As the film progresses, we hear about the history of the Lakota people. We see images of their impoverished reservation juxtaposed with joy-filled dances and rich cultural traditions. And at the same time, we’re drawn in by how the CRYP is helping many others like Genevieve work towards a stronger future for their people. It’s no wonder the film has amassed over 4.7 million YouTube views—it’s both beautifully shot and emotionally affecting.

It’s also an extremely effective example of brand storytelling, as it was produced not by a gritty independent film studio but by the financial services platform Square.

On first viewing, that might sound like an overstatement; Square isn’t directly mentioned in the film, and we only see it being passively used at Genevieve’s job. The focus isn’t on the product, but on the CRYP’s mission to empower Lakota youth with job and internship experiences that help them strengthen their community. That’s a noble aim, but how can a piece of content that is not directly about a brand be one of the best examples of brand storytelling?

Stories lead to a “branding moment”

The neuromarketing company Neuro-Insight can help us understand why this works so well. They’ve used neuroscience technology to look at what’s happening in people’s brains while they watch ads and TV shows. What makes Neuro-Insight unique is their proprietary technology called Steady State Topography (SST), which pinpoints how likely someone is to remember an ad. They call this long-term memory encoding.

As humans, our brains are built for stories. Whenever we watch something, our brain assumes there must be a story and tries to make sense of the narrative. This is particularly true when we’re introduced to a compelling character off the bat—like Genevieve, a young woman in the midst of coming of age and making a difference in her underserved community.

We see the Square product in action when Genevieve tells us how this opportunity to earn her own money gives her a sense of independence. To others, her job may be just a boring internship, but taking advantage of this opportunity is her triumph. And Square is one of the on-the-job tools that will give her the tech experience she needs while also simplifying a core business function for her employer.

Neuro-Insight calls this a “branding moment”—when our brain finally understands the story and memory encoding peaks. If your brand’s logo or product appears at that moment, people are much more likely to remember it.

Stories make messages memorable

Of course, not all the best brand storytelling examples take on such sensitive subject matter. The viral Cadbury “Gorilla” advertisement—wherein a gorilla drums along to Peter Gabriel’s “In The Air Tonight,” and no chocolate is consumed—is downright silly. However, per Neuro-Insight’s analysis, it ranked in the top 1 percent for long-term memory encoding. There’s a key lesson here for anyone who wants to tell a story that’ll make people remember their company: A big old bar of Cadbury chocolate appears at the end of this perplexing but engaging scene, and it stuck in people’s brains. And the next time they were checking out at the supermarket and saw that Cadbury chocolate by the cashier, they were more likely to subconsciously notice it, have a positive association, and buy it. Just like that, the ad increased sales by 10 percent.

Another killer example of storytelling advertisements is the “Mean Streets” video from Adobe. There’s a strong story that hooks you off the bat—a frazzled middle-aged guy meeting a dealer to seemingly buy drugs, but it turns out he’s buying clicks. He gets arrested, and we don’t really know what on earth we’re watching until the very end, when we realize it’s an ad for Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Stories can be used in a variety of formats

Not all effective brand storytelling has to be a high-production video, of course—feel free to breathe a sigh of relief. Intel is a great example of brand-centering stories about client impact stories through their social media content. Take this quick interview with Mary Beth Chalk, the co-founder and CCO of BeeKeeper AI. Mary uses her personal story of being diagnosed with cancer to demonstrate just how crucial AI services will be for the future of healthcare and personal privacy.

And as with the other examples in this list, Intel is not at the center of the story. At the end of the video, Mary lists which of Intel’s services are crucial for BeeKeeper AI to function—then we see Intel’s logo, and that’s that.

What makes these stories stick

There are a few things each of these examples of brand storytelling do really well:

• Prioritize the brand, not the product: Until the branding moment, they prioritize the story over selling the brand. As Heather Andrew, Neuro-Insight’s former UK CEO, explained: “This is highly effective from the brain’s point of view because our brains often reject overt selling messages, while brand cues like colors, shapes, and sounds can get in ‘under the radar.’”
• Focus on real people (or animals!) experiencing real emotion. The presence of people increased emotional intensity by 133 percent in a study of social ads.
• Introduce a compelling narrative right away. Branded content with an early story arc is 58 percent more likely to be viewed past 3 seconds.

The next time you scroll through your feeds, look out for branding moments. Which pieces of content do it well? Which don’t? Then, get inspired, and tell a brand story that people will remember.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about brand storytelling

What role does authenticity play in these successful brand storytelling examples?

Authenticity is crucial in brand storytelling, as consumers value genuine connections and narratives that resonate with their own experiences. Brands, like these, that convey sincerity and honesty in their storytelling are more likely to build trust and loyalty with their audience.

How can companies determine the most effective storytelling strategies for their brand?

Understanding the target audience, conducting market research, and analyzing past successful campaigns can help companies tailor their content marketing storytelling approach to resonate with their audience and achieve their brand objectives.

Are there any ethical considerations to keep in mind when using brand storytelling?

To maintain credibility and trust with their audience, brands should be mindful of cultural sensitivities, avoid exploiting sensitive topics for marketing purposes, and ensure transparency in their storytelling efforts. Additionally, respecting the privacy and consent of individuals featured in brand stories is essential to upholding ethical standards.

For more brand storytelling examples worth reading, subscribe to The Content Strategist and follow us on Instagram.

The post ‘Branding Moments’: Brand Storytelling Examples To Get Your Message Across appeared first on Contently.

But with the dizzying pace of new AI-powered tools released almost weekly, marketers can have a hard time deciding how to integrate AI into their content strategies.

Let’s explore the latest AI-driven technologies and their impact on the content landscape, as well as discuss how businesses can stay ahead by leveraging these tools effectively.

Generative AI and How It’s Changing Content Strategy

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating new content, data, or information based on existing patterns or structures. Essentially, it involves training machine learning models, such as neural networks, on vast amounts of data to learn underlying patterns, relationships, and structures.

