The B2B buying process is, in reality, not as linear as what might be suggested by the concept of a buyer simply “moving down the funnel.” From the lens of the funnel, the buyers start at the brand awareness stage (at the top of the funnel), then become mid-funnel leads, and eventually make a sale or purchase. While it’s not perfect, it remains a framework to help inform our editorial decisions.

The middle portion of the funnel is equally as important as its outer compadres in defining a brand’s longevity and the success of a content marketing strategy. Marketers who devalue this stage or fail to invest in its maturation may be missing out on opportunities to further enhance relationships with potential customers.

According to a 2024 study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs and sponsored by Brightspot, 63% of the content marketers surveyed said content helped them nurture subscribers, audiences, and leads — which takes place at the middle of the funnel — in the past year. At the same time, nearly half (48%) of the content marketers surveyed said they find it challenging to align content with the buyer’s journey.

These data points should alert us to the importance of the stage between content creation and conversion. While leads pour in with successful top-funnel campaigns, it takes effective mid-funnel content to move them toward a sale.

What is mid-funnel content?

Mid-funnel content bridges this gap between initial intrigue and the final purchase. It is the layer of the conversion funnel that holds everything together.

Generally, mid-funnel content is most important to B2B companies. That’s because B2B sales cycles are generally more complex, which means you need to spend more time building and nurturing relationships with prospects. The middle of the funnel for B2C companies, by contrast, is focused more on customer-relationship management.

How do you know if you’re producing the right mid-funnel content? Let’s first distinguish where mid-funnel prospects come from and what our goals are when they get there.

From the lens of the traditional funnel, mid-funnel folks are viewed as either leads that have trickled down from your compelling top-funnel content or remain in your system as potential repeat buyers — though we now know that realistically, buyers may enter the funnel at any stage, and they may move back and forth between stages.

Regardless of how somebody arrived at the middle of your funnel, the goal of content at this stage is to provide material that will help buyers evaluate your brand and develop an affinity for it over your competitors. The magic happens by deepening the connection made in the top of the funnel with content that is specific to different segments of your overall audience.

Goals of mid-funnel marketing

While the content approach will be different depending on where in the spectrum they fall, the principle remains the same. Mid-funnel content must:

1. Nurture leads, drawing them to an eventual purchase. (Hello, ROI!)
2. Educate current and potential customers on the factors that differentiate your brand.
3. Continually inspire an emotional connection with unique audience segments to establish brand loyalty and create brand advocates.

Mid-funnel content is persuasive, educational, and targeted. Aimed at people already in your CRM system, mid-funnel content delivers the right content to the right people at the right time, usually with the help of marketing automation technology. (More on that in a minute.) While top-of-funnel content should be optimized for broad reach among your target audience, mid-funnel content should be intentionally crafted to speak to the needs of those closer to buying your product.

Email segmentation to nurture mid-funnel leads

The easiest and most effective way to nurture your mid-funnel email strategy is through segmentation. Age, gender, and geography are all valuable segments, but behavior-driven groups carry the most potential to connect in a relevant and valuable way with individual users. Newsletter subscribers will follow a different path than those who entered your system through a YouTube how-to campaign and will thus expect different material. Similarly, podcast subscribers will respond differently to product and service offers than the avid long-form reader.

What is at the heart of these unique segmentation patterns? Determining who you are talking to, where they came from, and what they are seeking, and being able to deliver targeted material at the optimal time for the purpose of engagement. (Remember, there are people on the other end of those Gmail and Outlook accounts.)

Types of content to nurture mid-funnel leads

Middle-of-funnel content may take any (or more) of the following forms. It’s all about having the right context mix to meet buyers’ needs.

Detailed e-books

E-books can be a great way to nurture mid-funnel leads. They can also serve to deepen the relationship between you and your audience by providing rich information on a particular topic.

HubSpot is a pro at this strategy. Its persuasive, data-heavy (and free) e-books are embedded in blog posts and easily accessible via the company’s website. As a mid-funnel tool, the focus is not on acquiring leads but on assisting the buyer in his or her evaluation process.

Case studies

Case studies or customer stories are an easy way to show, not tell, prospects exactly what you do through the eyes of the buyer by leveraging direct quotations and data points. The impact? The company demonstrates the power of its products through a user’s lens. They can be so effective that the Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs study revealed that 78% of content marketers have used them in the past 12 months — an increase from 67% the previous year.

Case studies are incredibly useful for content marketers as they can be repurposed into many formats, like blog posts, social media material, newsletter highlights, testimonials, and more. The website of Coursera for Business — the B2B arm of the online learning company — features a robust library of success stories in both video and downloadable formats, and visitors can search for content assets based on topic and other parameters.

Webinars

A webinar can be an interactive and engaging way to say to your prospects, “Here’s what you should know about your industry and here’s why we are best suited to address it.” The best webinars are those that provide unique and timely subject matter and an interesting narrative that’s relevant to the issues facing your audience. By choosing the right presenters and guests, showing compelling (but not overwhelming) visual elements, and making time for audience questions, your webinar can be a great way to nurture mid-funnel leads.

White papers and research

A white paper typically looks like a longform fact sheet or an e-book on statistical steroids. Call me crazy, but Docusign has nailed this white paper on measuring the value of an e-signature, providing data, colorful graphics and images, and actionable how-to’s for its entrepreneurial audience, all while promoting its product and brand.

Integrated email campaigns

Email campaigns can (and should) be more strategic than a weekly newsletter blast — they’re the bread and butter of the mid-funnel process. Groove is exemplary with its mid-funnel email campaigns, as are Dropbox and Marketing Sherpa. In each case, notice onboarding emails that inspire a double opt-in, follow-ups with new perks when engagement is low, personal 1:1 recommendations based on email or site interaction, and — here’s the kicker — humanized, engaging language.

ROI calculators

Rather intuitively, ROI calculators allow prospects to plug in website and company information to determine the necessary investment to reach set goals.

The power of automation

Keep in mind that the list above is neither exhaustive nor precise. Exactly what your content looks like will depend on how different segments fit into your overall sales goals. The short answer to mid-funnel content creation is that there is no universal content template. Mid-funnel strategy is successful by the nature of its specificity, creativity and case-specific data.

How do content marketers organize and monetize this specificity? Enter automation.

Too often, once marketers acquire leads after investing in top-of-funnel content, they hit their general audience with unspecific or final-sell material. Without paying attention to audience behavior and tailoring a relevant message, the relationship between prospect and seller is cheapened.

Mid-funnel prospects are humans, and, naturally, they want a degree of familiarity once the relationship has been initiated. That means you have to engage in a thoughtful and direct manner that is specific to them.

That’s where automation comes in.

Superior marketers adapt their mid-funnel strategy to provide authentic content to distinct groups and individuals. Automation — particularly of email — simplifies this segmentation, personalizing information during this critical stage in relationship-building.

At the heart of these segmentation patterns is a greater understanding of the motivation behind the behavior (i.e., desires) of your customers. Conceptualizing these actions — and the people behind them — will allow you to map and deliver content to tilt purchase decisions in your favor and create brand loyalists.

Automation tools for mid-funnel marketing

When you first hear the term “automation,” you may immediately think it’s cold and robotic. The opposite is the case. Tools like drip campaigns, lists, tags, and rules in email software, and smart lists and snippets, make it easy to organize segments of your audience to speak to them in a targeted and engaging way. Tools may even allow marketers to sort by company attribute (title, department, location), behavior, or timeframe.

Meaningful data supports automation’s role in fueling the mid-funnel portion of your content strategy. Automated emails have an 83.4% higher open rate and a 341.1% higher click rate, according to an Omnisend study.

For further examples of what to do and not to do in the automated mid-funnel, just look in your inbox. You’ll quickly be able to differentiate the companies that have effectively automated you into their systems — and responded to your behavior — from those that have you on blast.

Lead scoring

If automated mid-funnel content bridges the gap between intrigue and sale, how do we measure the impact of this content’s success?

Like creation and distribution strategy, the metrics used for mid-funnel measurement depend on your goals. If the goal of a mid-funnel campaign is to offer an upgraded service or a certification, the newsletter subscriber who always opens your email but never clicks on a link will hold a different value than the subscriber who went to your blog from the email, read the entire article, and downloaded an e-book on the same topic that corresponds to your improved service.

While the leads may have originated from the same newsletter list, it makes sense to assign different values to these people based on their actions. This numerical assignment represents different proximities to a potential sale.

Oracle, Act-On, and Salesforce each have CRM mechanisms to help assign value to prospects based on their one-to-one and/or segmented engagement. Organized as a numerical system, the lead-scoring process lets you assign points to prospects depending on a number of variables (age, gender, demographic, behavior), resulting in an evolving number for each audience member.

The result is twofold. In addition to determining the proximity of a prospect to a final sale at a given point in time (when and how are they likely to make a purchase?), lead scoring allows you to track touch points to help you start to determine the ROI on specific pieces of content. The more you understand your segmented lists, personalized emails, and the behavior of these groups, the easier it is to pinpoint valuable metrics and determine attribution.

Checklist

While there are no golden rules in mid-funnel marketing, here’s a recap of what you need to know. (Use it as a checklist, print out for your fridge, and ponder it over a sandwich.)

Align mid-funnel goals with overall sales targets. Marketing and sales should always be simpatico: Marketing spoon-feeds ripe leads to sales, while sales returns the favor with valuable insight.

Take advantage of automation tools and email campaigns. Remember the power of segmentation, personalization, and behavior-driven lists. As long as segmentation is thoughtful and intentional, a diverse array of leads will remain valuable for long periods of time.

Track audience behavior. Take the time to understand how people in your mid-funnel engage with you and reach out to them in real-time. This involves marketing and sales collaboration. Use sophisticated, actionable metrics that make sense for your overall goals. You need to understand how well your audience knows what differentiates your brand and what drives them down the conversion funnel. And don’t underestimate content engagement metrics.

Be forward thinking. Integrate mid-funnel content with social. Both mid-funnel and social strategy tie into brand authority, trustworthiness, and recognition.

Now, go forth. Nurture those audience relationships. And remember that the middle of the funnel is the glue that holds the funnel together.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about mid-funnel leads

How can I determine the right topics for my mid-funnel content?

To find topics that will drive ROI, you can start by analyzing your audience’s pain points, frequently asked questions, and the content they have engaged with most. You can also revisit the content topic pillars or themes that drive your content strategy.

What metrics should I focus on to evaluate the success of my mid-funnel content?

Buyer engagement can be measured by metrics such as email open and click-through rates; social media likes, shares and comments; and audience interaction levels with specific content types, like web or blog hyperlink clicks, repeat visitors, or time on page. Additionally, lead scoring and tracking how leads progress typically through the funnel will provide insights into content effectiveness.

How often should I send mid-funnel content to my leads?

Your mid-funnel content cadence should aim to strike a balance between maintaining engagement and avoiding overwhelming your audience. Generally, a bi-weekly or monthly cadence works well, but it’s important to monitor engagement rates and adjust your content calendar accordingly.

The post How to Nurture Mid-Funnel Leads with the Right B2B Content Mix 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.

Advancing to this level is difficult—like climbing the Mount Everest of marketing analytics difficult—but it gets a lot easier when you start using a platform to keep track of everything in one place: strategy, ideation, planning, creation, distribution, and analytics.

Contently‘s industry-leading platform makes end-to-end content marketing easy with the tech, talent, and strategic insights you need to attribute efforts back to revenue. It’s almost as if the word “marketing” itself needs a marketing campaign because it no longer encompasses all that goes into building brands and growing revenue.

Keith Johnston, VP and research director serving CMO professionals at Forrester, notes the rise of data-driven communication:

“We’re at the tipping point where we’re trying to decide what marketing really means in this era.”

Evaluate new ideas by potential revenue

New content ideas come from all corners of a company, but you’re also probably sourcing ideas from keyword research, industry news, and events. An end-to-end content marketing platform like Contently can help you evaluate those ideas easily with a content request form that allows you to turn a good idea into an outsourced story in a few simple steps.

The platform also allows you to easily source ideas from our award-winning freelance network with the Pitch function. Send requests to your freelance team to get their unique perspective on an idea, then organize those pitches by tag or status.

Evaluate both pitches and internal requests with Contently’s SEO Story Ideas tool, which evaluates story concepts that are likely to rank well in search based on your content strategy.

Once published, Contently Analytics will show you which articles performed best, so you can double down on what’s working. Gated content can be analyzed using Docalytics. This unique tool provides insight into PDF engagement using heat map technology.

Docalytics shows marketers over 17 metrics to make sense of engagement, including views per page, time spent on that page, and heat maps that show where readers interact with your content the most.

