Now, there are two ways to explain this coincidence. 1) Henry is currently a popular name for boys, so the advertisers looked at a baby name list and decided to put Henry on their ads. 2) Facebook and Instagram tracked my online behavior and created tailored ads to increase clicks and conversions.

And the correct explanation is option 2 — targeted advertising!

While this level of personalization may seem creepy and invasive, it can actually make the shopping experience more convenient, especially for people with a son named Henry. And for that, I thank Meta Ads.

But is targeted advertising always this effective?

As many times as I’ve had a smooth shopping experience after clicking on targeted ads, I’ve also been served wonky ads that made me think, “Why in the world did this company target me?”

Before we can conclusively determine the effectiveness of targeted advertising, let’s define what it is.

What is targeted advertising?

Targeted advertising is a form of online advertising that specifically caters to a particular audience based on its characteristics, interests, or behaviors. This allows businesses to reach potential customers who are interested in their products or services.

However, audiences aren’t defined by just one characteristic, which is why advertisers can use different types of targeting to reach their intended audience.

Demographic targeting — Targeting based on factors like age, gender, income, and education.

Geographic targeting — Targeting based on location, such as city, state, or country.

Behavioral targeting — Targeting based on a user’s online behavior, such as browsing history, search history, or purchase history.

Psychographic targeting — Targeting based on personality traits, values, and lifestyles.

Businesses love targeted website advertising because it allows them to deliver more relevant ads, effectively allocate their advertising budget, improve their ROI, and enhance the customer experience. Yep, even though targeted ads can feel like an invasion of privacy, personalized promotions actually improve customer satisfaction.

How can targeted advertising be used for content marketing?

Targeted advertising can be a powerful tool to maximize the impact and reach of your content marketing strategy. Essentially, content marketing provides the substance, while targeted advertising ensures the substance reaches the right audience. Together, they create a more effective and impactful marketing strategy.

But you have to make sure your targeting and content strategy work hand-in-hand to ensure a seamless experience for your customers. First, design ads that encourage users to click through to specific landing pages — blog posts, product pages, customer review pages, etc. Make sure your targeted ads on social media and search engines perfectly align with your landing page content, and visitors will be more likely to become customers.

This approach is all about creating consistency throughout the entire customer journey and can be used to promote high-performing content, retarget website visitors, promote a content series, support social media campaigns, and generate leads.

Is targeted advertising effective?

Here’s the big question: Do ads actually work? To answer that question, we need to look at the numbers:

In 2023, the value of global digital marketing reached $366 billion, and that number is expected to grow at a rate of 13.6% every year for the next decade. In fact, the majority of CMOs in the United States and Europe are planning to increase their budgets for social media marketing, online videos, and influencer marketing in addition to the 9.1% of total revenue spent in 2023.

The reason CMOs are willing to pour more money into digital and targeted advertising is because marketing data collection and analysis is getting more sophisticated every day, leading to more effective ad spend and higher ROI.

Targeted online advertising is only as effective as the advertiser. To create effective targeted advertising campaigns that reach the right audience, generate leads, and drive sales, businesses need to:

• Gather relevant data
• Analyze the data to identify trends
• Clearly define their target audience
• Develop targeted ads that resonate with their audience
• Select appropriate channels for their ads
• Test and optimize
• And monitor ad performance

Yes, you have to complete all these steps to ensure successful targeted advertising campaigns. And there are a lot of brands who are willing to do it right. And since I just got an “A deal picked just for you” alert on my phone from Amazon, let’s talk about how Amazon uses targeted ads to grow their business:

Amazon’s targeted advertising success

Amazon is a prime example of a company that has effectively leveraged targeted advertising to drive significant growth and revenue. Their targeted advertising strategies have been particularly successful in:

Personalized recommendations

Amazon uses a sophisticated algorithm to analyze customer purchase history, browsing behavior, and product reviews to provide highly personalized product recommendations. These targeted recommendations have led to a significant increase in sales, because customers are more likely to purchase products that align with their interests.

Retargeted campaigns

Amazon uses retargeting campaigns to engage customers with abandoned carts. By reminding customers of their abandoned carts and offering incentives, Amazon successfully increases conversion rates.

Lookalike audiences

Amazon expands its reach by creating lookalike audiences based on its high-value customers. By targeting users with similar characteristics, Amazon is able to acquire new customers who are more likely to complete purchases.

Dynamic product ads (DPAs)

DPAs allow Amazon to target specific products to users who have shown interest in similar items or categories. This targeted approach ensures customers see relevant products, increasing the likelihood of clicks and conversions.

What are the challenges and limitations of targeted advertising?

While targeted advertising offers many benefits, there are some potential challenges and limitations that business owners and marketers should be aware of.

Ethical concerns

Let’s be honest — data collection is creepy. “There is definitely a ‘creepy line’ for targeted advertisements,” says technologist and writer Robert Quinlivan. “We’re being slowly conditioned to accept privacy invasions as inevitable, but people are still creeped out by the ‘surprise’ factor.”

The collection and use of personal data for targeted advertising raises privacy concerns among consumers. The more personal the data (think sex, health, and finances), the less comfortable people are about others knowing it. For this reason, we now have stricter data privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, which have made the targeted advertising process more complex.

Ad fraud

Ad fraud occurs when bad actors put out bots — automated, fake users — to click on ads many times. These extra, fraudulent clicks fool companies into thinking their ads are working and puts more money in the pockets of advertising firms.

According to Imperva’s 2024 Bad Bot Report, “almost 50% of internet traffic comes from non-human sources. Bad bots, in particular, now comprise nearly one-third of all traffic.” What’s even scarier is that Bad Bots can now mimic human behavior, making it difficult to detect and prevent fraudulent clicks.

If you notice sudden traffic spikes, high bounce rates, or near-nonexistent session duration, reach out to your ad provider. You can also implement fraud prevention tools to ensure your clicks are coming from humans.

Over-targeting and ad fatigue

Over-targeting occurs when a business excessively targets a specific audience segment to the point where it becomes intrusive or irrelevant. This can lead to ad fatigue, a phenomenon where consumers become so overwhelmed by repeated exposure to the same ads that they tune them out. Excessive targeting can also lead to negative brand perception if consumers think a brand is spammy or intrusive.

You can prevent over-targeting and ad fatigue by focusing on multiple audiences and limiting your ad frequency. Also, be sure to track campaign performance to identify signs of ad fatigue, so you can make the necessary adjustments to ensure the best customer experience possible.

In short, targeted advertising is complex, and it’s not going anywhere. Yes, new regulations may make data collection more difficult, but targeted advertising has proven to effectively reach specific audiences, increase sales, maximize the impact of content marketing, and improve the customer experience. So, as you create your own targeted advertising campaigns, just remember: don’t be creepy.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about targeted advertising

What are the ethical concerns related to targeted advertising?

Targeted advertising relies on the collection and use of personal data, which can be seen as an invasion of privacy. And consumers may not be fully aware of how their data is collected and used for targeted advertising, creating a lack of trust among consumers. This problem becomes worse when businesses share personal data with third-party advertisers, which often happens.

How can businesses effectively measure the ROI of targeted advertising campaigns?

Here are the key metrics businesses should track and analyze to determine the effectiveness of their targeted advertising campaigns: click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), brand awareness and recall, and customer lifetime value (CLTV).

What are some future trends or developments in targeted advertising?

Targeted advertising is a rapidly evolving field with several promising trends, like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to help predict future customer behavior and preferences. Businesses will also need to adopt more privacy-focused approaches to data collection, so users can have greater control over their personal data.

For more insights on content strategy, subscribe to The Content Strategist. 

The post Targeted Advertising: Does it Actually Work? appeared first on Contently.

To avoid these common pitfalls that plague brands, you’ll need to add B2B research methods to your marketing toolkit. By uncovering key insights about your customers, you’ll not only understand what makes them tick, but you’ll also discover new opportunities to deliver a better customer experience.

There’s no doubt that companies who know their customers inside and out have a winning advantage. So, use these five B2B research methods to be more like Nike and less like Bud Light.

Why You Can’t Afford to Skip Customer Research

Customer research involves gathering data about your ideal consumers—who they are, what they want, and how you can help them.

The benefits are massive. Companies that conduct research into their customers at least once a quarter grow up to 70% faster and are nearly 50% more profitable than competitors that don’t.

Yet, why do so many companies—from startups to enterprises—skimp on it? It often comes down to three reasons:

• Missing expertise. Analyzing is not easy, so companies without the proper infrastructure or employees with relevant skills may skip it altogether.
• Insufficient buy-in. High-quality customer research can be expensive, which means it can take a lot of work to get executive buy-in. If leadership doesn’t understand the value of it, they may simply see it as an unnecessary expense rather than an investment.
• Lack of resources. Customer research can be a full-time task requiring significant buy-in, especially for enterprise organizations. When resources are limited, the job may fall onto marketers who, as we all know, are already inundated with neverending Slack pings and an infinite to-do list.

But unsurprisingly, not conducting customer research can be more costly in the long term. If you’re implementing ineffective strategies based on guesswork, your new product can end up collecting dust on a shelf or, even worse, in a roundup of the biggest product flops of the year.

5 Types of B2B Research Methods

Customer research doesn’t have to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are a plethora of ways to conduct audience research on a budget—the key is finding a method that aligns with your resources, timeline, and answers you’re hoping to find.

1. Online customer reviews

When you don’t have the resources to conduct one-on-one interviews, mining online customer reviews is a fantastic B2B research method—especially if you’re:

• A company with a tight marketing budget
• Needing to write killer landing page copy
• Hoping to gather unfiltered buyer opinions

For example, instead of writing marketing content from scratch by staring at a blank Google Doc, scouring through online reviews for your and your competitors’ products can reveal the perfect swipeable copy, honest buyer opinions, and why customers choose you.

Let’s say you’re writing social media posts or landing pages for the email marketing platform, ConvertKit. By saving the highlighted text in this review, you now have some ideas to begin crafting your high-converting, hard-hitting relatable messaging:

Where to find online reviews

The key to reaping the benefits of high-quality and reliable online reviews is knowing where to look—these are great starting places:

• Your website or your competitor’s website
• Third-party review sites like G2, TrustRadius, and GetApp
• Social media and niche communities like r/SkincareAddiction or r/nutrition—pro tip: services like GummySearch let you tap into conversations about your brand on Reddit
• Social listening tools like Hootsuite to track brand mentions

2. Surveys

There’s a reason we’re constantly bombarded with “How did we do?” emails after making a purchase or using a service—customer surveys work. In fact, they’re one of the easiest B2B research methods for collecting data at scale, particularly for:

• Companies with a large audience
• Brands seeking easy and cost-effective qualitative research
• Marketers needing answers to specific questions

That said, if you instinctively hit the “delete” button when receiving a survey request, you’re not alone. Consumers have gotten desensitized to these requests, which means it’s more important than ever for brands to nail their survey design by:

• Having a healthy balance of questions. Too many questions and survey takers will bounce. Too few, and you don’t have enough insight.
• Experimenting with the phrasing of questions. Phrase questions in a neutral manner so you don’t sway opinions. For example, you don’t want to include a question like, “Do you think X feature in our product is reducing your stress?” Instead, a better alternative might be, “What do you think of feature X in our product?”
• Avoid double-barreled questions. Ask about only one topic in each question.