Once trained, these models can generate new, original output in various forms, such as text, images, music, or even design elements.

According to a Botco.ai report, more than 50 percent of marketers use AI for text, audio, and video creation, with email copy being the tactic most often created using chat AI tools.

ChatGPT, for example, is an advanced generative AI model that can understand context, answer questions, and produce high-quality content. This technology has the potential to revolutionize many industries by automating creative tasks, enhancing human creativity, and generating novel solutions to complex problems. Chat AI is reshaping content strategies as it brings new possibilities and opportunities to the table. Here’s how it’s making an impact:

• Scale content creation: Generative AI can help automate the content creation process, generating drafts or ideas for articles, social media posts, or ad copy, saving time and effort for content strategists.
• Personalization: By analyzing user behavior and preferences, generative AI can create personalized content, tailoring the messaging and format to suit individual users’ needs and interests, thus increasing engagement and conversion rates.
• Enhanced creativity: Generative AI can generate novel ideas, combinations, or formats that humans might not think of, pushing the boundaries of content strategies and inspiring content creators to think outside the box.
• Improved SEO: AI-driven tools can optimize content for search engines, ensuring content uses the right keywords, structures, and formats, making it easier for audiences to discover the content organically.
• Experimentation and iteration: AI-driven content strategies can quickly test and iterate on different content variations, learning what works best and continuously refining the approach.

By embracing AI tools within the content process, strategists can enhance their workflows, stay ahead of the competition, and deliver more engaging, relevant, and innovative content to their audiences.

AI & Google’s Algorithm: What You Need to Know About SERP & SEO

Google has integrated AI into its search algorithms with RankBrain, an AI-driven component that helps process search queries. This development has impacted SEO strategies significantly, putting an emphasis on high-quality, relevant content.

For example, content that effectively answers user queries and provides valuable information is more likely to rank higher in search results. The focus on user experience and engagement has also increased, with factors like page load speed and mobile-friendliness playing a crucial role. SEO professionals must now adapt to the ever-evolving AI-driven algorithms to ensure their content ranks well and stays ahead of the competition.

In fact, in May 2023, Google announced that it’s introducing generative AI into its search platform, aiming to transform information organization and answer complex questions more efficiently.

Accessible through Search Labs, the new Search Generative Experience will improve the search experience by understanding topics faster, uncovering new insights, and simplifying tasks. The AI-powered snapshots will provide key information with links for deeper exploration, and a conversational mode will allow users to ask follow-up questions with context carried over.

For content strategists, this development emphasizes how important it is to feature a wide range of voices and sources while highlighting web content to ensure their work remains relevant and accessible in the new era of search.

Brands Creating Effective AI-Powered Content Strategies

Deadpool actor and co-owner of Mint Mobile, Ryan Reynolds, submitted a prompt to ChatGPT to generate ad copy that included a joke and a swear word and also mentioned Mint Mobile’s holiday promotion. Reynolds then read the AI-generated script on camera, describing it as both “eerie” and “mildly terrifying.”

This innovative use of AI for commercial scripting is part of Mint Mobile’s ongoing efforts to stand out as a budget-friendly option and a challenger in the wireless industry. This ad also underlines the potential of AI tools like ChatGPT in automating creative work and streamlining marketing processes.

This year Patrón Tequila unveiled an innovative way to celebrate National Margarita Day through a partnership with global superstar Becky G. The brand introduced an AI-powered tool named the Patrón Dream Margarita generator, which lets users craft their dream margarita. By responding to prompts about location, flavor, and garnish, the AI tool generates personalized art pieces depicting their ideal margarita, which can then be shared on social media.

Users who shared their creations on Twitter or Instagram Stories could win tickets to a Becky G. concert in New York City, along with other benefits. This move underscores Patrón’s commitment to exploring emerging technologies and engaging with virtual communities in novel ways.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Implementing Chat AI Into Your Content Strategy

We all know the popular Spider-Man adage, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and that’s certainly the case when using AI. While generative AI technology is seeing explosive growth, it’s still in its infancy. Here are five common pitfalls to avoid when implementing these AI technologies:

1. Relying Solely on AI-Generated Content

It’s important to maintain a balance between human and AI-generated content to ensure authenticity and relatability. For example, while AI-generated content is efficient, it may lack the nuance and creativity that a human writer can bring to the table.

2. Not Fact-Checking AI Outputs

ChatGPT itself acknowledges that the information it generates can include inaccurate or even made-up information. It’s imperative to ensure you have a thorough fact-checking step in your content process.

3. Ignoring Content Optimization

Make sure to optimize your content for both users and search engines, taking into account factors like readability, keyword usage, and metadata.

4. Not Redirecting Time Savings Back Into Content

There’s no doubt that leveraging AI tools accelerates content production. But it’s a mistake not to invest that saved time into other areas in your content strategy to maintain high-quality standards.

5. Don’t Overlook AI Ethics

Be mindful of potential biases in the AI algorithms and the need for transparency when utilizing AI in your content strategy. This includes acknowledging the use of AI-generated content when appropriate and ensuring that output is accurate and reliable.

As we move forward into the future of AI-driven content creation, it’s crucial for businesses to continue exploring new ways to harness the power of AI and stay informed about the latest advancements in the field. This includes keeping an eye on new AI models and platforms that can help improve content quality, as well as understanding how AI technologies are shaping user behavior and expectations.

Subscribe to The Content Strategist newsletter to stay in the loop about advances in AI content strategy and digital transformation.

The post Revolutionizing Content Strategies: The Impact of Generative and Chat AI on Modern Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Today’s audiences come across so much mediocre content that looks and sounds the same. Lately, innovative marketing teams have been thinking beyond the standard blog post. They’re investing in new formats and new ideas that can push their businesses forward.

In our brand new report, we set out to highlight tactics that could help your brand thrive. We analyzed the entire B2B content marketing landscape, talked to experts, and broke down case studies from companies like Google, Microsoft, HubSpot, and more.