Make content plans that align with campaign goals

I’ve never met a content marketer with only one goal. We’re all out here with at least four: increase reach, increase engagement, generate leads, and impact revenue—usually for several different lines of business or products.

A company blog, for example, might see five new articles published every week, but each with a different goal in mind. You’ll need to aggregate all the content you create for each goal in one place to accurately measure whether or not you’ve moved the needle.

Contently’s enterprise campaign tool allows you to group content by campaign goal. For example, if your company is attending an industry event, you can collect videos, articles, gated content, social media posts, and emails all under one roof and quickly view analytics.

You can also organize and analyze content using a drag-and-drop calendar tool that gives you complete visibility into where each piece of content is in the creation process. Plus, you can filter by a whole host of different variables, including function, campaign, format, and tag.

Create content efficiently and at scale

Content marketers are under the microscope for the cost of their content, which has a reputation for being high. But flocking to find the cheapest content creators isn’t the answer. It will cost you more in the long run when you consider the time it takes to edit the writing. Why? When you don’t pay people what they’re worth, they aren’t motivated to do their best work.

That being said, you can incur additional expenses if your workflow or brief isn’t clear. This often happens when a stakeholder requests an article be completely rewritten because it didn’t match their goals, for example. Avoid those pitfalls with a platform that makes content briefs and workflows clear, notifications automatic, and hiring freelancers easy. In the publication settings of Contently’s platform, you can edit your strategy so that each new project you create will automatically house your content goals, personas, tone of voice, and pillars. This helps keep your freelancers on track from the moment they receive a project.

Contently’s Intelligent Talent Recommendation (ITR) tool uses an algorithm to match companies to freelancers with the right experience and industry knowledge. You’ll also gain access to editors that help you manage those freelancers and their output.

One of the best parts of the platform is the ability to create workflow templates that can be customized each time you outsource a story. They make every stage of the content creation process clear, from strategy to workflows (including outline, creation, review, and approval), content optimization, graphic creation, and distribution. You can even pay freelancers immediately and save your finance department time cutting checks.

Automatic editing tools check for plagiarism, SEO effectiveness, reading time, reading level, and grammatical issues to support editors. Contently’s Tone Analyzer, powered by IBM Watson, drills down on the voice and tone traits that engage your audience the most and provides suggestions to optimize your content to match those traits.

Zoom out to see the big picture with a content command center, which gives a birds-eye view of workloads, delays, and content production time.

Distribute content in many places from one platform

Content is typically distributed across your website, social media, email, and internal teams. Most content marketers keep a distribution checklist. Then, they open up platforms individually to get the job done.

That process is slow and leaves a lot of room for manual error. Contently allows you to connect distribution directly to your workflows. The platform integrates with your content management system (CMS) to automatically port over completed webpages, including images, tags, alt text, categories, feature images, and multimedia. It also integrates with a variety of other tools using Zapier.

Content value is easier to measure under one roof

Proving ROI for content is the biggest challenge marketers face—but it’s not impossible. Contently pioneered a four-stage maturity model to guide content marketers toward the measurement holy grail: multi-touch attribution.

Each of those four stages—crawl, walk, run, and fly—supports content marketers in proving the value of their content marketing programs, no matter where they are in their journey.

Assessing the value of your content marketing operations is so much harder when you’re managing the process across disparate tools. When strategy, editorial calendar, creation, social media, invoice, and analytics are under one roof, the picture gets a whole lot clearer.

An end-to-end solution like Contently sets you up for success in proving the value of your content. Schedule a demo for a consultation on your content measurement strategy today.

The post Prove the value of content by managing the end-to-end process under one roof appeared first on Contently.

Recently, Lucidpress took an in-depth look at those shifts in its 2021 Content Effectiveness Report, which surveyed 452 professionals from leading industries to gauge the state of current content.

They found that most effective content is personalized, relevant, timely, and informative, while making an impact across the customer journey.

Let’s dive into a few key takeaways:

Demand for content is on the rise, but it isn’t always being met

A staggering 85 percent of marketers surveyed by Lucidpress have seen an increased demand for content within the last year.

Content marketers are also seeing an increased demand for personalized content. In the study, 87 percent of respondents said their customers expected content to be personalized. However, just 32 percent of marketers say the majority of their content is tailor-made for a specific audience group.

A staggering 85 percent of respondents to the Lucidpress research have seen an increased demand for content within the last year.

Most are making some kind of effort — 81 percent of marketers personalize at least 10 percent of their content — but the research shows a demonstrable gap between what the audience wants and what marketers are providing.

Brand consistency remains a struggle

The report underlines the importance of brand consistency. Sixty-eight percent of marketers reported a 10-20 percent increase in revenue when brand content remains consistent—although we’d caution to take these figures with a grain of salt, as its unclear how marketers would actually measure the relationship between brand consistency and increased revenue.

On the flip side, marketers are struggling to create or enforce brand guidelines; 77 percent of respondents saw off-brand content created, while 15 percent reported having no brand guidelines at all. Only 31 percent said their brand bible was enforced consistently.

Confidence is mixed

Marketers’ confidence in their content in this study was a mixed bag—most marketers believe their content impacts purchase decision, but only 36 percent thought it impacted more than half of conversions.

Conversely, 68 percent of marketers believe their content is relevant to customers. So while brands believe their content is largely helpful and useful to customers, many worry it doesn’t have a significant influence over their behavior.

This is likely due to a bigger issue. As Contently detailed in its Content Measurement Maturity Model, most marketers aren’t measuring revenue KPIs when it comes to content.

Not surprisingly, 83 percent of respondents found that content is most effective during the awareness and consideration stages of the buyer’s journey, when users are researching products and weighing their options.

Content is still being left unused

A lot of content is going unused by stakeholders, according to the report. Only 14 percent of respondents said more than 75 percent of content was actually put to use regularly. Almost half of those surveyed reported 50 percent or less of their content was used, while 23 percent said they didn’t know, suggesting they weren’t tracking content usage at all.

On the topic of measurement (or lack of it), only 27 percent of marketers could confidently say they measure the ROI of their content.

The Lucidpress study displays some alarming gaps in the supply side of content, but also shows how marketers can take advantage of the pandemic-led growth in demand. Personalization, consistency, and accurate and honest measurement are all key to taking advantage of a daunting yet potentially defining era for content marketing.

The post How Marketers Are Handling the Rising Demand for Content Marketing, in 5 Charts appeared first on Contently.

The question came from a strategy colleague when I was helping a brand staff its new content studio. We had just presented a list of different types of writers the company needed to hire, including copywriters, bloggers, editors, and social media creators. My colleague wasn’t convinced.

She’s not the only person who’s raised this question. I’ve heard variations of it from marketers, freelancers, journalists, and students looking to start their careers. Sure, writing is at the core of multiple marketing jobs, but there are key distinctions. Copywriting and content marketing call for different skills and success metrics.

There’s more than philosophy at stake. If you’re hiring a writer, you want to get the right person for the job. You may get an engaging ad draft that reads like a haiku or a blog post that takes time to digest. Whether you’re looking to make the right hire or switch careers, it’s helpful to know what you need to thrive in each specialty.

1. Objectives

Consider the buyer’s journey. In its simplest view, a copywriter tries to pique interest immediately, with a heavy emphasis on brand awareness. The content marketer, meanwhile, focuses more on educating the customer and building trust, playing a bigger long-term role in the consideration and evaluation stages.

“When I’m writing ad copy, I become the product,” said Maureen Tsuchida, a freelance copywriter and social media consultant. “I can become warm and cozy like a hot cup of Campbell’s soup on a frosty day, blow through dusty dirt roads in an open-top Jeep Wrangler, or shift into transforming work processes using an AI platform to identify risks and eliminate obstacles so your projects deliver on time. See? I’m meticulously choosing words to paint a picture and bring the product to life.”

Photo by Yao Hu on Unsplash

When it comes to content marketing, Tsuchida stresses that she’s not directly selling the product. For that kind of work, she focuses more on challenges and solutions in the product category. “I’m still selling, but it’s not an ad.”

“Sponsored content is a gift to the reader,” said Ron Bel Bruno, a content marketing writer and strategist who was a longtime editor for Ziff Davis and Time Inc. “The best blogs, podcasts, or videos must employ the same skills a magazine or newspaper writer and editor uses. Your narrative needs to be fair, objective, and engaging, and leave the reader with some lasting value that will inform their future buying decisions.”

2. Skills

Just about all companies are looking for marketers who excel at writing and storytelling. But if you take a look at job descriptions, you’ll get a specific sense of how the roles diverge.

On the content side, job posts typically mention SEO knowledge and specific channel savvy (e.g., web, email, blog, video). The copywriter’s role description tends to be more about concepts, innovation, and brand communications. Both jobs involve putting words together well, but the essential skill sets required for a display ad campaign versus an e-book series are very different.

For ads, I want creativity. For content, I crave authority.

As a current marketing director and previous creative director, I’ve come up with a hiring shorthand that guides my decisions: For ads, I want creativity. For content, I crave authority. That means I tend to hire copywriters with diverse industry experience who can cross-pollinate ideas. For content marketing positions, I want writers with deeper vertical expertise who know what they’re talking about.

According to Bel Bruno, “You need journalistic skills, tempered with the ability to work facts into a template based on messaging pillars and marketing directives.”

3. Results

Most hiring managers want to see several examples of spec or in-market work, but what does successful work look like?

“I define success, be it in content or advertising, the same way,” said David McMillan, an experienced creative director and copywriter at top agencies. “Did it hold the reader and teach them something? Did the reader and I part ways with a transfer of information? Awards are validation for the insecure. A connection is the metric of success that tends to break the rules a lot with copywriting,”

There are, however, a few ways to differentiate that connection. In digital advertising, clients quantify effectiveness by impressions and clicks delivered through paid media. Across the aisle, content marketers track top-funnel metrics like unique visitors and time spent.

When it comes to ROI, there are a few similarities worth calling out. Depending on the project, copywriters and content marketers may both care about leads captured and (in some cases) revenue, if their email banners or referral links influence a purchasing decision.

On the awards front, there are a myriad of shows for copywriters, including Cannes Lions, Caples, Effies, and The One Show. For content marketing, which hasn’t been around as long, there are showcases like the Shorty Awards, Content Marketing Institute’s Awards, and The Finnys.

4. Career Trajectory

I started as an ad copywriter, dabbled in public relations, grew into a head of creative at several ad agencies before shifting to being a practice lead at a management consulting firm. While I still love creating ads, the deeper I got into digital marketing, the more I learned to love and excel at content marketing. Now I’m a strategist who advises on both.

However, as content marketing continues to become more established, it seems like people are specializing more in their respective fields.

Copywriters typically become creative directors at agencies or in-house departments. McMillan has worked at various global agencies as well as in-house at NBC News as creative director. Tsuchida has been a writer and associate creative director for the biggest direct and digital marketing agencies before consulting on her own.

Content marketing writers can rise up to become content strategists, content directors, or chief content officers. Content marketers may come from—or go to—fields like journalism, as Bel Bruno did.

As I told my colleague, good writing is good writing, but that doesn’t mean these skills are interchangeable. A great ad and a great blog post use different muscles, and hopefully this helps you recognize when you need to flex them.

Mat Zucker is a writer, marketing consultant, and author of Bronze Seeks Silver: Lessons from a Creative Career in Marketing.

The post Content Marketing vs. Copywriting: What Are the Major Differences? appeared first on Contently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This makes a lot of sense; all marketing is digital now, and digital marketing just doesn’t work well without great content. And every marketing leader on earth needs to focus on developing their team’s content muscle if they want to thrive.

With the pandemic raging across the United States, it’s likely that in-person events aren’t coming back until the end of 2021, and that’s being optimistic. Even if a vaccine is rolled out at scale in the first half of the year, it’ll be some time before we can safely pack convention centers again.

In-person events make up over 20 percent of B2B marketing budgets on average, and upwards of 50 percent inside many organizations. Smart marketing leaders are planning to shift that budget to content; according to LinkedIn, a whopping 78 percent plan to up their investment in content.

Content from brands is going to get better as a result. And everyone is going to have to up their game to stand out.

The smartest will reevaluate their media budgets, and reinvest some of that spend in content to up their effectiveness overall. After all, great content lowers your cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-lead (CPL), and spreads awareness, trust, and affinity for your brand.

The first place to start? Display. As Branded has repeatedly revealed in its newsletter, many display campaigns end up in unsafe brand environments—surrounded by bigotry and misinformation—and simply don’t work. Headphones.com, for instance, recently reduced its display spend from $1200 to $40 per day and saw no drop in performance.

Starting today, every marketing leader should have this checklist in their head.

1. Content Strategy

Do you have one, and does it have all seven key components? Do you understand the type of content your audience craves, and have you identified the sweet spot where what your brand cares about and what your audience cares about overlaps?