3. Internal resources

You might have gold in your backyard without realizing it. Given that sales and customer success teams have direct access to customers, they probably have a goldmine of insight you’re not tapping into, especially when it comes to:

• Getting insight into existing customers
• Quickly finding what clicks the most with buyers
• Finding patterns in what your audience shares

Get started by asking your CS team about the common questions they hear to pinpoint your customers’ pain points, areas of confusion, and potential objections.

Pro tip: Tools like Gong and ChorusAI can help you search for keywords from sales calls. However, because you won’t be able to ask follow-up questions, you’ll want to listen to several calls or analyze many comments, emails, and support tickets to scope patterns.

4. Audience intelligence (AI) tools

AI is all the rage right now, and unsurprisingly, it’s one of the most effective ways to discover what your ideal customers are doing on the web. You can use AI-powered tools to find data around engagement, influences, interests, and more, making them great for:

• Gathering audience insights
• Analyzing a large audience
• Finding who and what influences your target audience

The best part? These tools remove the dissonance between what customers say they do versus what they actually do. Your ideal consumer might tell you they regularly read the New York Times, while in reality, they’ve simply skimmed a couple of articles recently to impress a Hinge match.

New AI tools are popping up every day, but here are the five you can begin with:

• SparkToro: Find out who your ideal customer follows on social channels, which websites they visit most, and what phrases they most frequently use.
• Audiense: Understand your customer segments, their personality and needs, and buying mindsets.
• Brandwatch: Measure customer sentiment, how you stack up to your competitors online, and your brand perception.
• Affogata: Track your industry’s social media trends, real-time customer feedback, and what your competitors are up to.
• StatSocial: Gather social media insights from your followers, a 360-degree view of your potential buyers, and demographic data.

5. Customer interviews

We’ve saved the best for last—the literal version of “Just talk to your customers!” Customer interviews are best for:

• Companies investing heavily in customer research
• Gaining in-depth insight into your customers’ buying journey, motivations, pain points, and more
• Forming a genuine connection with customers

But why should you invest in one-on-one interviews when there are so many other B2B research methods? Not only is it an opportunity to build a closer relationship with customers—but instead of dancing around what they’re clicking on and searching for, you can also hear about their buying motivations, needs, wants, priorities, and more directly, all while being able to ask crucial follow-up questions.

A Treasure Trove of Customer Data Awaits

Taking periodic pulse checks of customer sentiment is the best way to find what you’re doing right and what flaws you should improve upon. The more you know, the more prepared you will be to serve them best—so you can replace those pesky one- or two-star reviews with a flurry of five-star testimonials.

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

The post B2B Research Methods 101: How To Start Reading Customers’ Minds appeared first on Contently.

Customer behaviors only indicate what’s already happened. For example, you know, at some point, someone put an item in their cart but didn’t buy it.

When you have a pulse on what customers are feeling or their general sentiment, you can predict more accurately what will happen in the future — like guessing a certain product might flop. We’ll look at how to measure sentiment using examples from brands with successful programs.

What Is Sentiment?

Customer sentiment measures how people feel about you — specifically your brand, products, or marketing campaigns. Sentiment adds depth to your awareness measurement strategy by shedding light on why your audience might feel a certain way about you (positive or negative).

A sentiment analysis can lead to strategic marketing decisions that greatly benefit a company’s bottom line.

Take Old Spice, for example. They needed to refresh the feeling that their brand was just for older men and wanted to attract more millennials. They successfully changed sentiment towards their brand with celebrity partnerships and a very effective advertising strategy.

Every action a person takes on your website has a reason behind it, whether it’s a click, engaged page view, form fill, or purchase.

Sentiment allows you to understand why people take action.

Why Marketers Should Measure Sentiment

It’s not enough for people to know about a brand anymore. They’re much more likely to purchase if they feel emotionally connected to you. That’s why you need to know how to measure sentiment. It’s one way to measure that emotional connection and craft a story around data you’re already collecting.

For example, say traffic to one of your webinar landing pages is much higher than usual, dropping your conversion rate. It turns out the company you partnered with recently got some negative press, and that news outlet linked to your webinar page. Your conversion rate can be explained as a consequence of that negative press.

They can also help predict when future activities might not go as planned. Let’s say you plan to attend an industry event next year. Part of your presence there will be the launch of a series of NFTs for sale. Then, as the event approaches, sentiment around NFTs drops, just in time for your team to pivot to another incentive.

How to Measure Sentiment

The best way to measure sentiment is with direct feedback from your customers or audience, but you can also keep a pulse on conversations in public spaces. Let’s look at how to measure sentiment with examples from brands already doing it well.

1. Support Ticket Analysis and Customer Calls

If you have a system where customers can call you directly or submit a ticket to a support team, natural language processing (NLP) tools can help you analyze sentiment based on those customer calls.

Based on the specific phrasing your customers use, NLP determines whether or not the conversation was positive or negative and crunches that data at scale. NLP tools can even take it one step further and automatically take action to improve sentiment.

Puneet Mehta, founder and CEO of Netomi, has seen firsthand NLP and artificial intelligence’s (AI) ability to give detailed information about customers to agents in their call center in real time. It even suggests the most appropriate agent for each scenario.

When customers ask complex questions, the AI summarizes and routes tickets to the right agent based on experience, bandwidth, sentiment, and other factors. Not only does their NLP tool help measure sentiment, but it’s actively working to improve it with a more positive customer support experience.

2. Company and Product Reviews

The most valuable part of an online review is the written text. Just like conversations in a call center, you can measure their sentiment using NLP technology.

The British Airways Holidays team uses NLP technology to analyze review sentiment regularly. This allows them to understand their campaigns’ impact on sentiment and ensure they’re optimizing for activities to drive the largest revenue.

Before adopting an NLP tool, they analyzed reviews by manually exporting them and labeling each with topics like ease, quality, trust, or location. This may be a good solution if adopting a new tool isn’t in the cards. Plus, reading reviews yourself may allow you to connect the dots that technology wouldn’t. This is especially true for reviews that might include sarcasm or slang, which is harder for NLP tools to identify.

Whether you choose a tool or a manual solution, regularly analyzing review sentiment can be a powerful indicator of customer emotions.

3. Survey Your Database of Customers and Contacts

Reach out directly to your contact or customer list with a sentiment survey. You can quickly learn how customers feel about you with a few multiple-choice questions and a Google form.

SurveyMonkey used its own tool for research on the sparkling water industry. They asked respondents how they perceived sparkling water brands like La Croix, Spindrift, San Pellegrino, and Schweppes by asking what adjectives they would use to describe them.

They then analyzed sentiment to determine whether those words were positive or negative. Words like “refreshing,” “bubbly,” and “tasty” were considered positive, whereas words like “dry,” “unpleasant,” and “mediocre” were considered negative.

They found that 61 percent of respondents felt positive about Spindrift, while only 24 percent felt negative about the brand. On the other hand, 59 percent of respondents felt positive about San Pellegrino, but 32 percent actually felt negative.

With information like this, Spindrift might feel more comfortable developing products that directly compete with San Pellegrino or running an ad campaign that directly points out the differences between them and their competitor.

4. Social Listening Tools

Analyzing the conversation about your brand or products on social media platforms is another powerful way to measure sentiment. Tools like Mention or Buzzsumo can help you collect and analyze data about your brand or select relevant topics.

Doctors of the World works to deploy thousands of doctors, nurses, and reporters in areas of need, and part of their mission is to ensure the safety of those people.

They use social listening tools to measure the political and social sentiment in their regions of focus and quickly forward any relevant information to dispatched teams.

From a brand perspective, they measure media attention and how it affects their perception. They also analyze influencer activity to identify endorsements they should leverage and those to keep their distance from.

5. Calculate Your Net Promoter Score

As a result of monitoring sentiment, you might look to calculate your net promoter score (NPS), which quantifies how likely your brand is to be recommended to a friend or colleague. You can calculate NPS as follows:

A high NPS typically indicates positive sentiment. The more customers are willing to promote your brand for you, the better they feel about you.

You can collect data using a customer survey, asking support reps or salespeople to conduct surveys, or prompting website or platform visitors with a quick poll.

6. Brand Study

Working with a third-party measurement company allows you to measure sentiment before and after customers interact with a specific marketing campaign.

Companies like Kantar, Nielsen, and Qualtrics use ad platforms and brands to measure brand awareness, lift, sentiment, engagement, and more. For example, Aviva wanted to know what was specifically driving positive versus negative sentiment with customers, journalists, and the public.

They worked with Kantar’s Voices Tracker to determine how each group talked about the brand in the public domain using a combination of social listening, webscraping, and human analysis before and after specific marketing activities.

Sentiment Reveals the “Why” Behind Your Audience’s Actions

How people “feel” about you at any given time will always be challenging to quantify. The most accurate sentiment measurement strategies will incorporate several tools for a well-rounded view of your impact.

Regardless, regularly analyzing brand sentiment is a powerful way to inform your marketing strategy. Sentiment can help reveal the “why” behind customer actions and empower marketers to tell a strong story behind their awareness data.

Sign up for The Content Strategist newsletter for more insights into how to strengthen your brand using content and measurement strategies like these.

The post How to Track User Sentiment vs. User Behavior in Your Content appeared first on Contently.

In its State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report, keyword research tool company Semrush surveyed 1,500 content marketers worldwide. Only a little over half had a documented content marketing strategy despite nearly all (97 percent) reporting that content marketing was a part of their marketing strategy. Among their ongoing challenges: attracting traffic to content, improving its SEO performance, and generating content ideas.

Fortunately, Google Trends is a free tool to help solve these challenges. It can help you deliver the best content consistently and creatively. Google Trends can help you figure out:

• The topics to address and the content you could create (what you can cook)
• How to time your content (when to cook what)
• Which keywords to play with and the kinds of content that will likely resonate with your audience (the right ingredients to use)

Selecting a Content Topic Worthy of Engagement

You want to feed your readers the content they’re most curious about, which directly ties to your brand. Peeking into keyword search is a great way to get on-the-money content ideas, giving you insights about what readers want to know.

Compare and contrast keyword terms to determine how popular yours might be. For example, this chart shows that “car repair” consistently gets more hits than “car maintenance,” likely because repairs are more urgent than routine maintenance.

To discover other related keywords that audiences use in search, look under “Related Topics and Queries.” You can see “car maintenance cost” and “car service” both do well. Related topics and queries can be especially helpful for identifying alternatives to keywords with a lot of competition for top positions in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Such long-tail keywords found through Google Trends are easier to rank for.

Toggle “Rising” queries vs. “Top Queries,” and you’ll find the search terms gaining traction. Spotting and capitalizing on these trends early, especially in a B2C market, will help you ride the popularity wave while it crests. Be careful to time your activities.

Fads can crash quickly, and prospective consumers will tire of a topic if it’s seen too much air time before you’ve gotten to it.

Google Trends also enables you to parse search results by geography for further segmentation, which is useful for targeted pay-per-click campaigns. Look to Google Discover on mobile devices to sift for more contextual ideas.

Use Data to Target Your Audience at the Right Time

Successful content strategy is not just about discovering what topics and angles to cover; it’s also about targeting your customer at the right time. Use Google Trends to find keyword phrases relevant over long and short periods.

You can start from 2004 (which is how far back Google lets you go) and measure trends over a year, a month, or even a few hours. The latter is useful if you’re playing with rapid-fire breaking news—though this is rarely the case with B2B content marketing.

This screenshot shows the rise in searches about ChatGPT, an AI-driven language generation robot. While there were small blips in October and November 2022, it caught on like wildfire in December. Breakout trends like these might be worth harnessing, especially if you’re in the B2C market.