Here are the five biggest trends you need to know.

[If you prefer to view a PDF version of the report that’s easier to print, we’ve got you covered here.]

1. Interactive Tools Give Brands a Creative Edge—and Empower Buyers

On Google, there are 260 million search results for “b2b technology.” There are only 214 million for “b2b software.” Based on the numbers, you’d expect b2b technology to be the more popular term. But according to Google Trends, that’s not the case. For most of 2020, b2b software has had about twice as much interest.

Data like that is powerful evidence for B2B marketers who can optimize their sites to take advantage of a keyword inefficiency. Best of all, anyone can access that information, and more just like it. Want to test your site speed? Assess your marketing maturity? Identify untapped markets? You can investigate all of these questions yourself using the Digital Marketing Toolbox on Think With Google.

A few years ago, the search giant launched Think With Google, a content hub for marketers and business owners. “It’s intended to be a resource for everything from high-level insights to deck-ready stats to useful tools,” said Alli Mooney, the site’s former editor-in-chief, who now runs brand content at Waze.

Those types of tools are just as useful for Google’s marketing team as they are for its audience. Interactive tools are one of the most cost-efficient content investments you can make because of their evergreen appeal. And once the content is live, it won’t require much upkeep.

A few good examples of this include CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer and Canva’s Color Palette Generator. Both tools occupy top spots on search rankings, driving more long-term value than your average blog post. According to a study by Demand Gen Report, interactive content was more effective at educating buyers than static content by 23 percentage points.

It’s the difference between telling someone what to do and empowering them to find the answer on their own. Why give a man a fish when you can teach him to how to benefit from your B2B software, right?

“When you let your customers interact with your content, they make choices that are relevant to them, and you learn more about them each time they click,” said Jennifer Burak, who was VP of marketing for Rapt Media, an enterprise video platform, before becoming director of marketing at Techstars. “This helps you create better content and continue to optimize your existing content.”

Interactive content encompasses a variety of formats like videos, calculators, quizzes, and even games. Creating this kind of B2B content can sound complicated if you’ve never done it before, but there are simple ways to get off the ground: calculators and quizzes.

Calculators have become the go-to resource for a lot of companies because they let people consider costs without a hard sell. Salesforce, for example, has a free ROI calculator that promises to show “how revenue, gross margin, and cost control could improve.” To make it as easy as possible, Salesforce asks users to filter by industry, which automatically enters some data based on recent benchmarks.

You can see why a tool like this is beneficial. It makes the case for why you’ll benefit from buying Salesforce, without you ever having to talk to a salesperson.

BuzzFeed’s calling card—quizzes—also works for B2B companies. Only instead of asking people to choose from 13 pictures of Taylor Swift and telling them what kind of dog they are, B2B marketers can develop diagnostic quizzes that point users toward solutions for their biggest work challenges. At Contently, we added a Content Strategy Assessment at the bottom of our content strategy services page on our website to help potential customers evaluate which of our solutions fits their needs.

When done right, interactive tools don’t just drive leads. They qualify them too, providing key information that’ll help you personalize your follow-up and push prospects down the funnel more efficiently.

For marketers wondering how to build awareness and even drive leads, this is one easy way to get people interested in your company. Tools like Typeform, Calconic, and Qzzr offer free trials and have plans for about $30 per month.

We expect brands to test the waters with more tools in the near future. And if that goes well, then they can graduate to our next trend.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Do some research in your field to see what tools already exist and where you can stand out.
• Start simple with a calculator or outcome quiz that your audience can use to discover something about themselves.
• Add value by guiding the user toward a solution like a relevant resource, case study, or product page.

2. Educational Courses Are Lead Gen Machines

Way back in 2011, some employees at HubSpot had an idea. They wanted to create an educational program on inbound marketing for HubSpot customers. So they wrote scripts for a few lessons, shot a few videos, and published them on a landing page. At the end of the course, they included an optional exam. If someone went through the course and passed the exam, they’d receive an official Inbound Certification.

“At the time, we knew it wasn’t the best course on SEO or content marketing or email marketing,” the company wrote in a recent e-book. “But what [the] Inbound Marketing [course] did do well was combine all of those strategies into a framework that really spoke to SMB marketers.”

Almost a decade later, that single project has evolved into HubSpot Academy, which offers over 350 free online courses. Per HubSpot, the Academy educates “tens of thousands of users every month.” In Q1 of 2020, new leads increased 115 percent year-over-year. Anyone can access the database to get certified in disciplines ranging from content marketing to business analytics to e-commerce. All you have to do is fill out a form.

HubSpot was clearly onto something. Virtual learning has boomed in recent years thanks to massive open online courses (MOOCs) like Coursera. Students can go through the material at their own pace, usually for free. Even esteemed colleges like Harvard and Yale have gotten in on the action, letting the public take certain online classes without needing to pay a cent of the $50,000 tuition.

In the professional world, this trend has huge appeal, especially for B2B companies. Workers can add to their skillset or learn something new if they want to switch careers. B2B marketers, meanwhile, can break down their complex products and services into lessons that are easy to understand. The courses also help nurture leads gradually (and improve customer retention). The built-in structure gives people a reason to come back multiple times to finish the lessons on your site.

Every course begins with a landing page. Think of it as a syllabus or outline, packaging the different components. This typically reveals how many lessons there are, who’s teaching them, and how long it’ll take to complete the whole course.

One reason these courses are so popular is because of chunking. The term comes from Harvard psychologist George A. Miller, who, in the 1950s, found that humans tend to memorize information best when something is split up between five and nine segments. If your boss asks you to learn Google Analytics, that sounds daunting. But if you go to Google Analytics Academy and see there’s a beginner course with smaller units for setting up basic campaigns and tracking conversions, suddenly the request seems more manageable.

For marketers, chunking supplies an added bonus: It gives users a clear reason to fill out a lead form. We’re all bombarded with pop-ups asking us to subscribe to newsletters and talk to a salesperson. But it makes sense to give up your email when you’re taking a course so that new lessons can be delivered to you on time.

