The foundation of the $80 billion SEO market is cracking and something new is being born: LLM Optimization (LLMO). And the companies that understand this shift first will own a massive competitive advantage.

The Search Paradigm Has Already Changed

I’ve been watching this transformation accelerate over the past year, and the data is undeniable. Users aren’t clicking through search results anymore, they’re getting complete answers directly from AI.

Think about your own behavior. When was the last time you scrolled through multiple Google results for a simple question? Increasingly, we’re all turning to ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity and getting comprehensive answers in seconds.

The numbers tell the story: LLM search queries are now averaging 23 words instead of 4. Search sessions last 6 minutes instead of seconds. Users are having conversations with AI, not just typing keywords.

This is a fundamental rewiring of how information discovery works.

From Rankings to References

Traditional SEO was built on a simple premise: rank higher on the results page. But in an AI-first world, visibility means something entirely different. Success is no longer about where you appear, it’s about whether AI references you at all.

We’re moving from click-through rates to reference rates. The question isn’t “did they visit your page?” It’s “did the AI cite your content when answering the user’s question?”

I’ve been testing this personally. When I ask ChatGPT for marketing advice, which brands get mentioned? When I query Claude about content strategy, whose insights surface? The patterns are revealing and they have almost nothing to do with traditional SEO rankings.

The Platform Fragmentation Challenge

Here’s what makes this shift even more complex: search is fragmenting across platforms. Apple just announced that AI-native search engines like Perplexity and Claude will be built into Safari. Google’s distribution chokehold is breaking.

Users are searching on Instagram, asking Siri complex questions, querying AI assistants embedded in their work tools. Each platform has different models, different training data, different ways of surfacing information.

This fragmentation creates both challenge and opportunity. The old playbook of optimizing for one search engine is obsolete. But it also means early movers can establish presence across multiple AI platforms before the competition catches up.

Three Critical Shifts for Marketing Leaders

Structure Trumps Keywords

AI doesn’t care about keyword density or exact match phrases. It prioritizes content that’s well-organized, easy to parse, and dense with meaning.

The inverted pyramid style – leading with the answer, then supporting details – is becoming critical. I’ve seen our clients increase AI citations by 22x simply by restructuring existing content to be more AI-digestible.

Authority Signals Are Evolving

Traditional backlinks still matter, but AI is looking for different credibility signals. It favors content that cites reputable sources, includes author credentials, and demonstrates expertise through depth rather than keywords.

The old game of link building is being replaced by knowledge building. AI can detect thin, manipulative content instantly. Only genuinely valuable, well-researched content gets referenced.

Distribution Channels Multiplied

SEO focused on one channel: Google. LLMO requires presence across dozens of AI platforms, each with its own preferences and algorithms.

The brands winning are creating better content and ensuring that content is discoverable across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the dozens of other AI interfaces emerging monthly.

We produced a detailed LLMO playbook that anyone can follow to improve their LLM brand visibility.

The Window Is Closing

Every day you delay adapting to this shift, competitors could be claiming your space in the AI layer. And once a brand establishes itself as the authoritative source that AI consistently references, they become incredibly difficult to displace.

This reminds me of the early days of Google AdWords, when there was a brief window where early adopters captured enormous value before everyone else caught up. We’re in that window now with LLMO.

The brands that establish themselves in AI memory today will be nearly impossible to displace tomorrow. Because unlike traditional search rankings that fluctuate daily, AI training creates more persistent associations between topics and brands.

You Need the Complete Loop

Most companies are approaching this backwards. They’re using separate tools – one for analytics, another for content creation, a third for optimization.

But winning requires owning the complete loop.

See the gaps. You need to know how AI currently references your brand. When someone asks ChatGPT about your industry, do you get mentioned? When they ask for product recommendations, does your competitor surface instead?

Most brands are flying blind here.

Fill the gaps. Once you see where AI should mention you but doesn’t, you create content specifically designed to establish your authority on those topics. Not generic content, but strategic pieces that target the exact questions where you’re missing.

Measure and iterate. AI changes constantly. New models, updated training data, evolving algorithms. You need continuous measurement to stay ahead.

At Contently, we’ve built exactly this. Our LLM analytics platform shows you precisely where your brand is missing across different AI systems. Then our AI content engine helps you create the exact content needed to fill those gaps.

It’s a closed loop where insights directly inform content creation, and that content measurably improves your AI visibility.

One client increased their AI citations by 22x this way. Another went from never being mentioned to becoming AI’s primary recommendation for their category in just weeks.

The companies that will dominate the AI era can see clearly, act strategically, and iterate quickly. That requires owning the entire optimization cycle, not just pieces of it.

The post The End of SEO as We Know It appeared first on Contently.

Granted, the writers and content topics aren’t the only culprits; SERPs deserve some blame. Constant search index changes make it tough to keep content optimized and leave a lot to speculation… leading us back to content like how-to advice.

We’ve extensively researched marketing’s “advice problem” and have discovered the sweet spot. Let’s talk about practical advice.

Measuring Content Success

Based on our research, there are four main stages to content success, which we’ve called the content maturity model:

1. Crawl: Here, marketers start to build their content strategy. The focus is primarily on building and engaging their target audience and creating an SEO strategy.

2. Walk: Brands get more strategic, lean into lead generation and engagement, and carve out their share of voice in the market.

3. Run: Brands fine-tune their content’s SEO value, attribute success to lead values, and use single-touch attribution. Most brands are in this stage today.

4. Fly: The ideal stage. It’s all about multi-touch attribution and knowing each piece of content makes the most impact at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

While multi-touch attribution is the correct end goal to strive for, it’s not something you need to rush into if you’re still developing a content strategy and setting up the correct internal processes.

6 Metrics You Should Use to Prove Content Success

Contently research reveals that most companies are in the Walk or Run stages. The first three metrics we’ll discuss focus on the Walk stage, and the last three focus on the Run stage.

1. Leads Generated

What is the difference between content leads and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)?

• Content leads are prospects who interact with your content and complete an action like newsletter sign-up or content download. These actions help build your email and nurture lists. Content leads can inform your content strategy. They show you what topics your audience is interested in. Of course, just because someone signs up or downloads content doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy.
• MQLs are ready to talk to sales (in theory). These prospects fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and express interest in purchasing or requesting a demo or trial. These leads are further qualified to continue on the buyer’s journey with your sales team.

Prospects will give you their contact information—becoming content leads—if you have exclusive content or a unique point of view to share. If your landing page effectively communicates the value proposition, like this example from Teamwork, you’ll encourage the prospect to fill out the form. The value has to be there. It’s an exchange of your content for their contact information.

You must nurture content leads and MQLs with relevant, timely content. This will, in turn, build your SEO strength.

2. Lead Engagement

Lead engagement measures the contact’s quality and interest in your brand. Once you have engaged qualified leads (MQLs) in your pipeline, you can start lead scoring.

There are many ways to score leads, but let’s focus on the top two. Lead demographic scoring and behavioral lead scoring are two of the most common ways marketers can gauge the value of a lead. Use your ICP to score lead demographics to confirm whether these prospects qualify for sales. This could mean job title, company revenue, industry, etc.

Behavioral lead scoring focuses on prospects’ actions with your brand. These actions include content downloads, pages visited, and email click-through-rate. You’ll want to partner with your sales team to determine further what qualities they look for to qualify leads.

Ensure your content is timely, helpful, and relevant to gain better lead engagement. Wistia is an example of a company that does this well. Their content is clean, helpful, and educational.

Whether it’s the content itself, your unique point of view, or exclusive research, your job is to delight and educate your audience. Also, keep in mind content gaps or whitespace—good SEO tools like Semrush can help you here. What is no one else talking about in your industry that you can take a unique position on?

Consider how to break up your big content pieces to create other assets and scale your content program. For example, can a whitepaper be turned into an email course, infographics, LinkedIn carousel ads, etc.?

3. Share of Voice

This metric refers to how well your content dominates the conversation and boosts your brand compared to competitors. There are three main types:

• Share of search is the amount of search traffic your content receives relative to competitors (i.e., for the term “small business advice”).
• Share of branded search refers to the amount of search traffic for keywords with your company name relative to traffic for competitor names (i.e., searches for Bank A vs. Bank B).
• Share of social is the number of shares your content receives on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc., relative to competitors.

You can calculate your Share of Voice (SOV) with tools like BuzzSumo and Semrush to measure how effective your content is in the marketplace.

4. SEO Value

This is the value of your organic content traffic versus purchasing traffic through ads. SEO value is a metric we’ve pioneered at Contently as part of our performance dashboard. It calculates what a piece of content is worth to a brand based on search traffic and the unique cost-per-click (CPC).

This helps brands determine how much they have to spend to replicate the keyword rankings and visits with paid search ads. According to our proprietary internal data, 67 percent of our customers’ traffic came from organic searches over the past year. But only a small number of our customers had invested in tracking the SEO value of their content.

Forrester Research tells us that executive buyers look at an average of 17 pieces of content before signing a contract. Generating quality content that provides value over time provides a steady stream of qualified visitors without forcing brands to spend money on paid ads.

5. Lead Value

Lead value is a straightforward approach to calculating the impact of your lead generation efforts. It’s the multiplication of the number of leads your content generates and your traditional cost-per-lead (CPL). You should aim to decrease the cost per lead over time while still generating high-quality, sales-ready leads.

Example: 22,000 leads multiplied by $71 CPL equals $1.56M in lead value ROI.

If you successfully track which “opportunities” are generated by content, the same calculation can apply if you know your company’s average cost-per-opportunity. So, multiply the average cost per opportunity by the number of opportunities tied to content. Historically, Contently creates these opportunities with our original research and industry playbooks.

6. Lead Attribution

Single-touch attribution is an attribution model that gives 100 percent of the credit for a sale to a single marketing effort. This metric usually takes either the first touch—what initially drove someone into your funnel—or the last touch—what they last interacted with before making a purchase.

We know buyers’ journeys are not linear, so there is a large margin of error here. However, single-touch attribution is still one of the most popular ways to measure content success at companies that do not have a lead scoring process in place.

Single-touch is an excellent first step for marketers who want to tie content to revenue. When starting a single-touch model, pay close attention to trends—they can inform future initiatives.

On the other hand, multi-touch attribution is the white whale of content measurement. This “white whale” requires you to have your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Content Marketing Platform (CMP) integrated so that the data tracks accurately and you know where prospects consume content throughout the buyer’s journey.

