge corporations alike — recruit employees. It’s how conference organizers find panelists. It helps morning show producers fill chatter and book guests. It’s how magazine writers find sources for their FOB stories. It’s how users decide whether to keep letting a brand in their inbox. It informs how beat reporters develop their next trend piece. And it doesn’t just mean blogs — a content strategy can include apps, books (like HowAboutWe’s “Modern Dating: A Field Guide”), emails, etc.

Content doesn’t just mean reporting and blogging. Content is everything. It’s how companies — startups and huge corporations alike — recruit employees. It’s how conference organizers find panelists. It helps morning show producers fill chatter and book guests.

For the first time in history, brands have the opportunity to communicate directly with their customers on their terms, which is a hugely powerful tool. Whether breaking their own news, aggregating content or creating a destination hub, brands have an unprecedented opportunity to own their message and shape their reputation. Why rent when you can buy?

Say someone with a journalistic background is looking into writing for brands — what can they expect? What is different?
I think this is a question for the specific editor as it really depends on how your brand views content. Is it promotional content to drive sales, or are they going a more traditional route in order to create value by providing a service? For example, the editors at LearnVest are some of the toughest (in a good way!) editors I’ve worked with, always pushing to dig deeper to make a piece more serviceable, or find a stronger angle that’ll resonate more specifically with their demographic rather than the general Internet. Everyone’s writing for an audience, brands and traditional outlets alike and it’s all about communicating with that audience. Traditional media outlets are often tied to traditional article formats: Q&As, straight-up articles, slideshows, etc.

But with many brands — particularly startups — there’s more flexibility with formatting and packaging. Check out Hipmunk’s city guides. When you break it down, each city page is essentially just a collection of smartly packaged articles: A map of the neighborhood, a listicle of area highlights, editorially selected “Best Ofs” and vetted reviews. It’s a classic service package, but presented in a way that provides a service to visitors and (hopefully) gets people to book through their site.

What’s something you’ve worked on that you’re most proud of?
This was a lot of fun: “How America’s Singles Date Offline: HowAboutWe.com Celebrates 1,000,000 Dates.”

The goal here was to create a remarkable piece of content that tells a shareable and newsworthy story, particularly to local audiences (after all, a successful experience on a dating site depends on critical mass in a local area), and showcases HowAboutWe’s authority on date spots across the US. We’d learned from previous efforts that people like learning about how their city dates — and being able to compare it to others was even better. By surfacing newsworthy nuggets of information, we were able to create a piece of content that got people sharing and the press talking.

I think one of the most exciting things about content right now is how we’re packaging stories. Technology is creating so many interesting ways to surface data, explain information, distribute content and engage readers. I like playing in this intersection of technology, data and story-telling.

Any writing or content pet peeves?
I’ve come across a lot of journalists who like to lament that there are “no jobs out there.” That’s so not the case. Are our jobs changing? Absolutely. But this is a hugely exciting time to be in media. We’ve never had more tools to tell our stories at our disposal, nor have we had more ways to find them. It’s a journalist’s job to cut through the noise and present information — and there’s always a market for those skills.

The post What Journalists Can Learn From Content Marketers: Q&A With Erin Scottberg appeared first on Contently.

These words from one of the greatest innovators in American history reflect the simple fact that people are essentially incapable of telling you what they really want.

We base our decisions on past experience, familiarity, social concerns and other factors that combine to make us horribly irrational, and unable to think creatively.

Unfortunately, most research done by ad agency planners fails to address these limitations, and the results can provide the wrong information about a campaign or creative execution. Why do we conduct market research on juice commercials while sitting around a conference table in a halogen-lit room with two-way mirrors? Commercials are viewed at home, usually while you’re in the kitchen getting a snack, impatiently waiting for your programming to return. Plus, they’re played back-to-back with five other spots.

The same questions can be asked of car research that doesn’t occur while driving down the highway, or shampoo research that takes place miles from one’s shower. The problem with most research is that we often ask people to tell us things they simply can’t—our feeble human brains are actually unable to process things like, well, our future feelings.