Most successful courses incorporate video lessons, but you don’t need a huge budget (or an academy) to put together a successful video course. The key ingredient is knowing what your audience wants.

In 2014, three researchers from MIT, edX, and the University of Rochester studied 128,000 students learning through MOOCs. The goal was to find virtual learning trends and provide recommendations for instructional designers and video producers.

After evaluating over 6.9 million watching sessions, here’s what the researchers suggest:

B2B marketers, particularly in tech, already have the instincts to build a course like this, since they’re used to communicating with a digital audience.

“Presentation styles that have worked well for centuries in traditional in-person lectures do not necessarily make for effective online educational videos,” the researchers wrote. “To maximize student engagement, instructors must plan their lessons specifically for an online video format.”

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Review your existing content to find common themes or topics that could become courses.
• Use your content calendar to map out new course lessons well ahead of time if you’re starting from scratch.
• Keep video lessons short and highlight the instructor to give the course a personal connection.

3. Newsletters Have Become the Centerpiece of Content Distribution and Audience Building

There’s always another hot new marketing channel. Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Alexa have all been anointed the next big thing that marketers need to care about. But one of the greatest resources marketers have at their disposal has barely changed in 50 years: email.

As organic social media traffic tailed off last decade and mobile device usage made homepages less essential, email newsletters helped marketers direct readers back to their sites on a regular basis. In a way, the inbox is now the new homepage. And it’s no longer a channel that brands can ignore.

Platforms like Substack have made it ridiculously easy for anyone to start an email newsletter. The appetite is there for this kind of content. It’s gotten to the point where people from places like Digiday and Politico are leaving their full-time jobs to start subscription newsletters.

For marketers, it’s also a more personal alternative than social media. As journalist Casey Newton told The New York Times, “You don’t have to fight an algorithm to reach your audience.” That’s why brands and publishers alike have opted for more personality in their messages, even letting certain employees include their names in corporate emails. I have a last name, but you may know me as Jordan at Contently. I’ve also come across Taco at Trello, Sophia at Yesware, and even Charles the Dog at Lighthouse Creative.

This personality has a point. Per HubSpot, 78 percent of marketers noticed an increase in email engagement over the last year. And according to Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 B2B Benchmarking Report, marketers rated email newsletters as the best way to nurture leads, ahead of blog posts, in-person events, and case studies.

“We love email,” GE’s Chief Storyteller told us. “It may sound old-school, but email subscription is really a hardwired link to your audience. For us, email subscribers are an extremely valuable audience that we want.”

A big part of email’s value comes from having a reliable connection with your audience. You can link to B2B content on social channels, but you’ll have to pay for distribution for it to have a meaningful impact. (Organic reach on Facebook was clocked at just 5 percent in April 2020.)

It’s like building a house on somebody else’s land. As our head of marketing Joe Lazauskas wrote in his guide to compounding content ROI: “Spend $500 on ads today, and you’ll have to spend again tomorrow to see the same results. But spend $500 on a piece of great content today and it will drive continuous traffic and leads for free—by ranking well for search, engaging website visitors, and increasing newsletter engagement.”

At Contently, we developed a model to map out how our newsletter impacts the bottom line. Our blog, The Content Strategist, gets hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month.

For the people who aren’t already subscribed to our newsletter, we put a pop-up on our site that lets them sign up if they’re interested. That pop-up converts at 2 percent. That means that every 100,000 new visitors will yield 2,000 new email subscribers.

Of those 2,000 new email subscribers, about 2 percent will request a demo of Contently over the next couple of quarters.Based on the average value conversion rates of an MQL, those 40 demo requests are worth $200,000 in weighted pipeline to our business.

Additionally, email provides more freedom to customize and experiment compared to other content distribution channels. Marketers have the ability to segment their subscriber lists. This tactic can be really useful if you’re trying to reach people in different industries, roles, locations, and more. Urbansitter, a tech company that connects parents and babysitters, increased conversions by 260 percent just by segmenting emails to its two different user groups.

Sending a newsletter isn’t exactly a new trend. But what’s noteworthy is that companies are beginning to treat email as one of the most important parts of the content lifecycle. It can be the ultimate factor that makes or breaks a B2B content program.

If you’re new to content marketing, look for ways to build your list and feed subscribers with insightful material. Even if the material doesn’t come from you all the time. Email partnerships, content swaps, and content curation can all get you in front of new people.

Morning Brew, which publishes four newsletters including Marketing Brew, has executed this strategy to perfection. The company expects to earn $20 million in ad revenue by the end of 2020, per Digiday. It has over 2 million subscribers across the newsletters and boasts an incredible 42 percent open rate.

Those numbers may seem untouchable right now, but keep in mind that Morning Brew had 160,000 subscribers two years ago. Email growth can happen fast, as long as you send the right message.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Set up lead forms on your site so it’s easy for people to subscribe to your newsletter.
• Give employees the freedom to have personality and share their experiences.
• Segment your subscriber list over time so you can tailor content to different audience personas.

4. B2B Tech Leaders Are Reimagining the Product Story in New, Creative Ways

88 Acres: How Microsoft Quietly Built the City of the Future…

It reads like the title of an award-winning magazine feature. Should’ve been, really. In 2014, Microsoft pitched a bunch of journalists an idea about how a group of employees were analyzing sensory data to revolutionize the way the company used energy across its 500-acre campus.

All of them passed. So Microsoft’s communications team decided to cover it themselves. Jennifer Warnick, the lead writer of Microsoft Story Labs at the time, put the article together. Forty-eight hours after it went live, 800,000 people had read it. To this day, it’s arguably one of the best pieces of content marketing ever created.

“88 Acres” is the platonic ideal of a product story. A Microsoft employee wrote about other people at Microsoft using the company’s products, and it didn’t come across as self-promotional.

