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.

It’s a word with high stakes, and it signals a strong emotional response. Even when we use it somewhat flippantly (I love that movie … I love the way my butt looks in those jeans … I love this chili recipe), it implies something important: intimacy.

A new study from MBLM shows exactly how important intimacy can be not just in life, but also business—especially in emotionally fraught times. MBLM’s Brand Intimacy COVID Update, released in late September as a followup to its 2020 study, reveals how 100 brands across 10 industries have fared over the past year of the pandemic in creating (or maintaining) intimacy with their customers in the U.S.

And it provides some fascinating insights for marketers who want to build a brand that people, well, love.

Brand intimacy on the rise

MBLM found that brand intimacy is up significantly across all industries since the pandemic began, and that makes sense. Since March 2020, we’ve become reliant on brands at a whole new level—turning to TV and movies for comfort, cars for escape, online retailers for supplies (and therapy), and nearly all forms of technology for a link to the outside world.

We’ve always done those things. Now we just do them much more.

The way we interact with brands these days is, by nature, intimate. Still, some brands are better at creating that intimacy than others.

MBLM surveyed over 3,000 consumers to understand the strength of their connection with different brands. Each brand was then scored on a Brand Intimacy Quotient, “a composite measure that reflects the intensity of the relationship between consumers and brands as well as the prevalence (usage and emotional connection) with the brand” that runs from 0-100.

The top four most successful industries listed in MBLM’s study, in order of ranking, are Media & Entertainment, Automotive, Retail, and Tech & Telecom.

Amongst Tech, Apple reigns supreme

Perhaps predictably, the tech brand that came out on top was Apple, which held its position from the original study last year.

While the average Brand Intimacy Quotient across all industries was 38.3, the Tech & Telecom industry outperformed an average of 45.6—fourth highest amongst all industries, and up 7 percent from last year.

Samsung and Google were tied as the second-most beloved tech brand, with a score of 54.6. Samsung is actually up 7 points from 2020, which is the biggest jump for any brand in the industry.

And then there’s Apple, with a Brand Intimacy Quotient of 73.7. Now that’s love.

It’s unsurprising that Apple’s brand intimacy is so high, considering the near-fanatic loyalty of its customers. Apple has some of the most effective marketing out there, and that held true during the pandemic.

Coincidentally, when broken down by gender, Apple is also the only of the brands to appear in the top five ranking for both men and women.

How language generates intimacy

Getting back to the subject of love, what makes these brands so successful at making us go gaga for them?

One big factor: language.

As part of MBLM’s study, the company analyzed language used on the websites and social media accounts of four leading tech brands—Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft. The results show clear messaging strategies for each brand, unified by a common theme: specifically addressing the concerns their targeted audiences experienced in 2021.

Speaking (or, in this case, writing) to your target audience’s concerns is marketing 101. But in the pandemic, brands have to not only meet customers where they are in their lives and careers, but also in relation to global events.

In 2020, communications from these same four leading brands revolved around words such as “continue,” “free,” and “soon”—language aimed at comforting a customer base living through “unprecedented” times, filled with uncertainty and financial pressure. Messaging promoted sentiments of hope, in addition to special offers such as free deliveries or discounted rates.

This year, communications are still pandemic-oriented, but now the focus is on actively facing both continued and emerging crises, combating misinformation, and getting people back to work. Fittingly, popular words from these brands in 2021 include “misinformation/misleading,” “work,” and, simply, “crisis.”

The takeaway here is that it pays to dig deep with your audience. Intimacy—or, dare we say it, love—is one of the most powerful predictors of loyalty we have, be it with our partners or products. And sometimes, the only way to achieve it is to get emotional.

The post These Are the Brands People Love the Most, According to a New Brand Intimacy Report appeared first on Contently.

But that makes sense. It’s extremely difficult to turn a profit without offering (or leveraging) some kind of tech, which means marketing those products has become very complex. It’s looking more and more like the intro sequence of HBO’s Silicon Valley.