2. Creative Talent

Do you have the right creative talent at your disposal to create content that’ll truly stand out? Are you able to go beyond blog posts and create for the channels and formats your audience craves the most? And if the answer is no, how will you scale quickly? Will you build an in-house team, or join the new generation of content marketers scaling with top-flight creative talent to maximize their creative and budget flexibility?

3. ROI Model

You’ll struggle to get adequate budget if you can’t show how your content investment will drive revenue. Do you have an ROI model in place? (If not, this article and this webinar will help.)

4. Technology

Do you have the right technology in place to empower your content team to do to their best work? To give them the content insights they need, streamline their production process, measure what’s working and what’s not, and make it easy to improve with each round of publishing?

The marketing leaders who develop their content muscle are the ones who will thrive and survive next year and beyond. They’ll generate leads that are already evangelists, totally bought in. They’ll dominate search, and deliver compounding returns over time.

They’ll do marketing that’s actually worthwhile, and they’ll be rewarded.

The post The 2021 Content Marketing Checklist appeared first on Contently.

When you’re working in a larger organization that has dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of employees, you can develop a brilliant content marketing strategy that will absolutely delight your customers. But, if you fail to make an internal case for your content, your plan will never get the buy-in or budget it needs to succeed.

A few weeks ago, Contently head of marketing Joe Lazauskas explained why it’s crucial to make the case for content marketing during uncertain times. Using that as a springboard, here are a few steps you can take to sell your content marketing plan with internal support.

1. Start by solving a problem

To begin, ask yourself two questions: What are we doing now? Where are we falling short?

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to pitch ideas to a number of wiser, business-minded folks. I can tell you from experience, the most cringe-worthy feedback to hear is, “So, what are you solving for?” because it means you failed to expose the problem.

When building the business case for content marketing, start where your current marketing efforts fall short. For example, you may have effective mid-funnel content like case studies, but potential customers don’t find them because there isn’t enough top-funnel content that builds awareness.

While you see the challenges and opportunities of your current marketing program on a daily basis, your boss may not. The best business case starts by illuminating the problem for those who don’t realize they have one.

In a recent article on The Content Strategist, Jay Acunzo explains that in the past, marketing was all about getting attention. Now, that’s not good enough. Today, content marketing is all about holding attention—not just for 3 seconds but for the long haul.

This is where content marketing can play a huge role for your company, deepening relationships with your audience across the customer journey. But first, you have to show your internal stakeholders why they need to put in the time and investment it takes to build a badass content program.

2. Show that your interests align with the business

Demonstrating that your interests align with that of the business is all about ROI. But that doesn’t mean you have to predict every single data point you expect to hit before you get started. Instead, you want to focus on a few key results that your internal stakeholders care about.

When thinking through this stage of your content marketing business case, the questions you’ll want to ask are:

• What is my company’s business model?
• What are the goals of my internal stakeholders?
• What metrics do they use to measure those goals?

Perhaps you work for a B2B tech company and content can improve sales enablement for your business. Or maybe you work for a retail company like Glossier, where content marketing leads the way for a direct-to-consumer business. In 2010, the Into the Gloss blog allowed the company to build credibility and trust with an audience of beauty lovers and consumers. The subscribers and loyal audience members from the blog acted as a built-in market for Glossier’s line of products.

There are a number of different ways to define success, including increasing readers, converting a lead, and improving customer retention.

How you measure it is a bit trickier. Odds are, your boss or department head has shared overall company goals with you (if not, you can always ask). Use that information to frame your approach to ROI. If you don’t have a strategy yet, make the case for why you need to invest in the right partners and team members to help you build one.

3. Back up your plan with examples

Whether your company is super traditional or full of open-minded pioneers, you should provide examples of existing content programs that can offer context. The key is to share both positive and negative examples of content marketing. Many people skip this step when building a business case—especially the negative part.

As far as finding good examples, take a page out of Hollywood’s playbook. When someone wants to pitch a movie, they try to drum up excitement with a concise comparison. For example, Speed, which grossed $350 million, was initially pitched as Die Hard on a bus. How could anyone say no to that?

You may not have Keanu Reeves as an influencer, but there are plenty of roundup posts that list successful content case studies. One of my favorite examples is John Deere, which started a print magazine called The Furrow 124 years ago. It is one of the oldest examples we can look to for insight into how content helps companies build relationships with their customers beyond exchange of product or transaction.

In my opinion, The Furrow is why John Deere is one of the most widely known household brands in the world, despite only a portion of that world being target customers. In 2019, the company showed it will continue to invest in the long game with content marketing by announcing The Furrow would begin using podcasts to share stories with Deere fans through a new series called “On Life & Land.”

There’s far less to say about content marketing that fails since no brand wants to publicize its shortcomings. But there are some examples out there, and they can be instructive to show how you’re going to avoid major mistakes.

I often cite SugarString, a controversial tech news site started by Verizon in 2014. The site shuttered within two months due to a lackluster content strategy that never allowed the site to establish credibility. The corporate promotion and conflicts of interest were too blatant.

When the brand fell under scrutiny for opposing net neutrality while simultaneously being complicit in handing phone records over to the NSA, launching a censored news site did not sit well with the public. The site was criticized by everyone from Gizmodo to David Carr of The New York Times.

4. Be upfront about risk

When making the case for content marketing internally, you want to focus on all the positives: potential, success, creativity. But it’s still important to be realistic and identify possible risks that you could encounter along the way.

As with anything new, your internal stakeholders know that you are bound to come up against obstacles. Most people make the mistake of building a business case with the absence of error. However, to a C-suite executive or VP, the absence of error may signify naïveté or idealism.

In order to have confidence in you and your content marketing business case, leaders need to see that you’ve thought through all the possible outcomes. That could include slow growth, limited resources, and competition from established companies.

Questions to ask yourself when building this part of your business case:

• What are your internal stakeholders greatest fears about content marketing?
• What traps or risks exist for your content marketing program?
• What resources do you need (budget, team, external expertise/support) that safeguards against risk?

Depending how big your team is, I suggest finding one or two people in your organization who can help you make the case. This usually works best when the team working on the plan has different roles, positions, and perspectives.

If you’re working with a content strategist, do yourself a favor and practice the pitch with them before putting it in front of your internal stakeholders. Your content strategy will be a key driver of the overall success of your content program, so it is great to have allies on board from day one.

The post 4 Steps That Will Help You Sell Content Marketing to Your Boss appeared first on Contently.

For years, I have been chasing the capsule wardrobe.

That chase to streamline your wardrobe is similar to the quest to create and measure evergreen content. Compared to trend-based commentary, evergreen content provides consistent value to your audience (and a reliable stream of traffic to your site). For most B2B companies, it’s the most effective way to create content that makes an impact.

However, few of the brands I’ve worked with personally have a dedicated and repeatable process for ideating, creating, and measuring evergreen content. I understand why—it might seem more appealing (especially for folks with journalism experience) to react to industry trends and be part of the current conversation. But these people are missing opportunities to future-proof their content destinations.

What’s needed is a strategic approach, which includes a way to measure the success of this very specific type of content.

Finding the evergreen score

My solution to this challenge is the evergreen score. This metric helps marketers understand and amplify their most timeless content pieces.

While no content marketing metric is a magic bullet, this one focuses on impact after the first wave of engagement on your piece has come and gone. Buzzsumo, one of our trusted data providers, calculates evergreen score by taking the sum of all backlinks and social actions associated with a piece 30 days after publication, comparing that result to other content in a similar timeframe.

While they keep the exact details of their formula under wraps, you can preview your own content’s evergreen scores in a free trial on their site. Clients of Contently’s Strategy Services programs have access to this metric through our internal tool, StoryBook, but you can also make an approximation of your own with some Google Analytics customization.

When you rank your own content by evergreen score, your top performers will often be different from what you’d expect, especially if your current goals focus exclusively traffic or attention time. For example, on The Content Strategist, “What’s the Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing?” is one of our most evergreen pieces, even though it hasn’t received as much traffic as something like “The Latest Insights on Gen Z.”

Keeping up with the times

After calculating your own evergreen scores, you can (and should) take a few actions. First, update your most evergreen pieces. There are comprehensive guides on how to do this well from an SEO perspective, but any opportunity to add new, helpful information, or update statistics is always a safe bet. It’s also a good idea to check that structural elements are in place—like clean, descriptive headers and helpful images.

Secondly, you can use your successful titles to predict what new evergreen opportunities might be worth exploring. Our most evergreen pieces on TCS define and demystify marketing concepts or provide in-depth instruction on how to improve your content program. I might pitch something like “What’s the Difference between Brand Voice and Tone” because the format (“What’s the difference”) has evergreen potential for us, as does the topic of voice and tone.

Generally, explanatory pieces and well-structured lists make good candidates. If you’re up for a challenge, you can also analyze the most evergreen content of your competitors and your favorite publications to get an idea of what’s performing in your space. Sorting by evergreen score is a great way to filter out the noise from blue chip publications that cover news but also provide really good evergreen content too (like TechCrunch or NerdWallet).

Calculating evergreen score won’t solve all of your content marketing challenges, but it can help clarify where you’re already providing lasting value for your audience. If you use it well, you might just build a ‘capsule’ content collection of your own.

The post Evergreen Score: The New Content Metric You Should Care About appeared first on Contently.

We’re happy to report in that in our 2020 trends webinar last month, we did not do that. Instead, we focused on data and insights that you can easily use to create more effective content. Find all seven trends below—plus a recording of our presentation, for all of you crazy webinar junkies out there.

Watch the full webinar below, and get ahead of the game before the AI-powered robo-marketing holograms come to take your job.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/379083428

1. Invest in multimedia content (the data backs it up)

We’ve been talking about the importance of video and infographics for years, but marketers have been slow to make the investment.

That’s starting to change, and you need to keep up. Video spend on the Contently platform increased nearly 50 percent this year, with a spike over the past six months. And as we revealed in our financial services benchmark report earlier this month, videos and infographics greatly outperform other formats.

But don’t just create any old video. Your 50-year-old CEO’s monotone monologue is going to drive an average view time of about 2.5 seconds. Instead, invest in animated explainers and educational series at the top of the funnel and product videos and case studies for the middle and bottom of the funnel.

2. Embrace deep relationship metrics

When we were first building Contently’s Performance Analytics, we wrote a mantra on our whiteboard wall: People, not Visitors.

The idea was that vanity reach metrics weren’t what mattered. Instead, we needed to measure the relationships our customers were building with people.

Content marketing has gone through an ROI evolution over the past six years, since content marketing first became a thing. Initially, everyone touted reach metrics like followers, impressions, and pageviews. By 2016, there was a deeper focus on engagement metrics like shares, return visitors, and time on site.

In 2018, we witnessed a hard turn towards “transactional” metrics, as CMOs challenged content marketers to prove their value through traditional last-click attribution. (Which is a very limited way to measure the value of content.)

In 2020, marketers will embrace a more sophisticated approach by prioritizing the relationships they’re building with people, and tying those relationships to revenue. They’ll focus on newsletter subscriptions and return visitors as key KPIs, and use Google Analytics’ attribution modeling to track how their audience converts within a 90-day window.

3. Ungate your content

In B2B, there’s one easy tactic that’ll help you build stronger relationships with people: ungate your content.

We wrote about ungating your content at length two weeks ago. When companies gate content, they often unwittingly throw their prospects into the marketing funnel of hell. Here’s how it goes:

Step 1: Marketing gates a valuable report.

Step 2: One hundred people arrive at the landing page for the report. Eighty of them leave immediately because filling out that form will unleash unspeakable hell upon their inbox. The other 20 fill out the form.

Step 3: Marketing gives the contact info for those 20 people to the sales team.

Step 4: Sales harasses the people who downloaded the e-book with passive-aggressive emails and cold calls, even though all they did was download a piece of content.

Step 5: These 20 people who downloaded the report now regret doing so. In fact, they kind of hate the company, making this an incredibly masochistic exercise for everyone involved.

That being said, there are scenarios in which it makes sense to gate your content—webinars, educational courses, exclusive subscription content, and PQL (product qualified lead) projects. But even then, you need to be extremely thoughtful about how you follow up.

In the long run, you’ll gain way more customers by making it easy to access your most valuable content, instead of hiding it behind a lead form and driving people away.

4. Get creative with compliance

The greatest feats of creativity we’ve seen in our time at Contently have come from marketers at highly regulated companies who have to figure out how to work with compliance.

In financial services, healthcare, and other highly regulated industries, a poor working relationship with compliance can kill a content program. But we’ve seen some tactics that help:

In addition, your life will be much easier if you invest in workflow technology that provides audit trails, comprehensive record keeping, flexible workflows, and off-platform approvals. This helps you integrate compliance into the production process without drowning in a sea of spreadsheets and email chains. Contently has a ton of financial services clients, and without these features in our platform, I’m not sure how we’d get anything done.