This requires a lot of collaboration with your marketing operations, revenue, and sales teams. Make sure you agree on how to value each touchpoint along the buyer’s journey. Lead scoring can be complex, but once you prove to your organization how content impacts the flow of leads through the funnel, you can start attributing more revenue back to individual pieces of content.

Content Metrics That Matter

There’s a lot to consider when generating leads and setting up your internal processes. How you define a lead, and the strategies and tactics you create to generate leads are vital to proving the value of your hard work.

Contently can help you master your content marketing analytics. Hear from the experts: watch the on-demand webinar, “Prove Content Success: 6 Metrics That Matter.“

The post 6 Metrics That Prove Content Marketing Success appeared first on Contently.

Doing so brings two fundamental benefits.

First, marketing data analytics helps content marketers communicate the benefits of content to non-marketing peers.

Marketers can get buy-in and build stronger relationships with business stakeholders by linking content assets to concrete business results like marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

Second, marketing analytics also equip content marketing leaders to make data-informed decisions about where to invest money and talent resources.

Marketers can de-emphasize poorly performing platforms and formats and invest more in higher-performing alternatives. That can increase the ROI from content marketing.

In fact, more than a third of marketers named analytics as the emerging technology likely to impact their strategy. Whether you’re just getting started measuring the impact of content or looking to refine your current program, follow these four steps to define your strategy for marketing analytics.

Step 1: Decide what you want to know from marketing data analytics.

More is not necessarily better when it comes to analytics, despite the availability of free or low-cost marketing analytics tools. After all, every metric you decide to track requires investment from the marketing team to make it useful. You need to track it over time, clean the data, de-duplicate it, and validate that it complies with your organization’s governance policies. And if you want to present it to anyone, you’ll need to visualize the data to make it consumable.

To avoid wasting resources tracking marketing analytics you ultimately don’t use, start by asking what you need to know. Pay attention to the questions you ask while planning your content strategy or quarterly calendar. Examples include: What content formats produce the highest volume of engagement? Which ones produce the deepest engagement (meaning, they drive conversions)? What content surprises do you see in terms of over- or under-performance?

Step 2: Understand what your business partners want to know from marketing data analytics.

You can engage with your business partners to understand their questions and identify corresponding data and analytics that could help answer them. By deciding which marketing analytics will help, you both commit to assessing impact according to the same terms. You also improve collaboration and alignment to determine which metrics to track, retire, or add as circumstances change.

Step 3: Ensure balance in the marketing data analytics you track.

Defining “balance” is up to you. Some organizations may want insights across the buyer journey. For example, striking a balance between “attention” or “attraction” metrics like site visits, banner clicks, and email opens and “engagement” metrics such as repeat visitors, social shares, or weekly newsletter sign-ups.

Other organizations may instead categorize metrics according to the business performance standard of leading indicators, lagging indicators, and operational indicators. Leading indicators predict specific actions, lagging indicators tell you what happened in the past, and operational indicators tell you about the effectiveness of your marketing processes. All three may align better with what business stakeholders expect to see.

Step 4: Leave room for soft metrics.

The evolving world of marketing data analytics can bring immense benefits. But that doesn’t mean marketers can or should abandon all non-quantitative approaches to assessing value. This applies to how marketers view the outcomes they can measure and how they communicate about aspects of marketing that remain inscrutable.

One example of the need for nuance in leveraging metrics relates to timelines. Some initiatives produce clear, short-term, and measurable benefits. A seasonal or event-related campaign is an example of that. Other initiatives, such as branding partnerships, are long-term by design to deliver value incrementally, often in ways that are difficult to quantify. The latter isn’t necessarily less helpful for its lack of transparency, but you need to evaluate it differently.

The core takeaway is that marketing analytics is critical in identifying high-value content topics and formats, measuring content’s impact on business results, and communicating that impact to others. But it is just one input you should use to define your content strategy, create a plan for executing it, and assess how well it served the business.

Stay informed! Subscribe to The Content Strategist for more insight on the latest news in digital transformation, content marketing strategy, and rising tech trends.

The post (Im)proving Content’s Impact Using Marketing Data Analytics appeared first on Contently.

But is complex always the right path? Single-touch attribution, where 100 percent of the conversion credit is given to one touch point in a buyer’s journey, can still have a place in modern marketing analytics.

Why Use Single-Touch Attribution?

Marketing teams that use single-touch attribution usually choose the first or the last touch point to qualify the lead as derived from marketing. So why use single-touch attribution in a 21st-century marketing context?

1. It’s easy to implement.

Marketers choose one interaction with a customer (often the first or the last) and credit the entire sale to that piece of content, regardless of how many touch points are created for the buyer’s journey.

This could be the social ad you ran on LinkedIn that first caught your customer’s attention which drove them to read a blog (first touch), or the webinar you offered that convinced the customer to purchase your service or product (last touch).

2. It’s easy to understand.

When tying ROI to the content, choosing one touch point is the simplest way to show how your content marketing efforts worked. It’s also the easiest to explain to leadership how you arrived at your conclusion (that webinar worked!) without needing a wall with yarn, pins, and a pad of stickies.

For example, a potential customer sees an ad for your product and signs up for a webinar. After attending the webinar, they purchase the product from the follow-up email. In first-touch attribution, the ad gets the credit for the sale. In last-touch attribution, the follow-up email receives all the glory.

3. Great for smaller companies.

Companies with simple marketing or sales systems (or no sales team at all), a shorter sales cycle, a smaller budget, or teams that only use one or two channels may find a single-touch model is a great option for them. There’s no need to over-complicate a process before it’s ready to become complex.

Challenges of Single-Touch Attribution

While single-touch attribution has a place in marketing analytics, it doesn’t come without challenges. The biggest: single-touch doesn’t capture the entire picture of how a customer moves through the buyer’s journey. Did they purchase your product based on that one ad they saw on TikTok, or did additional touch points (product reviews, blog posts, newsletters, etc.) influence their purchase? To truly understand how a customer went from interest to purchase, you need the complexity a multi- or omni-touch model provides.

The danger of putting all your analytics eggs in the single-touch basket is that the data will be skewed. Single-touch doesn’t look at anything else (touch point or channel) in the buyer’s journey, nor does it show which was the most effective. The buyer’s first encounter with a blog post may have set them down the path to purchase, but was it really the piece that moved them from consideration to purchase? Probably not, but it’s still an important part in the buyer’s journey. We can’t always assume the last touch point was what clinched the deal.

Use Single-Touch Attribution to Test Effectiveness

If you have a complex funnel with a longer buying cycle, it’s likely you use a multi- or omni-touch attribution model. However, single-touch attribution can still be used to test different channels or touch points within your marketing funnel for effectiveness or to answer specific questions you may have about your funnel.

For example, you may use social media, newsletters, blogs, and videos as top-of-funnel content. By taking a microscopic view of each channel, you can discover which ones drive the customer deeper into your sales funnel and can inform where you allocate more resources to drive more customers to a purchase.

Single-touch attribution can also provide insight into bottom-funnel content and how it influences customer decision-making. Do you have a higher conversion rate after reading a case study, or are webinars more effective? Do you see more sales after customers consider a side-by-side comparison with your competitor? Single-touch is also great for sales teams, as it can help determine which campaigns are instrumental to qualifying a sales lead.

Single-touch attribution doesn’t have to go the way of the 8-track just yet. It’s a great way to keep things simple when needed. If you’re already functioning in a matrix model, single-touch attribution can help you evaluate and fine-tune parts of your content marketing efforts.

Stay informed on the latest content trends, industry insights, and news. Subscribe to The Content Strategist to receive weekly updates.

The post Single-Touch Attribution: Mapping Marketing ROI Back to Content appeared first on Contently.

A few years ago, this expensive hobby motivated me to draft up a new year’s resolution to spend less money at restaurants. It went really well—all I had to do was drink enough espresso martinis with the meal to forget I even spent $150 in the first place.

I’m only kidding—don’t be like me and make vague new year’s resolutions because unsurprisingly, it’s about that time of year where nearly two-thirds of all resolutions have already been abandoned.

Both personal and professional resolutions have one thing in common: in order to stand a chance at success, they need to include measurable goals and a plan-of-action.

In the digital era, more and more companies are relying on data analytics software for their content analytics. With strategic content methodologies, intuitive engagement metrics, and a remarkable talent network, Contently helps these brands optimize their content to tell great stories and see quantifiable results that a lackluster new year’s resolution just can’t deliver.

If you’re looking to expand your content, you’re in the right place. Here is an inside look at five influential tech success stories from our flipbook of 47 Content Marketing Case Studies That’ll Inspire You to encourage your brand to make meaningful changes in the new year. 

1. How Dell Perspectives Grew Its Audience 200 Percent and Launched a Digiday Award Winning Content Site Through Bold Impact Storytelling

In order to reach the c-suite of tomorrow, Dell knew it had to target a younger audience with an emphasis on social impact stories. With Contently’s technology, editorial team, and freelance network, the tech giant was able to build a staff of writers of all races, ages, gender identities, and sexual orientations to tell great stories—and tell them right. Dell tackles racial bias in tech, challenges facing women in STEM and LGBTQ+ telehealth issues, and boasts noteworthy growth as a result of focusing on the topics their target audience was passionate about.

2. How Document Analytics Optimized the Length, Quality, and Cadence of Microsoft’s Downloadable Assets

Microsoft wanted to track the performance of their content beyond clicks and open rates to determine if reader engagement was dependent on where they encountered the content. Using Contently’s Document Analytics heat maps and page-by-page engagement metrics, Microsoft was able to narrow down where its audience focused their attention, understand how behavior differed across channels and thus optimize their demand-gen stream.

3. The Strategy That Increased Gild’s Audience by 574 Percent

Gild not only wanted to introduce a new recruitment technology into the market, but also change the way people thought about hiring software by establishing a unique brand voice and creating a scalable content program. Working closely with Contently’s brand editors and a thorough content methodology, Gild increased its investment in talent and distribution to generate a 995% rise in total attention time and a 14% spike in engagement.

4.How Contently Built a Customer-Centric Content Strategy for Xerox

In order to change audience perception during its rebrand, theveteran B2B services company needed to scale content production and drive traffic to its website. Xerox partnered with Contently to develop a customer-centric content strategy that utilized our workflow infrastructure to scale content and deliver everything from expert interviews to e-books, case studies, social content, and SlideShare presentations.