Among the legions scrambling toward profitability are tech startups (unicorn or otherwise), legacy companies adding new branches of innovation, B2B tech, and consumer tech, just to name a few. Many are chasing the path set forth by the technology titans: Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

We’ve surveyed the offerings of some of our favorite tech companies in order to bring you a short list of stand-out content marketing. Most of us could learn a thing or two from these industry leaders.

Slack | The State of Work Report

Every brand wants to carve out a space of authority. Releasing a branded data report on your industry is the perfect way to do that. Published by Slack, the company that brought you the biggest disruption to corporate communication since Gmail, the annual State of Work report isn’t just a nice advertisement; it’s a genuinely useful piece of content for anyone who needs to think about how workspaces are built.

By gathering data, Slack makes a compelling case for streamlining office communications. The report is interesting enough that the company doesn’t have to seed CTAs throughout the copy, but any reader who enjoys it will likely conclude that Slack knows the lay of the land really well.

2019’s report found that workers who feel misaligned from their company’s central goal are the most likely to feel unhappy in their jobs: “When we’re not in sync with our company’s goals, we tend to feel more pessimistic about where our company is headed, and that’s reflected in our perception and experience of our workplace across a wide range of factors, from collaboration to productivity to compensation.”

What’s one way to connect your employees to your C-suite and a company’s high level strategy, you might ask? Downloading a chat program like Slack might help. Just saying.

Buffer | The Science of Social Media

There’s a paradox to branded podcasts. Every brand on earth wants to create an engaging podcast, but it’s hard to think of listeners who actually prefer branded programming.

But, like GE’s incredible show The Message, Buffer’s branded podcast is actually an exception to this rule. If you’re looking to dive into issues related to communication, marketing, and publishing, during your commute, you could do worse than tuning in to Buffer’s The Science of Social Media.

In one particularly interesting episode, co-host Heather-Mae Pusztai breaks down social copy into more detail than seems possible. “Consider the specific letters in the words you’re using,” she said, “particularly when it comes to stop consonants and glide consonants. Stop consonants are those that cause the vocal tract to block when pronouncing the consonant. Glide consonants do not obstruct the vocal tract and are quite frictionless when spoken.” Stop consonants, according to Pusztai, are ideal for clustering around your CTA, because they force the reader to pause.

Additionally, Buffer writes up a blog post for each podcast episode, which is a really great way to drive additional traffic and ensure that your audio content ranks on search. The Science of Social Media is just a great content product, and it enhances Buffer’s brand identity without getting into the promotional weeds.

Blendtec | Will it Blend?

The conceit of Blendtec’s massively popular YouTube series is simple: using their blender products, the company tosses in ridiculous objects to see if their patented blade technology will shred it. Put simply, “Will it Blend?” is a masterwork of a social campaign—it’s actually a deft bit of product marketing, wrapped up in a platform-specific package that respects the kind of content YouTubers like.

Based on the tone, costuming, and set design, you can tell watching the videos that Blendtec didn’t just start churning out this content on a whim. It researched what works on YouTube, and it paid off. The brand’s channel has 876,000 subscribers, and the top video (blending an iPad) has been viewed 18 million times.

Bumble | The BFF Tour

When I was single and living in a new city, I relied on Bumble for finding dates. For that, the app rocks. But when it came to finding girlfriends to meet up and confide in, I was definitely out of luck, relying on long distance phone calls with faraway buds.

Thanks to Bumble’s BFF option, singles can use the dating app to meet up platonically with new people. This update to the dating platform was launched with a live events tour, which followed a traveling airstream trailer. It’s that fun loving, surprising bit of event marketing (and content marketing!) that lands Bumble on our list.

Capitalizing on the “pop-up cocktail event” craze that’s been sweeping the nation for over a year, the BFF Tour offered a social setting for lonely singles trying to find their crew, and it fit perfectly with Bumble’s other marketing events.