5. Create data-driven stories

Brands have one key content advantage over media companies: proprietary data and research.

Original research is by far the easiest way to drive social engagement, press, and backlinks. One of our favorite examples is athenahealth’s flu season dashboard. It’s both helpful (to medical professionals and reporters tracking the spread of the flu) and a little terrifying—especially if you live in Pennsylvania, where 8.37% of all primary care visits involve flu-like symptoms.

Athenahealth’s content team did a fantastic job turning the company’s anonymous healthcare data into a dynamic piece of content. Take a closer look, and you’ll likely find some newsworthy data being crunched inside your company, too.

6. Invest in smarter distribution

The biggest mistake a lot of marketers make is failing to invest in the distribution of their content.

If you want to build an audience, paid media is your friend—particularly on Facebook, which remains one of the most cost-effective content distribution channels. It just makes sense. If you’re going to spend $500 to produce a piece of content, why wouldn’t you spend another $500 to ensure that three times as many people see it?

And if the content is really good, paid distribution has a tremendous trickle-down effect. It helps you generate more email subscribers and social followers, and can even drive an SEO boost. We call this the compounding returns of content.

One good place to start: your search budget. The average CPC on Facebook is only $1.72, which is five-to-ten times cheaper than the CPC on Google for equivalent topics and industries.

7. Think like a teacher

We love this quote from business author and professor Adam Grant: “Good communicators make themselves look smart. Great communicators make audiences feel smart.”

The best content marketing teaches an audience something new and helps them make smarter decisions. There’s no better way to build relationships with people.

This can look like Patagonia helping their customers plan the perfect outdoor adventure, or a tech startup in New York helping people create content that doesn’t suck. We call this buyer enablement content.

It may sound easy, but teaching someone something new requires careful communication. A few tips:

1. Meet the audience where they are, on their terms and at their level of knowledge. Aim for simple language. If concepts are complicated, break them down first.

2. Don’t be afraid to rely on a ghostwriter. Being a subject matter expert and an expert writer are two very different things.

3. Create content in a variety of formats, and use visuals whenever possible. Most people are visual learners, which is why effective teachers use whiteboards, PowerPoints, and physical objects in their lessons whenever possible.

Want to take your content marketing to the next level next year? Sign up for our free content marketing course.

The post Content Marketing 2020: 7 Tips for Creating Content Your Audience Actually Likes appeared first on Contently.

As marketers and publishers become more sophisticated, companies have looked beyond the click for something more meaningful. Brands and publishers don’t just want you to go to a page, they want you to stay on site and remain there.

You can see that gradual shift all over digital media. In 2018, Quartz redesigned its site, specifically to improve time spent. The New Yorker ranked its 25 most popular stories by time, not readers. Reddit started wooing brands as it topped Facebook in time on site. YouTube creators even started posting longer videos to increase time metrics favored by the platform’s algorithm.

In December, it was clear the industry was shifting toward deepening relationships with audiences and keeping them around. The Nieman Lab at Harvard University noted that many publishers had set pageviews aside in 2018, opting instead to focus on quality time and time on site.

For all of those reasons and more, the metric of the year is time.

Time is money

Every marketer should find a way to tie content to revenue. But getting there requires a gradual process, and there are different checkpoints to hit along the way. Time-bound data offers marketers a path to the hard ROI they crave.

Time your audience spends on your site is an indicator of a deepening relationship, which you can’t capture if you’re just focusing on gathering readers or their impressions. As Contently’s head of strategy Joe Lazauskas is fond of saying, if content doesn’t help the user enjoy their lives more or do their jobs better, it probably sucks. Bad content is relative, though, so the tricky part is knowing what to measure.

Let’s say 100,000 people visited a brand blog last month. You might look at that big, shiny number and conclude that you’ve created something fantastic. But if most of that traffic comes from one piece of content that took off, odds are time spent will be down relative to your average post. Also, most of those people probably won’t come back if they’re coming from a wave of social momentum or a press mention. You can bet your site’s engagement metrics won’t seem as sexy the next month.

Now let’s look at a different brand blog that gets 50,000 readers per month. A lower aggregate number, but with a better balance of traffic. The audience comes regularly, and they spend more time with the content than the first company’s audience. This team is actually closer to proving ROI, but there are some people who will fixate on the big number and think otherwise.

When your data shows that people stay with your content and come back for more regularly, that signals they may be ready to progress from the top of the marketing funnel to the middle. Some brands new to content aren’t ready to get to this stage yet. However, based on what we’ve seen from our customers and the market at large, many of them are actively tracking and reporting engagement metrics that get at the quality of the content.

Time metrics you can measure

If you’re concerned with the amount of time users are spending on your site, or you want to measure the quality of the time they’re giving your content, here’s a short list of metrics on the rise that you can evaluate.

Average time spent

This—also known as dwell time to some—is simply the amount of time a visitor spends actively reading, watching, or engaged with your content. For example, your audience may spend an average of three minutes with your content. (According to Taboola, the average page session duration on publisher sites was a shade under two minutes by the end of last year.)

Google also uses the metric to rank search results, which means it presupposes that users are trying to answer a question or learn about a subject they’ve typed into the search bar. As John E. Lincoln writes for digital marketing agency Ignite Visibility, “Longer dwell times are better for business. The more time a visitor spends on a page, the more likely they are to have read and understood your content. It’s a signal that your content strategy is working and appealing to your intended audience.”

Average finish/scroll depth

To truly gauge time spent data, you’ll want to check it against this companion metric. Average finish or scroll depth is how far down the page a person gets when looking at your content, with 100 percent being the perfect score.

This metric is a great way to study the quality of your users’ site visits, especially if you publish more short content than longform. If you publish a 4,000-word article that takes 20 minutes to read, then an average time spent of four minutes isn’t all that great. Conversely, if people spend 90 seconds with a short piece, that could be a great sign that your team is giving the audience what they want.

Bounce rate

This is a pretty simple metric that measures whether or not people visit other pages once they arrive on your site. A 50 percent bounce rate, for instance, means that half of your audience leaves your site after looking at one page. Users who bounce could be responding to bad UX, misleading headlines, or lackluster information.

The lower the bounce rate, the better. And if people are looking at other pages on your site, odds are their time spent will increase as well. However, a high bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean the apocalypse is coming—especially if you’re just starting a content program. As Contently strategist Felicity Blance explained on this site: “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.”

Time between visits

This metric is a little tricky. It’s not just a case of increasing or decreasing time between visits, but studying the metric can tell you quite a lot about your audience. If you have a pretty good return rate, but users often let weeks go by between site visits, the audience may be telling you that they find your work useful at times but don’t trust you as a go-to source on a consistent basis..

For example, I’m a Marvel nut, which means I’m constantly on the prowl for new information about Disney’s superhero movies, and more often than not, I get my updates from The Hollywood Reporter’s nerd blog, Heat Vision. If there’s no news, however, I don’t tend to spend any leisure time on the site. My time-between-visits probably looks pretty erratic, and bursts of activity can be pegged to trailer releases, casting news, and announcements from Disney and Marvel.

On the other hand, I read superhero content on io9 more regularly, especially on slow news days, because the site’s editorial team publishes evergreen work too. I know from experience that every day, io9 will post something related to my interests, so I type in their URL regularly, and my time-between-visits is usually less than 24 hours. Adobe would say that low time between visits suggests a site’s stickiness. If users engage with a site every day, something is compelling them to search for updates.

The quantitative approach to quality

All the metrics above can be combined into a comprehensive study of quality of time, and statistics can be very persuasive when framed correctly. However, marketing hasn’t been completely taken over by artificial intelligence and Google’s algorithm, so it’d be a mistake to ignore the human element.

Shifting your brand’s focus from clicks to quality of time spent with your content nudges you closer to thinking about conversions. After all, a high number of monthly uniques doesn’t mean that all those readers have committed themselves to your brand. On the contrary, an audience of regular readers is more likely to engage with your brand deeply and purchase something, even if your total readership is smaller. Time spent on-site supports lead generation, because an audience that depends on you for interesting content values what you have to say. And value, of course, is the name of the game.

The post 2018’s Content Metric of the Year: Time appeared first on Contently.

Jannelle, Halifax, Nova Scotia

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

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

[Ed. note: This is true.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-KL, London

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Griselda, Stockholm

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

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

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

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

The real game-changer, however, was data. With hand history, you could build a perfect database of every opponent, tendency, and mistake. It didn’t take long for technology like heads-up display (HUD) to come along to track how someone gambled. Playing too loose in early position? Overplaying hands like pocket nines or pocket tens? The database would tell you all and encourage you to improve the leaks in your games. Instantly, my results improved and profits increased.

A few years later, in 2007, I decided to record every poker hand I played in a notepad. I was playing quite a bit at the time, so when I sat down at a table, I wanted to make sure I had a data-driven advantage. In addition to online games, I played roughly 10 tournaments that year, including a few events at The World Series of Poker. In total, I logged more than 1,000 live hands.

Looking back over a decade later, I’m not sure I made the wisest decision. Sure, it sounded great in the moment, but I didn’t improve as much as I hoped. The goal became to collect as much data as possible instead of trying to become the best possible player and make a little money. (I didn’t cash at the World Series, but the 2017 main event winner took home $8.15 million.) By the end of the year, I came to my senses and put the notepad away for good. Frankly, I found that data alone was not the solution. In order to be at my best, I needed to optimize my decision-making more than my data collection.

You may be surprised to hear me push back against data collection. I’m Contently’s VP of revenue marketing, which means my days are filled with Salesforce reports, spreadsheets, and discussions about ROI. To be clear, marketers need strong quantitative evidence to prove the value of their investments, especially to executives and boards of investors. My issue, though, is that many of them seem to be fixated on gathering all the data when they should really put all of their chips into finding the right data.

It’s easy to see why. Every marketing solution on the planet promises that it can measure the most important metrics for your business. The truth is some can; some can’t. Just like poker, the lure of both real-time data for better decision-making as well as databases for more serious analysis can be seductive. But when marketers pile their stacks with more software, they wind up drowning in data. A 2018 study from InsightSquared and Heinz Marketing found that “the more experienced a marketer is, the more likely they are to be dissatisfied with their marketing automation system’s reporting and attribution capabilities.”

Data alone was not the solution.

So what can you do to use analytics more effectively? The answer, gleaned from a few of our clients, is deceptively simple: start with one data point that shows clear business impact. That’s it. Walmart, for example, started to gradually get more budget and buy-in over the years when the editorial team discovered that customers who engaged with content had an average order size 7 percent larger than customers who went straight to shopping.

Of course, Walmart couldn’t coast on that one stat. As the editorial team got smarter about what content to create, there were other signs of progress—bounce rate improved by 22 percent, for instance, and time spent jumped by 30 percent. But the larger point is marketers can’t get hung up on showing success 10 different ways when that’s rarely plausible in the early days of a content program.

We love to talk about storytelling here. And while I’m definitely more of a numbers guy than a scribe, I do appreciate a good narrative. When I comb through those spreadsheets and calculate the ROI of our internal marketing efforts, I think of it as telling a story with data. It’s my job to build trust with my audience—without overwhelming them or straining my credibility.

There’s an interesting parallel here between content creation and content analytics. Brands have mostly adopted a quality-over-quantity mindset for storytelling. They’d rather prioritize one great e-book that has lasting impact than five blog posts with ambiguous results. For whatever reason, that level of thinking isn’t as widespread as it should be on the business side in a lot of organizations. But as brands start to understand what they can do with a few powerful stats, I bet that’s going to change.

The post Make Sure Data Isn’t Your Downfall appeared first on Contently.

If we learned anything from last year, it’s that marketers are striving for accountability more than ever. They’re no longer just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Budgets have a purpose. Strategies get developed with long-term vision. And results need to be tangible.

As content marketing continues to transform in 2018, here are 24 predictions that will keep you one step ahead.

1. “Content marketing” will cease to be thought of as just a top-of-funnel activity for building an audience. Instead, marketers will realize content is the golden thread that connects every experience in the customer journey. Great stories aren’t just crucial for articles and videos; they’ll be necessary for case studies and sales decks as well. (Tweet this!)

-Joe Lazauskas, director of content strategy

2. Less quantity, more quality. Smart brands will reduce the amount of content they produce, using that budget to improve the production value of everything they create. (Tweet this!)

-Shane Snow, co-founder

3. For a while now, brands have tried creating their own podcasts without much success. This year, I think brands will sponsor individual episodes of existing podcasts that are already popular. (Tweet this!)