When companies write about themselves, we usually wind up with dry, hollow press releases. However, the typical press release machine has become somewhat outdated. Why put an update on the wire hoping a journalist covers it when you can tell your audience directly? Microsoft’s story shows what happens when a brand controls its own narrative.

Over the years, brands have gradually warmed up to the idea. SEMrush uses its own features to analyze its content on a regular basis. Then there’s Typeform, which walked us through a more unusual example earlier this year. When Paul Campillo, head of brand and communications, was working on a story about chatbots, he wanted to insert one so readers could ask it questions about the article. Only problem was, Typeform didn’t have a chatbot. So their dev team built one.

“The article was a huge success,” Campillo said. “Now it’s one of Typeform’s three offerings.”

Marketers have this tendency to sugarcoat everything. But we’ve heard from clients that they liked learning about our trials and errors. They could relate to our challenges and follow each step as we worked to overcome them. At Contently, we think of ourselves as our best case study.

That’s something anyone can do, regardless of whether or not they have a tale as rich as “88 Acres.” And since product stories appeal to both new leads and existing customers, the content can help with onboarding and retention. Think of them like Help Center assets that customers can use to solve problems on their own—only with more creativity than the usual instruction manual approach.

For software companies, these stories can be integrated throughout the product. We’ve started doing this ourselves with a new video series called “Contently In Action.”

When customers reach a certain part of our platform, a short tutorial pops up and explains how we use the feature to optimize results. It may not win an Emmy, but it serves actionable advice at the right time.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Compare a press release and an article side by side while noting the differences in tone and creativity
• Sort through the most popular Help Center articles or tutorials to discover good product story ideas
• Write about your own experiences using your product like an investigate reporter, highlighting challenges and solutions

5. Branded Shows Are the Future of Multimedia Content

The average Netflix subscriber spends two hours per day on the streaming service. When marketers publish content, they’re usually hoping someone will spare two minutes to look at it.

That’s such a stark difference when you say it out loud. At the core, though, a Netflix executive and a B2B marketing executive are after the same thing. Both are building audiences and vying for user attention to increase revenue. So how can we get people as vested in our B2B content as they are in Stranger Things?

The first step is to think in terms of series rather than one-off pieces of content. The biggest mistake people make when setting up a content calendar is treating it as just a daily tracker. The calendar is more than just a to-do list. For your content strategy to work, you need a long-term lens

You never hear someone ask, “What’s your favorite episode of TV?” You say, “What’s your favorite show?” You want to know what series got them hooked, coming back for more.

“To hold attention, the only plan must be to provide your audience with a worthwhile experience,” Jay Acunzo, founder of Marketing Showrunners, wrote on The Content Strategist. “Shows are the world’s best vehicle for doing that. They help marketers create compounding returns on our content investment, since shows are binge-worthy when done right.”

A number of innovative companies are starting to take this track through podcasts, video series, and even feature-length documentaries. Acunzo keeps a running list of over 200 branded shows broken down by B2C, B2B, and non-profit. It might surprise you to see the B2B space represented so strongly with Adobe’s Wireframe podcast, Moz’s Whiteboard Friday, and Lessonly’s Do Better Work, to name a few.

With in-person events paused for the foreseeable future, shows could fill part of the void in the marketing line-up. Like educational courses, video series are good for driving and nurturing leads. They’ve proven to be effective—a study from Animoto found that four times as many customers would rather watch a video than read an article to learn about a product.

One new show that Acunzo recommended is Onboarding Joei, created by 360Learning. The docu-series, which debuted in April, follows Joei Chan as she gets acclimated as the tech company’s new director of content.

As writer Molly Donovan detailed on the Marketing Showrunners blog, the show drove immediate results. In the past, 360Learning had to spend €900 to acquire a marketing qualified lead. For Onboarding Joei, the MQL cost dropped to €25.

“I was able to show that I could bring in a lot of qualified subscribers,” Nicolas Merlaud, the show’s creator, told Donovan. “Moreover, I could prove the show’s ROI.

This approach could even translate to virtual events. (There’s a reason they call it event “programming.”) Standard marketing events tend to struggle with meandering panels, awkward lulls, and dry speakers. Pre-recorded presentations benefit from higher production value, and polished editing grants audiences a smoother experience.

Recently, we adjusted our lead generation efforts to include pre-recorded webinars. The slides and voiceover were edited and uploaded before the event time. After the presentation, we switched to a live Q&A with attendees to address their thoughts.

The move makes a ton of sense because we’re showing the best possible version of our work. At the end of the day, whether you work for Netflix, Google, or a company just starting to invest in B2B content, that’s what we should all be aiming for.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Brainstorm series instead of ad-hoc stories when planning your content calendar
• Invest in video content, budget permitting, to give customers a binge-worthy experience
• Explore turning in-person events into a virtual series with a mixture of pre-recorded and live elements

The post State of B2B Tech Content Marketing: 5 Trends That’ll Get You Promoted appeared first on Contently.

“SEO” may be the most ubiquitous marketing word out there—an OG term that sits alongside “engagement” and “cross-channel” in the pantheon of lexicon that’ll never die. But even though everyone from junior marketing coordinators to seasoned CMOs will give lip service to it, a great SEO strategy is hard to find.

Which brings us to CarMax. The nation’s largest retailer of used cars has also become one of the world’s most popular content destinations for car shoppers—thanks in large part to its unique combo of SEO dominance and editorial excellence.

Recently, CarMax let us take a look under the hood of a content program that’s driven over $56M in content value over the past year, and come to rank for 1.5 million keywords worldwide.

Hero, Hub, Help

One of the most impressive things about CarMax’s sophisticated content program is that it didn’t really exist until 2016.

According to Malissa Mackenzie, director of creative services at CarMax, the turning point was gaining support from the company’s senior leadership. After the team ran a small experiment with a few pieces of content, they were able to make a data-driven case for how content could drive valuable search traffic while also helping consumers make smarter decisions. Immediately, the leadership team bought in.