Dell Technologies’ Perspectives | Girl Scouting for the STEM Age

Modern consumers want to purchase goods and services from brands that reflect their personal beliefs—the data tells us that much. That’s why creating content about empowering girls in STEM was a great move for Dell Technologies, the tech company that puts out the digital magazine Perspectives.” (Full disclosure: Contently partners with Dell Technologies to produce Perspectives.)

By describing a tech-related event that might seem small to most audiences—one girl scout troop leader taking her girls to a coding academy—Dell Technologies centers its brand in a detailed discussion. The story’s existence implies that the brand values even the smallest movements in its industry. Best of all, it leaves the reader feeling inspired about the world.

Squanch Games | Branded subreddit and discord

Few creators have a better understanding of our digital world than Justin Roiland, co-creator of the uber-popular cartoon Rick and Morty and head of the VR brand Squanch Games. Maybe because Roiland’s cartoon picked up steam in online fan communities, he was fully aware of the power of user-generated content when he launched his games studio.

Instead of waiting for consumers to start conversations about Squanch, Roiland and his team created dedicated spaces on the platforms their target audience was already using: Reddit and Discord. Combing through the discussion channels, you don’t see a lot of intrusion or advertisement from Roiland himself—unless he’s doing an AMA (Redditspeak for “Ask Me Anything” session)—but both websites are linked on Squanch’s homepage. They bear an official stamp of approval, which makes users feel like their conversations are being heard.

No matter how you fit into the technology industry, you can find creative ways to stand out by studying your target audience. That’s the bright line connecting our favorite content marketing campaigns from tech brands. The best ones meet consumers halfway.

The post 6 Examples of Incredible Content Marketing From Technology Companies appeared first on Contently.

Dell Perspectives launched in 2017 to showcase the company’s thought leadership and attract the attention of business leaders across the globe. Immediately, the content was a hit. The site earned a Digiday Content Marketing Award for Best B2B Branded Content Site in its first year thanks to a blend of unique research, reporting, and insights.

Heading into 2020, Dell Perspectives welcomed Christina Westbrook from the Global Client Solutions business unit as its new editor-in-chief. “I don’t think I ever wanted a job as badly as I wanted this job,” she said.

As Westbrook took over, her team wanted to maintain the publication’s strong coverage on emerging technology and the leaders behind it. But they also had a goal of appealing to a younger audience that would become the C-suite of tomorrow.

“For Gen Z and millennials, it’s not just a ‘nice to have’ to be aligned with their social impact priorities and beliefs,” Westbrook explained. “They don’t want to work for—or with—companies that they think are tone deaf or disingenuous. So Perspectives is a great platform to discuss the topics that really matter to us as a company and as human beings—like diversity, inclusion, social responsibility, and sustainability.”

One of the first steps was increasing the diversity of voices on the site. “Diverse content requires diverse writers,” Westbrook said. “We didn’t want to be a technology publication publishing a wide range of articles written entirely by contributors of a singular experience. In 2020—in an industry as diverse and innovative as tech—that was unacceptable to us. We worked with Contently to recruit a team of global writers of all races, ages, gender identities, and sexual orientations. These folks help us tell stories and tell them right.”

The creative additions proved to be crucial when COVID hit last March, and Dell Perspectives needed to shift its content strategy to address the new challenges it was facing.

Recovering Together

In response to the pandemic, Westbrook and her team developed the Recovering Together Series in April 2020. During a time that was full of non-stop depressing news, Dell Technologies wanted to stand out with stories about incredible innovations that were helping the world fight back.

“We just threw out one giant pitch request on the Contently platform and said: ‘Bring us your stories about how technology is helping us address all these cracks in the system,'” Westbrook said.

The series spanned everything from this fascinating story about a Dell Technologies employee making face shields at home to this fantastic feature on how a new wave of telehealth access was helping address the needs of the LGBTQ community.