-Alli Manning, director of talent and editorial services

4. Content marketing initiatives will become table stakes for marketers to compete in their fields and keep their jobs. (Tweet this!)

-Greg Merson, sales operations manager

5. Brands will make much better use of persona research and buyer’s journey stages when planning and executing their content strategies. (Tweet this!)

-Kelly Wenzel, CMO

6. B2C companies will take more of a public stand on key topics, especially social issues, which will be reflected in their content. (Tweet this!)

-Cyrus Park, implementation manager

7. Paid distribution will lean heavily toward video as content marketers add YouTube and Facebook video to their list of most important channels. (Tweet this!)

-Felicity Blance, manager of distribution services

8. To prove their value, marketing teams will put a lot of effort into creating content that can be used across all departments. (Tweet this!)

-Luke Maloney, senior sales executive

9. The past few years have focused on the mechanics of content marketing—how the sausage is made. In 2018, brand leaders will return to a fundamental question: How good is the sausage? (Tweet this!)

-Erin Nelson, senior managing editor

10. Content marketing and revenue are going to become great friends. As marketing systems get more integrated, marketers are going to be able to prove their content marketing initiatives drive meaningful revenue. With that quantified data, the pressure will be on to consistently increase the number. (Tweet this!)

-John Fernandez, VP of revenue marketing

11. To stay relevant but avoid adding to the noise of shortform video, brands will experiment with animation, motion graphics, and other advanced forms of multimedia. (Tweet this!)

-Brian Maehl, manager of talent and editorial services

12. CMOs will become increasingly obsessed with transparency across lines of business, different campaigns, and executive teams. (Tweet this!)

-Adrienne Todd, communications specialist

13. Content marketing platforms will begin to consolidate as larger software companies look to make acquisitions. Expect these big companies to include content marketing offerings as a standard part of their marketing cloud solutions. (Tweet this!)

-Dillon Baker, product marketing specialist

14. Marketers will opt for more a strategic approach to content creation, delivery, and optimization that is powered by artificial intelligence. As a result, they will automate personalized customer experiences across the entire content journey like never before. (Tweet this!)

-Priyamvadha Ramakrishnan, content distribution associate

15. Organizations will get more sophisticated and truly look to measure ROI in meaningful ways. (Tweet this!)

-Rob Haber, director of customer success

16. Brands will look at how their systems connect to make it easy for anyone in the entire organization to access any content that’s created. (Tweet this!)

-Alicia Phuah, account manager

17. We’ll see more content marketing connected to the internet of things. The internet of things is all about providing convenience, and anything brands can do to make their customers’ lives easier is a win. (Tweet this!)

-Ann Fabens-Lassen, chief of staff

18. Enterprise brands will start embracing the “center of excellence” approach we have been preaching for years. For marketers to succeed in the age of digital transformation, their approach to content marketing and marketing content must mature and evolve. (Tweet this!)

-Henry Bruce, VP of product marketing

19. Brands will talk a lot about delivering a frictionless content experience to their consumers by analyzing online and offline behavior. But the key phrase here is “talk a lot about” because the majority of brands are years away from successfully tackling this challenge. (Tweet this!)

-Syd Alperowicz, senior product manager

20. There will be an excess of founders posting thought leadership videos on LinkedIn. A lot of it will sound vaguely Vaynerchuk-ian, and a lot more will sound like two-minute TED talks. (Tweet this!)

-Colton Cox, outreach associate

21. As Fortune 1000 CMOs learn of the successes achieved by the likes of RBC, Morgan Stanley, Manulife, and IBM, they will accelerate the shift of marketing dollars from traditional marketing channels into content marketing. In particular, these executives will leverage content marketing platforms to drive this shift. (Tweet this!)

-Gavin Power, VP of finance

22. So many of us believe multimedia will rule, yet brands shy away from investing because of the sticker price. However, there are big payoffs to prioritizing social-first videos and graphics that deliver your messaging in a relatable and shareable way. (Tweet this!)

-Ines Tamaddon, content strategist

23. The smartest marketers will have an increased desire to completely understand the ROI behind their content programs. (Tweet this!)

-Marc Schraer, SVP of sales

24. Hot takes will cool down. Even though creators will keep manipulating algorithms and peddling clickbait, I think we’ve finally reached the threshold of fatigue. Companies that treat their audience with intelligence will gain a huge advantage when customers are ready to make a purchase. (Tweet this!)

-Jordan Teicher, editor-in-chief

The post 24 Content Marketing Predictions for 2018 appeared first on Contently.

As CMW gets closer, I wanted to share three sessions that I’m particularly excited to see:

Imagination at Work: Lessons in Storytelling from GE

Sep. 6, 8:20 a.m. – 8:50 a.m.

I love the GE brand because it manages to make industrial and engineering products sexy. I’ve long quoted vice-chair Beth Comstock for saying: “You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything.” And GE’s current CMO, Linda Boff, has written about the importance of marketers who value learning and empathy—two traits I also espouse for today’s leaders. Given that GE was one of Contently’s earliest clients, I’m excited to hear about what this groundbreaking brand is up to now.

Content ROI – How Marketers Demonstrate Value to the Brand and the Boss

Sep. 6, 10:15 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

This year, I’ve written and spoken about the ROI of content more than any other topic. We launched our Accountable Content Series this summer to start a conversation about ROI, business objectives, and organizational efficiency. If content is the fuel for the marketing engine, then strategy, clear process, and data can help brands show how their creative efforts drive continuous improvement. I’m eager to see how this panel of B2B and B2C marketers stacks up to the business case we see at Contently.

The Future of Content Marketing Isn’t Content Marketing – An Approach for Agencies and Enterprises

Sep. 7, 4:15 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

The last session on this list features my colleague Joe Lazauskas, Contently’s director of strategy. After talking to clients and prospects about the future of content, we feel like there’s a real opportunity for marketers to make smarter decisions. As Joe explains what the next era of content marketing will look like, I expect attendees to walk away with the insight they need to transform their organizations for 2018 and beyond.

If you’re interested in hearing more about content marketing ROI, we’ll be at booth #14 throughout CMW and would love to see you. And if you’d like to schedule a demo of our newest features, book a private meeting during the conference, or simply stay informed of all things Contently, you can sign up here for our VIP list.

The post 3 Content Marketing World Sessions That’ll Make You Better at Your Job appeared first on Contently.

The biggest challenge facing content marketing is also its greatest opportunity. How do we connect each piece of content to a specific business outcome?

In content marketing, ROI means many things to many people. The responsibility for content can reside with every team from comms to social to digital to brand. It’s no wonder then that the measures for success vary greatly. Some strive for brand awareness or lead generation or organizational efficiency. Others care about all three simultaneously. But regardless of the unique circumstances, everyone shares the same overarching objective: accountability. We often hear from passionate content professionals who struggle to evangelize the importance (read: value) of content up the ladder or across their organizations.

I’m very excited to announce The Accountable Content Series, a new program from Contently designed to explore this concept in detail. The series aims to help marketers understand how content can deliver measurable brand impact and business outcomes. We decided to focus on four key themes:

1. Strategy: The blueprint for connecting content to your goals and objectives
2. Process: How teams and technology impact productivity
3. Content: Creating breakthrough content that drives meaningful engagement
4. Results: Using data to inform decisions and drive continuous improvement

The emphasis here is on a holistic approach. Sure, there’s lots of attention given to how an individual piece of content performs, but that’s only part of the story (pun intended!). Experience working with some of the world’s best brands has taught us that it’s the combination of these elements that drives optimal success.

Over the next few months, we will begin rolling out articles, infographics, webinars, events, and more to guide you on all of these topics. We envision each asset as a piece to a puzzle to help increase your company’s efficiency and efficacy so you keep improving.

Right now, there’s still a lot of noise out there. Our customers are bombarded by mass-produced fluff and filler. But we believe there’s an opportunity to do better.

If you’d like to learn more about the Accountable Content Series and sign up for exclusive updates, please check out our resource center here. Of course, I hope you’ll join us for the first webinar in the series, where I’m joined by Shawna Dennis, AVP of Global Content Marketing at Manulife for the case study on how this global insurance provider leveraged Contently to reduce production costs and drive double-digit ROI in less than a year.

Finally, if you have ideas for topics you’d like to see us address in the Accountable Content Series, please reach out to us on Twitter or Facebook.

The post Connecting Content to Measurable Business Outcomes appeared first on Contently.

Since then, Wells Fargo has been on the rebound, focusing on using technology to shape its customer service. That means investing in everything from artificial intelligence to video to virtual reality. At the core of all this investment is storytelling. As CMO Jamie Moldafsky said last month at Collision 2017, “We have to rebuild trust with our customers. We think we have a good story because a lot of our changes have been about making a better employee experience.”

During the conference, I interviewed Moldafsky to find out more about how Wells Fargo is tailoring the customer experience and why last year’s scandal has sparked a renewed focus on content.

How would you describe Wells Fargo’s approach to content?

Marketing serves as an air traffic controller to determine what content to focus on. Our job is to make sure that we make the content available that day, for that audience, at the right time. We invest a lot in the infrastructure to enable that. We focus on understanding the customer and where that customer is in their journey.

How have you focused more on delivering content at the right points in the customer journeys?

It’s about tailoring the experience. For example, we’ve always had student lending, student checking accounts, and student credit cards. Now, we’ve created more of a centralized hub for students that actually help them as their needs evolve over time. It’s much more needs-based. It’s much more customer-focused.

Why the focus on students?

When you form relationships early on, they are stickier. It’s all about an experience. If we deliver a great experience, we have a lifetime customer. I think one of the opportunities for full-service financial firms like Wells Fargo is that we have the products and services to help people in their journeys, from college graduation to home buying.

If we have a historical relationship with the customer, we’re better able to serve their needs. We also find that’s the stage in life when people most want this guidance, when they’re starting to break out on their own and actually establish these relationships.

Are you thinking at all about utility content, like calculators and the different tools for financial planning?

Absolutely. We just launched recently something called “My Credit Options Guide.” Part of what we realize is people come in and sometimes say, “I need a car loan.” Let’s step back. First of all, do you need to borrow money? Do you want to use a checking account or savings account? The answer is, “No, I haven’t thought of that.”

Every CMO in 2017 has access to a pile of data. How do you evaluate what’s actually relevant to your business?

I would call our’s a mountain versus a pile. We have 70 million customers and 6 billion transactions. It’s often much more important to look at the behavior associated with the data. What insights do we have about either their expressed or hypothesized behavior?

It’s all about an experience. If we deliver a great experience, we have a lifetime customer.

I’ll give you an example. Somebody gets a automatic deposit of $10,000, then all the sudden, one comes in that’s $50,000. What does that tell you? They probably have a different need. If that much money was deposited, it’s an opportunity to reach out and say, “Is this something you want to invest? Is this something you want to save? Is this something you want to use to pay off your loans?”

That’s where artificial intelligence for us is really exciting.

Robots!

We’re dealing with very, very complex dimensions of inflows, outflows, time, and then access. All those are variables that have to come together to create an informed solution or suggestion. That’s why AI is so appealing. You have to take into account every channel over time, all the products and services, and then the third-party data.

What role does video play in your content strategy?

We shifted a lot of dollars from traditional channels to digital video. We’ve also seen a huge shift to shorter form video. It used to be 30 seconds, then it’s 15 seconds, now it’s eight seconds.

How-to videos from thought leaders have been really successful for us because these are things that you take for granted if you’re a novice investor. It’s really helpful to have somebody walk you through those things.

How are you determining ROI on video?

I’m exploring the video distribution sources. If you have a piece of content on the economy, and you get 25 CFOs to look at it, that’s probably good. On that flip side, if you’re putting out a how-to video, and you only got 25 customers, you’d be miserably depressed. Learning how to measure the video consumption and the video downstream impact is really challenging but something we’re really focused on.

Are you experimenting with augmented reality or virtual reality?

We’re exploring. Our philosophy is that we’re going to be everywhere our customer wants us to be, hopefully in an engaging way facilitates the process.

In financial services, it’s a little trickier. There’s one end of the spectrum, which is helping people visualize their retirement through VR. At the other end is “I want to move money from A to B.” We’re testing across that spectrum. We have always been a technology company. You have to make sure people understand how committed we are to innovation and technology and then it starts to get more interesting.

How is experiential a part of your strategy?

The other benefit of Wells Fargo is that we do actually have the ability to foster in-person relationships. Tools often start valuable conversations, but people often come to us and say “Now I get that the tool told me I need to do x, y, or z, but a calculator said I should be saving $1,000 a month. I don’t know how to do that.”

I was on a panel earlier and someone asked “Do people even go into banks anymore?” Actually they do. We constantly look at how to use those occasions and interactions. How do you make everything experiential?