Malissa MacKenzie, director of creative services at CarMax

“Even at the senior executive level, you have those different perspectives coming in, listening to each other, and agreeing on this is a place that’s worthy to invest,” Mackenzie explained.

It also helps that a heavy investment in content just makes sense for CarMax. Car shopping is a high-consideration purchase, so people do a lot of research online. Since CarMax isn’t biased towards any one manufacturer or model, the content team can take an unbiased, editorial approach that puts the customer first.

The content team can take an unbiased, editorial approach that puts the customer first.

They’ve scaled the maturity of their program in record time by adopting the “Hero, Hub, Help” framework, which was developed for YouTube in 2015.

“Hero” content consists of bigger, flashier pieces that draw your audience in and build your brand. (To use the most dramatic example, think of Red Bull dropping Felix Baumgartner from space.)

“Hub” content includes content series that get people to return to your site. (Think Moz’s “White Board Friday” series.)

“Help” content answers key questions your audience is asking—and as you’ll see, it’s where CarMax has shined brightest.

Helping shoppers

In such a competitive automotive content landscape, figuring out what content to create and what questions to answer are key.

CarMax tackled these challenges by working collaboratively across teams. “Our strategy incorporates inputs from SEO strategists, content strategy analysts, as well as creative and UX,” Mackenzie said. “We have this culture of continuous improvement. We recognize there’s a lot of companies that publish automotive and car shopping content, so we want to make sure we’re developing content that’s unique.”

At the heart of that strategy is CarMax’s comprehensive rankings—like The Best Affordable Sports Cars of 2021 or 7 Best Off-Road Vehicles—and trend stories, like this examination of how classic cars are making a comeback. These guides help buyers during the research process, bring them to CarMax’s site, and keep the brand top-of-mind when someone is ready to make a purchase.

The team takes an art-and-science approach to bring that content to life. “It’s a collaboration between passionate editors and passionate SEO strategists,” Mackenzie said. SEO insights help CarMax figure out what models and categories to zero in on, then editors figure out the unique approach the company can take.

But CarMax doesn’t stop there. They also layer in customer research, product development insights, and qualitative feedback from its associates on the ground. That results in a lot of different content that CarMax needs to create to meet the needs of its audience, which is where Contently’s content marketing platform and award-winning network of freelance writers come in.

“Our partnership with Contently has been a huge benefit to us because we couldn’t do the volume that we’re doing without them.”

“Our partnership with Contently has been a huge benefit to us because we couldn’t do the volume that we’re doing without them,” Mackenzie said. “We pull in CarMax data to make sure that our Contently writers can incorporate a CarMax perspective into those topics specifically.”

That data-driven approach comes to life in pieces like the 4WD/AWD Index, which uses CarMax data to look at where four-wheel drive and all-wheel drive vehicles are most popular in the country, creating a piece of visually engaging storytelling that can be repurposed across channels.

“Contently’s been an amazing partner, and I was really impressed early on by the ability to have a Contently editor who has automotive experience,” Mackenzie said.

Contently writers and editors join CarMax’s weekly standup, which has allowed for incredible collaboration. “It almost feels like they are a part of our in-house team.”

It’s working. Millions of people read CarMax’s content each month—with 75 percent of its traffic coming from search. And that traffic is worth over $56 million, according to Contently’s Content Value Tracker, which measures how much a competitor would have to pay to replicate a brand’s organic traffic through Google search ads.

Embracing video for Hero and Hub content

In early 2020, CarMax partnered with Edmunds, a car review and shopping site, to up their video content, and later acquired the company in 2021. The acquisition strengthened the partnership they already had on dynamic video content.

Video has helped CarMax extend its search dominance to YouTube, the second-largest search engine on earth. The well-edited, informative, and entertaining clips are hosted by Edmunds editors. Just check out this review of the Dodge Challenger vs. Dodge Charger, which has earned 1,200 likes and over 268,000 views on YouTube.

“CarMax brings data on what we know about sales shoppers, and then Edmunds brings the vehicle expertise that they have with a whole team of car experts,” Mackenzie said.

These videos are TV-quality productions that keep car junkies hooked. Ultimately, it’s all about finding ways to both serve CarMax’s audience and bolster the business case for its content program.

“We hope that we can add value and inspire readers to choose CarMax as the place they want to complete their shopping process, ” Mackenzie said. “But we’re very happy if we know that we’ve added value to the research that they’re doing.”

And that dedication to their audience is CarMax’s guiding light.

“It’s our responsibility to always advocate that the intention of creating content is to help the customer,” Mackenzie said. “That’s the highest business goal we have.”

The post How CarMax Drove $56 Million in Content Value Through the Art & Science of SEO appeared first on Contently.

It should have been the most fun class ever—and in some ways, it definitely was. But there was one big problem: The readings were unreadable.

Week after week, we’d be assigned papers by anthropologists who wrote in a rambling, convoluted code. After a few more anthropology and psych classes, I realized all of academia was in a giant contest to see who could write the most confusing sentence possible.

One of the most dangerous lessons academia teaches us is that complexity equals authority. If we use long, dependent clauses, big words, and generally confuse the hell out of everyone, people will think that we’re smart. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Over the past few weeks, I covered the first two elements of great storytelling: relatability and novelty. Now, it’s time to explore the element of storytelling that separates the content you hate from the content you love: fluency.

Why you should write at an elementary school level

If you grew up writing papers in Microsoft Word, you’re probably familiar with the Flesch-Kincaid Grade level index, which measures how much education you need to understand a text. Clippy was obsessed with it, which turned Microsoft Word into a game of getting the highest reading level possible.

A few years ago, Shane Snow—who wrote The Storytelling Edge with me—ran the work of best-selling authors through a reading level analysis. Turns out, the most beloved storytellers on the list—Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, J.K. Rowling, Hunter S. Thompson, etc.—wrote for elementary school students.

The people who wrote at a high school or college level? Crappy business authors who had bought their way onto the bestseller list.

This tells us something important: We love writers who make it as easy as possible to get lost in their stories. They break down the barrier between us and them. They write with as much fluency as possible.