Our biggest challenge as content marketers is to think about the environment in which people share information.

Or, as Dan Ariely’s description of irrational decision-making in The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves, explains: “We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe.”

For content marketers this is a particularly important lesson.

Content marketing allows for the organic spread of information, shedding “interruption-based” advertising and encouraging sharing in existing peer/professional groups. So our biggest challenge as content marketers is to think about the environment in which people share information, not whether they think the shade of purple you’ve used makes them feel melancholy. In other words: context.

Now, we’re not advocating stepping into the shower with your research subjects to ask them questions about their shampoo, so let’s get specific here.

Imagine you’re charged with using content marketing to encourage people to take better care of their teeth. Most people, when asked point-blank about their brushing habits, will lie about how frequently they brush. Our moms and dentists have conditioned us to think that the correct answer is two, but nobody’s perfect, and on average it’s probably more like 1.5.

The goal is … to engage in a conversation that builds context.

A research subject might reason with himself and decide that several times a week he forgets to brush, but that most of the time he brushes twice a day, and so the answer is two. If people can’t even give a straight answer about the discrete number of times they load up their brush with paste, imagine trying to ask them what would make them share information about good oral care. Oof. That’d go nowhere fast.

To get around our built-in irrationality, and the inaccuracy of our research subjects, it’d be more useful to understand the drivers that influence people to care about their teeth—vanity, peer pressure, gingivitis, preventative care. Once you know the emotional impetus, then you can get tactical. When do people brush? What makes them skip brushing? Do they look at their smart phones while brushing? What kinds of personal rewards do they set up for themselves when they follow a tooth brushing routine?

The goal is not to ask one-off questions, but to engage in a conversation that builds context, and from which you can make inferences about behavior. Once you’ve painted a complete picture of brushing behavior, motivations, strategies, and social implications, you can design content campaigns around this information.

Maybe it’s an iPhone app that uses gamification to make brushing fun, or a knowledge sharing effort that exposes facts about the preventative power of flossing. Whatever the execution is, if you’ve done research that provides context the result is much more likely to reflect how people actually think and behave, instead of how they act in a vacuum. With that in mind, research should be used to inform strategy rather than to falsely judge solutions. What this means for market research:

1. Research is best used to understand problems from a human perspective, shedding light on what stimuli they react to. It provides context, not answers.
2. Research is elemental to the upfront development process – as an input into strategy rather than a ‘judge’ of what ‘works.’
3. Research methodology should be creative. The best learning comes from ‘real’ situations in home ethnographies, friendship groups – rather than false environments of strangers meeting for the first time in front of a two-way mirror.
4. It is not the role of research to art direct or write executions. This results in communications that are acceptable to all and meaningful to none. If every respondent ‘likes’ an idea they have probably seen it before.

So the next time you’re tasked with a research problem, think about what life would be like if we were all on horseback right now.

Images courtesy of Emily Baron/flickr, David Fant/flickr

The post How Market Research Is Flawed – and Content Can Replace It appeared first on Contently.

Across the board, CMOs want to boost their content marketing budgets in 2013. It’s a top priority. But online media isn’t a free-for-alland the competition is stiff. Your target audiences are constantly bombarded with a lot of reading material. Your company needs to stand out.

Do Your Due Diligence
As the following infographic from Uberflip explains, you need to undergo the following simple steps before jumping into the content marketing craze:

1. Understand the tactics that best complement your line of business
2. Determine your success metrics

More than Just Writing
B2B content marketing is about bringing audiences knowledge, thought leadership, and industry best practices. Writing isn’t enough to accomplish that end goal.

You need a blended approach that incorporates social media to fuel distribution, a newsletter to encourage user retention, case studies to help make your business’ use cases more tangible, and in-person events to personalize audience connections. Videos, webinars, and executive-authored blogs can be key parts of a broad marketing strategy that is equal parts knowledge factory, traffic generator, and sales channel.