Let’s talk a little bit about your strategy. How does your brand tell its story, and how does that relate to recruiting and hiring?

Obviously, we’ve had some reputation setbacks. Day by day we are introducing things that make it a better place to work. We raised our minimum wage. We changed our goals from product sales goals to more relationship- and service-type roles.

The story actually really becomes Wells Fargo helping people build better careers. Hiring is a challenge, especially where we are, headquartered in San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley. We’re competing for a lot of technology resources. The other piece would be training. We invest a lot in training and skill development.

We’re finding having people join a vision of helping customers be successful and giving them a path to do that is more and more important. Those are kinds of programs that a lot of people that join us really love, because it’s not a desk job. It doesn’t feel like a desk job.

Did last year’s scandal generate a renewed focus on content?

Absolutely. In fact, we just met with our recruiting team the last couple weeks to address that point. The message has to be different. We have to rebuild trust with our customers. We think we have a good story because a lot of our changes have been about making a better employee experience.

We’re a company that has deep pockets to actually fund those things, which, as you know, in this world, can be a really hard part of it. You can have the best vision in the world, but it won’t matter if you don’t have the means to bring it to life. We have the means to bring it to life. Thinking about accelerating, moving faster, bringing speed to market, into the culture.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

The post Wells Fargo’s CMO on Lifetime Customers, Mountains of Data, and Coming Back From a Scandal appeared first on Contently.

1. I have a catalogued list of my favorite content marketing SlideShares.

2. There’s one that’s my most favorite, and I reference it all the time.

I’m talking about Why Content Marketing Fails, by Moz founder Rand Fishkin. It tackles the biggest content marketing mistakes with the help of clip art and some pretty bad fonts. (Also a bunch of pictures of Rand looking like a railroad baron.) There are two slides that I love in particular because they explain the biggest misconception in content marketing: that content is just another direct-response marketing tactic.

Preach! If you’re hoping that your content is going to directly lead to sales on a consistent basis, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. The consumer journey is just much more complicated than “click-read-buy.” And yet, content marketing does have a huge impact on the sales funnel. Per HubSpot, companies that publish content 16 times per month generate 4.5x more leads than those who publish less than four times per month, and 93 percent of B2B marketers say that content marketing generates more leads than traditional marketing strategies.

But for many marketers, demonstrating the long-term effect that content marketing has on lead generation and customer acquisition can be a daunting task, especially if you’re not a Marketo and Salesforce wizard.

While multi-touch attribution is the most accurate approach to demonstrating content marketing ROI, there’s a simpler metric that can get you started: leads influenced.

Time for a definition!

Leads influenced: The number of people who engaged with a piece of content and converted into a lead within the next 90 days.

Let’s look at an example. Say that I publish this post and 5,000 people read it. And amongst those 5,000 people, 65 become a lead for Contently in the next 90 days—they fill out a demo request form, ask to talk to a sales person, download an e-book, or some other conversion event. Then, that piece of content would have 65 leads influenced.

This metric is an easy way to show the impact that content has on the top of your funnel and can be tracked with a simple conversion pixel placed on various conversion event points, like the aforementioned demo request form or e-book download. It’s one of the metrics that we bake right into our analytics platform, and helps us optimize our distribution strategy to ensure that content pieces that generate a lot of leads get prioritized in both our paid and organic campaigns.

We also measure something called lead impact score, which pinpoints content pieces that influence or generate a lot of leads relative to the number of people who read the piece. So say that 100 people read a story, and 70 of them end up becoming leads: We’d give that piece a lead impact score of 70, and likely prioritize pushing it out in our distribution campaigns since it’s so effective.

Ultimately, there are a lot of reasons that content marketing fails. But having a good handle on how content impacts lead generation definitely isn’t one of them.

The post This One Lead Gen Metric Will Help You Show Marketing ROI appeared first on Contently.

At 23, I helped start an online newspaper out of a Park Slope, Brooklyn coffee shop, and by some stroke of luck, we connected with an upstart digital agency that offered us office space and a small retainer. In exchange, we promised that our small squad of editors and freelancers would serve as the company’s on-call editorial team. Apparently, this agency wanted to do something called content marketing.

It was new to me, but as I soon learned, it was new to everyone. The concept—creating entertaining and informative stories for brands so that they could connect with people online—made enough sense. And if they wanted to pay us real money to make this stuff, who was I to argue? After all, I’d graduated into The Great Recession. I never became a journalism purist because all of the pure journalism jobs were gone.

Back then, content marketing was barely on anyone’s radar. I was lucky to get into it early while I could learn on the job as the industry evolved. There were young journalists, like me, who got in the game for a steady paycheck and came to love marketing. There are marketers who transformed their careers. With each passing year, we’ve matured and discovered what works through trial and error.

It used to feel like you could hire anyone to run your content marketing program because no one knew what the hell to do. That’s definitely not the case now. Over the past few years, a new class of creatives has come to learn the ins-and-outs of content marketing. As I survey the industry today, the big differentiator that all successful brands have is people who actually know what they’re doing.

Which leads us to our first big trend of 2017…

1. The content marketing talent war

A few years ago, I predicted that a rash of editors would defect to content marketing programs. That came to fruition at a few companies like Casper, Harry’s, athenahealth, Starbucks, and Coca-Cola, but we never experienced the kind of mass exodus I had in mind.

I never became a journalism purist because all of the pure journalism jobs were gone.

When I made the prediction, I overlooked something important: It’s easy for journalists to freelance for a brand, but it’s another thing for a journalist to work every day inside a brand newsroom. You have to be ready to learn new business lingo and navigate bureaucracy full of silos that stand in the way of everything you want to accomplish. It’s not uncommon for an editor to take a content marketing job, only to discover that she has no control over the email newsletter, social channels, or paid distribution budget.

You can’t succeed just on great editorial instincts. You also need the patience, business acumen, and interpersonal skills to execute your plan. Most people don’t have this unicorn skill set, so they return to the media world or settle for lucrative one-off freelance assignments. There is, however, a special class of creatives who have successfully worked inside content marketing programs and know how to get the job done. In 2017, brands will battle to find and hire this talent.

Look for everyone to start poaching from T Brand Studio and other successful content marketing outlets. This war won’t just be about money, though; the brands that commit to editorial independence will secure the best young content creators. These changes, more than anything, will lead to an improvement in the quality of branded content in 2017.

2. An obsession with 5 percent content

I’ve mentioned this stat before: In September, a study by Beckon found that the top 5 percent of branded content accounts for 90 percent of all engagement.

Some people have used this stat to argue that content marketing is a risky or failed venture. Smarter folks, however, see it as an opportunity: If you create something really good, you’ll monopolize consumer attention relative to your competitors.

The best brand newsrooms will take this stat, stick it on their wall, and force themselves to ask one question about every piece of content they create—is this a 5 percent piece?

This year, I expect to see the long-overdue demonization of the puffy filler that infects most content marketing programs: mediocre blog posts, generic e-books, self-promotional press releases dressed up as native ads. Instead of just peddling busy work, smart marketers will focus on creating exceptional content that drives widespread sharing, earned media, and audience loyalty.

3. Short video optimized for Facebook

Bold and daring, I know.

At this point, stating that video is going to be a big trend is like predicting that Donald Trump will tweet something insane about China, or that a Silicon Valley CEO will say something cluelessly sexist. It’s not speculation. It’s expected. The more important question is what kind of video will take off?

Brands are doing enough video, but they’re doing it wrong. The majority of branded video consists of 30-second spots repurposed on Facebook or YouTube. If a clip is produced just for the web, it’s often something that no human being would want to watch. I’d rather stand on the corner of Broadway and Houston and ask tourists to slap me with hot dogs than watch some 15-minute interview with a bank’s VP of financial services.

In 2017, we’ll finally start to see brands emulate the video tactics that have worked so well, particularly on Facebook, for media companies: short motion-graphic explainers, like the ones created by Vox; how-to videos that immediately capture your attention; spoofs of social dynamics made popular by the likes of BuzzFeed and The LAD Bible.

Brands don’t need to break the bank to create these videos. And they’ll soon learn that these clips are a lot more effective than giving Bob from accounting his 15 minutes of fame.

4. A renewed focus on paid media

No brand would ever create a commercial, plop it online somewhere, and just expect people to find it. You need to make some media buys, secure airtime and online impressions, and give it a chance to make an impact. Yet, when it comes to content marketing, too many organizations have little or no paid media support.

The work just sits there, gathering digital dust.

Since so many content teams exist in companies with silos, they may be in charge of creating and publishing content, but they’re cut off completely from most mechanisms of getting it out there. As a result, the work just sits there, gathering digital dust.

This year, we’ll see marketing heads finally realize that this system is an utterly bizarre way to run a marketing operation. The smart decision-makers will set aside a large, dedicated budget to promote their content marketing on Facebook, Outbrain, Twitter, and other platforms. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: If you’re going to spend $500 to create a piece of content, it only makes sense to spend $50 to ensure that twice as many people see it. (Or hell, another $500 to make sure that ten times as many people see it.) If paid distribution isn’t at least 25 percent of your content marketing budget, you’re doing something wrong.

5. Custom ROI formulas

I’ve spent years trying to crack the code on content marketing ROI. It’s something I have to help our clients do, but it’s also something I need to figure out to justify our own content efforts on The Content Strategist.

Over the past year, I’ve come to a conclusion: There’s no universal formula for content marketing ROI.

While there are general frameworks you can follow, there are also some measurements that will likely be very specific to your brand. This year, for instance, we’re using Clearbit to track how we’re reaching our target audience (by company size, industry, etc.) in a very granular way. While we grew our audience to several million readers in 2016, our focus in 2017 is increasing our audience size in specialized groups, such as Fortune 500 finance companies.

I expect companies across the content marketing industry to improve their ROI game this year as well. My confidence comes from trusting the people running those content marketing operations. (For instance, check out this existential content ROI thread by Coca-Cola content head Doug Busk.) After a half-decade in this industry, we’ve figured things out. It’s no longer guesswork. It’s game on.

The post The Talent War, and Other Big Content Marketing Trends for 2017 appeared first on Contently.

The question is: What does content maturation actually look like?

According to Altimeter’s new report, “The 2016 State of Digital Content,” there are several key factors that go into creating a well-oiled content machine. Let’s take a look at a few of the most important components.

A unified content strategy

This might seem intuitive, but it’s crucial to have a clear and documented content strategy—especially if you want to get other departments on board with content marketing.

As the Content Marketing Institute found in its annual study, those who document their strategy are more effective in nearly all facets of their content marketing operation. And yet, Altimeter reported that less than half of marketers can confidently point to a unified strategy within their company.

Your content plan should outline your objectives, target audiences, market research, and key resources needed to carry out your operation. With these points clearly documented, each department can understand how content feeds the company’s big-picture goals, and how different employees can contribute.

Support from leadership

In order to get backing from the C-suite, content marketers have to prove how their strategies will impact the bottom line. As Sam Slaughter, Contently’s VP of content, wrote of the clash between creative and business teams: “The larger challenge isn’t just marketing against content marketing, it’s how marketing and content support the front-line teams in general.”

However, only 39 percent of content marketers reported having full support from executive leaders. Unsurprisingly, 35 percent said that their biggest content challenge is winning that support.

If marketers can gain executives’ trust, they will have opportunities to propose budget increases, bring other departments into the mix, make new hires, and take risks on ambitious projects in order to reach their goals.

Integration with multiple departments

When you’re running a mature content operation, the creative process is about more than just one person or even one team. Other departments, such as product and sales, should be able to contribute their own valuable perspectives through blog posts, webinars, etc. This way, customers will see your brand as more open, honest, and transparent.

Perhaps that’s why the top priority for marketers in 2017 is developing a content strategy that unifies departments across an enterprise.

Meanwhile, those who already have a content-enabled enterprise broke down the impact of each department. Internally, data/analytics, executive/C-suite, and content teams top the list of teams that lead content development. Corporate communications, market research, and social teams were the most common teams that participated in strategy development.

Data-driven insights

While almost all companies (99 percent) use data to inform their content strategies, many are still figuring out how to take insights from different sources and deliver a unified customer experience.

It’s no wonder, then, that 67 percent of marketers say data analysis is the most important skill for content strategists to have in 2017—even above content editing and writing skills.

Additionally, only 35 percent of companies claim they can deliver personalized content. As the report states, this is surprising given that the technology needed to serve personalized content exists. It seems marketers either don’t realize they need to distribute personalized content or can’t afford the resources that will help them do it.

Measurable ROI

Here’s a sad stat: Only 39 percent of marketers can link their content to incoming revenue, and 55 percent struggle to prove the content’s impact on their business. Capturing this data is crucial, not just because it can show value to executives, but also because it will help the company as a whole understand the importance of content.