Unfortunately, marketers struggle to do this.

The digital age has broken down the barriers between brands and consumers. But with bad content, brands often put that barrier right back up—through bad white papers, boring talking head videos, and jargon that just doesn’t make any sense.

That’s because many of the bad habits we develop in academia carry over into the business world. Over the past decade, I’ve had to read hundreds of corporate white papers and e-books for work—let me tell you, they could be used as a mild form of torture.

The best content marketers do something different. They explain difficult to grasp concepts in a simple, colloquial way.

GE Reports does a fantastic job of demystifying science and engineering, regularly going viral on Reddit.

Mint built its business by making complex finance topics easy enough for a 4th grader to understand.

Cardinal Health does a fantastic job of demystifying healthcare technology, and has seen a huge audience boost as a result.

But fluency isn’t just about the written word.

Fluency matters for video too

For whatever reason, way too many brands waste their time filming 20-minute clips of their boring CEOs talking in front of a camera. Not surprisingly, those videos get almost no engagement.

In an age in which we consume most brand video in-feed, fluency means capturing and holding someone’s attention in just a few seconds.

A few years ago, a neuromarketing firm called Neuro-Insight studied social video, and found a few keys to capturing attention: an early story arc, the presence of people, topical content, and text or subtitles.

You don’t need to make Uncle Drew commercials to put these principles into play. For instance, GE uses these keys to create social video around topics you’d normally find in a tedious whitepaper, like the impact of globalization.

These videos actually don’t have to cost half your budget. Andrew Davis creates entertaining, story-driven marketing videos for his Loyalty Loop series out of his own garage.

This type of fluency applies to business presentations too. Open with a story, don’t use jargon, and keep it simple. Whether it’s an article, video script, or presentation talk track, check your copy’s reading level, and run it through this awesome jargon tool.

Every time you tell a story, you’re competing for attention with the millions of other stories buzzing in your audience’s pocket. So don’t make your content feel like homework.

The post Content Fluency: Why You Should Write For 4th Graders appeared first on Contently.

Quantifiable objectives headlined every case study we wrote. Then, after detailing the approach, the results would align 1:1 with the objectives. By addressing each point this way, we described how this success could only be attributed to the campaign at hand (and not any other marketing efforts from the brand).

Because of my role, I saw firsthand why a good case study is arguably the most important piece of content you can create. It arms sales teams with creative ammunition and provides proof for what you can do without the need for a hard sell.

While most people already use the challenge/results model, there are other factors to consider. I’ve written dozens of case studies for the experiential marketing agency Mirrorball, and now do so weekly as part of my full-time job as a sports marketing writer and content strategist for Facebook. Let’s look at the elements that take a case study from good to great.

Get permission first

This seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often companies leap to publicize their top campaigns without asking their customers first. Don’t do this! It’s a quick way to lose trust and future revenue.

HubSpot does a nice job emphasizing this process in its eight-step case study guide. Not only do they make a point to ask for permission, but they also cover the legal components of getting the go-ahead and navigating possible NDAs in contracts. It’s a good idea to coordinate what data and information you can use. Visuals need to be on brand. And you’ll want to discuss distribution so everyone is comfortable with how to share the finished product.

Simplify, then simplify more

Good writing should speed readers along, not confuse them with industry jargon. Rely on succinct sentences and short paragraphs, and cut anything inessential. You’re writing a case study, not an essay, so make your points and wrap it up.

Also think about simplicity from a design perspective. Sometimes the best case studies don’t get the attention they deserve due to crammed spacing or too much text.

A great example of case study design done right is this urban farming piece from global design and innovation company IDEO. The clean layout makes the narrative very easy to follow. (Given that the brand specializes in design, this isn’t shocking.)The case study outlines short versions of the challenge and outcome right at the top and neatly breaks up the text with pull quotes and images.

Another way to start strong is to highlight the shiny data upfront in case people skim the case study and don’t make it to the end.

The example below from performance marketing platform AdRoll hooks the audience right away with appealing hero imagery and bright, impressive results that will get the attention of any executive. It then goes on to tell the rest of the story in detail—but for some audiences, those first few lines will be enough to prove the campaign’s worth.

Don’t force the narrative

Since case studies are so valuable, some marketers produce them simply to check a box or hit a quota. Don’t create one unless you have a legitimate story worth sharing, because people will see right through the forced efforts.

The big thing to focus on is matching the objectives to the results. Don’t reverse-engineer a story just because you want to highlight a particular client logo or product feature. Additionally, wait for genuinely impressive results. If you have a good story to tell but limited data to back it up, just wait for everything to line up. Otherwise, you risk losing your audience, because they’ll look at the case study and be upset that you wasted their time.

Think about the medium

All case studies should tell a cohesive story that seamlessly links the challenge, strategy, and results. But the manner in which you tell that story can vary greatly depending on the format. Instead of a text-heavy article, visually appealing PDFs and slides work well when presenting case studies in-person.

In today’s media climate, consumers are gobbling up engaging videos, so if you can tell your story through a series of interviews and b-roll clips, that may be more effective than the standard post. Check out this video case study on bag manufacturer Herschel Supply Co. created by social management platform Hootsuite:

“If you didn’t know this video was a case study for Hootsuite, you’d assume it was simply an artsy video capturing Herschel’s startup success,” Caroline Forsey writes for HubSpot. “The Herschel marketing team mentions Hootsuite, but they … remain primarily focused on the appreciation they have for their social media community.”

Promote, promote, promote

For case studies to lead to recognition and revenue, the right people have to find them. Once the assets get approved, promote it wherever you can—company blog, social profiles, website landing pages. A lot of companies set up a dedicated case studies page on their websites, which is a good start. But go out of your way to distribute it as well.

If you have budget, put paid spend behind the case study as well to boost it across social. A few dollars in ad spend can go a long way–if you think the results in your case study are impressive, imagine the ROI when the paid boost leads to a few new clients. Almost sounds like grounds for a case study in its own right.