Look Beyond Yourself
Share the love. B2B buyers rely on social media networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook for information. Like your company, they’re looking for exposure. Share the love by regularly and publicly acknowledging and communicating with customers, prospects, and fellow brands that you love on your blog and through social media. 

Focus on Leads
Leads and sales are the lifeblood of your business (obviously) and should always be clear goals in your content marketing strategy. Content marketing engages customers, attracts prospects, drives sales for your business, builds thought leadership, and educates the market. This newly engaged audience can convert into prospects. As a content marketer, it’s your job to make it happen.

What’s Missing
This infographic needs some brand examples to help illustrate B2B companies that are doing it right. Check out the following B2B brands for great inspiration:

— Crazy Egg leverages its blog to generate free trial sign-ups for its website heatmapping software.
— Grasshopper positions its blog as a tool to share valuable insight with entrepreneurs.
— Unbounce’s blog is instrumental for building a community of conversion optimization experts.

The post Creating B2B Content that Actually Rocks [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on Contently.

Tablets Overtake Smartphones as the Big Shopping Device (AdWeek)
Mobile devices will facilitate a quarter of all online sales by 2017 —  and approximately three-fourths of these sales will come from tablets, according to a recent eMarketer report.

Consumer behavior is making a dramatic jump into new territory. Get ready for it.

How Your Content Strategy Thrives When Marketing and IT Work Together (Content Marketing Institute)
What happens when creative energy meets form and function? Brilliant new concepts, seamless execution, and boundless potential to scale.

Technology drives solutions, and as a marketer, it’s imperative that you collaborate with your development team.

Preparing the Next Generation of Chief Marketers (AdAge)
It’s an understatement to say that the CMO’s role is becoming increasingly complex.

At the focal point of every CMO’s success is the customer. To that end, effective CMOs will accomplish the following: drive top-line growth and brand strength, anticipate building the marketing competencies of the future, and navigate a transition into C-suite leadership.

Soo Meta, the Storify for Online Video Storytelling, Launches to the Public (PaidContent)
Multimedia worlds converge on this platform.

Soo Meta makes it easy to assemble photos, quotes, and videos together to create unique narratives. The core value proposition is audience engagement. An integration into smart TVs is even a possibility.

Image courtesy of JAlcaraz/shutterstock

The post Tablets Lead Mobile E-Commerce, Marketing Meets Tech, CMO Roles appeared first on Contently.

Why the Onion Is Awesome for Publishing Details of Its Twitter Hack (AllThingsD)
By now, you’ve probably heard that the Onion’s Twitter account was hijacked by a Syrian hacker group last week. What did they do about it? Leverage the attack as a public service opportunity.

In a detailed post, the website’s tech team released a thorough report on how the attack happened. In a world where most companies keep their vulnerabilities quiet, the Onion owned it in a way that helps the public at large. That’s awesome.

News Flash: Twitter doesn’t Have to Hire Journalists to Be a Powerful Media Competitor (PaidContent)
There’s no question that Twitter is a powerful media entity. The key value proposition? Communication and distribution — not journalism.

So what happens when Twitter posts a req for ‘head of news?’ Twitter says it’s not a media operation but has become a powerful counterpart in journalism. The argument of this article is that Twitter is a media partner but also a competitor.

What Happens Next in Media? 9 Predictions (AdAge)
Key highlights: Larry Page will rethink privacy settings, conspiracy theorists will launch countless websites and forums to try to fixate on Obama’s HuffPo use, and the next generation of Groupon will make its debut for “frictionless” shopping.

 Email and Social Media: Why Marketers Need Both (Social Media Examiner)
If you’re not coupling your social media and email marketing efforts, you may be missing out on customer acquisition.

It all comes down to retention. The key claim is that it’s easier to convert users via email than social. You need to move your most active social users to email. Here’s how.

The post The Onion Counters Hack, Twitter’s Media Power, 9 Predictions appeared first on Contently.