“The telehealth story is one of my favorites,” Westbrook said. “It’s not because it was the highest performing, but it was the first one where we really leaned into something we’d never done before. It was article about cutting-edge innovations in queer health written by a queer-identified author.”

The end result was a 23-story series that reached over 24,000 readers and generated over 40,000 minute of attention time—as measured by Contently’s Analytics—all without any paid promotion.

Celebrating diverse innovators in tech

The next big series for Dell Perspectives came in February of 2021, when it launched a Black History Month campaign, which celebrated black leaders and innovators who paved the way for us all.

Ideas for the visually engaging series came from Dell Perspectives’ diverse roster of writers. The stories attracted readers by highlighting incredibly important figures in the history of tech, examining where we’re falling short today, and reporting on initiatives, like the Code Crew in Tennessee, that are building a better tomorrow.

“Dell Technologies believes in the power of diversity and considers it one of our huge strengths,” Westbrook said. “Diversity and inclusion are not just the right things to do, they drive better ideas, better decisions, and even a better bottom line.”

The series was also a hit. Stories saw 34 percent higher attention time on average than other Perspectives stories, an 11 percent higher finish rate, and 1,686 percent more readers.

Following Black History Month came Dell Perspective’s Rebel Women Series in March to celebrate Women’s History Month. The name for the campaign was inspired by the Rebel Girls YA series, and profiled five incredible women in STEM—all of whom are distinguished engineers at Dell Technologies—sharing the path they took to build storied careers.

Dell Technologies’ staff of Contently writers interviewed the engineers, and the journalistic approach unearthed incredibly moving stories.

“All the pieces were about women and written by women. People loved it internally, and it got great results,” Westbrook said. “One woman said her father cried when he read it.”

People loved it externally too. The series generated an astounding 73 percent average finish rate, 50 percent more attention time, a 71 percent higher engagement rate, and 494 percent more readers.

The response led to an important realization: This type of content shouldn’t just be limited to a specific month.

“I have a steering committee meeting every Tuesday and we asked ourselves, ‘Why are we only doing this for women’s history month?'” Westbrook said. “The number of women in STEM is low. We’re trying to encourage women to pursue careers in STEM. So these women’s stories are both interesting and relevant.”

One thing Westbrook appreciates is the way Contently has helped Dell Perspectives take their storytelling ambitions to new heights. “I appreciated the excellent editing and the thoughtful writer sourcing. I don’t have to worry about whether the writers or the graphic designer are up to par,” she said. “They’ll point out things that I don’t notice, and that’s where the partnership is really valuable.”

This month, Dell Perspectives is continuing that ambition with a Pride Series. Stories covers everything from how to be a more meaningful ally at your tech job to a feature story on LGBTQ community groups trying to ease the digital divide for seniors, at-risk youth, and homeless people within the queer community.

“As we enter the second half of 2021 and into 2022, we want to continue to ensure that our Black or queer or women writers, for example, aren’t only given stories that speak to their personal life experiences,” Westbrook added. “Yes, we want them to be the ones to tell those stories on Perspectives, but we also want them to feel encouraged and empowered to write the tech story that has nothing to do with belonging to a marginalized community—the ones that straight, cis, white men have had the privilege of telling from the get-go. That is the future of Perspectives. That is where we are moving toward.”

These efforts are paying off. Dell Perspectives has become beloved internally as the audience grew 200 percent over the past year, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers.

“What excites me is that there’s a lot of confidence internally in what we can do with Perspectives,” Westbrook said. “And there are a lot of people interested in leveraging what we’ve done and scaling it across our entire organization.”

As that happens, there’s no limit to the kind of high-impact, human stories that Dell Perspectives can tell.

The post How Dell Perspectives Grew Its Audience 200% Through Bold Social Impact Storytelling appeared first on Contently.