5. How HotPads Increased Blog Traffic By 4,000 Percent Through the Power of Original Content

HotPads needed to ramp up traffic and grow a loyal, engaged audience of locally targeted personas with more high-quality, original content. To appeal to hyper-local markets, the company utilized the Contently network to find qualified, vetted journalists all over the country to cover assignments. Our talent managers helped HotPads source storytellers who collectively published over 270 stories last year and increased website traffic by 4,000% in just 7 months.

The post 5 Tech Brand Case Studies That Will Inspire You appeared first on Contently.

Not necessarily.

Google Analytics defines bounce rate as the number of “single-page sessions divided by the number of total sessions.” In other words, it’s the percentage of all sessions on a site when a user leaves after viewing a singular page.

A bounce occurs in a handful of common situations: when a user clicks the back button, navigates to a new URL, or closes the browser. The only time a bounce does not occur is when a user clicks through to a second page on the domain.

So how does this knowledge impact marketers? When planning a paid distribution campaign, one of the first considerations I discuss with a client is the objective. Bounce rate can be an important indicator of success. But it doesn’t have to be. It ultimately depends how a brand wants to define success.

If the goal of the campaign is to move the users through the funnel and drive leads, a high bounce rate could be cause for concern. If the objective is to drive more top-of-funnel awareness and engagement, however, then a high bounce rate may not mean much.

Brand Awareness vs. Conversion

Take a thought leadership blog post. A visitor could come to the site, read the entire article, and leave. Even though this session would have a high finish rate, the session would have a bounce rate of 100 percent. That’s just what happens when you have a binary metric. You either bounce or you don’t.

To add meaning to brand awareness campaigns, Outbrain suggests modifying the bounce rate parameter in Google Analytics. By adding a little code to your site, you can ensure that a bounce only registers if a user spends a certain amount of time on that page (say, 15 seconds). This adjustment helps distinguish a true bounce, where a user immediately leaves a page within a few seconds, from an engaged session, in which a user eventually navigates away after giving you some attention.

Now, let’s say the goal of the campaign is to generate subscriptions for a weekly newsletter. A high bounce rate could indicate that users aren’t converting. In this scenario, that would be cause for concern. But even then, you can make some tweaks to get a more accurate reading on how bounce rate affects your brand.

Social channels and content discovery platforms typically offer users a chance to define the “conversion window,” which sets the number of days after the initial click you use to track your audience. If you extend the window, you may end up with a higher conversion rate while the bounce rate would stay the same.

Bounce rate can be an important indicator of success. But it doesn’t have to be.

All marketers want a user to read one article and immediately convert. But that rarely happens. More often than not, brands have to build trust with their audience and nurture them along. By mapping content and KPIs to each stage of the funnel, marketers can ultimately use content distribution strategically to compel the right actions from the right users at the right time.

Keeping this in mind, bounce rate takes on different levels of importance depending on the stage of the funnel. In the discovery phase, a high bounce rate is much more common as readers are exploring and retaining new information. As readers move toward the decision making phase, however, a high bounce rate begins to indicate that users are considering other options (and possibly selecting them.) At this stage of the funnel, you will need to adjust and optimize.

A few months ago, I was working on a brand distribution campaign for a finance client. This company had a very specific audience profile and wanted to pursue advanced targeting to hit traffic and engagement KPIs. At the start of the campaign, we saw a low clickthrough rate, which told me that we were reaching the audience too far along in the decision-making process. What alarmed the client, however, wasn’t the poor engagement metrics; it was the high bounce rate.

We agreed to open up the targeting to reach a wide audience. As expected, the engagement metrics skyrocketed. The campaign reached users at the beginning of the discovery phase. The bounce rate didn’t change at all.

By looking at the data, the client came to understand the relationship between content distribution and bounce rate. They were pleased that the adjustments had helped increase brand awareness. Now armed with the experience and expertise, there was one finally takeaway that should help them for years to come: They were able to discern when bounce rate really matters.

The post Does Bounce Rate Really Matter in Content Marketing? appeared first on Contently.

At a recent networking event, I was talking to a marketer who’d just gotten married. Given her profession, she wasn’t surprised when her momentous life occasion triggered an onslaught of promos and offers. What she hadn’t prepared for, though, was when brands expected that she’d soon be expecting.

About 10 weeks after the wedding, this woman started receiving coupons from a well-known baby-goods retailer. And she was mad about it—really mad. She wanted kids someday, sure, but she also wanted to enjoy the honeymoon phase of her marriage and continue developing her career. She definitely didn’t want this store up in her business.

It’s not hard to see how we arrived at this point. The brand probably mapped out its touchpoints and discovered through research that a good percentage of couples conceive soon after their weddings. What the data did not account for, however, was the emotions of couples who had no plans to conceive on the same day they smash cake in each other’s faces.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use the vast amounts of data at our disposal to make informed decisions. But if we don’t combine facts with people’s feelings, we’ll end up surrendering revenue. (Guess who won’t be going to that baby retailer for future baby shower gifts?)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about empathic marketing. Since this is the last column in my four-part series, it’s time to look at how we as marketers earn our keep. How do we use empathy to persuade people that our products can solve their pain? How do we take someone from consideration to conversion by being more considerate?

As the just-married marketer can attest, brands have to choose the right moment to make their pitch. Here’s how they can do that in the future.

Look for signs of readiness

Have you ever complained to a friend about something and gotten annoyed when they interrupted with a quick fix for your problem?

Psychologist and California State, Chico professor Dr. Joel Minden has described the impact of interruption as follows: “Not allowing someone to complete a statement conveys messages like, ‘I want you to stop talking’ or ‘What I have to say in this moment is more important than what you’re saying.'” Not only do you feel disrespected, but you’re still stuck mid-kvetch with your pain.

Marketers can be like that overeager friend. We have good intentions! We want to help! We have a solution! But we come in too soon, interrupting our buyer.

Marketers can be like that overeager friend. We have good intentions! We want to help! We have a solution!

So what’s the alternative? Taking the time to read verbal (“I just don’t know what to do”) and visual cues (calmer hands) until you find the perfect moment to pitch. In the book The Marketing Power of Emotion, Columbia University business professor John O’Shaughnessy notes that some researchers believe knowing your customers’ emotions can help you “identify an emotional script that goes from the triggering event to the thought to the feeling to the action.”

O’Shaughnessy argues that this approach is not foolproof, because situational factors also play into decision-making. But this book was written in 2002, well before we had the technology to track situational factors. Seems to me like there is a way to take into account both practical and emotional cues—like “customer visited website three times last week” and “customer was excited on a call with the sales rep”—to determine whether when someone becomes a qualified lead.

Even if you can’t achieve that kind of data harmony yet, you can always conduct research to find out what buyers were feeling in the weeks, days, and moments before they made a purchase or signed a contract. Salespeople, merchandising teams, and account managers can all use your research to improve their timing on promotions or demos.

In the future, technology may provide an additional assist that makes empathic marketing easier. Cutting edge “emotional detection” or “emotional recognition” software is beginning to provide facial (visual), semantic (words), and sonic (speech) sentiment assessments. That sector is poised to grow 40 percent annually and be a $36B market by 2021, according to MarketsandMarkets. Some companies are already using these programs to test ad campaigns, so it seems plausible that one day we’ll use them to test buyer readiness in real time.

Show, don’t sell

Marketers tend to overuse the word “should.” It’s such an easy linguistic trap. If we tell people what they should do, they’ll listen, right? (Anyone who has a child knows this is not true.)

Thanks to my past life as a journalist, I’m extra conscious of the word. Craig Matters, former managing editor at Money, banned staff from using it. He didn’t want our readers to feel like we were being condescending.

There are other reasons not to use the S word. As British life coach Hannah Braime writes, when we use the word, “we are not accepting reality.” We’re trying to spur customers to do something divorced from their current situation.

Braime suggests that her script is more effective when she focuses on the benefits—so instead of “I should go to the gym” make it “I feel really energetic and powerful when I go to the gym.”

In psych terms, this is called the framing effect. It comes out of a study by Nobel-prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman. (The study details are fascinating if you have some extra time.) The basic takeaway is that focusing on the benefits helps your argument more than highlighting the cost of not doing something.

Marketers can easily apply that thinking to our calls-to-action. Instead of focusing on the urgency to buy or sign up, test language that speaks to the benefits of what you’re offering. You can see a good example in the image above from project management platform Basecamp. I like that it speaks to both the suffering of the target customer (the inability to get stuff done) as well as how the product contributes to solving the problem.

Empower buyers to make decisions

In “The Art of Giving and Receiving Advice,” Harvard business professors David Garvin and Joshua Margolis make the case that as someone in an adviser position, you want to “think of yourself as a driving instructor. While you provide oversight and guidance, your ultimate goal is to empower the [advice] seeker to act independently.”

That same logic could be applied to marketing. Wouldn’t it be best if your customer arrived at a purchase decision instead of feeling forced into something? Buyers want agency to make their own decisions.

If we don’t combine facts with people’s feelings, we’ll end up surrendering revenue.

So how do you nudge the buyer into an independent decision that’s in your favor? If your business has a high-touch sales process, your bottom-of-funnel stage might include a meeting with the client where you ask how your product compared to other vendors. The salesperson could then share facts about product differentiation (“they have X, but we have Y”) rather than trying to be persuasive (“you’ll be better off with us because…”).

If you’re an e-commerce business that would have difficulty doing this face to face, you could include a chart on your purchase page that compares your product to the competition. (Here’s a great delineation of that strategy from Meagan French, CEO of demand-gen consultancy Lotus Growth.) You could also work this chart into lead generation and sales enablement collateral.

By paying closer attention to the buyer’s journey, you could empower visitors to tell you exactly what it would take to turn them into customers. When someone comes to your site and doesn’t convert, an exit modal might appear that says “We want to be better. Can you tell us why you didn’t make a purchase today?” Then you can send customer service reps or retargeting solutions in to close the deal.

Give something to get something

Not too long ago, a friend teased me after I confessed that I sat through a demo after going to an event the vendor hosted. I was a victim of the psychological concept of reciprocity, which is when we feel compelled to pay back a positive action someone has done for us. In his pivotal book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Dr. Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University, named reciprocity one of the six key principles of influence.

The rule of reciprocity can also be a useful addition to our empathic marketing toolbox. Whether we realize it or not, the process of buying something actually causes us suffering, even if it’s something we really want. Our brains are wired for loss aversion, which means the negative feelings we experience around a loss are greater than the positive feelings that accompany a gain. Every purchase includes a loss since the customer has to part with money.