Numbers are double-edged swords — they’re just as powerful as they are confusing and potentially damaging. Position your stats as a power tool. It starts with storytelling.

“Just like you wouldn’t expect an author to write a book without a plot, or an entrepreneur to launch a new venture without a business plan, you can’t expect to march blindly into creating a report or article using data without knowing what you want to say,” wrote Myles Harrison for his blog, Everyday Analytics.

Here are the building blocks to guide your approach:

1. Audience Connection

Math is no different from sports — some people like it, and some people don’t. Some people are Olympians, and others would prefer to ‘just get by.’ Some think of a math as a hobby, and others are full-time statisticians. When writing about numbers, you need to prioritize your audience.

“Understanding exactly what information is important for your audience and presenting it in a way that is meaningful can greatly affect the understanding of the intended message,” explained Rachel Barron-Simpson in a presentation for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Numbers are subjective, and as a blogger, writer, or marketer, it’s up to you to forge that bond.

2. Humanization

Numbers are far from friendly to the human-eye. Especially when you get into  fractions and decimal points, you risk causing unnecessary confusion for your viewers and readers.

Why mention that something grew by 345% when you can say that your success rates ‘more than tripled’ instead? Choose your numbers wisely. Always seek to transcribe quantitative concepts into straightforward and handpicked words.

3.  Bias Illumination

Numbers aren’t science — they’re an art. Every data set comes with its own biases. That’s because a range of decisions and judgment calls influence quantitative analyses — your sampling design, statistical techniques, and observations are all a power of the human eye.

“Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design,” wrote Kate Crawford for the Harvard Business Review Blog. “We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations.”

If you try to find data without bias, you’ll be chasing your tail. As a writer, blogger, or marketer, what you should do instead is call out these short biases. Describe the analyst’s sample, and play devil’s advocate. Never accept numbers at face value.

4. Forethought

What’s key to storytelling through data is how you select your numbers. Your judgment plays an equally important role to the numbers themselves.

“One key role we play in the process is choosing which data to look at,” wrote Justin Fox for HBR.

Every number, percentage, decimal, data point, chart, or graph deserves a critical eye. Use your smarts and better judgment.

Images courtesy of dvanzuijlekom/flickr, Paul Lowry/flickr

The post The Building Blocks of Data-Driven Storytelling appeared first on Contently.

In Counting Actual People, Hyperlocals’ Smaller Traffic Numbers Can Be Big (StreetFight)
If you’re a content marketer, web publisher, or big brand, it’s invaluable that you look at your analytics in terms of people – not pageviews or numbers.

From an advertiser’s perspective, a niche publishing website can deliver significant ROI. Small communities attract focused and close-knit groups – a quality that makes interest based targetting more efficient. So what if you attract only a couple thousand unique visitors?

Agencies Ready for the ‘Year of Experimental’ (AdAge)
Marketing is about pushing boundaries – tradition is an element of the past. It’s time to experiment and innovate.

From new event-marketing arms to stunt campaigns and human installations, brands are taking customer engagement experiences to new frontiers.

Facebook is Growing Through Risky Business (Wired)
Facebook’s mobile revenue rose impressively last quarter, but at what hidden costs? Advertising is a key component of this model, and Facebook is leveraging opportunities to follow users more aggressively.

As with the majority of multimedia businesses, the advertising balance is one that’s tough to strike. Here’s one Wired writer’s take on the topic.

6 Tip for Keeping the Conversation Flowing at Tech Events (VentureBeat)
Networking is awesome. But how do you ‘break’ the awkward silence.

Be yourself, have a goal, search for common interests, and follow-up. It’s up to you to make the connections last because you never know who you’ll meet – a future business partner or mentor. Maybe even a new best friend.

The post Small Mighty Web Traffic, Experimental Ads, Facebook’s Risky Business appeared first on Contently.

The Changing Face of Content Authorship on the Web (Lance Haun)
Here’s a look into the power of distribution. It’s amazing how one Amazon review can instantly amass more pageviews than your blog, guest posts, and social media profiles combined.