A note of caution: You always need an original point of view, especially when the web is filled with content addressing the same topic.

Watching trends play out over time can help your content strategy as you observe peaks and troughs for certain keywords. For example, do certain keywords trend as you approach Earth Day in April? Plan content calendars in advance so you can develop fresh takes every year.

Optimize Your Content on the Right Channels

Successful content uses relevant keywords and presents them in a format that suits the goals of the asset. If your strategy is not limited to written content alone, understanding what kinds of searches to optimize for (news, videos, etc.) will help. Toggle through the other options on Google Trends (Image Search, News Search, etc.) to find what kinds of content are doing well. It might spark ideas for diversifying your content buckets in the future.

Much like cooking, sometimes content strategy requires understanding how well existing content (listicles, blog posts) is performing and how you can repurpose them in new ways. You can also use Google Trends to get inspiration for adjacent categories by looking under the “Related Topics” widget. A related topic for the “Chat GPT” search term, for example, is “artificial intelligence.”

Google Trends can also help you keep tabs on your competition’s content efforts. Enter Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola in the comparison search boxes, and you can tell the cola wars are steady as ever. If your company’s search trend pattern dips compared to others, you may need to refresh your awareness-building efforts.

Research Google Trends for Content Topics with Reach

Google Trends is a helpful tool for identifying content marketing topics that have reach. Careful menu planning still doesn’t guarantee a great meal, however. Delivering consistent content that resonates requires you to understand your audience and audit content regularly to find the top performers.

Use your best judgment. If a keyword term is tired and used often, try and test new topics and approaches. There’s no substitute for well-produced content that is useful, resonates with your readers, and effectively positions your brand. It’s a tried-and-tested recipe that propels your content marketing strategy on the path to success.

To stay informed on all things content, subscribe to The Content Strategist for more insight on the latest news in digital transformation, content marketing strategy, and rising tech trends.

The post Three Ways to Use Google Trends for SEO in Your Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

When voice recognition technology first became popular, consumers used it to have funny conversations with AI or ask their Bluetooth speakers to play their favorite songs. People still do that, even as they increasingly turn to voice search technology for answers to their questions. Voice search enables instant gratification, providing an answer in seconds for about 94 percent of all search queries.

What does voice search mean for content marketers in 2023? We have four takeaways. But first, let’s connect the dots between voice search and digital marketing.

Voice Search & Digital Marketing: What’s the Connection?

The mainstreaming of voice search means that digital marketers need to adapt their digital content to make it voice-search friendly so they can rank in voice search results.

Don’t panic—that doesn’t mean you need to abandon your current practices and re-write everything on your site. Basic search engine optimization (SEO) principles still apply to voice searches. SEO is all about writing for the customer and creating content that answers burning questions. That core concept remains the same, though voice search does affect SEO in one way—length.

When consumers use voice search (compared to regular text search), they typically ask longer, more precise, and more conversational questions. Voice search queries average 29 words, and those questions are often situational and specific. As a consequence, you need to optimize your content to ensure rank in voice search results.

4 Ways to Make Your Content Marketing Voice Search Friendly

Use these strategies to rank higher in voice search results.

1. Partner with your organization’s digital marketing team.

For anything SEO-related, the content and digital marketing functions must be in lockstep. Voice search is no exception.

Aligning your marketing team around the same goals is one way to promote collaboration. If you include voice search rank results as a quarterly goal for your team, then each sub-function will come up with relevant actions toward that goal. There may be some overlap between content and digital marketing. Working together will yield maximum results.

While digital marketing and content marketing’s responsibilities vary widely across organizations, it’s essential for both functions to understand SEO best practices. In that way, multiple people on the marketing team can collaborate throughout the content development process to drive the best results.

Be sure to partner with digital marketing experts to create paid and other forms of digital content optimized for web search.

2. Optimize for featured snippets.

Featured snippets, or highlighted pieces of text that appear at the top of a Google results page, are your golden ticket toward getting more organic traffic to your site. Often referred to as “Position 0,” featured snippets deliver such a perfect answer to a query that the user doesn’t scroll any further down the page.

When it comes to voice search, featured snippets are even more important. Most of the time, Siri pulls the answer to a question directly from Google’s featured snippet.

Note, however, that Google’s algorithm is constantly changing, which means that the most effective strategies will also change. As of now, however, consider these strategies for getting your content in the coveted featured snippet spot:

• Explicitly answer the question users search for.

• Use SEO tools like Semrush to identify target keywords with a featured snippet and create content specifically to rank for that snippet, answering burning questions and satisfying search engines alike.
• Write valuable, readable, and targeted SEO-optimized content to out-rank your competitors.
• Organize your content so that human readers and search engines can easily scan it. Use headings that include your target keyword, listicles, etc.
• Follow SEO best practices, like including the target keyword in your meta description, using internal and external links and optimal URL structure, etc.

Tip: To stay on top of trends, read SEO-specific publications like Search Engine Journal as a part of your routine.

3. Write content that answers questions.

This might seem obvious, but the more you tailor your content to answer a user pain point or question, the more likely it is to end up in the top rank of the voice search results page.

Writing question-based content forces you to step back and ask yourself, “Does the content I’m writing serve a customer’s need or is it purely serving a marketing objective?” It’s a great litmus test during content brainstorming.

Answering questions, rather than only providing information, is also a key way to show up in voice search. When people use it, they often ask questions such as, “What’s the weather like today?” or “Can my dog eat celery?”

Let’s dive deeper and examine the “People also ask” section in Google SERP results. When you type a question into Google, a box often pops up with four similar questions. This appears either directly after the featured snippet or after one or two organic results.

By following best SEO practices for a particular keyword and writing targeted, question-focused content, you can build your credibility and eventually show up in the “People also ask” section. For this section, it’s important to check out related searches and see what questions show up. Ask yourself, “How can I tailor content to answer the audience’s original question and any follow-ups they might have?”

4. Create mobile-friendly content.

Most voice searches come from mobile devices. In fact, 27 percent of the global online population uses voice search on their mobile phone. If you want to rank for voice search, you need to make sure your website and content are as mobile-friendly as possible.

This is another instance where collaboration with the digital marketing function is essential. Together, content and digital marketers need to optimize the website for mobile and create content that’s easy for users to engage with on their devices.

A few tips to help you optimize your content for mobile include:

• Create short, catchy, and concise content pieces
• Use statistics and design elements to set your content apart from competitors
• Create visuals that adhere to responsive web design
• Make your CTAs obvious
• Chunk content into short paragraphs
• Use snappy headings for readability

Looking Ahead: The Future of Voice Search

If the past few years are any indication, voice search isn’t going anywhere. In 2023, expect more consumers to gravitate toward the convenience and value of using devices on the go to get answers in seconds.

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The post How to Adapt Content to Rank in Voice Search Results appeared first on Contently.

UGC leverages the voices and experiences of real people to promote your brand. Think customer reviews, social media posts, and photos or videos shared by loyal customers. It’s authentic, it’s relatable, and it works!

But what makes it so successful?

Trust

When it comes to making a purchase, trust is everything—and nothing builds trust quite like seeing a post from a friend or another customer praising a brand or product. It’s authentic and unbiased, which makes it more likely for a potential customer to trust the brand and consider making a purchase.

Hand in hand with trust comes social proof—a term first coined in 1984 by psychologist Robert Cialdini. Consumers credit reviews from the people they view to be “like them,” thus making social proof a type of decision-making shortcut.

One example of a tried and true UGC campaign that effectively built trust is the #LikeAGirl campaign by Always, a brand of feminine hygiene products. The campaign aimed to change the negative connotations associated with the phrase “like a girl” and empower young girls to embrace their own strength and confidence.

To achieve this, Always launched a social media campaign that encouraged girls and women to share their stories and experiences using the hashtag #LikeAGirl. They also created a series of videos featuring real women and girls discussing issues like gender stereotypes and self-confidence.

The campaign was a huge success; over 6 million social posts included the hashtag. It also helped to change how people think about the phrase “like a girl” and raised awareness about young female empowerment.

Additionally, the campaign helped to build trust with Always’ target audience by showing the brand understands and cares about their concerns and commits to making a positive impact in their lives. The campaign was informative, inspiring, and relatable to the audience.

Awareness

Beyond trust, UGC can also increase brand awareness and reach. When customers share a post or photo featuring a brand or product, their entire network sees it. If that customer has a significant following, their posts bring a whole lot of eyes to your brand. That can be a good thing or a bad thing.

Here’s an example of when it’s bad: United Breaks Guitars is a song and music video that musician Dave Carroll created in 2009 after United Airlines damaged his guitar during a flight. After failing to receive satisfaction from the airline, Dave wrote and recorded a song about his experience and posted it on YouTube. The song quickly went viral and received over 17 million views in the first year. It significantly impacted United’s reputation and customer trust during that time.

The song became a classic example of how UGC can have a major impact on a brand’s reputation and awareness. It also encouraged companies to be proactive in handling customer complaints. Carroll wrote the song with a funny, ironic tone, but the message was clear: the airline didn’t care about his customer experience. The song was not only a form of UGC but also a form of protest and a call for action. It was a way for the customer to use his creativity to express frustration and dissatisfaction.

As a result of the song, United Airlines issued a public apology and established a customer relations department to handle customer complaints. It also served as a reminder for other companies to take customer complaints seriously and to respond promptly and effectively.

Community

People want to feel like they are part of a cause that is greater than themselves. “Word of mouth” marketing is key for creating community and virality.

Take the ice bucket challenge as an example. A charity organization raising money to fund research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, started this viral marketing campaign in 2014. It raised awareness and funds using video-based UGC from people participating in the challenge, which involved pouring ice water on themselves and challenging others to do the same.

The campaign was a great example of how word-of-mouth marketing can create a viral sensation and raise awareness for a cause.

Cost

Another major benefit of UGC relates to the costs of creating content. Brands don’t need to spend a fortune hiring professional photographers and video production crews. Instead, they can leverage the talents of their customers. Brands still need to cultivate their digital presence to encourage customer contributions, but overall, UGC can help brands manage their marketing expenses by leveraging the time and talent of their fans.

One of the many brands that have mastered cost-effective UGC is GoPro. The action camera brand built its reputation by encouraging customers to share their experiences and adventures on social media using footage from their GoPro cameras.

GoPro has a dedicated website where customers can share their videos, photos, and stories. They also have dedicated social media channels where they feature customer content as a way to build a strong brand community. GoPro offers incentives and rewards to customers who share their content—for many, seeing their content on the brand’s website or social media channels is a big motivator.

UGC helped GoPro build a strong community of loyal customers and increase brand awareness and reach without expensive marketing campaigns. GoPro has seen UGC related to its brand spread widely on social media and other digital platforms as a form of advertising. The brand’s UGC campaign has also helped establish GoPro as a leader in its industry and a brand synonymous with adventure and excitement.

In short, UGC can help you build trust, increase brand awareness, foster community, and save you some money—a pretty sweet deal if you ask me. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers to share their experiences with your brand and products. You might be surprised at how much it can benefit your business.

To stay informed on all things content, subscribe to The Content Strategist for more insight on the latest news in digital transformation, content marketing strategy, and rising tech trends.

The post User-Generated Content: How to Use It for Good and Avoid a PR Crisis appeared first on Contently.