One easy way to ease the loss aversion would be offering a freebie or freemium option before you present your solution. That could be a personalized report, an initial consult, a 60-day trial, even a dinner at a fancy restaurant. (Slightly concerned that I’m positioning myself for a plethora of dinner invitations.) Keep in mind that it has to be something your customer will perceive as having real value (I value meals at fancy restaurants) rather than useless swag like flash drives and beer koozies. The file-sharing platform WeTransfer is one of my favorite examples of this. By offering something for nothing, the company tells customers they’re worth the short-term loss of revenue that comes from a free option. The user then has time to get hooked on the product. And WeTransfer is setting up the chance for reciprocity. I’m writing about them, aren’t I?

Speaking of the rule of reciprocation… it’s your turn now.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve shared plenty of ideas on how to practice more empathic marketing—some I’ve tried, some I haven’t. I’m definitely not an all-knowing guru. But I am a concerned citizen of marketing who’s frightened of a future in which we talk to humans solely through our marketing stacks.

Thanks for joining me on this journey on empathic marketing. I’d love to practice what I’ve preached for a bit and listen to what you have to say about empathic marketing. Have you tried any of these tricks and found they worked (or not)? Do you have your own strategies that would be valuable for others to know? What are your favorite examples of brands with heart? And most important, what will you do in 2018 to be a more empathic marketer? I’m looking forward to hearing your stories—and strengthening my own empathy muscles along the way.

Margaret Magnarelli is the senior director of marketing and managing editor for content at Monster. This is the fourth and final column in her series on empathic marketing. You can the first, second, and third installments here.

The post Show, Don’t Sell: How to Use Empathic Marketing to Win More Business in 2018 appeared first on Contently.

Since we’re fortunate enough to work in the heart of one of the world’s best food cities, we wanted to take advantage of the incredible number of options for just about every cuisine imaginable. But New York’s respected culinary reputation is about more than just an abundance of choices. In theory, all of those choices could be average or subpar. What makes it worthwhile for our lunch crew is that when there are so many places to choose from, the change of finding a fantastic spot is that much greater.

At Contently, one of our key differentiators is giving clients access to our network of over 100,000 freelance creatives who come from different countries and professional backgrounds. Similar to grabbing lunch on Wednesday, the sheer number of options is only half of the appeal. The other half is building a process that can identify the right contributors for our clients.

Our talent team, which staffs our clients with contributors, used to spent most of the time manually sifting through thousands of portfolios of freelancers. Now, though, we’re using internal data collected over the last few years to improve our staffing processes so that brands can become better and more efficient publishers.

1. Getting new clients off on the right foot

In 2016, the Contently talent team paired 5,952 freelance contributors with our clients. This number looks great, but it’s also important for us to constantly track which freelancers are most active and productive.

To figure this out, we worked with our business intelligence team to pull data on the number of stories and pitches each contributor submitted. Then our developers integrated this data within TalentMatch—our internal search engine that uses an algorithm to categorize contributors based on which publications they’ve already written for and how many clips they have.

With more insight on our contributors, we can see who is ready to go and who still needs to prove themselves. Perhaps most importantly, we can provide new clients with active contributors who will deliver high-quality pitches right out of the gate.

Our long-term plan is to do this for all clients, no matter what. That’s why this data is so important. It always gives us a snapshot of contributor productivity across our network. If we only staff contributors who have written for us in the past, the talent pool won’t grow. As we bring in new clients with different needs, we’ll ideally be able to match them with new contributors who have proven to us they’re ready to take on more freelance work.

2. Introducing a contributor scoring system

In the past, there was not a way for Contently editors to rate contributors based on their first drafts or responsiveness, which led to some issues. Clients could rate contributors, but they could’ve been basing those ratings on drafts that were heavily edited. As a result, the talent team had no way of knowing if a freelancer getting a lot of work was truly worthy of their recommendations. Now, every editor has a customized rubric for grading contributors and tracking the quality of stories.

Today, editors evaluate drafts on five criteria: spelling and grammar, structure and organization, sourcing and fact-checking, responsiveness, and professionalism. With a library of quality data, we now have concrete information that guides us when figuring out who is most responsive for rush projects, strongest at fact-checking whitepapers, and most professional for phone calls.

3. Only staffing trained contributors

Staffing accounts has always been a balance. For our network to keep growing, we need to give new contributors an opportunity to work with clients, but we also understand that we can’t afford to put freelancers on accounts if they don’t understand our process. If they have strong portfolios, they’re given plenty of opportunities to complete our training courses. When a contributor doesn’t complete the training, we lose faith in their commitment and ability to impress our clients.

Thanks to our developers, we now have data on training that lives in the Contently platform. It’s also mandatory for every contributor to complete our training course before being added to an account. Gone are the days when a contributor isn’t familiar with how to pitch through the platform, how long they have to complete revisions, and what constitutes plagiarism.

4. Staying ahead of pitch requests

One of our newest product features is pitch requests, a tool that lets editors and decision-makers notify contributors if they’re looking to cover a specific topic.

We want to ensure that pitch requests are never met with silence. In response, we’ve set up alerts that tell us when pitch requests are set to expire with fewer than three responses. These notifications go to both the talent team and editors on the account so we can intervene before the publishing schedule gets delayed.

Intervention works like this:

1. The talent team makes sure the request provides sufficient information
2. We check existing pitches for potential matches
3. We search a database of previously declined pitches for any good ideas that fulfill the request
4. We package up our findings and send them to the publication’s editor
5. The pitch request has more responses, or the client knows how to tweak future requests to get more responses next time

When building a content program that needs to grow quickly, the stakes are high. Recruiting the wrong freelancers, taking the time to educate them, and spending extra time on revisions can greatly hinder the ability to publish quickly. Having access to contributors, or restaurants, is a start—but only valuable so long as there’s tools to pick the best.

On rare occasions, we make a bad decision on Wildcard Wednesday (the Uncooked Turkey Burger Fiasco of 2015). But when that happens, we know to avoid that place going forward and make up for it the next week with one of our favorite spots.

Now excuse me, but it’s time to grab chicken parm.

The post 4 Ways Contently Uses Analytics to Connect Brands With the Right Freelancers appeared first on Contently.

This month, I’m going to get my Tony Robbins on and talk about story inspiration. Because there are invisible forces motivating all of us. And that invisible force is the desire to keep our jobs.

Even though we reuse content, how do you keep coming up with new content ideas?

—Cass, St. Louis

For the sake of this answer, let’s assume you already have a solid content strategy in place. Your content maps to your company’s business goals, and you’ve figured out all the components of a good content plan.

But now the well is dry. And your audience is thirsty as hell.

Start by examining what’s worked for you in the past. Which stories resonated with your audience and which ones fell flat? An easy way to do this is to tag your stories by different attributes, like topic, format, and contributor. Then compare how many stories you created per attribute and how those stories performed. For example, here’s a snapshot of my Contently Analytics dashboard, which compares stories created by topic with how those stories did across a few different engagement metrics.

This data can help guide your decisions when you’re brainstorming ideas. In this instance, I’d conclude that we should be mixing in a little bit more “Fun” content, like this marketing buzzwords burn piece or this surprisingly popular headline quiz. This type of content takes relatively little effort, and our audience loves it. We should also focus on social media stories a bit more, and probably not publish quite as many stories on content strategy. These are adjustments I’ll make in September.

Another simple yet effective tip is to gauge how different stories about your topic of choice are popping off on other sites. I recommend BuzzSumo, an excellent competitive analysis tool. Here’s a search I did for the most-shared stories on “content marketing” over the last month.

This is just a starting point. Obviously, you don’t want to just copy your competitors’ ideas. You want to tell original stories that will make your audience react like they’re at a Beyoncé concert. This could be you on Twitter!

So how do you get inspired? Here are a few tactics we use every week.

Editorial meetings: On Mondays, my team meets for an hour. Everyone is obligated to pitch at least two story ideas. Then we discuss them. We poke holes or suggest new angles. There’s creative energy. There are stakes. The person with the best ideas wins a Groupon for a booze cruise; the person with the worst ideas has to wear a bear suit and ask our VP of finance to approve us expensing a booze cruise. (Note: This reward system is still pending HR approval.)

Tap other departments for story ideas: Even if you’re an edit team of one, there are still ways to brainstorm with your coworkers. I like to think of all the other departments in our company as possible sources. Our sales team, for instance, spends all day talking with marketers. They hear about their concerns and struggles when it comes to content, and they know what questions these folks want answered.

Every two weeks, we hold a meeting called Content Universe. Our edit team spends most of the time listening to what our sales team learns talking to brands. This process has helped us create some of our most popular pieces of content, like this in-depth guide to securing a content budget.

Slack (or some group chat): We spend all day in Slack sharing industry news and tossing around story ideas. It’s a great way to get inspired and maintain a reservoir you can tap for future content. Plus, as I wrote about here, this type of running conversation helps get the entire company involved and makes everyone smarter.

Freelance pitches: One of the biggest advantages of working with freelancers is that they bring fresh angles and perspectives that your internal team just wouldn’t have. (Check out this great guide to working with freelancers.)

(Finally, I sometimes just sit at home with a bottle of wine and text crazy ideas to Jordan, our senior editor, until he asks me to stop ruining his date night or admits that yes, what the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can teach us about content marketing is a great story idea.)

Hi, Jess, can you please give me advice on how to smile every time I go to a job interview? I may need a voice coach.

—April Ann, Daly City, CA

Even though Jess Black is our head of events, all of our daily and weekly newsletters go out from her email address. This means that “Ask a Content Guy” questions occasionally get directed at her.

Jess is one of the most smiley people I know (evidence)—probably because I bought an inflatable hot tub for her backyard this summer. So I thought I’d let her weigh in with a guest answer:

Hi April Ann,

In my experience, smile/voice coaches are like chiropractors and psychics: They have weird offices. Instead of a smile coach, maybe you’re not applying to funny enough jobs. Is Guy Fieri looking for an assistant? Probably.

Alternatively, you might want to consider occupations in which smiling is actually an occupational hazard—maybe the DMV, or a TGIF Fridays in Atlantic City?

Good luck!

Jess

How do you keep your drive while keeping the content flowing?

—Aaron, Sumter, SC

A lot of what I wrote above applies to this question, but it brings up another point: You have to be passionate about the topics you’re covering.

A company’s content should reflect the passions of the people who work there. GE’s stories reflect how much its employees geek out about science. When you read the Moz blog, you know that team really, really loves SEO. In storytelling, enthusiasm is infectious. If you really care, it shows. The opposite is true as well. If you have apathetic content, you’ll have apathetic readers.