It may lead you to get discourage and give up blogging altogether. Do yourself a favor and don’t. What you need is a centralized hub for your content and online identity. That’s  your blog.

Can Display Advertising Work for B2B Marketers? (VantageLocal)
Even if you’re marketing to businesses, the ability to build brand awareness is key. Display is an important part of this mix, but you need to get your strategy right.

It’s not as simple as throwing a banner on a webpage either. You need managed site placements, contextual targeting, and retargeting. Through ad exchanges, it’s possible to reach the niche audiences (that you absolutely need to find) at massive scale.

The Top Five SEO Mistakes (Search Engine Land)
SEO is far from a dead discipline — is it a part of your brand’s content strategy. Search engines are powerful referral tools.

Make sure that you include the right words on your page, ensure that your website is crawlable, and leverage webmaster resources. And what shouldn’t you do? Dwell on link-building and keyword-stuffing your content. Be natural, but be smart.

How to Avoid the Broke Brand Trap (Clarity)
‘Rough times’ does not even begin to explain the early days of starting a business. To kickstart your growth and marketing (at a low cost), your content strategy is key.

Image courtesy of futureshape/flickr

The post Changing Face of Authorship, Display for B2B, SEO Mistakes appeared first on Contently.

The online economy is competitive, and to stay robust, your company needs a solid marketing strategy. That means knowing how to reach customers and prospects across a variety of devices. On phones, computers, tablets, and whatever else the future holds.

Not sure that you have what it takes? Yes, you do. As a content marketer, you are — by definition — a creative thinker, confident, outgoing, a strong leader, and open to criticism.

As you maneuver through your career, you need to have a goal in mind. That’s why Pepperdine University has broken down exactly what you need to do to be a top marketer.

Why This Visual Rocks

This infographic is a highly constructive and action-oriented visual tool. It does a great job breaking down the market for marketing execs — highlighting what to expect payment-wise and where to live to secure highly coveted job opportunities.

You’ll know exactly what coursework you’ll need to thrive on the job. If you enjoy cross-functional topics that sit at the intersection between statistics, psychology, history, finance, business, advertising, and economics, then marketing might be the perfect job for you.

The infographic further breaks down marketing tactics that you’ll need to master before advancing to the C-suite  — in addition to the challenges that you’ll inevitably overcome. Common blind spots? Data, the economy, and the shifting realm of social media.

What’s Missing

Employment stats would add significant value to this infographic. How are marketers finding C-suite marketing jobs, and approximately how many are out there? How competitive are opportunities, and where at they? At large corporations? Agencies? Startups?

Why not share some quotes, stories, and advice from fellow C-suite rockstars too?As a marketer, do what you already do best. Be a storyteller.

The post What It Takes to Be a Top Marketing Executive [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on Contently.

In keeping with the spirit of its Real Beauty campaign, Dove commissioned a FBI-trained sketch artist to draw women based on how they see themselves; he then drew the same women again based on the description of others.

The big reveal takes place when the side-by-side sketches are shown to the subjects. Women are clearly their own harshest critics, hence the tagline, “you’re more beautiful than you think.”

The heart string-tugging video, created by Ogilvy & Mathers Brazil, has social and mainstream media buzzing. Here’s why brand content creators should be paying attention:

Dove is selling a consistent message

Dove’s Real Beauty Campaign began nearly a decade ago, and it’s been selling that powerful message over and over again in various ways, said Dan Hilbert, senior vice president of client engagement at TBA Global, a creative events marketing agency.

“There’s nothing more powerful than a brand really owning an emotional benefit.”

He worked on the original Dove Real Beauty campaign in his former role as director of integrated marketing for Unilever, Dove’s parent company. “If you can represent a powerful idea that is relevant to the consumer, you will win and always get the sales volume,” he said.

As such, he’s not surprised to see that Dove has capitalized on this idea once again. “There’s nothing more powerful than a brand really owning an emotional benefit,” he says. “Unilever’s support and consistency is amazing. That’s a unique concept in today’s world of changing brand leadership and marketing schizophrenia.”