But your work isn’t really done yet. Publishing is just the end of one process and the beginning of another, essentially launching a chain of distribution tasks. These tasks get your content into the right hands at the right time, ultimately maximizing your return on the investment used to create it. Once you hit the “Publish” button, you need to get your content where it needs to go, share it with your audience, and ultimately measure your results.

Think about how you will promote, share, and distribute the content you create with your target audience and key stakeholders before it’s in production. Including project management software in your MarTech stack can help you avoid a situation where you must scramble to figure out what comes next.

Build a Strong Content Distribution Strategy

If you are creating content surrounding the launch of a new research study, someone on your team may need to publish a landing page to link to the study. Someone else may publish a related blog post linking to the landing page, and another stakeholder may need to promote it on your social media channels.

Developing a concrete plan for what happens after you publish means identifying the right internal stakeholders to start the distribution process. Figure out what cross-functional team members need to be involved in promoting and distributing the content before it’s created.

Proactively building a content distribution strategy also allows you to check for consistent messaging before content and promotional assets are published—a concept that lies at the heart of integrated marketing.

The right workflows for content help measure performance accurately and inform key stakeholders of its progress.

Steps to Take After You Hit the “Publish” Button

The following steps can help you plan and execute your content promotion and distribution strategy. Keep in mind that larger organizations may have many more employees involved in the post-publication process compared with a startup or small business.

1. Notify critical stakeholders within your organization.

Think about those within your organization who might need to leverage the content asset to execute your promotion plan or who can share the content on their own channels to heighten its reach. That doesn’t mean you should blow up every internal communications channel with every single content asset you create. And this process might look very different for multiple pieces of content surrounding a significant product launch versus a one-off blog post.

Example: If you publish a new article to your site, notify the content marketing team and everyone involved in the project (designers, SEO specialists, campaign planners, and social media managers) with a URL or attachment and a short message. (Email, Slack, Teams, and project management software are great for this.) Remind them to amplify its impact by liking and sharing it from their networks. Create unique sharing UTM links so you can see exactly how each person accessed your blog through internal sharing.

Key stakeholders to notify may include (but aren’t limited to):

• Social media specialists who can share the content asset on channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
• The sales team to use in upcoming sales efforts such as pitch meetings
• Campaign and project managers to mark a project as “complete” in your team’s project management software and route the asset across your organization
• Designers, writers, editors, or anyone else involved who needs to know their role is complete
• The product marketing team, if it’s related to a new launch, release, or bottom-of-funnel asset
• Customer marketing if the asset is a case study
• Marketing or revenue operations for lead scoring, qualification, and attribution

2. Notify external writers and stakeholders.

Let external freelancers (writers, designers, videographers, etc.) know the content is published so they can share it with their professional networks. If an influencer or thought leader played a role in development, be sure they know the asset is live; they can also help drive higher engagement or traffic.

Notifying freelance contributors can help them grow in their careers, as they can showcase the asset on their portfolio or website, thus strengthening your relationship with them. If third-party agencies, media partners, agency creators, or public relations firms were involved, you can also send it their way.

3. Execute a larger internal communications plan.

If the asset is part of a major product launch or marketing campaign, consider sharing it with employees across the entire organization using a larger internal communications plan.

For example, send a mass email to your staff notifying them that you recently published an eBook on the company’s website, which may be repurposed into a webinar or part of a larger campaign strategy. Perhaps, the president or CEO of your company just wrote a new blog post highlighting the organization’s perspective on a pressing issue or an update on a company-wide public relations initiative, like scholarship awards or patents earned.

Encourage employees to share the content asset across their social and professional networks for broader distribution (assuming higher engagement is the goal). You can create a channel or group in your company’s messaging system where all new web-based or downloadable content is shared. If your company uses an intranet for communication, posting an update there is also an option.

4. Launch your promotion and distribution plans.

The steps mentioned above, especially in larger organizations, may need to happen before you reach this one—and it’s the one that typically excites us the most. After all, this is crucial to driving your ROI because it’s when your target audience starts consuming your content. What might this look like?

• Promoting a new blog post or infographic on the company’s social media, starting with the channels that best align with your target audience
• Directing readers to the new content asset in a regular email newsletter
• Linking to new content in existing blog posts or website landing pages
• Promoting your content using a paid social media ad

Depending on various factors (like your budget and goals), you might want to consider paid media opportunities in addition to leveraging organic content channels for promotion. In certain situations, a combination of both is ideal. Well-crafted organic content on social media can have just as much of a positive impact as paid social media. But with paid media, you can have greater confidence that you are reaching your desired audience, as you can target specific users based on demographics and other data.

Paid social media can also be more beneficial in promoting long-form content or anything with a high potential to drive ROI, such as an asset that’s already driving a lot of conversions. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads on websites and as part of ongoing media partnerships, as well as OTT ads on video streaming services, are other options for certain content assets.

You might also use influencer marketing to share or promote your content through industry leaders who already have a relationship with your audience. Even if they weren’t involved in content creation, existing or paid partnerships could do wonders for your distribution strategy. If you have existing relationships with other organizations, notifying them can also help your content make its way onto their channels.

5. Launch your measurement plan.

You can only determine the success of your content by proactively coming up with a plan to measure it. Such a strategy can help you accurately determine whether your content helped drive ROI.

Your KPIs will look different for building brand awareness, generating leads, driving sales, and retaining customers post-sale. Unless you use an end-to-end solution that measures full-funnel content performance, you may need multiple data analytics platforms in your MarTech stack beyond Google Analytics.

6. Repurpose or atomize your content.

If a content asset is performing well and meeting its KPIs, squeeze as much juice out of it as possible. Content repurposing or atomization is one solution— repackage a content asset into multiple formats. This strategy benefits the content marketer by:

• Saving time on creating multiple content assets
• Expanding the lifespan of your content marketing efforts
• Optimizing content that performs well
• Catering to the needs of different audience segments
• Filling up your content calendar with timely, relevant content

For instance, you can break a newly published long-form content asset into smaller pieces for use across multiple channels (audio snippets of a podcast shared on social media, for instance, or an eBook turned into multiple blog posts). You can also repackage various smaller pieces of content into a long-form asset.

7. Regularly revisit and update your content as needed.

On a quarterly or regular basis, you might consider updating content marketing assets that perform well to keep them “fresh” for the current year. This often entails ensuring all data and information are up to date.

Revisiting a content asset also allows you to add new hyperlinks to related content you’ve more recently published. If your search ranking recently dropped with no signs of recovery, you can take the proper steps to optimize your content for better performance. This is particularly important for evergreen content about topics that remain relevant to your audience regardless of how much time passes.

With Contently, you can automate and streamline content distribution processes by integrating the platform with Salesforce and your brand’s social media accounts. Using the Content Value Tracker and other analytics tools, you can also facilitate internal content distribution using Contently’s content portals and measure content ROI down to the dollar.

Request a demo of Contently to explore this powerful enterprise content marketing technology that helps tell great stories and drive results.

The post 7 Things You Need to Do After Publishing New Content appeared first on Contently.

It’s a perfect opportunity to share the success your clients and business had in 2022. Whether you’re creating a video, interactive landing page, or eBook, take this opportunity to showcase what you’ve learned throughout your campaigns.

Look at the data from the content you produced over the past year. Did your pieces perform the way you expected them to? What needs to be updated or optimized for better SEO performance? Assess how your content performed. Once you understand what worked and what didn’t, apply these findings to your 2023 strategy.

Analyze and Optimize Your Content

Content Marketing Institute (CMI) predicts that companies will spend less on paid content and focus more on organic ways to gain audience share in the new year. And to make that happen, you’ve got to ensure your SEO optimization strategy is ready.

If you haven’t audited your content in a while, it’s time to ensure the content you create works as planned. But if you produced a lot of content in 2022, assessing all of it can feel daunting. Content auditing tools like Semrush can automate the process and highlight which pieces of content need quick updates, extensive rewrites, or removal from the site altogether.

Giving your personas a once-over is also an excellent place to look if you want to optimize performance. The pandemic changed a lot of how buyers think and research, and it’s essential to make sure your content connects with today’s audience.

Evaluate Your Content’s Impact

When using a full-funnel strategy with several touch points along the way, how can you truly know the effectiveness of each piece of content? Contently pioneered the content maturity model to map out a content marketer’s journey to world domination (just kidding). But it does tell you where you stand with your content marketing programs. The model includes four stages: crawl, walk, run, and fly.

• Crawl: If you’re in the crawl stage, you focus on building and engaging your audience. To do this, you’ll want to create an SEO strategy and measure your audience reach (unique visitors, page views, etc.), audience engagement (average attention time, social shares, etc.), and SEO effectiveness (number of keywords ranking).
• Walk: This is where a content program moves from awareness to lead generation. You’re starting to understand your SEO strategy and move toward a comprehensive lead generation plan. This is where you carve out a share of voice in the market.
• Run: In this stage, you’re refining content’s SEO value and attributing success to content through single-touch attribution.
• Fly: This is the ideal stage. Multi-touch attribution finds its place here, and every piece of content in the buyer’s journey is mapped back to ROI.

If you’ve recently started evaluating content’s impact on the business, you need to start at the crawl stage and move through the rest of the steps in order. There are no bonus points for skipping ahead. Evaluating content effectiveness is critical for bringing in new customers and showing the value the content brings to the table.

Content Marketing Trends to Prepare for in 2023

Make sure to look at the trends for the new year and evaluate how you can best leverage them for your team’s success. Marketing has historically fallen behind the curve in adopting new technologies. This is your chance to get ahead by evaluating your needs and seeing how you can incorporate them into your team. As you look to the new year, here are five trends to keep your eye on.

1. Look at how AI fits into your team.

One of the biggest trends for 2023 is generative AI. And one of the biggest questions for marketers is how to incorporate AI into their processes effectively. AI can write blog posts and generate images, but should this cause your team a sense of doom and gloom? Not at all! Generative AI helps teams automate basic tasks and drive efficiency. If you’re not already testing AI tools with your team, it’s time to start.

2. Evaluate your MarTech stack.

In this season of economic volatility, everyone’s looking at their budgets and the tools they use to see what they can cut. When was the last time you reviewed your MarTech stack? Martech.org anticipates companies will evaluate their current technologies to see if any efficiency gaps need to be addressed.

Before your throw your current stack out the window, it’s a good idea to take a deep dive into the products you already have to check out their capabilities and evaluate how your team uses them. A Gartner study found that companies use a little more than 42% of their stack’s capabilities, so it’s possible you’ve got the tools you need—you just don’t know it yet.

3. Do more with less.

The mantra of 2022 will be the same for 2023: “Do more with less.” We expect to see less budget for content, a shortage of in-person talent, and a desperate need to produce more despite the lack of resources.

Utilizing AI and MarTech to automate repetitive tasks and improve efficiency will help ease the burden on your team, but neither entirely solves the people “problem.” Hiring additional team members may not be possible, so you seek outside partners (freelance writers, designers, videographers, etc.) to build your team.

When you partner with a platform like Contently, you have a comprehensive platform for ideation, creation, review, scale, optimization, distribution, and measurement. Plus, you have access to over 160,000 top-notch freelancers who can help you scale your content program and act as an extension of your team.

4. Personalize content.

One of the key trends for 2023 is personalization. Content tailored to a specific buyer is becoming more expected as technology advances. Luckily, this is another place where AI can assist in helping. A simple example of personalized content is adding a first name to an email subject line, “Ali—Check out these new styles we think you’ll love!” to Netflix’s uncanny ability to recommend your next favorite docu-drama (based on your previous watch history, of course).