If you can’t get excited about the content you’re creating, you’re either covering the wrong topic or hiring the wrong people.

If you have a question for next month’s column, please submit it here. You can also tweet me @JoeLazauskas or tag me with the question on Instagram in the comments section of this photo of President Obama looking very confused by a newspaper. My Instagram handle is @joelazer.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do You Keep Coming Up With New Story Ideas? appeared first on Contently.

Unfortunately for those folks, that magical god metric simply doesn’t exist.

No matter your goal, you need to understand your results on a number of levels. This is easier said than done, however, and because it’s so difficult, you begin to see a familiar, damaging pattern in the way that brands approach metrics.

Take the type of marketer who tends to focus only on editorial metrics, either because she hails from a media background or because she uses Google Analytics. The most forlorn of these folks will just look at pageviews—a metric that only really matters for publishers selling display ads—and social shares. More advanced marketers in this vein will also measure metrics like engaged time, average finish, and return visitors to get a richer sense of how people are interacting with their content. But they’ll stop there.

The other main type of marketer tends to focus on conversions, but not care too much about audience-building metrics. To them, conversion is king. All that really matters is how many people are getting driven into the funnel, and everything that comes before isn’t as important.

Both of these types of marketers are putting themselves at a disadvantage. If you truly want to succeed at content marketing, you need to look at conversion and audience metrics together.

Say your goal is lead generation. After all, you’re creating content because you want people to buy something from you, and for many—particularly digital, B2B businesses—it’s relatively easy to track how many people who come in contact with your content subsequently become customers. However, fixating on lead generation means you’re making the assumption that nothing important happens before someone becomes a lead.

You’ve probably heard the cliche that content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. There’s a lot of truth to it. Often, a prospect will be a reader for months, maybe even years, before expressing interest in becoming a client. But you’ve held their interest through great content, and now that the stars have aligned, they’re eager to work with you because of the strong relationship you’ve developed. That’s something you won’t see if you’re only tracking lead gen metrics.

In reality, strong audience metrics often correspond with strong lead gen metrics. That’s especially true for content marketing operations that are less than 18 months old because encouraging audience metrics are often an indication that a lead windfall is on the horizon. Getting people’s attention for the right reasons pays off.

On the flip side, if your goal is brand awareness, conversion metrics still matter. Even a cereal brand that does most of its sales in-store should be concerned with how many email newsletter signups or social follows come from its content, and which pieces of content are performing best. It’s another important data point when trying to determine which content performs best.

In 2016, smart content marketers will look at all of these metrics in concert. That’s our bet, at least. And that’s why we’ve been building our Analytics platform to show our clients how their content performs both in terms of audience and conversion metrics so they can demonstrate clear success and, more importantly, keep improving their content over time.

Marketers who embrace that holistic view of content measurement will be at an advantage, and when the debate starts raging between conversion and audience metrics at the next marketing conference… well, you can just rest easy at the happy hour bar.

Michael Enriquez is the product manager for analytics at Contently.

The post Conversion vs. Audience Metrics: The Secret to Successful Content Measurement appeared first on Contently.

Ladies@ launches

Elisa Cool (VP of Sales): Ladies@ is our initiative to promote female empowerment inside and outside Contently. We went out for cocktails one evening, and we were overheard by a couple of women who worked at a company down the street, and they reprimanded us because they said, “You know, you shouldn’t take this for granted that your company is great, because a lot of places still have a lot of issues.”

Jessica Black (Marketing Manager): One thing we really want to do is interview a lot of really smart women in the industry. I did events for Contently for years, and one problem that I ran into was having a serious lack of speakers who are women. I have panels full of white dudes. First of all, white dudes are boring, and second of all, it’s not a fair representation of who’s actually in leadership.

Elisa: We had our first event with three excellent speakers. We got lots of good feedback and we’re looking to do another one in October, and we plan on launching a blog around it under the Contently website very soon!

Rebecca Taskin (Operations Manager): It’s important that tech companies have ladies involved in their company as a whole and that they know how to speak up for themselves in a male-driven industry.

New offices in San Francisco and London

Brett Lofgren (Chief Revenue Officer): In twelve months, we’ve expanded into two Geos and roughly doubled the size of our customer base and revenue. We’ve done a really good job of expanding our services.

Corey Cummins (Director of Enterprise Sales): Europe is very, very big on face time. They want you to have a presence there. They want to know that you’re part of the community. It doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint to continue to travel to San Francisco and London every six weeks when we should probably have someone out there who can easily meet these people.

Evan Kendall (U.K. Sales Manager): I think we’ve already seen, in a fairly short time, how impactful Contently can be to the right businesses in the U.S., and being able to start supporting similar businesses overseas is an exciting opportunity.

Joe ‘Lazer’ Lazauskas (Editor-in-Chief): We sent Joe Lopardo, one of our top sales executives, to open the San Francisco office. We wanted to establish the right kind of culture out there, and I’m quite glad that Joe—or J-Lo, as we know him—is the one to do that. He’s ridiculously friendly and charming. From Jersey. Great tan. Passionate. Basically everything that makes Contently great. We even put out a West Coast edition of our print magazine, Contently Quarterly, to coincide with the launch.

Joe Lopardo (Sales Executive): It’s been really good. It’s been a really good, busy first month and a half. Everything’s going well. The office is really good. Getting and having a lot of in-person meetings and prospect meetings. San Francisco and Silicon Valley are sort of the place to be when it comes to technology.

West Coast Contently Summit

Shane Snow (CCO, Co-Founder): We’ve been doing an event every six months since the second year of the company, but this was the first one that wasn’t in New York.

Joe Lo: The summit was a huge success.

Brett: It definitely was a milestone for us as a company.

Claire-Voe Ocampo (Field Marketing and Events Manager): Our brand strategy is “P.S.F”: it means our brand is premium, smart, and friendly. Everything that we put into the event was P.S.F. I really wanted something that was casual and relaxing, but also had a premium vibe. That’s who we are.

Shane: You go [to a Contently event] and you get education, you get insights. You learn new things. That’s the way that we build relationships with people who either already are our customers, or might be, or are just starting in the industry. We try to put together programs that will be really useful and helpful to people, whether they’re our customers or not.

Lazer: Shane sent me a picture of everyone reading our West Coast mag between panels, and that seemed like a good sign—folks are hungry for our perspective.

Richard Sharp (Head of Product and Customer Marketing): My friend let me know that D’Angelo was playing in Oakland. It was the weekend before the West Coast Summit, so I came a few days early and went out to see the show at the Fox Theatre. No one quite puts out the sexy vibe like D’Angelo—not even Contently.

When are you coming to visit me? #california A video posted by Joe Lopardo (@joelopardo) on Jun 11, 2015 at 6:55pm PDT

Breaking revenue records in Q1 and Q2

Dan Kim (Director of Business Intelligence): We built out a plan based on hiring X many people and those people would be X productive. I think it was a combination of setting realistic, achievable, good goals based on an aggressive model and then executing on that plan, which worked out well for us.

Elisa: We exceeded a number of [revenue] goals, which is really exciting because hitting goals is a little bit like always trying to hit a moving target—the goal is always getting bigger and you’re always trying to match that with the number of people that you have, and the best practices. It’s a lot of science and it’s a little bit of art.

There were a lot of challenges in Q1 and Q2. Part of it is navigating a marketplace that is ever-changing because it’s growing up. That’s difficult and fun. It’s a fun puzzle.

Dustin Abanto (Inside Sales Manager): Q1, we had an amazing amount of opportunities come in. We broke the records. We brought in new folks to work different verticals so we could have, like, a grand master plan of going after the entire world.

The swapping desks experiment, and its attendant drama

Shane: We’re big enough now that some teams don’t really know what others are up to. New people don’t really know what someone who seems cool even does. So someone brought up the idea—I think it was Brett—that at some last job of his they did a desk swap where everyone shuffled desks every once in a while, every month or every quarter for a week, so that people could get to know new people. I thought it was a cool idea.

Winter [Lee, senior front-end developer] managed to not swap her desk somehow. I think she peeked at the things you draw out of a hat. She managed to make it so she didn’t have to trade with anyone.

Winter: I didn’t feel like I was going to talk to someone sitting next to me anyways. Most of the time I listen to music anyways. It didn’t seem like there was really a huge reason to move, especially for one week. It throws off my environment. If you want to talk to me, Slack me.

Sam Slaughter (VP of Content): A lot of the product team really didn’t want to do it because they don’t want to have to be subjected to the sales team. I love the sales team. They’re great people. I love sitting with the sales team. I guess my real issue, the only real issue I had, was that I didn’t want anybody to know how little work I do, so I had to work hard that week.

Shane: Most of the people I talked to loved it. They were like, “We have to change back already? That sucks.” We thought it’d make everyone way less productive and that wasn’t true. People made new friends and they found out about things that other people were working on.

Dave: I love it. Some people are haters. I don’t get a chance to meet or hang out with everyone in the company that often, so it’s always nice to especially get to sit with the guys and the girls and see what they are up to during the day.

Jessica: I got to sit at Sanjay [Ginde, VP of engineering]’s awesome desk, which is like a small palace. It’s kind of like flying a plane using his computer. I got to sit there and feel like a princess for the week.

Rebecca: So many millennials in this office. No one is ever going to be happy.

The Williamsburg rooftop BBQ

Ali Kriegsman (Sales Executive): Somehow, Contently’s really mastered the friendly-but-professional atmosphere.

Sanjay Ginde (VP of Engineering): Ate burgers and drank beer. It was like any other Contently event.

Dan: I had a great time. It was a beautiful day. There were dogs running around on the roof. Ann [Fabens-Lassen, communications manager] was kind of enough to provide an awesome venue for all of us to get a little bit silly, and I think it’s lucky that nobody got heat exhaustion. It gets a little fuzzier towards the end, but I’m no longer twenty-five and single, so I can’t speak to what happened after six p.m.

5th floor expansion

Sam: Sanjay evicted me from my seat where I had been sitting comfortably for a long time because he really felt like he needed more room to spread out all of his crap. That was really hurtful to me, and I thought that he maybe should have kept his crap to himself. … I was exiled.

Sanjay: I’m not responsible for it. Our team is growing, and that has always been our space, so we just kept moving and taking over more. We had two interns start this summer. We had a new developer start. They didn’t have desks, so we needed some desks.