The reason for such emphatic coverage is simple: Great stories leave an emotional resin on readers, imprinting them in a way traditional marketing copy does not. But as our CMO likes to remind us, storytelling alone is not a strategy. Plenty of brands are interested in telling stories, but that doesn’t mean everyone is doing it effectively. According to a study by the marketing intelligence company Beckon, 5 percent of all branded content accounts for 90 percent of total engagement.

Since we’re in the midst of a heated battle for consumer attention, we decided to break down our internal data to see how different industries were performing in 2017 across three key metrics: average attention time, engagement rate, and finish rate.

The data revealed some interesting trends. For instance, B2B brands got high marks for average attention time, getting users to stay with their content for more than three minutes at a clip, but the average finish rate for their content was 13 percent. That discrepancy suggests there’s an opportunity for those companies to re-evaluate the length of their content. Readers are clearly hooked, but maybe the stories are too long for a given topic. Writers and editors have the ability to produce something valuable that stems beyond an intriguing headline or lede.

In the infographic below, check out how three industries—finance, B2B, and tech—compare when it comes to performance metrics. Welcome to the Content Performance Games. How do you match up?

The post Infographic: Which Industries Have the Best Content Marketing? appeared first on Contently.

One touchdown pass and many incompletions later, I re-entered reality with ambivalence. The game was fun, but unnatural. Due to the motion sensors’ limitations, it felt like I was throwing darts, not a football. Still, despite its flaws, the potential was exciting.

Whenever you read about virtual reality, that word—“potential”—comes up a lot. Companies are clearly enthused about where the VR industry is headed. Some agencies are so excited by VR’s potential that they are covering the costs for brands interested in creating VR content, according to Digiday.

But at this stage of virtual reality’s evolution, is the technology a smart choice for brands looking for an immediate return on investment? Maybe not.

VR’s soft arrival

Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford and the founder and director of Virtual Human Interaction Lab, is not among those expecting VR to transform branded entertainment overnight. At the most basic level, the cost renders it a luxury many brands can’t afford.

“Movies only have to account for the small window of space where you point the camera,” Bailenson told Slate. “Video games are not infinite. But VR has to work from any distance, any angle, all the time, so the cost of making content is astronomical.”

Unlike traditional storytelling formats with a single narrative for the audience to follow, VR puts the viewer in control. The immersive experience allows you to take in multiple arcs at the same time, which makes the job of the producer that much harder.

“It’s a fundamental shift in how stories are told,” said Ji Lee, creative lead at Facebook, during a VaynerMedia-hosted Social Media Week presentation. “You’re swapping linear for 360-degree, spherical, multidimensional storytelling. And the user has a new role as participant.”

In Lee’s mind, there are two major hurdles currently holding back virtual reality: scalability and content. Despite mainstream devices like the Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift, the technology still lacks widespread adoption. And even for customers who can afford VR, the library of content is limited. Plus, much of what exists so far makes for a great initial viewing experience, but loses its “wow” factor thereafter.

“When the iPhone first came out, there was a lot of utility to the apps. You’d go back and use them over and over,” said Zoey Taylor, business development at Framestore VR Studio. “With VR, you might put on a headset and use it for ten minutes in the morning, but people need a reason for repeated usage throughout the day.”

Even with multiple narratives at play, you’re not going to watch the same VR piece ad nauseum. And worse, much of the public isn’t yet able to appreciate the wonders of VR at all.

“In the early days, people could read reviews, but they couldn’t experience it themselves,” said Christine Cattano, global head of VR, executive producer at Framestore. “The press would cover it, there would be good buzz, but in terms of the larger population, they couldn’t actually know if it was good or bad. VR was being viewed in a vacuum.”

It’s tough for brands to swallow the costs of production knowing very few consumers will actually enjoy the end product. Only 6 percent of Americans were forecasted to own a VR headset in 2016, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics. And 93 percent of those in that small fraction owned cheaper smartphone models. While those numbers will improve this year, scale approaching any other mainstream media format remains years away.