5. Create short-form videos.

Are you producing short-form video content for platforms like TikTok and IG Reels? Short-form and explainer videos are becoming more critical as audiences prioritize this medium for information. (This style of video is not just for entertainment!) These types of videos have the highest ROI in social media, and content marketers ready to leap ahead are jumping on this trend.

The future is bright with opportunity.

Content and technology are innovating at a rapid pace. While the needs won’t slow down, it’s essential you do. The “lull” between the end of one year and the start of the next is the perfect time to reflect on what you’ve done in 2022.

Celebrate your wins. Take time to evaluate how your content performed. What performed as well as (or better than) you expected? What didn’t perform as well? Implement the lessons you learn from this audit into your 2023 content plan.

Pay attention to what’s happening in the marketplace. Are there any emerging trends you can utilize? Evaluate how you can implement them into your content plan to stay ahead of the competition and be the go-to knowledge base for your target customer.

With reflection, evaluation, and trend projection, you can start 2023 off on the right foot and be in a position to make this new year the best one yet.

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 2022 Learnings to Inform Your 2023 Content Marketing Plan appeared first on Contently.

G2, the world’s leading business software review platform, can help answer that question. Each quarter, G2 publishes reports and gives Best of Software Awards accordingly.

G2 Winter 2023 Reports Are Here

The G2 Winter 2023 reports are published, and Contently is proud to rank as the leading content marketing platform in several categories.

View G2’s Winter 2023 Reports >>

For the 9th time in a row, Contently ranks number one in the Enterprise Grid® for Content Creation Software.

In this quarter’s report, Contently is a Leader based on having the highest:

• Number of Reviews
• Customer Satisfaction
• Market Presence
• Overall G2 Score

G2 ranked platforms on this grid by customer satisfaction (based on verified user reviews) and market presence (based on market share, seller size, and social impact). So, enterprise companies that utilize Contently are more satisfied than customers of any other content marketing platform. Plus, our platform has the largest market share and industry impact.

Customers rate their satisfaction in G2 reviews, so Contently is glad our satisfaction rates rank so highly with our clients:

• Likelihood to Recommend, 93 percent — Only four out of five dentists recommend certain toothpastes, but more than nine out of ten users recommend Contently.
• Best Meets Requirements, 92 percent — Contently’s platform helps marketers check off all their boxes internally when managing approvals and compliance.
• Ease of Doing Business With, 96 percent — Contently’s onboarding program helps you realize benefits as early as the kick-off call.
• Quality of Support, 95 percent — Reviews credited our Customer Success team for being dedicated partners every step of the way.
• Ease of Use: 91 percent — Smart content planning tools and automated recommendations help users make quick decisions backed by data.

We love our customers, and our customers love us.

Our customers also love the Contently platform features, as evidenced by their overall ratings:

• Customizable Template Workflows, 93 percent — Ensure compliance and process adherence through easily created, smart workflows that keep your team on track.

• Editing and Approval Tools, 90 percent — Move from a linear approval process to a more fluid system that suits your company’s individual needs with Contently.
• User, Role, and Access Management, 91 percent — Contently provides five user roles with different permission settings that each user can have, tailored to your content team:
  1. Owner: An account administrator who can see and do anything.
  2. Manager: A user who can write, edit, and review content from other users as well as their own.
  3. Collaborator: A user who can approve submitted stories or request revisions. Usually, this role is for members of your marketing or legal team who need to review stories before they’re published.
  4. Observer: A user with access to all stories but can only perform a limited set of actions (e.g., submit pitches, comment on pitches and stories, upload story assets).
  5. Contributor: Often a freelancer who produces stories based on the content brief.

Contently Is Leading the Pack

The G2 Winter 2023 reports also rank Contently above our competitors. For example, although this competitor has more overall customer reviews than Contently, our product ratings rank above theirs in several key areas.

We already touched on some of the features above, but for a couple of those we have not:

• Calendar: Contently’s intuitive drag-and-drop calendar gives you complete visibility into the state of your content program across the organization. Easily filter by function, line of business, format, tags, and more. Simply put, it’s an editor’s dream.

• Has the product been a good partner in doing business? — There’s a reason Contently is the secret content weapon of the world’s most valuable enterprise brands. As the latest G2 reports and awards confirm, Contently’s content marketing platform makes it easy to create high-performing content and measure its impact down to the dollar. We’ve spent the last ten years helping the world’s most valuable brands grow by telling stories people love.

Our enterprise content marketing platform turns modern marketers into content superstars.

Cross-functional content calendars, campaign centers, and in-platform strategy tools align teams to create incredible content that performs.

Request a free content consultation to learn how our powerful enterprise content marketing technology and world-class talent network can help you create better content faster.

The post Contently Gains New Momentum in G2 Winter 2023 Campaigns appeared first on Contently.

If I asked you to buy a chocolate chip cookie that I made, would you? Without additional information, probably not. What if I told you I exclusively use high-quality ingredients from local female or minority-owned farms? Or that I donate half of the money I make from each bake to the local hospice?

I’d bet you’d be much more likely to purchase after learning the latter—a purchase that I’d attribute to effective brand messaging on my part. To craft your own, you’ll need to get clear on your company’s target audience, value proposition, values, and mission.

What Makes Good Brand Messaging?

It’s a clear, simply stated framework for communicating why your product is the right purchase for your target customers. Without one, you risk your target audience not understanding you and will miss the opportunity to connect with them emotionally.

When you’re done, the framework you’ve built should include descriptions of those target audiences, your unique selling propositions (USPs), your value proposition, company values, one-liner, company description, messaging pillars, and boilerplate.

8 Critical Steps to Crafting a Good Brand Message

Your goal should be to create a pool of effective messages to choose from. Follow these eight steps to build your messaging arsenal.

1. Define your target audience

Define your target audience by talking to customers. If you don’t have any, talk to people you think might buy from you before selling them anything. Don’t assume you know exactly who wants your product. That’s the biggest mistake you can make. Even very educated guesses are often wrong.

You should spend as much time on this step as possible. These conversations will empower you to execute every following step well if you’re thorough. At this stage, you’re looking to create a document with data-driven personas, or detailed descriptions of your target audience, in three steps:

1. Survey your current customer base, or get on Zoom and talk to as many of them as you can. Find out why they bought your product, what they love about it, what they hate about it, and what they think of your competitors.
2. Analyze your first-party data on current customers to discover information about location, cost preferences, demographic information, industry, and more. Look for large groups of data that signal a pattern amongst people who buy from you. Make assumptions from the data. Test those assumptions via that survey to your current customer base.
3. Draft personas that include made-up names, company titles, demographics, and a summary of the problems that person faces and how you solve them.

If you do this correctly, you should end up with more than one persona—usually three to five. The more specific you are, the more targeted you can be with your marketing strategy.

2. Create a list of feature selling points

During those interviews, you should have spoken to customers about your competitors. Include anything positive they have to say in a list of competitor selling points. Ideally, you want to talk to some people who actually made purchases from them, if possible.

Do some of your own research to document a list of competitor messages from their website, emails, social media channels, digital ads, and products and services. Organize your list in a table with personas in one column and related selling points in another.

3. Conduct a features, advantages, and benefits (FAB) analysis

You created your list of competitor selling points first because you need to understand which of yours are unique. Start by making a complete list of your own based on your customer interviews.

Use the same format as your competitor list and organize your selling points by persona. Put them side-by-side in a spreadsheet with your competitor USPs to cross-reference and find the unique ones. Collect those in a different tab in the same spreadsheet.

We’re not insinuating that you won’t use your full list of selling points, but good positioning comes from what makes you unique. These should be the first messages out of the gate when a potential customer discovers your brand for the first time.

4. Craft your value proposition

You’re valuable to your target audience because of what makes you unique. A value proposition is simply written text that communicates your value using your USPs as a foundation.

Lean into the emotional benefits of working with your brand, too. A word of caution, though—your value proposition shouldn’t just include a list of unique products, features, or services.

You should aim for a few paragraphs of text at the most. Describe the people you help, their problems, and why you’re the best solution. Create a different value proposition for each persona—the emotional benefits of purchasing from you are likely different for each, and the way you position your products to each of them will differ.

5. List your company’s values

People like to buy from people who share their values. These days, 82% of buyers look for companies that align with their values over competing brands. Defining yours will require a round of internal interviews with the executive team, the human resources department, and relevant members of management.

Ask questions like:

• Is diversity something you champion?
• Is ethical manufacturing a priority?
• Is your environmental impact a priority?
• How do you develop employees?

Write a company mission statement based on your findings. This can be anywhere from a single sentence to a full article depending on how much you have to say. Length isn’t important—the goal is to build a strong emotional connection as succinctly as possible.

Bombas does this well by quickly describing their efforts to get more socks on homeless feet.

The Skimm is specific about the audience they’re looking to reach in their mission statement—they focus on educating women.

The mission statement of NYU is lengthy but has to cover a collective mission for a university with a very diverse student body and curriculum. Their mission is to be one of the best in their field.

6. Write your one-liner

At this point, you’re ready to tackle your one-liner, a snappy phrase or sentence that covers your most important USPs and value proposition all in one go.

These are most often used on the homepage of your company’s websites but are often repurposed in content and ads, too.

A good one-liner will get an emotional reaction, like Stripe, which draws people in who want to be considered ambitious.

Others effectively describe what makes them different from competitors, like Bumble, whose tagline focuses on their mission to put women in control of dating.

7. Pick your brand messaging pillars

Use your USPs, value proposition, mission statement, and tagline to draft brand messaging pillars, which may become website sections or blog categories, and help you define your marketing strategy.

Contently works with its customers to define messaging pillars and create a content strategy that aligns with them.

8. Draft a company description and boilerplate

Last but not least, you’ll want to write a paragraph or two that describes your company. It’ll act as an informational summary and boilerplate for the media. This answers the question: “What is your company?”

You can keep it short and sweet, like Live Nation, which simply lists their owned properties and tagline.

You could also view your company description as an opportunity to show off your personality, like Popbar, whose boilerplate leans into their values.

Many company descriptions are informational, like Apple, which is a list of products, services, and company data.

Use Your Brand Messaging to Impact Revenue

You should walk away from this exercise with a document that includes all the elements listed here. Include it in your brand guidelines, and actively introduce your messaging to marketing and sales teams. Frequently bring it up in meetings to help brainstorm ideas until you see other team members using it regularly.

Consider this a living, breathing document that needs to be measured by impact on revenue and revised if it’s not working well. Measure your impact using regular feedback from your sales team, customer surveys, and results from your marketing campaigns. Your brand message will evolve with your customers’ needs, and you’d be remiss in keeping your brand message stagnant.

Reach out for a Contently demo to learn more about how our analytics tools can help you measure the effectiveness of your brand messaging pillars.

The post How to Craft a Messaging and Positioning Strategy for Your Brand appeared first on Contently.

Typically, turning a sales prospect into a customer takes much longer in B2B marketing than in B2C. Why? Because there are generally many stakeholders involved in purchases for businesses. Plus, the purchase is usually more costly, requires extensive onboarding and rollout, and involves many end users.

Why Is B2B Storytelling Important—and Challenging?

With so much at stake in a B2B purchase, you can understand the importance of creating content that allows SaaS buyers to connect with your brand personally. In fact, research has shown that in comparison to consumers, B2B customers, on average, feel much more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers.