Lazer: Sam brilliantly moved our team upstairs at the soonest possible moment. I feel like the opposite of the Office Space guy. I have a stapler and I can watch the squirrels.

Sam: I quite like the new floor. There’s actually sunlight and I don’t have to deal with Sanjay’s pretentious taste in music anymore. Also, I don’t have to deal with Paul [Fredrich, VP of product]’s pretentious taste in everything.

Ann Fabens-Lassen (Communications Manager): I really like the fifth floor, especially because I sit with the content team. They’re dope.

New hires

Lazer: I was hired as the thirteenth employee less than twenty months ago. Now we’re like one hundred twenty people. That’s nuts.

Sanjay: When I started, it was a company of five people. There were three founders, and Sam and I started at the same time. There was also an intern. It’s crazy. You used to know everything that was going on in the business. Now it’s hard enough just trying to keep on top of things going on in the tech and product side.

Sam: I realized there was a point about a month or two ago where there were people whose name I didn’t know. At first, when we started, every new hire would be this huge, amazing deal, and it’d be like, “Oh my god, there’s a new person.” Now, we’re so big that we add people every week.

New dashboard, analytics, and distribution

Richard: We’ve done pretty big things, I think, on the technology side. Our Analytics dashboard was a really huge event for us, probably the most significant technology upgrade that we’ve had over the last year or so. We also launched Contently Research, which I think has been really well received.

Lazer: As our editor, I love Analytics. I would take our dashboard to an all-inclusive Caribbean resort. Actually, I have. My girlfriend always catches me checking our numbers while on vacation and emailing ideas back to the team. They tell me to go back to the beach.

Paul Fredrich (VP of Product): 2015 was an amazing (and intense) year on the product side. We doubled the size of the product team, and tripled the number of data scientists we have, since we think data is ultimately what’s going to set the best content marketers apart. We also launched our new API very early on, and saw a series of awesome integrations build on top of it launch throughout the year.

Ray Cheng (VP of Marketing): Most companies don’t develop analytics to a level of detail that Contently is aspiring to measure. Analytics are really powerful for marketers in a way that no other product out there can measure audience engagement by audience loyalty.

I’m excited about the next ten months because a lot more features and enhancements to the dashboard are on the way. We’re making recommendations to content marketers about what they should do next. That, to me, is really powerful because technology is supposed to help make your job easier.

Contently.org Wins the ASJA award

Sam: We started the foundation because we cared about investigative reporting and we didn’t see traditional media companies doing a good job with it. Early this year we got a call from the American Society of Journalists and Authors and they said, “Your story that you’ve written for Contently.org has won the Donald J. Robinson Memorial Award,” which is one of the most prestigious awards out there.

Shane: One of the things we said when we launched the nonprofit is that we one day want to win an award in journalism for it. And our very first story actually won an award for the best investigative story of the year!

Our goal is to bring stories that wouldn’t normally get funded by newspapers or would take too long or too much effort. The idea is to write a smaller number of stories where we can spend a lot of time and effort, bringing stuff that ideally causes people to think about the world differently, or want to make some change in their community, or send bad guys to jail.

Tales of debauchery from SXSW

https://instagram.com/p/0J55QNnsoA/
Jessica: We are the nerds that ruin the cool artsy festival, but we had an amazing time. There was a lot of debauchery.

Joe [Lazer] does this thing every year where he, like, becomes a one-man distribution army, and he takes the Quarterlies and just puts them everywhere. He, like, blankets the city.

Lazer: I was the editor of my college paper, and I used to hand-deliver copies of the paper to every dorm room on campus. I kind of do the same thing at SXSW. People are bored waiting in line everywhere, and everyone’s cell phones are dying, so it’s the perfect captive audience.

Jessica: We did get in a dance battle with NewsCred, which was pretty amazing. There was a lot of dancing. Where there is Contently, there will be dancing. That’s how it goes.

The post ‘Where There’s Contently, There’ll Be Dancing’: An Oral History of 2015 appeared first on Contently.

But content marketing is still in its infancy, and marketers have a number of challenges to overcome. As we discovered earlier this year, measurement remains a hurdle; our content measurement survey from this summer found over 90 percent of marketers were not confident that their key content metrics were effective in measuring business results. For the year’s end, we wanted to broaden our scope and ask our audience of content marketers some important questions related to their triumphs, failures, and future goals: What types of content led to the most ROI? What resources were in short supply? What are some of the biggest challenges marketers face on a daily basis?

What follows is a crucial snapshot of the content marketing landscape as we get ready to transition into 2015.

METHODOLOGY

Between November 5 and November 17, we surveyed 601 marketers with an 18-question online survey.

As the survey was answered by nearly our entire population target, the calculated margin of error was approximately one percent.

KEY FINDINGS

In the next section we’ll unpack the noteworthy results in detail, but at first glance, a few striking data points stand out:

— Sixty-nine percent of marketers back original content over licensed content.

— Fifty-seven percent of all companies have two or more people dedicated to content marketing.

— While a slim majority of marketers are devoting 25 percent or less of their marketing budgets to content, 23 percent are now devoting over half their marketing budgets to content.

— Fifty percent of marketers are looking at return on investment (ROI) and lifetime customer value (LTV) as the most valuable goals to measure.

— Seventy-four percent of marketers believe that they could drive 2.5x more ROI, brand lift, or LTV if they had an expert content team, indicating a strong level of optimism heading into the new year.

RESULTS & ANALYSIS

Publishing quality content over time requires a healthy investment when you account for the talent and tools required. Here, we see there’s a huge range in the resources companies are committing to content marketing. While 52 percent of marketers are devoting 25 percent or less of their marketing budget to content, a significant group—23 percent—have shifted over half of their marketing budget to content.

Over the past few years, it’s been common to see content marketing treated as an experimental marketing practice, often put in the hands of a single employee juggling other responsibilities. While that’s still the case for 43 percent of respondents, it’s promising that more than half of all brands have at least two employees dedicated full-time to content marketing. Companies like Coca-Cola have succeeded with a balanced model that teams a few full-time employees with dozens of freelancer working remotely.

Given the small teams who are dedicated to content marketing, it’s not a big surprise that approximately two-thirds of respondents are creating fewer than five pieces of content per week. Finding the right balance of quality and quantity is one of the biggest challenges marketers face today, but it’s one that needs to be tackled if brands want to compete with traditional media companies for audience attention.

Considering most marketers only publish a few times per week, filling those slots with the right content becomes even more important. Interestingly, respondents didn’t overwhelmingly prefer or dismiss one medium over another—save for infographics. Longform, shortform, video, and social media posts were all deemed the most effective medium by between 16 and 23 percent of respondents.

Of note: Almost one-fifth of those surveyed picked “I don’t know.” Perhaps the popularity of that answer choice echoes the idea marketers are still searching for the best way to link their content to business results.

A marketer is only as good as his/her tools, and those tools include time, money, and analytics. Fittingly, our respondents identified budget (34 percent), the inability to measure business results (22 percent), and lack of time (11 percent) as their biggest challenges.

Ostensibly, these challenges are all connected. A larger budget can open access to the necessary analytic tools and resources, and the right analytics help content marketers devote their time and money to the most effective tactics.

When it comes to publishing original content versus licensing content from other publishers—also known as syndication—the results are clear: More than two-thirds of those surveyed favor original content. That answer shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. If readers can get your content elsewhere, what would make them come to you specifically?

As Cyrus Shepherd, director of content and SEO at Moz, told Contently co-founder Shane Snow: “Syndicated content is like giving popcorn to children. It will keep them busy for a while, but that’s it.”

Moz, a robust content creator in its own right and a leader in search engine optimization, doesn’t syndicate any content in either direction. “I think all the value is having something original,” Shepherd said.

Licensed content from other publishers rose in popularity in the early days of content marketing as a one-click solution to populating corporate blogs and as a hack for boosting search rankings. But its clear from these findings marketers see limited value in it.

What if marketers could create content under ideal conditions? The responses here show how optimistic marketers are about the maximum benefits of their content marketing operations. Notably, a majority of respondents seem to think they could increase ROI or brand lift by 2x–5x with the right team producing high-quality content.

Interestingly, even though a plurality of marketers selected ROI as their most important marketing goal, lifetime customer value and audience growth were very close behind. When it comes to content, measuring success can be a complex endeavor, with ROI, LTV, and audience growth all intersecting at various points.

However, the results suggest marketers are embracing a nuanced approach when figuring out how content can impact their bottom lines. Cultivating a loyal audience takes time, but the benefits are long-lasting. Once you have a relationship with your consumers, the ROI should follow.

CONCLUSION

Though many still treat content marketing as an experimental trend, brands are quickly learning that there’s a science to creating content—and spending their sacred budget.

Clearly, there’s plenty of room for growth. According to a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute, only 23 percent of B2C marketers are successful at tracking ROI. Everyone points to Red Bull, GE, and American Express as the all-stars of content marketing, but aspiring content marketers likely need some of the resources afforded to those best-in-class brands—a stable supply of time, money, and analytics that take the guesswork out of their jobs.

Ultimately, the fate of content marketing isn’t in the hands of the marketers pushing for creativity on a daily basis. In reality, it depends on a dedicated investment from the executive level. For example, American Express President Ed Gilligan fully supported Open Forum’s initiative to publish small business content, and Marriott International Chairman Bill Marriott, who doesn’t use computers, still saw the value of telling his company’s story directly to consumers and has invested heavily in content.

Thanks to an early commitment from the executive level, Red Bull now employs approximately 135 people just for their media house, and Nestlé’s digital editorial team consists of almost 20 community managers and designers producing content every day. And according to the Columbia Journalism Review, Coca-Cola “now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.”

In 2014, many brands tested the waters, and a few dove in headfirst. In 2015, we’ll see how many follow.

(Full disclosure: Coca-Cola, GE, and American Express are Contently clients.)

Charts created by Brian Meyers

The post The State of Content Marketing Heading Into 2015 appeared first on Contently.

Editors, marketers, and content strategists put so much time and effort in creating visual content, yet when it comes to using it, it’s often a one-and-done affair. They publish it, then let it languish.

Let’s take a look at some smart ways to repurpose images, posters, video or other visuals you already have and make them shine the second (and third, or even fourth) time around.

1. Use static visuals to create animated videos

Hootsuite created an infographic last year comparing social media networks to the competing houses (or families) from the popular HBO series Game of Thrones. In a clever twist ahead of this year’s season premiere, the Hootsuite team used the old visual as a springboard to assemble a new video riffing off the show’s opening theme song and graphics.