But could there be an advantage in beating the pack—and reaping the rewards of the investment later?

Building for the future

Despite his hesitations, Bailenson believes VR does have some worthwhile applications in the present, though he limits those use cases to four categories. In the aforementioned Slate article, he describes those categories as follows:

• “Expensive: If it would cost a lot to do something in real life, like visit the statue of David in Florence, Italy, it might make sense to do it virtually.”
• “Dangerous: Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro might be the adventure of a lifetime, but it could also be your last. Several people die on its slopes every year.”
• “Impossible: You can’t travel back in time, grow a third arm, or experience life as a person of a different race or gender. But VR can give you a surprisingly visceral taste of what it would be like if you could.”
• “Rare: You could go whale-watching a dozen times without seeing a humpback breach right next to your boat. Or you could do it once in VR.”

For Framestore, early client investments in virtual reality have led to encouraging results. A mobile VR driving experience created for Volvo generated 28,000 app downloads and over 50,000 inquiries for more information, impressive totals even without a correlating dollar figure. Though sometimes, VR and ROI require a long-term mindset.

“When we first started working in VR, there were three goals for ROI: generating PR buzz, shifting a user’s perception of the tech, and being the first mover in the space,” said Cattano. “None of those have really changed, but I do think it’s a mistake to look for an immediate fiscal return on an investment into innovation. It’s more about, ‘How do I prep myself for this field in the future so in five years we’re not playing catch-up when it’s a more ubiquitous medium?'”

Case in point: “The Field Trip to Mars,” a one-off school bus built for Lockheed Martin to figuratively transport those on board to the Red Planet. The actual experience was limited to attendees at the USA Science & Engineering Festival, but the virtual field trip generated huge levels of worldwide press coverage and earned media. Framestore estimates that a year later, it still receives “15-20 inquires a day” about repurposing the idea.

“If you ask the question on behalf of the client, was it worth it for those 30 or so direct eyeballs, absolutely it was,” Taylor said. “While you can’t track the worth the way you would in traditional mediums we’re more used to, you have to open your mind a bit to the value of creating a bespoke experience for your consumer.”

Brands like Wayfair, an e-commerce company that sells home furnishings, are already starting to build a library of 3D scans of their products for anticipated future uses in the AR and VR realms. But is that the right move? On the one hand, a smart investment now can pay big dividends down the road. On the other, the “VR has potential one day” prediction is just that—a prediction. Since there is so little content out there, it’s difficult to know if what seems like quality VR content today might be outdated tomorrow.

“There are no true barometers for quality at the moment,” Taylor said. “It’s tough to recognize ‘high quality’ VR. People can see the potential, but they don’t have enough knowledge or comparisons yet to know what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ VR look like.”

Part of that quality conversation is ensuring that projects actually make sense for the VR treatment. Even those in the industry admit it’s not always the right tool for the job.

“We’ll sometimes, to the detriment of winning work, decide not to repurpose material just for the sake of virtual [reality],” Cattano said. “We try to encourage the conversation to hit the right points: How will this tech provide value for you? How will it solve a business problem?”

At the end of the day, that mindset is what Cattano believes is most important in determining if virtual reality is a smart use of budget. The answer varies depending on the specific task at hand, and whether VR provides value a cheaper medium simply can’t offer.

“We’re maturing into a place where we can look at it and say, ‘How does VR solve this problem uniquely?'” she said. “It has to be through the lens of what problem you’re solving rather than the ROI you’re generating, because ultimately, using VR to solve a specific problem is your ROI.”

The post Are Brands Wasting Their Money on Virtual Reality? appeared first on Contently.

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

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

(Full disclosure: ASUS is a Contently client.)

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

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

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

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

How do you explain content marketing to people at ASUS?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where do you think we are headed next?

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

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

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

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