Despite all the talk about storytelling, many B2B content marketers focus more on promoting the product or service rather than how it can change a potential customer’s life personally or professionally. Many don’t know where to start or don’t have the right tools to execute storytelling properly, said Mark Evans, principal at Marketing Spark.

Evans says storytelling can be challenging to execute in reality. But once you have the right resources to make it happen, it can be a key brand differentiator.

Individual pieces of content—whether blog posts, videos, webinars, infographics, and so on—can be presented as a narrative, but the larger customer journey can also be viewed as such. In other words, each piece of B2B content you create can be viewed as a small piece of a larger story that guides a reader from the brand awareness stage through the sale (and beyond).

So, what does storytelling in SaaS content marketing entail, and how can you integrate it into your strategy?

The Customer as “Hero”

“Great stories are ones where there’s a narrative, there’s a hero, there’s some kind of drama,” Evans said. “The audience can completely relate to them because (they reflect) their interests, their needs, their problems, their challenges.”

The format of a B2B story is similar to what you would read in a work of fiction. The potential customer—not your company—should serve as the “hero” of your story, said Ardath Albee, CEO and B2B marketing strategist for her firm Marketing Interactions. You also have an antagonist, which is the problem they need to solve. Finally, the vendor (your company) is the “mentor” or guide who assists the hero in reaching their ultimate destination—like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings or the fairy godmother in Cinderella.

Take customer success stories as an example. Many B2B content marketers structure these as follows: Company X works with Company Y and sees Z results, said Tommy Walker, founder of The Content Studio and former Global Editor-in-Chief of Quickbooks. But this format is missing the human element of why the problem exists and matters to the audience.

When Walker worked at Shopify Plus as the company’s first marketing hire, they published this case study, which Walker feels is a good example of storytelling in action. You can see how the story begins—not only did the co-founder of an online T-shirt company have to deal with a crashed website at 2 a.m., but this happened on the night of his bachelor party, which he had to put on hold. This added a human element that made for a much more relatable story.

Ultimately, the co-founders chose Shopify Plus as an eCommerce platform that would keep up with the company’s rapid growth. According to the case study, Shopify Plus alleviated the stresses the co-founders encountered with technology and allowed them to focus more on the business.

The Customer Journey as Narrative

In SaaS content marketing, storytelling also means providing a seamless narrative that spans the entire customer journey through multiple pieces of content and easily directs the reader from one point to the next. Think of every piece of content in the customer journey as a chapter in a book, Albee said, all the while remembering that a B2B tech sale can take months or even years.

Albee said that the buyer should be able to access the different pieces of a larger narrative to meet them where they are in their current situation. And they may find these pieces in a variety of places.

Good B2B storytelling means showing you understand the buyer well enough to help them resolve the challenges they face and ultimately get the outcome they want.

“We have to think about how do we let (the buyer) drive but still put those guardrails around that experience, that story, so we get them all the information they need to get from A to Z in whatever manner that looks like,” Albee said.

Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel

Once you understand the basic framework of a story, you can map the different parts of your content strategy to a character’s journey:

• Top-of-funnel content: Show you understand the various challenges buyers face (and how to solve them) in detailed ways. This can be done through blog posts, social media, podcasts, brand awareness emails, and more.
• Mid-funnel content: Help your character overcome the obstacles that might arise in the decision-making process—for instance, internal politics or budgetary concerns. Possible content formats include eBooks or guides, case studies or testimonials, whitepapers, landing pages, webinars, events, or product-focused blogs.
• Bottom-of-funnel content: If your mid-funnel content is executed well, the sale should happen naturally through the “change” your character experiences rooted in the onboarding, implementation, and customer success of your product. But if you do need more content to drive a sale, this can be done through pitch decks, product demos, competitive analyses, and more.

4 Storytelling Tips for B2B SaaS Content Marketers

1. Know your customer.

Understanding your customer’s current needs is key to bringing your story to life—after all, they are the “hero” of your narrative. Storytelling helps them solve real problems by providing directly applicable solutions.

“You have to commit yourself to knowing your audience, knowing what makes them tick, and really understanding the stories they want to hear,” Evans said.

If you don’t have the budget to develop extensive buyer personas, Albee recommends speaking with customers yourself.

2. Know your company.

Remember that your company, as the mentor, is still an important part of the story, so understand its products, services, or solutions very well before you craft your narrative. This will clarify to readers why your company’s offerings are the best way to resolve their problems.

“Whoever is in charge needs to get as many perspectives as they can from within their company and get an understanding of who they think they are and what they’re about,” Walker said.

And when in doubt, you can always ask an internal subject matter expert to review your content before it goes live.

3. Think of your story from a holistic perspective.

A common problem B2B marketers face, Albee said, is that they publish one-off pieces of content that are repetitive or disconnected from one another. Potential customers may read this content, then move on without thinking about it or taking action.

Don’t assume a potential customer will know where to go on your website after reading a blog post, for example. Direct them to the next part of the story.

“We have to proactively package that up for them in a way that they can access it without our help,” Albee said.

This might entail including a call-to-action at the bottom of a blog post that drives readers to a product landing page, for instance. Or, if you cite a source of information or data, you should hyperlink back to the original source or a related piece of content.

Remember that storytelling extends beyond the sales stage of the customer journey. How your customer uses your product is also important and can be told through post-sale customer success content.

4. Get in the storytelling mindset.

Ultimately, keep in mind that consistent B2B storytelling will require a mindset shift, and it may not be easy—but experts say it’s worth it.

“You really have to buy into the idea that storytelling matters, storytelling works,” Evans said. When your audience relates to what they’re reading on an emotional level, they’re more likely to relate to your brand, make a purchase (ideally more than once), and advocate for your company down the road.

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 How Storytelling Can Build an Emotional Connection with a B2B Audience appeared first on Contently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2019, 81 percent of companies are aiming for better brand awareness, per Content Marketing Institute. It’s a smart goal for marketers because providing an audience with creative, reliable content will help these firms stand out in a sector constrained by regulations and misleading information.

To show you what kind of ambitious stories, tools, and resources are possible, we collected five exceptional examples of healthcare content marketing. Think of this list as medicine for marketers searching for inspiration.

J&J | Campaign for Nursing’s Future

In 2002, experts projected a nationwide shortage of nurses by 2020. That dire version of the future inspired Johnson & Johnson to address the topic with the Campaign for Nursing’s Future.

The long-running campaign features articles, training opportunities, a podcast, and other resources that support nurses. The audience can find an abundance of videos from day-in-the-life vignettes to lectures from current nurses. There’s even a “Career Path” pillar that includes advice for getting hired and links to relevant job sites.

This is a great example of building a microsite around a cause. Johnson & Johnson has created a comprehensive resource center. Through the company’s work and the advocacy of others, the support seems to be working. It is now estimated that the nursing workforce will grow steadily through 2030.

Mayo Clinic | Sharing

Frequently cited as one of the best hospitals in the world, the Mayo Clinic has also been recognized as the leading player in healthcare content marketing. Its Sharing blog offers patients an extensive amount of information that touches on topics from medical research to treatment plans and diagnoses.

What truly makes their online library shine is that every piece of content is written by the hospital’s own patients and staff from all around the world. These contributors use their own experiences dealing with different health issues to color the content with authority and a personal touch; like this piece about one patient that managed to live 11 years (and counting!) after a diagnosis of a rare and incurable cancer.

The process of researching and finding treatment can be lonely. There’s no one better equipped to empathize with a patient’s problems than someone who recently went through the same treatment. An online community like Mayo Clinic’s website is the perfect place to forge those connections.

AbbVie | Scientist Rock!

What should a pharmaceutical research company’s website look like? Could it include videos of underwater research and vintage Air Jordan sneakers collections? For AbbVie, the answer is yes.

AbbVie’s unique Q&A series, Scientists Rock!, covers a different employee’s personal passion each month. The content allows experts to describe what inspires them to get up and go to work every day. The interviews are a fun and manageable way for the audience to discover what scientists do outside of the lab.

One article revealed that the director of disease portfolio management at AbbVie moonlights as a marine biologist “evaluating the effects of marine toxins on animals.”Meanwhile, the head of digital health and innovation still manages to squeeze in some time to watch football with his family.

It’s humanizing and illuminating. Each piece of content makes AbbVie look lively, engaging, and like a company that attracts people who appreciate the wonders of the world.

Cleveland Clinic | Health Essentials Podcast

Ranked No. 4 on the 2019-2020 Best Hospitals list by U.S. News, Cleveland Clinic has expanded its brand awareness through its digital publication: Health Essentials.

The team posts three to five articles a day to the website, distributing the content to the brand’s 4 million combined followers on Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, in light of the rising popularity in audio content, the brand recently invested in a podcast series that focuses on topics like breast cancer, heart-healthy diets, and sleep patterns.Each episode brings in a different medical experts who shed light on a given topic, offering listeners reliable information that can help them live their best lives.

The company has made a big bet on podcasts, launching a full library with other series as well, including Butts & Guts, Cardiac Consult, Love Your Heart, and Neuro Pathways.

athenahealth | athenaInsight Flu Dashboard

Through incredible storytelling and design, athenahealth’s publication Insight has been able to differentiate itself from other healthcare blogs.

[Disclosure: athenahealth is a Contently client.]

As a cloud-based network provider that lives and breathes data, the company has become a trusted source for healthcare information. Look no further than this Flu Dashboard, a detailed and useful example of interactive content.

The dashboard, which tracks the spread of the flu in the U.S. every season, gets updated weekly based on new data from athenahealth’s vast network. What’s really cool is that they’ve been tracking the changes since 2017, and data shows that there have been fewer flu diagnoses over time.

Healthcare companies may face more challenges than brands in retail or travel, but their hurdles are also present an opportunity. As these five companies have shown, there’s a way to differentiate yourself through content. In a world where people are becoming more aware and concerned about wellness, informative and personal healthcare content marketing is the best way to connect with them.

The post 5 Examples of Creative Healthcare Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

According to Greentarget’s 2014 digital and content marketing survey, just a quarter of law firms have a documented content strategy.

As a follow-up question, he asks, “How many of you envision having a dedicated content strategy between now and the end of the year, or are working on that now?” Additional hands go up. He predicts that between 30 and 50 percent of law firms will have a dedicated of content strategy by the end of the year.

Law firms have money—lots of it. And as Corey’s experiment suggests, an increasing number of them are investing that money into content marketing instead of traditional advertising.

“If you look at law firm websites, you see firms like Goodwin Proctor blogging about intellectual property issues, or Foley & Lardner blogging about the automotive industry, or BakerHostetler and Covington blogging about data privacy,” says Norm Rubenstein, partner at Zeughauser Group LLC. “The list of firms that have blogs is now probably longer then the list of firms that don’t.”

But creating content as a law firm brings challenges. Lack of a content strategy is one, but pushing change for how law firms—a traditionally risk-averse bunch—write and market themselves may be an even bigger one.

Writing, but not like a lawyer

Lawyers are, for the most part, smart and educated individuals. They have opinions and knowledge on a number of topics and industries, particularly the ones they specialize in. For law-firm marketers, their lawyers are “a treasure trove of intellectual insights to draw from,” said Corey. But they face a difficult task: writing comprehensive stories non-lawyers can understand.

At some law firms, lawyers have adopted the discipline and style required by professional journalism in order to create accessible stories for current and potential clients.