2. Liven up your next email campaign

Don’t assume that everyone on your mailing list visits your blog or follows you on Twitter: feel free to cross-pollinate! Let your visuals do double duty by featuring one or two in your next email blast, so they’re seen by as many people as possible.

With Google recently introducing a visual way to preview emails in the Promotions tab—the feature is still in beta—the advice below is more relevant than ever before.

• Don’t overdo it. How many images you choose to insert in your email will depend on your product or service. Retailers or restaurants can get away with image-laden email more than a business consultant whose services don’t rely on visual appeal.
• Watch your analytics. Check the bounce and click-through rates of emails that include visuals to see what impact they have on your overall campaign strategy. Be ready to change tactics if your customers don’t respond well.
• Make sure your visuals are mobile-friendly. Keep the overall layout of your emails simple. A single-column setup is better than two or more columns, for example, which may force mobile readers to scroll sideways.
• Plan for the invisible. Some email clients turn images off and the reader needs to take deliberate action to display them. Never assume that they will. Position the image in a place where it won’t look awkward if displayed as a blank white box and add a good HTML description so the recipient can read what the image is about

3. Use web and print content interchangeably

Producing visuals can be costly, so it’s always a good idea to try to repurpose existing content before absorbing the expense of creating something new. And who says web content can’t be used in print—and vice versa?

• Place static versions of your visual media where you’d normally run print ads. Short infographics make a nice change of pace from traditional ad copy.
• Make your press releases pop by including eye-catching infographics, charts, or diagrams to illustrate your message.
• Upload copies of your print ads to social media channels to encourage traffic to your website.
• Turn existing videos into animated GIFs using a free web-based service like Picasion.

4. Update existing visuals with current data

Sometimes, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel when simply inflating a tire will do. Rather than creating brand new visual content, you can either update an older visual with recent data, or use data you already have to whip up a new visual. For instance, a batch of slides depicting charts of holiday buying trends over the last few years can become a slick new video or interactive visualization.

The Huffington Post really ran with this idea during the recent NCAA Final Four tournament by creating an interactive, continually updated infographic for the event.

5. Build a blog post around an existing visual

One of the most obvious ways to recycle visual content is also the most often overlooked. Creating a blog post around an infographic, poster, or a video allows you to share a story with more depth than a single static image can offer.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Don’t simply repeat the data that’s already in the visual. Instead, expand or elaborate on why it’s important.
• Tell the story behind your visual. Publish a few initial sketches of the design or have the team who worked on it talk about interesting challenges encountered in the production process and how they were resolved. This can turn your visual into an evergreen learning tool that others can come back to long after it’s been published.
• Be sure to include social networking share buttons and a call to action. One study conducted in 2011 showed that total views increased by 94 percent if a published article contained a relevant photo or infographic.

Keep these tips in mind the next time you’re creating visual content. Think about ways you can reuse what you’re making some time down the line and give it a new lease on life with minimal fuss.

Featured image from Shutterstock

Lisa Hoover McGreevy is a seasoned professional writer specializing in corporate messaging, a data journalist on the Visually Marketplace, and a regular contributor to the Visually blog.

The post 5 Creative Ways to Recycle Your Visual Content appeared first on Contently.

Just over a year ago, Coca-Cola Company said good-bye to their corporate website. Never known for doing things halfway, the company made their debut in brand publishing with Journey, not merely a publishing arm, but the new front page of Coca-ColaCompany.com. Coke wasn’t just dipping into brand publishing; they were making publishing a part of their identity.

“It’s distinctly Coca-Cola’s voice that we’re channeling,” said Jay Moye, senior writer and editor for Journey. “We’re publishing in the optimistic tone that Coke is known for, as well as the quality. We believe that great writing wins the day.”

Visually, Journey is clearly a publication. Large, vibrant photos scroll across the top of the page, directing visitors to articles, videos and galleries featuring everything from a gastronomic tour of Mexico City to Maria Shriver’s thoughts on women in poverty. Of course, one can find corporate information tucked into the site’s outer edges, but the intent is clear.

“Leadership refuses to call it a corporate website anymore,” Moye said. “It’s a media platform.”

A History of storytelling

Perhaps Coca-Cola is well placed to lead the way toward brands blurring the lines between what they publish and who they are. The company’s history has been steeped in storytelling, from crafting the modern day Santa Claus to changing public image of NFL player “Mean” Joe Greene with one iconic commercial.

“People expect Coke to be a world class storyteller,” said Moye. “They see us as a beacon of optimism and happiness.”

Journey itself has a history within the company, originally published as a popular internal magazine for employees and stakeholders in the 1980s. When the brand publishing conversation arose in 2010, resurrecting Journey was a natural decision.

Getting the world — both internally and externally — to understand the convergence of their corporate website and new publishing platform was one of the early challenges for Journey.

“We’re still spreading the word about what Journey is,” Moye said. “Journey is a pretty first-of-its-kind thing, especially for a brand like Coke.”

Unwavering buy-in from senior leadership has proven to be invaluable in that process. When they flipped the switch on Journey in November 2012, the company’s willingness to go all-in played no small part in the site’s success.

Lessons in data-driven content

Today, Journey carries an interesting mix of Coke-focused content, food articles, cultural pieces, music, jobs stories and more. Ultimately, the recipe was written from a year of serious data analysis.

“Everything we publish on Journey is data-driven,” Moye said. “It’s how we create content our readers want to read.”

Journey attracts an average of 1.1 million visitors each month, and they help determine the direction of the publication. In some cases, that means pulling back on underperforming topics, such as sustainability. In others, the data pointed to content that was so successful, such as food and music pieces, that the Journey team created dedicated channels to highlight them.

A big data-driven surprise for Moye is how voraciously people consume Coke-focused content.

“We thought people would be looking more at the non-branded stuff,” he said. “We were surprised that pretty much everything we publish about our advertising or our history does incredibly well. We doubled down on Coke-focused content.”

Determining exactly how much content to publish was a challenge Moye wrestled with as well. Analytics have helped Journey match their publishing volume with readership demand. By publishing two to three new stories each day with a support staff of seven and a pool of freelancers, they seem to have hit their stride, featuring more than 1,200 pieces of content in the first year.

By keeping a close eye on metrics, Journey was ready for a reboot just one year into publishing. The front page highlights their high-performing channels — brands, videos, food, music, and the “Unbottled” blog — as well as gave the site an even glossier, magazine-like appearance with much more content than before.

“The first iteration of Journey looked great, but we saw the chance to feature more stories,” Moye said. “The design is going to be a work in progress. This isn’t the last look you’ll see.”

Step one of a global journey

The whole world, in fact, is due to see new versions of Journey in the near future. After an initial year of growth and development on the “global site” managed in the U.S., Journey has begun to launch international sites that focus on local content in more than 30 countries. Sites in Australia, Germany, Japan, Ukraine, Morocco, New Zealand and Russia are already live, with more countries to launch throughout 2014.

“We work with them to develop the same approach and tone,” Moye said, “and though we supply some of the markets with content, they’re mostly creating their own.”

While the original global site is technically the elder team in charge of teaching the newbies, Moye says they’ve already found themselves learning from the international teams’ strengths and the content they’re creating.

With about 30 international sites yet to launch, that makes for even more learning and growth opportunities to come. Add to that a continued close watch on analytics and Coke’s unique storytelling voice, and Journey’s second year as Coca-Cola Company’s public face should be worth watching.

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 businesses grow by telling stories that people love. Take advantage of our tools and talent and come build that world with us.

The post One Year Later, Is Coca-Cola Journey a Success? appeared first on Contently.

In the last year, Dollar Shave Club has progressed from a scrappy viral video to immensely popular business. Last fall, they raised a $9.8 million funding round, and earlier this year, they even launched – get this – a line of men’s butt wipes. And with this growth, they’ve decided to make an oddly traditional move: They’re running a less profane version of the video on ESPN, Spike TV, and Comedy Central, said Kate Kaye of AdAge earlier this week.

The ads have been running since January, and are Dollar Shave Club’s only non-digital ads aside from a series of radio spots.

Why Buy TV Media When YouTube is Free?

Dollar Shave Club’s viral video cost just $4,500, according to Entrepreneur magazine last year. That small investment effectively kickstarted their entire business and PR strategy.

So why the investment in TV ads?

The goal is to compete on par with massive competitors like Gillette, explains AdAge. The $13 billion global market for men’s shaving has practically infinite resources, and to be a visible player, Dollar Shave Club needed to take a leap out of digital.

“We were very hesitant to go into television in the first place,” said Adam Weber, VP of consumer marketing at Dollar Shave Club told AdAge.

The concern wasn’t that it would be unnecessarily expensive; it was that they wouldn’t be able to effectively track results compared to online video channels.

Then Came the Data

Traditionally, television advertisers have relied on 800-numbers to track direct responses from interested buyers. These days, toll-free numbers are no longer effective measurement tools. Consumers would rather hop on their computers or smartphones to do a little more research first.

What pushed Dollar Shave Club to make the jump into TV was the availability of attribution metrics from a company called Convertro, which offers a service that could help them pinpoint the ideal times and places to run TV ads, and then deliver analytics in return.

In the eyes of ROI-hungry marketers, data has brought TV advertising back to life.

“[Convertro] runs through a model and spits out that the TV ad at that airtime delivered this many incremental orders for us,” explains Weber.

Using Data to Invest Budgets Wisely

Dollar Shave Club’s ESPN clips are 60-second clips of Dollar Shave Club’s original viral video. We’ve seen this strategy before, of testing an ad in a low-budget form with no cost for distribution  to validate its appeal before the company invests the big bucks on mainstream media. If something is as much of a sensation online as Dollar Shave Club, it’s likely to elicit laughs (and conversions) regardless of the media channel.

When it comes down to the basics, though, this is a story about data. After four months of using Convertro to figure out when and where to run ads, Dollar Shave Club’s cost per acquisition has decreased by 48 percent. Traditional, seemingly expensive TV ads can actually turn out to be extremely efficient if they have the right data backing them.

The next step for Dollar Shave Club is probably to move beyond that $4,500 viral video. Even a YouTube sensation can’t last forever – especially for a start-up competing against some of the world’s biggest consumer goods companies.

The post YouTube Legend Dollar Shave Club Says TV Isn’t Dead appeared first on Contently.

Ikea Introduces New iPad App

Ikea’s Klippbok, a new iPad app, “allows users to experiment with different room settings by digitally rearranging IKEA furniture,” according to B&T.