People are still using vanity metrics (or as Altimeter calls them, “marketing-focused metrics”) to gauge the success of their content. For instance, they’re probably racking up spreadsheets of pageviews, likes, shares, and impressions. Those metrics aren’t useless, but they only scratch the surface. In order to truly understand content performance, you need to dig in and calculate metrics like conversions, direct sales, and cost per lead.

This chart illustrates why it’s important to look at how metrics influence each other. For instance, you can’t get executive support without a solid content strategy, and you can’t measure true ROI without integrated data sources.

Perhaps that’s why marketers like to use the analogy of a well-oiled machine. If you’re running a mature content operation, all the parts work together to serve a cohesive unit. It may take some time to reach that point, but eventually, if you put the work in and take the necessary steps, your content operation should start running smoothly and delivering results for your brand.

The post Altimeter Study: How to Know When You Have a Mature Content Operation appeared first on Contently.

I was reading about the glacial history of New York City the other day. Fifty thousand years ago, a sheet of ice one thousand feet thick sat right on top of the five boroughs. Its far end extended down across Brooklyn and Queens, pushing soil, boulders, and anything else in its path up into a huge mound.

It’s fascinating how a glacier that disappeared tens of thousands of years ago still affects millions of people today. When the ice melted, the ridge of debris at its far end remained and is now the home of neighborhoods with names like Crown Heights, Bay Ridge, and Jamaica Hills.

Here’s where my marketing brain kicks in:

The way a glacier moves feels a bit like lead nurturing. (Or at least, lead nurturing in a perfect world.) In this metaphor, the ice serves as our nurturing efforts, pushing leads along with the overwhelming weight of our email prowess. The process might be slow, but the boulders in our path are powerless to our brilliant marketing.

But, truth be told, we’re less like a glacier and more like a wave crashing on the shore. Sure, we pick up a few shells as we move, but a vast majority of the sand we roll over stays put. A good number of the shells we push forward get sucked back out to sea as the next wave rolls in.

Marketing automation software is a powerful tool, but many of the companies that use the software to create nurture campaigns attempt to turn leads into customers through brute force.

Ultimately, consumers are the ones paying the price. Nurture emails that are barely distinguishable from seedy spam messages stuff our inboxes. In a must-read piece from Velocity Partners, Doug Kessler said we shouldn’t even call it “nurturing,” since that’s not what we’re doing:

“For the rest, you may call what you’re doing ‘nurturing’ but it’s really just blabbing, spamming, small-talking and, at best, influencer-stroking.”

Ouch.

Conventional wisdom tells us to put new subscribers in a drip campaign, send some product-focused content, wait for them to click on a pricing page, and then have a salesperson cold call them as they’re about to eat lunch.

But is that working?

The answer seems to be a resounding “meh.” Only one-fifth of B2B marketers consider their lead nurturing efforts to be “very successful” and content effectiveness consistently ranks as a top challenge for marketers.

This would seem to indicate a disconnect between desired and achieved outcomes.

So what does a successful nurture program look like? And more importantly, what can marketers do to be more successful?

Automate or prospect?

Nothing warms the cockles of a CEO’s heart like hearing the words “automate” and “scale.” Lead nurturing lends itself well to automation; many of the tasks involved are repetitive, and an automated process allows you to test hypotheses and improve your methods.

“The biggest benefit of automated lead nurturing is the mass personalization that it enables across the entire lifecycle of a prospect or customer,” said Gabe Paley, former senior manager of marketing operations at InsightSquared and current deputy data director for the Colorado Democratic Party.“It’s no secret that you’ll have more success getting someone’s attention if you can market to them as individuals.”

For most companies, some form of automated nurturing is a necessary part of a sustainable business model. With constant pressure to keep acquisition costs down, a well-planned nurture strategy is a great way for marketers to free up time. Automated nurture campaigns can also react to customer behaviors instantly, and we know that timing matters with leads generated online.

Still, an automated process has its drawbacks.

“The downsides to automated lead nurturing come in their complexity and the potential for error that that complexity causes,” Paley said, “Creating hyper-specific segments in your email marketing program is great, but when you have twenty to thirty segments, it’s nearly impossible to make sure everything is going swimmingly and everyone is getting the right emails.”

Low barriers to entry mean that more brands, from Etsy shops to multinational corporations, send automated nurture emails. Prospects are inundated with automated messages from brands, so their guard is often up when checking email. Besides giving marketers a bad name, this impersonal touch can make things a bit tricky for salespeople when it’s time to connect.

“The good thing about automated lead nurture is that it actually gets done, versus leaving it to chance that you remember it,” said Scott Britton, sales expert and co-founder of the CRM chatbot tool Troops, “But sometimes, it can come off as impersonal and canned, which never engenders the same rapport as a personalized note.”

An alternative to a fully automated nurture program could be an inbound prospecting system, in which SDRs research new contacts that look at content, connect with them to learn about their needs, and filter them into a nurture campaign based on that prospect’s timeline and pain points.

This is a more labor-intensive (and costly) process. While much of that work can be outsourced, it does increase customer acquisition costs and eat into margins—which can present problems for companies attempting to scale their marketing machine. But this approach does allow you to actively pursue opportunities rather than waiting for a prospect to display interest.

But even this strategy requires a certain level of lead intelligence and automation. SDRs need to gauge, at a minimum, if a lead is in the general ballpark of their target market. For B2B brands, this typically means knowing job title, industry, and company size.

“If you aren’t able to discern this with data in an easy way, you should focus on improving that process to help an SDR more easily make the decision to reach out,” Britton said.

But what if we could reliably predict this information without manual prospecting?

Lead scoring

The difference between an effective and an ineffective lead nurturing strategy often comes down to good lead scoring.

The temptation for many marketers is to put all top-of-the-funnel leads into a nurture and let the ones who are a good fit naturally flow to the bottom. But this spray-and-pray approach ignores buyer context and personalization.

Here’s Kessler again in his piece on nurturing:

“An awful lot of B2B demand generation teams are still doing intensive marketing automation without actually scoring their leads. That’s just spamming while wearing a white lab coat.”

It’s impossible to create a recipe for scoring that works for every company, but there is a resource marketers can use to get insight into what triggers a prospect to move down the pipeline: your existing customers.

“The first step in identifying buying behavior is (surprise!) to study the behaviors of your existing customers as they went through the buying process,” Paley said. “This will be different for every company.”

At InsightSquared, the team realized people who downloaded one of their free apps were far more likely to become paying customers, but rarely was that action the first step they took. Rather than pushing leads immediately toward a purchase or even a free app download, Paley said they identified the behaviors that led up to that stage and created stories to encourage those behaviors.

Metrics and behaviors that indicate fit or product interest could include standard qualifying data like job titles, industry, and company size, but an automated nurturing program should also take into account things like website pageviews, email engagement, social media engagement, referral source, and other types of data.

Once you learn this information, you can then run experiments that replicate your buyer segment in a scalable way—things like retargeting campaigns across social media and banner ads, event invitations, special offers, and more.

It’s also important to note that this path is rarely simple or clean. Nurture campaigns are often complex and segmented, and feature multiple paths that require careful planning. You may want to get product-focused content in front of prospects as quickly as possible, but there are other steps to take first that can make or break a nurture program.

What to send and when

Content marketing allows you to remain engaged with prospects across long buying cycles.

Unfortunately, poorly calibrated nurturing programs can spoil that engagement. Consumers now have more control over advertising exposure, and that often means opting for a lot less of it: adblockers are increasing in popularity, Facebook users can customize their ad preferences, and people will just unsubscribe from a newsletter if a brand emails them too frequently.

This landscape paints a pretty bleak picture for marketers hoping to move a prospect down their pipeline, and reiterates the importance of helpful, targeted content.

“You wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on the first date.”

“These prospects are valuable but are at the top of your sales funnel, so you want to treat them as such and warm them up by showing them relevant information,” Paley said. “You wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, and neither should you be advertising your pricing plans to someone who hasn’t demonstrated even initial interest in your product.”

This system will differ depending on the type of lead. Some may land on your blog, explore a product page, and request a demo all in one sitting. Others may subscribe and read for months before taking the time to look at your product. There will also be people in your market who never buy from you but still want to consume your content.

It’s important to plan for each of these segments. For prospects who still have time before they’re ready to make a purchase decision, educational content can help you build relationships and stay top of mind.

“The key at this stage is to build trust in your product and your team by offering value in the form of education about your core competency,” Paley said, “Let’s say I’m thinking about buying a house for the first time but am nervous about the wide variety of options as well as my lack of expertise in this area. I google around and land on a real estate website that has written about ‘How to tell if the time is right to buy your first home.’ If that company then maintains that relationship with me and keeps in touch through periodic email updates or retargeted ads, I’ll be more likely to remember them and call them up when I’m farther along the buying process.”

Even though email frequency can cause consumers to unsubscribe from newsletters, readers do still want to hear from relevant brands on a semi-regular basis (weekly or monthly).

The key is making sure those messages stay relevant to their needs. This is no easy task, but a well-planned automation strategy can keep that relationship between buyer and seller healthy. Marketing automation tools can help you identify the topics specific users click on the most and send them content that matches their interests.

Rolling down the river

Ultimately, a successful nurture program can be measured on a single scale: revenue.

“If your nurture programs generate lots of leads but you can’t tell whether those leads are becoming customers, it’s difficult to call those programs successful,” Paley said.

Revenue metrics should extend beyond customers. You should include things like upsells, renewals/retention, and buying timeline. While growing an engaged audience is great, it’s important to keep a pulse on these lower-funnel metrics in order to prove content ROI and make a case for further funding and support.

While most brands will never become a marketing glacier, forcibly moving everything in their path, we can aspire to be more than repetitive waves. Instead, our nurture campaigns could resemble river systems—smaller tributaries feeding into your larger customer segment, consistently and predictably flowing and delivering value downstream.

The post How to Fix a Broken Lead Nurturing Strategy appeared first on Contently.

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

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

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

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

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

How agile applies to marketing

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

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

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

With fewer dependencies, we got more work done.

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

Here’s how we visualize our agile squad structure:

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

1. The unicorn problem

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

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

2. The “creative at scale” problem

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

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

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

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

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

The scene has changed dramatically since then. In the last year alone, the number of marketing technology companies has grown 94 percent, to 3,874 vendors and counting. That’s a 2,482 percent increase since 2011.

Understanding marketing technologies—and how they work together in a stack—has become a critical part of any marketer’s job. There are even competitions, like The Stackies, that judge the best ones. But as the exponential increase in technologies suggests, building a marketing stack is more complicated than ever.

At Contently, people regularly ask us questions like: How do you build your stack? How does your content translate into actual business? So, in an effort to share our knowledge with the rest of the industry, we’re going to reveal how our martech stack works. But before we begin, let’s go over why marketing stacks are so damn important.

What is a marketing stack and why should I care?

A marketing stack can be intimidating, but it’s really a simple concept at its core. Basically, it includes the different technologies you use during your marketing process, from the first time a prospect encounters your brand to that final sale.

Creating, managing, and improving a stack is critical to marketing success. Without a stack, you might as well use a tally system and just guess how effective your content is. Without an efficient, integrated, and optimized one, you’re just wasting your money.

So how do you build a stack?

1. You first have to understand your goals. Buying tools won’t help if you don’t have a strategy in place.

2. You need to consider the framework of your entire marketing ecosystem, as well as the individual tools that will power it. Then you need to figure out how these tools will work together.

3. You need to ensure that each marketing solution tracks results. If there is no way to prove the ROI of your efforts, there is no way to justify them. (Your boss won’t be happy if you can’t back up the purpose of that software that costs $4,000 per month.)

Marketing stacks can look very different depending on a company’s priorities. Scott Brinker, editor of ChiefMartec, simplifies marketing stacks into four categories: suite, platform, multi-platform, and bus.

According to Brinker, most martech companies began as a suite: a single solution provided by one vendor. This suite model eventually gave way to the platform, as leading vendors developed software that also allow for additional plug-ins. Think of it like a web browser that you can trick out with various technologies—with companies like Salesforce, Marketo, Oracle, Adobe, IBM, Act-On, and HubSpot stabilizing your add-ons.

However, these platforms typically weren’t enough on their own, particularly for larger enterprise companies. As a result, two additional models emerged.

One is the multi-platform model, in which several big martech platforms interact. For example, a company might rely on Salesforce for managing the sales process, HubSpot for inbounding, Adobe for content, and so on. These large platforms vary wildly in their ability to communicate with each other.

The other model is the bus, which emerged partly as a response to the multi-platform model. The bus unites many tools—but in this case, one technology connects the data between all platforms. Brinker refers to this guiding technology as a “marketing middleware” that “specialize[s] the flow of data across platforms.” It’s a lot like an operating system for your various marketing programs.