Corey recommends law firms adopt a six-step framework for implementing journalistic practices in their writing. This approach combines an organization’s market intelligence and subject-matter expertise with the credibility and the narrative techniques of professional journalism. Here are the steps Corey and Greentarget propose:

This method encourages lawyers to commit to accuracy, fairness, and credibility. It also reminds writers that their primary goal should be to serve their audience.

According to Greentarget, this approach allows organization to “act like media companies” —demonstrating thought leadership and building brand awareness along the way.

Thought leadership, not advertising

Hiring a lawyer or a team of lawyers is a huge investment for companies and individuals; as such, many law firms’ marketing efforts tend to share more characteristics with B2B content marketing than any other industry.

“Compared to consumer brands where maybe there are more nuances, a B2B model tends to be more effective in focusing on the specific people making the decision to go with a particular law firm,” said Peggy Heffner, manager of media relations and communications at Dechert LLP.

This is mostly done through thought leadership aimed at decision makers, meant to differentiate specific lawyers and firms as particularly knowledgeable—and therefore worth hiring.

Dechert LLP, for example, recently went through a rebrand. Like other B2B brands, it concluded that one of the best ways to raise the firm’s profile is through thought leadership, rather than pouring its budget into advertising

“We really wanted to focus our resources towards producing thought leadership that would distinguish our firm, as well as demonstrate our deep expertise in what has become an increasingly crowded marketplace,” said Michelle Lappen Vogelhut, director of marketing and business development at Dechert LLP.

Lawyers display their skills by writing articles peculiar to their field of expertise. Marketers, meanwhile, push for lawyers to dissect the latest laws, bills, and consequential cases and discuss the implications they might have for their clients.

But how to get this thought leadership seen? Firms, of course, have websites, microsites, and blogs—but LinkedIn seems to have recently taken over as the platform of choice.

LinkedIn: The lawyer’s best friend

Where is legal intelligence marketed? These days, it’s mostly on every ambitious ladder-climbers favorite social network: LinkedIn.

Regardless of age group, about 60 percent of lawyers have used LinkedIn professionally within the past week. Overall, 37 percent said they had used it within the past 24 hours. That number is higher than the number of lawyers who’ve used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube combined, according to Greentarget’s survey. In addition, LinkedIn’s publishing platform, Pulse, is providing further opportunity for lawyers to spread their content wide and fair.

For most companies, the company’s social media account is the main focus. That’s not the case for law firms. What matters the most to them is their specific lawyers’ profiles, rather than the firm’s.

“My understanding is that most people who are engaging in LinkedIn are not engaging with the firm’s content—they are engaging in the content of individuals,” said Mary Young, legal strategist at Zeughauser Group.

But producing content as an individual in the legal field comes with challenges. There are restrictions on attorney advertising, but they usually do not prohibit lawyers from publishing articles about legal subjects.

The real risk for lawyers is not an obstacle to publishing articles on legal issues, but the consequences: People may do what the lawyer suggests, and it may not work, creating “malpractice” liability. Lawyers try to protect themselves from this type of liability by making it clear in the publication that it is not intended to create an attorney-client relationship or be legal advice.

For lawyers and law firms just getting started on LinkedIn who’d like to avoid these perils, Young has three suggestions. She recommends lawyers have a profile they consistently update and optimize. “A profile that says someone went to Harvard Law School and has been practicing circus law for 35 years is not sufficient to convince a client to hire,” she said. A strong profile needs to tell clients what the lawyer does and what they love to do. It should feature a professional photo and links to any recent articles or speaking engagements.

In addition, she advises for lawyers to start publishing their own content as well as articles from others in their firm and any outside content that they deem interesting.

Lastly, she suggests that lawyers join groups. Forming or participating in groups actively allows for clients to communicate with lawyers directly.

Content strategy for law firms is new. Things up until this point were reactionary—lawyers waited for a particular case to come down and produced an article accordingly. Now, the focus is on how firms can be a resource for their clients.

“Everybody is in the social content business today,” Corey said. “But not everyone has something to say.”

Blog now, or forever hold your peace. Just be sure you have something important to say.

The post The Surprising New Adopter of Content Marketing: Law Firms appeared first on Contently.

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

The Genesis of Cool 

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Google

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Big Tobacco Back as a Big Advertiser? (AdAge)
The three largest U.S. tobacco companies are entering the electronic cigarette market, which is currently unregulated by the FDA. This means they can jump back into media channels that they haven’t been able to in full since the ’70s. How long will it last?

Hillary Clinton’s Twitter Bio Is Perfect, Describes Her as “Pantsuit Aficionado” (Slate)
If you’re looking for examples of awesome personal branding, look no further than Hillary Clinton’s Twitter debut. A latecomer to the platform, Hillary has finally sent her first tweet, and within a day, she already has hundreds of thousands of followers. High-five to America’s favorite ‘pantsuit aficionado.’

The Deep, Dark Secret of SEO (PandoDaily)
According to this article, the secret to this murky goal is to create content that is relevant and that readers love, prioritizing user experience in the process. Stuffing keywords into your content will no longer give you a leg up…because everybody’s doing it.

5 Free Startup PR Tools to Start Using Right Now (Onboardly)
PR and marketing company Onboardly’s co-founders say they’re frequently asked whether they invest in expensive PR tools and wire services. They say no, following a belief that every interaction should be a personalized one and that generic blasts really don’t help.  Here are five tools they recommend.

The post CONTENT WATCH: Big Tobacco’s Content Marketing Comeback, and more appeared first on Contently.

As marketing consultant Suzanne Baran put it, “a viable content strategy relates each [customer] persona and target audience to each phrase of the sales engagement cycle.”

But this can get tricky because content marketing is not always a direct sales tool. Content marketing drives sales by generating brand awareness, building trust, and engaging prospects. Consequently, good content marketing requires keeping clear metrics of success at the top of your priority list at all times.

Here’s what some of your most basic priorities should be for optimizing your strategy:

1. Distribution

Content gives your brand legs — and these metaphorical legs can walk. Content opens doors to new, ever-growing distribution channels that your landing pages, product galleries, and contact forms could never enter. Every blog post you write can be shared or syndicated with larger media channels if you strike the right deals and relationships. Anybody can link to your stories if you make it easy for them to share.

Make sure that you’re doing everything you can to get your content in front of as many people as possible by joining relevant conversations, sharing information, and actively seeking to add value. It’s up to your marketing team to kickstart the process, taking into account strategies that may involve syndication partners and dissemination of stories through social channels. At the very least, make sure those Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn sharing buttons are high up on each piece of your brand’s content so that readers and viewers can get the word out.

As an example, LaunchBit CEO Elizabeth Yin syndicates her writing with the more widely-read Women 2.0 blog. This strategy helps her amplify her reach and exposure while generating awareness about her ocmpany.

2. Strategic Partner Development

Trying to get the attention of a potential brand partner, advisor, or customer? Write about her — feature her story on your blog, and link to her. Better yet, ask for an interview. Content marketing opens doors for conversations that will teach the interviewee or partner about your brand in the process.

When you’re leaving blog comments, responding to discussion threads, and featuring great stories, you’re doing more than just growing audience — you’re building new relationships. Make sure there’s a dialogue between your content marketing efforts and your partnerships team. Knowing their priorities can help shape yours.

For inspiration, check out Crazy Egg and Unbounce — two conversion optimization software companies that run amazing blogs. They’re leveraging their content marketing efforts to cross-promote one another.  Blogging is social, powerful for companionship, and invaluable for community support.

3. Customer Retention

If you’re handling goal #1 on this list properly, you’re seeing that good content brings prospects to your site. Now what? Use it to make them come back. Newsletters, social media, e-books sign-ups, and regular blog updates are all invaluable strategies for building retention. Make sign-up fields and social “follow” buttons prominent. Customers won’t come back unless they have reason, so you’ll need to craft a strategy to push that content right to them once they show the initial interest.

Money management platform LearnVest maintains a daily newsletter that pushes high-quality content to subscribers each morning. Readers get a glimpse of great writing in their email inboxes, but the really good stuff? You have to click through to the company blog. They use a “tease” of inspiring content to keep bringing customers back to their site.

4. Brand Advocates

If your content rocks, your community will share it — and the more that they share, the more your audience will grow. But you can’t be everywhere online — that is, until your fans and followers start sharing your content in their own professional and personal circles. That’s free marketing. Identify who these brand advocates are, reach out to them, and let them know you’re paying attention to them (this applies to branded content much in a way that it applies to basic social media management). That’s a basic way of improving their connection to you so that they’ll share even more prolifically.

When power Twitter user Peter Shankman tweeted to Morton’s to meet him at the Newark airport with a steak, he hardly expected them to show up. To his (and everyone else’s) surprise, they did, and his response was more than enthusiastic. If your brand is awesome, the world will find out.

5. Employee Training Assets

You’ve been there — you find the perfect entry-level addition to your team. Thing is, he knows nothing about online marketing or your industry. If only you could accelerate the growth of his wisdom. If only you had the time to teach him everything. You’d love to get him set up even before his official start date. Well, if you’ve been blogging regularly or producing great video content, you’ll have exactly that — instant training tools for your new team members. Your content tells your brand story and this is invaluable for people getting to know your company internally as well as externally.

As an example, check out Zappos. This online retailer produces an annual ‘Culture Book’ of employee-generated content that’s distributed to team members, visitors, and new hires.

The ROI of content can go a long way if you keep the right goals in front of you at all times. When you do, that content will prove invaluable to your business’s bottom line. Happy writing.

The post 5 Things Your Content Campaign Is Missing appeared first on Contently.

Three Brands that Used Data to Transform Their Media Strategies (AdWeek)
Data won’t necessarily make your ads sexy — but it’ll darn well make your media spend more efficient.

What’s surprising is that advertisers don’t always know how much data they actually have (or how to use it, for that matter). Keep an open mind and be highly creative in your approach to your numbers.

Facebook’s New Ad Plan Is the Web’s Old Plan (AllThingsD)
Facebook is expanding its advertising ecosystem to target users based on all of their online activity — not just sponsored stories.

Facebook says that its strategy will allow marketers to have the best of both worlds: native ads and behavioral targeting. Each has a clear place along the sales conversion funnel, and Facebook’s goal is to address both.

The Question All Smart Visualizations Should Ask (HBR)
Pictures are pretty, but they’re also much more — they’re narratives, jumping off points for debates, and educational resources.

Your success measurement? The ability to effectively communicate complex information in a straightfoward, simple, and easy to follow way.

Do You Know the Most Powerful Type of Advertising? (OPEN Forum)
You might be surprised by the answer to this question — it’s not branded journalism or user experience.

It’s… celebrity endorsements. If you think you’re immune to subtle product placements, you should guess again. There’s power in fame.

The post Efficiency in Data, Facebook’s Ad Strategy, Smart Visualizations appeared first on Contently.

Related articles

• How to never run out of blog post ideas (contently.com)
• 10 Blogs You Should Be Reading If You Manage A Company’s Content Strategy (contently.com)
• How To Write Traffic-Gobbling Headlines Like Huffington Post (contently.com)

The post 4 Quick Steps To Finding Your True Voice appeared first on Contently.

We’ve covered how to kill it with content strategy before, but Mashable just ran a great infographic about the site’s social reach that we thought was worth sharing.

The post Pinterest For Content Marketers: The Basics appeared first on Contently.

“When a brand is on Facebook and you feel like it probably shouldn’t be there, it’s that the brand hasn’t figured out how to communicate in 2011,” they note. We completely agree – it is always risky to attack a platform without a plan.