The National Marketing Manager of IKEA Australia says that the app gives customers “the confidence to try new things and have a go.”

Tumblr Charging for Analytics Data

According to Mashable, Tumblr is charging a starting rate of $500 per month for analytics.

“At that price, customers can create five user accounts to track one topic and 10 blogs,” writes Lauren Indvik. “A $999-a-month plan enables tracking of up to 10 topics and 20 blogs.”

Aflac’s Social Media Discoveries

According to the New York Times, it took this year’s Aflac charity drive for the company to figure out what works in the realm of social media.

The company features the cancer patient who designed the Aflac stuffed duck (proceeds are donated to cancer hospitals) and included mommy bloggers in the campaign.

Media Panel Discusses Branded Content

Campaign’s Stuart Derrick reports on a meeting between industry professionals at The Soho Hotel and what they had to say about branded content.

A key lesson: Amic Lock of LiquidThread says, “You might have brand information, but the way to deliver it has to be engaging. It’s a multi-layered experience communicating functional elements and making it interactive to bring it to life. It has to work on a rational and emotional level. If you don’t trigger something emotionally, the rational side doesn’t break through.”

Spending this Holiday Season

ClickZ and comScore report that so far, more than $16 billion has been spent on the web during the 2012 holiday season. 

Spending is up 17 percent from last year. Cyber Monday wasn’t even one of the top 10 spending days of the season, according to the study.

Writing Tips from CopyBlogger

CopyBlogger’s Robert Peters discusses how to get inspiration for writing projects and content creation.

He says that writers, like author Roald Dahl, need to always be taking notes and observing what’s around them. They should create a special writing place, whether it’s an office or a kitchen table, and establish a routine.

Above all, writers have to do the work and not “fall into the trap of analysis paralysis. Reading lots of articles about publishing online, listening to podcasts, watching videos … these are all great for developing your knowledge. But none of it will help you achieve your goals if you don’t do the work.”

Content Wants to Be Shareable

Forbes’ Susan Gunelius says that if content is going to be successful, it must be shareable.

She writes, “shareworthy content must be useful, meaningful, and relevant to your audience. If your content doesn’t interest them and deliver value to them, they won’t want to share it across the social web on their websites, blogs, Twitter profiles, Facebook Profiles and Pages, LinkedIn Profiles and Pages, and so on.”

Shareworthy content is about the audience and their wants and needs.

The post Ikea’s Klippbok, Tumblr Analytics, Aflac’s Social Media Discoveries appeared first on Contently.

A new infographic from Pardot delves into the metrics behind content marketing. According to the company, since this past January, the popularity of the search term “content marketing” on Google has increased by 38 percent.

A whopping 90 percent of in-house marketers say that content is going to become more important, while only 38 percent report having a content marketing strategy.

The biggest reason for producing content is to engage audiences, followed by garnering traffic for the company’s website and spreading brand awareness. In terms of metrics, 88 percent of marketers measure unique visitors to the content, 76 percent measures pages viewed by the visitor, and social shares clock in at 59 percent.

The infographic reveals, however, that marketers are overlooking key metrics: “Marketers are focused on metrics directly related to how their audience is consuming and sharing the content. These metrics are a great way to measure how much your content interests your audience and how well it resonates with them. However, by also focusing on lead generation and sales metrics, marketers can keep content aligned with overall business goals.”

In terms of measuring metrics, Content Marketing Institute offers a handy list of tools for content marketers including Blog Pulse (searches blogs for keywords), Intense Debrate (tracks comments online), and Omgili (scans forums).

To measure sales metrics, which is “the holy grail” of metrics according to Jay Baer of Convince and Convert, he suggests using tools like Highrise or Sugar CRM.

“You’ll want to note in the prospect record that the potential customer consumed content pieces X, Y, and Z,” he says. “Then, when your crack sales team turns that prospect into a sale, determine the projected revenue and profit (lifetime value if you can) of that customer, and assign it to the content pieces.”

The key question that marketers need to ask when it comes to sales metrics is how often the content successfully turned consumers into customers. Baer stresses the same point as the infographic: “Content isn’t just about consumption, so don’t only track consumption. It’s also about sharing and leads and sales.”

The post The Right Way to Measure Content Marketing Results [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on Contently.

The most popular tool, of course, is Google Analytics—a simple and fun way to track page views, plus discover neat stuff about your audience, like where your visitors are coming from, what language they speak, and even what operating system they use.

But, this is just the beginning. When you share links to your content on many social networks, you want to see them spread — more exposure means more clicks back to your site. Measuring and analyzing this social reach will help you target content and resources to the right places.

Check out the following five tools to see how you can better measure your content’s social reach, and for more, check out this compilation of 10 free content analytic tools.

1. Bitly

Bitly, a URL shortener that enables users to track link performance, is a must. It’s the best way to measure each content piece across platforms. Bitly will show not just how many clicks you got on your own link, but also clicks received from additional shares.

If you know you’ll re-post a link, you can also come back and use the same shortened link and watch how it performs over time. Bitly can be integrated into TweetDeck, one of the most popular free social media dashboards.

While the analytics with the free version are great, Bitly also offers its own social media dashboard that allows for publishing, monitoring and optimization, all in one package called Bitly Enterprise, at $995 per month.

2. Buffer

Buffer is a tool used for increasing engagement by queuing tweets and Facebook posts at optimal times. It is best known for saving social media managers from tedious scheduling, but the quick and easy feedback on performance make it a double threat. Clicks and retweets are shown next to each message you post, but the real treat is what Buffer calls “Potential” — the number of people who may have seen your post, compounded by followers of people who retweeted you.

The free version of Buffer allows for one Twitter and one Facebook account, and limits the number of queued posts, but paid versions start at only $10 per month. All versions support connecting your Bitly credentials to make tracking engagement easier.

3. Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is Facebook’s own analytics tool that assists users with measuring the impact of their Facebook Page. This is great, as you don’t have to leave Facebook to see how the Page is doing.

Since it’s an in-house tool, Facebook can provide better analysis than many third-party services that try to lump Facebook analytics with the rest of the social sphere. To look at the reach of your content, select the “link” view under “Post Types” and you’ll be able to see how many Facebook users viewed your post, clicked, reshared or “liked.”

(For more, check out our free e-book, the Marketer’s Guide to Facebook.)

4. Hootsuite

Hootsuite, a top social media dashboard, now allows you to download reports, which put your activity and reach into easy-to-understand graphs. For links, Hootsuite uses its own Ow.ly shortener, so if you use this as your only platform for posting, you reap the benefit of consistency in analysis.

Hootsuite Pro is a great deal at $5.99 per month, with integration for Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and unlimited social media accounts, among other perks.

5. Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster is a resource for social media optimization that offers a free personal account with the option to upgrade to use it with multiple accounts. It’s the up-and-coming product that offers suggestions for increasing your reach as well as providing analysis.

There are a few different ways to visualize your reach, so it works for people who prefer a certain kind of graph. One unique piece is the tweet impressions map, which ranks your tweets based on how many people actually saw them. This means a lot for marketers who struggle with scheduling tweets for optimal times. Crowdbooster is a great example of a service that was designed for community and social media managers.

People Also Read

7 Social Media Stats All Marketers Should Know

17 Platforms That Will Make You a Better Marketer

The State of Social Media Content, in 12 Charts

Infographic: What Are the Best Days and Times to Post on Social Media?

Should Your Brand Voice Stay the Same Across Social Channels?

The post 5 Tools for Measuring Your Content’s Social Reach appeared first on Contently.

By tracking metrics that measure the results of your content, you can actually determine which types of content bring the most results.

Update: For a more comprehensive look at how to measure the effectiveness of your content plan, download our free e-book, Content Methodology: A New Model for Content Marketing.

The first step is to understanding overall how to measure the return on investment on your content strategy. And then make sure you that you are tracking the right metrics.

The Content Marketing Institute says that there are 21 Real Blog Metrics that you should be tracking. But not all of the metrics listed pertain directly to the quality of content and certain measurements more accurately show the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of your content marketing strategy.

Here are the five easiest metrics to measure if you want to increase the ROI of your content:

1. Number of Social Media Shares

When someone likes something they read or watch, they share it with their friends. By tracking how many times readers share your content through Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you get a good picture of how many times readers are intrigued enough by your content to recommend it others. You are also getting a higher ROI on your content when someone posts your content on social media because your readership and exposure is exponentially increased.

2. Time Spent On site

Content Market Institute specifically recommends tracking the average time people spend on your site overall and also how much time they spend on specific pages. If someone is not engaged in your content, then they will click to another site pretty quickly. When your readers are spending a significant amount of time on your site overall or on a specific topic then you know that you are delivering the content that they want.

3. Visitors & Return Visits

While it’s important to know how many people are visiting your site, it is even more important to track the trends in the numbers. Has the number of visitors risen with your increased focus on content marketing? Are your numbers higher when you post on a certain topic? How many are repeat visitors? Or do you see spike in visitors when you promote your content on Twitter or Facebook? By tracking the trends of visitors in relation to your content and marketing, you can continue to focus your content efforts in the right direction.

4. Blog-related Expenses

If you don’t know what your investment in content is, then you can’t determine the ROI. By having a baseline of what you have spent, then you can begin to determine the ROI using the Blog Related Revenue metric. And if the expenses are too high for a large return, then these numbers can help you trim expenses to increase your return.

5. Blog Related Revenues

One common mistake is not building mechanisms into your site that track revenues that come directly from your blog traffic. The simplest way to do this is to add Google Analytics tracking code to your site and set “goals” and “funnels”, so Google can track when your visitors convert to leads or sales, and whether those conversions came through your content or some other source. While some of the ROI, especially in the beginning, is not directly related to revenue, the ultimate goal of a content marketing strategy is to increase revenue.

Other Content ROI Metrics

One goal common among brands and other content marketers is to increase “brand awareness”. Beyond traffic and shares, metrics like mentions and reblogs can act as proxies for brand awareness, especially when viewed over time. We’ll blog more about that in an upcoming post.

Update: For a more comprehensive methodology on studying brand awareness, check out our latest study.)

You may wonder why “number of comments” was not included in the top five metrics. While comments are tangible and an ego boost, they often don’t provide a good illustration of the ROI of your content. Many people who become customers may not ever post a comment and oftentimes the most prolific posters have no intention of purchasing.

By following these five metrics, you will have good start to monitoring results and knowing where to focus your content marketing strategy.

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