Brinker’s topologies are a helpful way to conceptualize how brands can bucket their marketing technologies. Whether or not you fit into one of these four frameworks, the important takeaway is that a brand’s stack will ultimately depend on specific company goals.

The buyer’s journey

Every person has a unique experience with a brand. The process (to use an established metaphor) resembles dating: Even if you date the same person that your best friend swiped right on last month, your experience will be different.

Some leads have that instantaneous connection with a brand. Others take more time to nurture. Some play hard to get, only to find what they wanted was in front of them all along. In each case, the technology in a stack tracks the user’s behavior and manages the brand’s response to this behavior.

Let’s examine the journey of one hypothetical lead through Contently’s stack.

Drake becomes a Contently lead

Drake, the CMO of a Fortune 500 enterprise company, wants to launch a content marketing initiative. He starts this process on Google, searching “how to build a content team.” He clicks on one of the top three articles: “How to Build a Culture of Content and Transform Your Marketing.”

A few days go by, and Drake is served a retargeted sponsored ad on Facebook. He clicks on the new article, “Why Cisco Is Hiring 200 Content Marketers.” Drake is so delighted with the article that he shares it on Twitter and decides to follow Contently.

While on Twitter, another article takes Drake back to The Content Strategist. He decides it’s time to sign up for Contently’s weekly newsletter. Later that week, Drake receives an email from Jess at Contently with the subject line “How to Staff an Amazing Content Team.” He clicks through and fills out a form to download the e-book.

Ten days later, the newest edition of Contently’s print magazine, Contently Quarterly: The Summer 2016 Issue, arrives at his office door. He reads an interview with Glenn Greenwald and continues on to a story about how Marriott is growing its multimedia studio. A week later, the Quarterly is still on Drake’s desk when he gets an email from Luke, who works on the sales team.

Over the course of the sales cycle, Drake will receive Contently content to stay top of mind and accelerate the sale. Drake’s trajectory at this point depends on his budget, authority, and the needs of his organization. He may, for example, access one of our recent webinars through On24 (a software platform) that’s relevant to his pain points.

If Drake’s budget gets cut or his board decides to revert to traditional marketing tactics, Drake will be added to a “win-back” campaign through Marketo, where he is served valuable content to keep Contently fresh in his mind. For the purposes of this story, let’s say Luke successfully closed the deal and earned a hefty commission.

What martech systems were at play?

From that first search to that final phone call, there were many marketing technologies at play. Here is breakdown of how our software tools impacted Drake’s journey and prompted action.

Contently: The blog post Drake first found was produced on Contently’s content marketing platform. After responding to a pitch from a freelancer on our talent network, our editorial team assigned, created, and edited the story using the Contently workflow system. Prior to the publication of this article, we used Contently Analytics to determine the right topic, format, and tone for prospects looking to build their content team. We also have custom fields for keywords, images, tags, and meta descriptions that help boost SEO once an article goes to the next step.

WordPress: Once the story was complete, our senior editor pushed the story directly to Contently Live, our custom CMS. Contently Live is a WordPress template that’s integrated with Contently’s platform and helps increase lead generation.We ideate, produce, and optimize editorial content on the Contently platform, but everything we publish is hosted on Contently Live.

Google Webmaster Tools, Moz, Screaming Frog: Since Drake came from an organic search, Google AdWords wasn’t involved in this case. Instead, prior to Drake’s search, we used several SEO tools to help us rank organically.

AdRoll: We were able to reach Drake on Facebook with retargeted ads served from AdRoll.

Buffer: On Twitter, we tapped into Buffer analytics to ensure Drake saw organic Twitter posts at the most likely point of engagement.

SumoMe: Back on The Content Strategist, Drake was prompted to sign up for the weekly newsletter with a pop-up inspiring him to subscribe.

Campaign Monitor: The newsletter was compiled and sent through our email service provider (ESP), Campaign Monitor, which integrates with Marketo and Salesforce, and allows us to segment audiences by location, industry, department, and title.

Marketo: Drake officially entered the Marketo lead database after he filled out the lead form to download the e-book. Here, our marketing team tracked all of his interactions with Contently content.

Document Analytics: Once Drake began reading the document, we tracked his engagement on every page, using the Document Analytics feature on our platform. Once we saw where Drake spent most of his time scrolling and clicking, we could share more relevant content and prepare the sales team with insights on his behavior for a future call.

SalesPredict, Clearbit: After Drake was in Marketo, he went through a series of tools that helped us determine how qualified he was as a lead. SalesPredict looked at Drake’s demographics and prior behavior with Contently, and assigned him a lead score. Clearbit, which appends additional data points like company name, location, job title, and other public information, gave further context to Drake’s value.

Print for Less (PFL): We used this direct-mail service to send Drake The Contently Quarterly.

Salesforce: We pushed Drake into Salesforce, where he was assigned to Luke. In Salesforce, Luke could track each interaction with Drake.

On24: During Luke’s nurturing process, we used On24 to serve Drake relevant webinars.

Here is a helpful diagram that illustrates how different tools helped move Drake down the funnel:

How did they work together?

If we follow Brinker’s topography, Drake made his way through our multi-platform stack. At Contently, four marketing technologies guide our stack: Contently, WordPress, Marketo, and Salesforce. From there, a variety of SaaS services work with one or more of these central technologies.

As the source of our content production and analytics, Contently is the focal point between these main players—pushing content (WordPress), servicing marketing initiatives (Marketo), and empowering sales communication (Salesforce). The key is the different elements of our tech stacks are never isolated during a lead’s journey.

Tracking everything this way ensures we connect content to ROI. Without an integrated system to record the interaction between Contently and Drake, it would have been impossible to attribute a particular piece of content to the eventual sale.

As content marketers for a content marketing platform, it is critical we understand the value of each piece of content as it relates to a sale. Our stack makes that possible. In fact, it generates 10x ROI, based on findings from our marketing, editorial, and sales teams. (There is no better feeling than when a sales director tells you that your creative project was worth over $100,000 in ROI).

It’s important to note that while these are the hypothetical tools used in Drake’s journey, this is not an exhaustive list of our marketing technology. It is also not a fixed stack. As our needs develop, so will our stack.

(Editor’s note: Our senior marketing operations manager would like me to make clear that this post is not an open invitation for vendor solicitation.)

Started from the bottom

Whether you follow the suite, platform, multi-platform, or bus stack model, a seamless relationship between technology and content is often the difference between complete confusion and meaningful ROI.

While the explosion of marketing technology might make it harder to determine which solutions to invest in—there are thousands, after all—it also means technology exists to solve almost any problem you can think of.

In the words of Drake: What a time to be alive.

The post How We Built Our Content Marketing Stack to Drive 10x ROI appeared first on Contently.

Oh, how much has changed. Since then, I finally hit puberty. More importantly, the interest graph in content marketing took an upswing that’s only been matched by people Googling “American move to Canada or maybe France?”

As the content marketing industry has evolved, so has the sophistication of the questions people ask about it. People tweeted us dozens of questions during The Contently Summit, and we didn’t get a chance to answer them all on stage. So for this edition of “Ask a Content Guy,” I decided to answer the best ones.

advice on maintaining unique engaging voice while navigating bureaucracy and adhering to more rigid corporate brand rules? #contentlysummit

— dj (@djhalp) October 13, 2016

How should traditional/conservative industries try to introduce engaging, innovative and appealing content?? #contentlysummit

— Amy DeCicco (@ADMktg) October 13, 2016

These two questions go together since it’s really hard to create engaging content without an appealing brand voice. There’s a reason Siri doesn’t tell bedtime stories.

At Contently, we work with a lot of brands in conservative or technical industries, such as finance, insurance, healthcare, and B2B technology. In these industries, there are a few common misconceptions that can sabotage a content marketing program from the onset:

1. We conflate being dry and boring with being authoritative.

A lot of us learn a bad habit in high school and college, which is that if you want to write something authoritative, you have to be dry, pedantic, and just not very fun to read.

That’s insane. As a content marketer, you want to tell stories people actually enjoy. You don’t want to make it difficult for them to learn something from you, especially when the subject is technical or complex.

Just look at the publishers that do a really good job of making dense topics go viral. Vox is one of my favorites. It takes subjects that have the potential to be really difficult to understand and makes them accessible to the masses. For example, watch this explainer on the war in Syria, which uses colloquial narration and strong visual cues to break down the conflict. In the wrong hands, it would be incredibly dry and boring. In Vox’s hands, it’s been viewed over 3 million times and went viral on Facebook.

This doesn’t mean banks and insurance companies should start using “on fleek” and calling their audience “fam” in an attempt to mimic a millennial-friendly publisher. They should establish an intelligent, friendly voice that fits their brand. But they should also learn from the storytelling tactics that work for publishers like Vox, BuzzFeed News, and The New York Times.

Another favorite example of mine is Margot Robbie explaining mortgage-backed securities in The Big Short, which won last year’s Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. I know that a video of Margot Robbie in a bubble bath probably isn’t getting approved by most big banks. But it illustrates how to take a boring topic and explain it in a way that captures people’s attention and helps them learn something.

2. We don’t define our brand voice, and we don’t have anyone on the hook for maintaining it.

This simple step often gets skipped, but you should actually go through the trouble of defining your brand voice. Come to a consensus. Write it down. And then educate the rest of the company on what it is.

If you need help defining that voice, content strategist Melissa Lafsky wrote a helpful two-part guide on how to craft your brand voice. (Read it here and here.)

Finally, have someone on the hook for approving every piece of content that you publish. As I outlined in our content methodology report, your content workflow should look something like the diagram below. One person should be in charge of green-lighting each story and pressing publish when it’s ready to go live.

3. We don’t make the easy sell.

Case studies! Use them. There are are so many case studies of brands that think outside the box and create rich, engaging content in traditionally stuffy industries. Three of my favorites:

• GE Reports
• American Express OPEN Forum
• athenahealth

It’s way easier to get approval to take risks when you show that other people are already having success. Trust me, it works.

#contentlysummit top tips for energizing a small team already underwater with client work to dig into thought leadership content creation?

— Amanda Story (@Amanda_Story) October 13, 2016

To start, content needs to be a priority. If you put 17 client tasks on someone’s plate and then say, “If you can write that post about ROI for the blog, that’d be great too!,” the post for your blog will always be the thing that gets pushed off.

On the other hand, if you make writing a story one of the most important things someone on your team has to accomplish that week, then they’ll write it.

That’s easier said than done, but it helps to consider the hidden value of thought leadership content. “Thought leadership” is an overused—and often misused—term, but when it’s done right, you get a lot more out of it than a blog post. Sitting down to think critically about a problem and writing about the solution is an incredibly valuable exercise. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve written a thought leadership post about a content marketing topic and figured out how we could improve internally as a result.

Take, for instance, this post on the five rings of marketing ROI by Sam Slaughter, our vice president of content. This post inspired us to expand some of the metrics we tied to content, and it’s helped justify our investment in content to our execs.

If you want to energize your team, you also have to make sure that the audience reads what the employees write. That means having a strong content distribution strategy. See this “Ask a Content Guy” column for some tactics that’ll help you up your distro game.

#ContentlySummit what arguments would you use convince sales-focused execs to look @ audience growth & engagement metrics, not NMRR?

— Tai Nicolopoulos (@tainicolopoulos) October 13, 2016

I really hope that NMRR stands for “new monthly recurring revenue” and not something like “non-monetizing Russian roulette,” or else this answer is going to be really off.

Let’s be real, most CEOs and CFOs don’t care a ton about audience growth metrics. The key to effective content measurement is tying your metrics back to business goals that they do care about. In other words, your content objectives and content metrics should derive from your company’s larger business goals.

Another effective tactic is to explain the five rings of marketing ROI. Direct revenue from content is certainly an important ROI metric, but it’s just the center of the bull’s-eye.

We break down how to measure each ring here; I encourage you to check it out and reach out if you have any questions.

How (and how much) should quality storytellers think about content distribution & targeting? #contentlysummit

— Katie S. Sanders (@KatieSSanders) October 13, 2016

A lot—content creation and distribution shouldn’t be separate thought processes. From the moment you come up with a story idea, you should think about the platform you’re going to use and the audience you’re hoping to reach. When hiring your content team, make sure they understand that.

Otherwise, you’re going to end up posting a 30-minute video to Facebook of a pasty, washed-out financial advisor explaining mortgage-backed securities. You don’t have to watch The Big Short to know that no one wants to see that.

If you have a question for next month’s column, please submit it here. You can also tweet me @JoeLazauskas or send me a Snapchat of a puppy playing checkers. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to figure out what you’re asking.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do You Create Good Content in a Boring Industry? appeared first on Contently.