Check out some of the crazy but true campaigns they mention:

• A robot that shot stains at a line of crisp, bright-white shirts for Ariel laundry detergent (Saatchi Stockholm) . Facebook fans choose which “flavor” of stain to shoot on their computers.
• Users sent their sick friends personalized cans of soup for Heinz’s “Get Well Soup” campaign.
• Facebook users helped lead a real “character” escape from a room in an evolving “social film”ruled by Facebook posts and own videos.

The post Top Social Brands Spill Their Facebook Tactics appeared first on Contently.

Just two years later, the eyewear company has built a larger-than-life brand and amassed a sizeable following, selling trendy glasses for just $95 each and matching every purchase by donating a pair of glasses to someone in need.

Social Media Manager Jen Rubio says that social media, word of mouth and the company’s content strategy have enabled the company to grow quickly while also building relationships with its customers.

“Content strategy is one of two core things that my team focuses on,” she says. “The other is interaction — customer experience, proactive outreach, influencer relationships. Our content and editorial strategy are the driving force behind all of our editorial, events, campaigns, and exploration of new platforms.”

We recently caught up with Rubio to pick her brain on content.

(Editor’s Note: Impressed? Nominate Warby Parker For A Contently Award!)

Contently: What kind of content does Warby Parker produce on the web?

Warby Parker: We have showrooms inside boutiques across the country, but we’re primarily e-commerce and all of our products are sold directly to customers on our website. On the social front, we’re very active on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram and are working on expanding our YouTube presence. We post photos, videos, news, links, etc.There’s always a ton going on at Warby Parker, which means there’s a lot to share. I always cover our events on social media, whether we are taking over the New York Public Library for a guerilla presentation during Fashion Week, transforming a massive SoHo garage space into a holiday store made up of yurts, riding custom bikes outfitted with our sunwear around Miami for Art Basel, or launching a showroom with Ashton Kutcher in LA. (That’s just from the past few months!)

A lot of brands see social media as a one-to-many broadcasting tool, but we’ve used it for thousands of one-on-one conversations with our potential and existing customers. It enables us to become entwined in every step of the customer’s experience. As an online business, we never see the majority of our customers in person, but we’ve had more frequent and more in-depth conversations with them than one would at a brick-and-mortar store.

On Twitter and Facebook, we personally address each message we receive, which can add up to hundreds per day. You wouldn’t ignore a customer who calls or emails in, so why would you online?

Contently: I noticed that the Warby Parker’s Zagg Pepper Tumblr blog is about much more than eye wear. What’s the strategy there?

Warby Parker: Zagg Pepper is our place to post about the people, places, companies, and things that we love. I think it’s important for our blog to not be so promotional and to have a space where customers can see the things that inspire us—we work hard to give our brand a personality, and our Tumblr is one place where we can showcase that.

Contently: What types of content have been the most well-received or gotten the best results? What’s flopped? And why?

Warby Parker: Our favorite content is user-generated. We have a home try-on program — the first of its kind in the U.S. — that lets our customers try on five pairs of glasses for five days for free before purchasing. When our customers receive their frames in the mail, we encourage them to post photos on our Facebook Page, so that our community can help them pick the pair that looks best. As a result, the majority of posts on our page are user-generated, and it’s made for some great conversations (and ultimately, conversions). Through this program, we were able to develop an amazing community on Facebook and Twitter by answering the simple question, “How do I look in these glasses?” Purchasing eyewear is a social activity — most people want feedback from friends and others, and social media tools help us ensure that shopping for Warby Parker glasses is social and fun.

Posts that come across as very promotional get the least engagement. By fostering and encouraging user generated content as opposed to creating filler to drive ineffective engagement, we created true organic brand awareness that’s unrivaled by traditional advertising tactics.
Contently: How do you determine the level of success for the content that you produce?

Warby Parker: On Facebook, we look at Reach, Engagement, and Virality as measures of success for original content. The new Insights tools make it very easy to measure the performance of each piece of content we post and adjust our editorial strategy accordingly.

We measure success on Twitter more on a one-to-one basis: What is our response time? Are we getting to every single person that talks to us? Customer experience is a cornerstone for our company, so we measure success on a one-to-one basis instead of focusing on how many times our broadcasts are retweeted and how many followers we have.

The post Community Manager Secrets: An Interview with Warby Parker appeared first on Contently.

Last year, a study led at Columbia showed that instead of remembering the actual information we learn online, we remember where we learned it. Because we trust that websites are more or less permanent, we often simply plan return to sites later to find facts when we need them, rather than memorizing said facts in the first place.

So how do you implement the right kind of stickiness on your own site? By quickly and clearly demonstrating to readers that your blog is more than a conversation – it’s a resource.

Image via BookWitch

Keywords help readers easily orient themselves and assert a site’s relevance. From there, they can provide clear leads for the reader to find what they are looking for.

Brainpickings Uses An Intriguing and Engaging “Explore” Guide To Give Readers A Taste For What They Might Find

Brainpickings does an excellent job at using keywords to hook and engage readers. The site, known for its quirky collection of creative intellectual pursuits, uses an “explore” sidebar to give readers a taste of its contents. This not only lets the reader know what is important, but it helps map what they may expect in the future.

Make Your Archives Accessible

By offering a clear and useful way to see old posts, a blog becomes a much deeper experience than its latest article. Therefore, a blog should make their content searchable in every way imaginable.

Bryan Boy, One Of The NowManifest Bloggers, Uses Archives To Increase His Content’s Entertainment Value

NowManifest, a style blog collective that hosts bloggers like Bryan Boy and Fashion Toast, does a great job maximizing its resources this way. The site’s posts aren’t time sensitive, so opening them up means more entertainment for their readers. Intrigued wanderers suddenly have hours of images, blurbs, and inspiration to digest – at no additional pain to the content creators.

Embed Your Juiciest Stuff

Give your reader maximal opportunities to interact with your best content by putting it on your homepage – even if your main site isn’t a blog. This gives users a taste of what you are, and will be offering, in terms of content.

Open Culture’s List of Essentials Gives Readers A Clear and Useful Roadmap To Their Site

A great example of this is Open Culture’s list of essentials. Their lists don’t overload readers, but excite them with a preview of their powerful insides. This way, a reader might have found the site for free online courses, but may come back for free textbooks.

Help your reader find what they need, while showing them your best stuff. Hopefully, they’ll leave with a good first impression of your site, but more importantly, a lasting memory of its contents.

The post 3 Key Ways To Turn Your Blog Into a Super-Resource appeared first on Contently.

Strategy is more than just a cool-sounding word. If you know the future and are able to act on it before any of your competitors, you have a major advantage.

Can any brand actually predict the future?  “Yes,” – with qualifications, of course.

If enough energy is spent doing the critical work of thinking, then your business can indeed predict a reasonable facsimile of the future. Why is this important? Below, we’ve consider a few of the areas where your strategic reaction to your future forecast can directly affect your bottom line:

Preparing For The Future

You operate in a world beyond your control – but you can control your reaction to events, as well as the pace of these reactions. Keep an informal plan of what could go wrong, and what could go right – that way you can stay somewhat prepared.

• Think about potential world changes –  how would major transformations in the economy, technology, and/or political stability affect you?
• Also think about potential industry changes. Is is growing or shrinking? What are the threats? How would changes in government regulations affect you?  What about changes in suppliers, or competitors?

How are you prepared to react? What are the opportunities? And if applicable, how can you take advantage of them?

As you begin the hard work of figuring out what you think is going to happen, start testing your marketing around these assumptions.

Make Strong Assumptions, Though

Jeff Bezos of Amazon did this with the businesses key marketing advantage – free shipping.

He fought for years with shareholders who thought his insistence on customer service was eating into the company’s profit margins. But Bezos understood that long-term, happy customers were more important than higher margins.

Today, its dedication to customer service has allowed Amazon to grab and hold leadership of the e-commerce market despite thousands of competitors. And its higher marketshare has led in the long run to, you guessed it, higher profits.

For the marketing professional, this means it’s important to consider strategic assumptions about the future in addition to current conditions if you want to succeed. A proactive approach, rather than a reactive one, can help you catch a wave before it crests. Change is happening at an accelerating rate, but if you can recognize the future before others, you have a huge advantage.

Now You Can Adapt Faster

In the Internet age, making strategic assumptions in business have taken on an added importance. New technologies can change the way an industry works in the blink of an eye, and companies that are not prepared to deal with the change can quickly find themselves falling by the wayside.

Record labels and the publishing industry are still struggling to adapt to a world where most content is consumed online. Had they put long-term strategies in place before these disruptions occurred, they may have been better prepared to deal with them.

If you can target your resources and hone your message to a future you see first, you will get a lead that your competitors won’t be able to close, and one that will grow exponentially larger over time. Your customers, of course, will appreciate your efforts to stay ahead of the curve, and they’ll be impressed at how your inbound marketing reflects your prescient state of mind.

Your knowledge, having put in the hard work of thinking about and then acting on the future, will be justifiably rewarded. It will be almost like having a crystal ball.

Related articles

• How Big Should Your Blog Be? An Informal Formula (contently.com)
• How Modesty On The Internet Can Actually Build Your Following (contently.com)
• 10 Blogs You Should Be Reading If You Manage A Company’s Content Strategy (contently.com)

The post Forecasting The Future – A Strategic Imperative appeared first on Contently.

Of course, the particular balance depends on your resources and your needs.

Original Content

This can be a strong draw for an audience, because it’s presumably something unavailable elsewhere. When you have the right original content, results are sticky because you give people something they can’t find elsewhere. You also have the opportunity to develop a unique voice and personality for the company.

However, there are some drawbacks. Someone has to create the custom content. To get something of quality can be either expensive (depending on how much you need created) or time consuming (if you decide to write it yourself). Even if you hire a writer, it can take more of your time to communicate the style and type of material you’re looking for. Put the necessary time into blogging and you may find yourself diverted from other aspects of your business.

Curated Content

This is in theory much easier to obtain. You find links whose content supports the message you’re trying to deliver through your blog. Another advantage is volume. It becomes easy to refresh your site with new material. Curated content is less expensive to assemble than creating custom content.

But, like original content, there are obstacles. Any number of other sites, including those that belong to your competitors, might choose similar links. You can’t guarantee that yours is the only site that mentions the links, so your search engine ranking takes a hit. And it’s not as though it’s effortless. You still need to add a unique take or angle that helps your audience see the relevance. Plus, maintenance can be a little difficult. A site might change its Web structure and suddenly break any link you’ve made to it.But there’s no reason to stand at one end or the other.

Stock and Flow

A mix of stock and flow content is the best way to approach your blog. Stock content is the original material, longer in form that expresses your views and personality. It will bring the audience in the first place because it’s your site’s unique selling proposition.

At the same time, you can use flow content — curated aggregation — to add more volume to your site. With proper curation, where you add something to the conversation, you also help build bridges with other sites and increase your SEO strength.

The good news is that you don’t have to nail  the “right” amount of each right away. Find a mix that seems to address your audience, your communication needs, and your resources by experimenting. For example, see what happens when you mix the two together or keep them in separate areas. Try different schedules of when you add curated and original content. Just be sure to watch the metrics for how your audience reacts.

Related articles

• A Marketer’s Guide to Content Curation (hubspot.com)
• How Google+ Fits Into a Content Strategy (contently.com)
• How To Write Traffic-Gobbling Headlines Like Huffington Post (contently.com)

The post Balance your Mix of Stock and Flow Content Like A Pro appeared first on Contently.