Dove knows its consumers

While it may seem an easy formula – create something inspiring and align it with your brand – finding something that resonates so strongly and comes across as genuine is like capturing lightening in a bottle.

“It serves as evidence for truly understanding the perspectives and mentalities of consumers, as well as the benefit in taking a courageous stance to better peoples lives beyond the direct product or service,” said Chad Kaszer, communications strategist at experience design and innovation practice, Sub Rosa.

More important, Dove has latched on to an important facet of the female consumer in particular.

“Women often select brands that they ‘believe’ in,” said Nora Miller, co-founder of Anderson Miller PR. “Advertising a clear brand mission shows customers that the brand believes in its customers’ well-being, and builds trust.”

Dove is not simply selling a bar of soap, she notes — they are selling the notion of how to feel beautiful and comfortable in your own skin.

Dove is leveraging a well thought out media mix.

The campaign goes beyond the YouTube clip. It’s been shared on Facebook thousands of times, and users — including major women’s media brands — are tweeting about it or using the #wearebeautiful hashtag on Twitter. Not to mention all of those in-person conversations that can’t be captured online or quantified.

“Women are sharing, liking, commenting, writing blog posts, and response videos with their personal experience with the video’s message, and how they learned from the campaign,” Miller said. “They are watching it with their daughters, and even playing the video in class. It’s viral affect shows that it’s a win.”

Backlash happens, and that’s OK

As with any national conversation that people care about, there is bound to be criticism, such as this Tumblr post that’s generated a lot of attention for its critique of the ad, saying the campaign equates beauty with happiness and defines ideal beauty as thin, pale, blonde-haired and blue-eyed.

Even if Dove missed an opportunity to reach a multicultural audience, the majority of the engagement has been positive. “I think if you try to predict or anticipate criticism, you might never move forward with anything,” said Paul Donaher, president and COO of New York-based creative agency Laird + Partners. “That is not to say that sensitivity to certain issues isn’t important, but trying to avoid criticism is just an impossibility in today’s world.”

Either way, despite criticism, people are talking about it, said Miller. “The larger the discussion, the more people see it.”

What will Dove do next?

It’s now up to Dove to leverage all the buzz and brand goodwill that they’ve generated to drive sales of their products.

“As a result of this effort, I would expect that consumers would be more likely to listen to what Dove has to say next,” said Kaszer, ” to give the brand a few more seconds of their time, and to entertain what we in marketing all hope for. a real relationship between consumer and brand.”

The post How Dove’s Real Beauty Video Touched a Nerve and Went Viral [VIDEO] appeared first on Contently.

Ad of the Day: Dos Equis (AdWeek)
The most interesting man in the world is back to star in what might be one of the world’s most interesting ads.

He’s a handball player, hieroglyphic reader, and mobile media visionary. Every marketer can learn a valuable lesson from the masterminds at Dos Equis. Here are some insights you’ll love.

Don’t Think of It as a Newspaper — Think of It as a Platform for Talent (PaidContent)
There’s a common perspective that newspapers are standalone products. It might be time to shift from that vision, however.

Where online media is most strong is in its ability to connect readers with information — brands with audiences, writers with interested information-seekers, and artists with revenue. It may be time to reinvent media’s place in the world of commerce.

Twitter Will Introduce a Music Application (NYTimes)
If you haven’t yet heard, social media’s about to get musical. Twitter is launching a music feature that will leverage users’ music habits to recommend media to them.

It’s still unclear how the platform will look, but the core idea is straightforward — there’s an inevitable musical component to buzz.

3 Ways to Double Your Email Open Rates (Crazy Egg Blog)
E-mail is an invaluable part of your content marketing equation.

The key first step? Getting people to read your message. Your email open rate is a crucial metric that you can’t afford to ignore. Here are three marketing strategies to help you reach your users.

The post Interesting Man’s Comeback, Media’s New Role, Musical Tweets appeared first on Contently.