The post The Anatomy of a Great Case Study appeared first on Contently.

Eastman transitioned from an “artsy” four years at the University of Miami to a career as a finserv consultant after American Express made its way onto her personal list of most-admired companies. She worked her way up to VP/GM of marketing at Amex, turning around several early-stage LOBs through an advanced approach to content and digital marketing. She then went on to serve as the CMO of Behalf, a fintech startup that’s raised over $300 million in funding. Next came the managing director and head of retail marketing role at BlackRock.

Currently a free agent, Eastman visited Contently’s office to give an honest assessment of the finserv marketing landscape. She discussed the biggest industry mistakes, advice for finance marketers, and why brands need to hire journalists. Check out the video interview below, followed by a transcript of our chat.

What are a couple of mistakes you see people making in financial services marketing?

I think the biggest mistake is to have experts at something be responsible for creating the content for customers. I’ve actually seen this at every company I’ve ever worked in. There’s this chasm between the corporate story and the customer story. And the corporate story is very easy to get lost in because we go to work every day and we sit in a conference room all day long with our colleagues and we talk to each other. We have this one discussion, and it’s about: What our product does that our competitors products don’t do. It’s about what the market opportunity is. It’s about how good our technology is—etc, etc.

There’s no way for you to come up with the right story for the real humans in that conference room. So I think that’s the biggest mistake—when people who make the product or the services are also responsible for making content for the true customer.

Companies get it best when they hire people who are video editors or have journalism backgrounds. They bring that external view and expertise on how to create content that people would actually consume and look forward to. Then you can merge the artistry and the science of those experts with the internal teams that are the experts at the product. That’s the way best content gets created for customers.

Why do you think a lot of marketing teams are hesitant to bring in people with that pure journalism or editorial DNA?

Well, I think it’s uncomfortable for brands, right? We all—me included—create content on a day-to-day basis, and we’re used to doing it our way, and we also feel pretty proud of it. So it’s quite something to confront that you may have been doing it wrong all of this time. When you invite a different type of expert into your process, it’s a shakeup. Everything about their approach will be different, and you have to be willing to be uncomfortable in order to get your content to the next place with this alternative point of view.

What advice would you have for marketers at a financial services company who have trouble getting their content through compliance?

I would encourage all marketers to treat compliance as their most important partner or even their customer. If you’re thinking about your compliance colleague like you would your customer, utilize design thinking to understand their unmet needs, understand what their outlook on life is and the emotions that they’re bringing to their own job, and figure out how to problem-solve your way to yes.

In the same way you would if you’re acquiring a new customer, compliance partners are critical to the process. They’re there to keep us out of jail. You want them on your side. And it’s in all of our best interests in marketing to find a way to tell our story that also meets our compliance partners’ requirements. So I would say start earlier, schedule face-to-face meetings, explain why you’re doing what you’re doing, explain the goal of the content you’re producing. Invite your compliance partner into the process to help you understand how to say what you want to say in a compliant way.

Compliance partners are critical to the process. They’re there to keep us out of jail. You want them on your side.

Looking ahead into 2020, what are some of the big opportunities that you see in financial services?

The companies that are going to win are the ones that truly embrace customer advocacy and help regular everyday humans solve the problems that they have with managing their finances. I’ve been disturbed by how big credit has gotten in the U.S., and I’ve certainly participated myself in many aspects of building credit-oriented businesses. It’s very lucrative for a financial services company, but I personally believe it’s bad for customers.

Companies will lose if they’re going too far on credit and not going far enough on helping customers live within their means, put away money for the future, and have an emergency savings initiative, so that whatever happens to their family, they can afford to do the right thing. Whatever their dreams are—pay for college, buy a house, retire—these are things that many people are not going to be able to afford to do unless their financial services partners help them by eliminating some of their unhealthy financial behaviors.

The younger, nimble companies that are spending very little but really striking a meaningful tone and creating truly meaningful content in social media storytelling are the ones that are going to win.

Content is really important for helping people understand the way they’re standing in their own way, right? I think content is a wonderful way where you can release stories of people just like you, whoever the you is, that help make it real, and help make it human and help people be able to kind of see themselves more clearly through the eyes of others. Because one of the big behavioral economics teachings is that people don’t see themselves clearly. So it stands in the way of them making smart decisions.

What’s your big prediction for financial services marketing this year?

I think the smaller players are going to win the day. I think the large financial services players are still spending an excessive amount of time on things like Super Bowl commercials and focusing on things that mattered 10 years ago.

The younger, nimble companies that are spending very little but really striking a meaningful tone and creating truly meaningful content in social media storytelling are the ones that are going to win.

The post Hot Seat: Finance Marketing Leader Crystal Eastman On Why Brands Need to Hire Journalists appeared first on Contently.

Money affects everyone. Finances can dictate what we do, where we live, and how we make decisions. It’s a wide umbrella, spanning everything from consumer banking, investment banking, credit cards, fintech, insurance, and more. The fact that many finance organizations try to reach B2C and B2B audiences simultaneously adds another factor to the equation.

Financial services content is also incredibly complicated. Understanding how to pick the right insurance or save for a mortgage can literally change someone’s life. Companies in this space have a unique opportunity to build meaningful relationships with consumers.

To capitalize on that opportunity, finserv companies allocated an average of $23.3 million for their content marketing budgets in 2019, per Contently research. This number includes content creation, distribution, technology, and talent.

Finserv companies are doing a decent job getting a bang for their buck. However, there’s still room for improvement.

To help marketers be more efficient and effective, Contently created this new report that examines the state of financial services content marketing. The first part compares finance against other industries and highlights content benchmarks. The second part explores tips and strategies marketers can use to stand out from their biggest competitors and create content that performs.

Brands spend large sums of money on content marketing. It’s time they made the most of their investments.

[If you prefer to view a PDF version of the report that’s easier to print, we’ve got you covered here.]

Report Methodology

Data for this report was compiled in November 2019. The industry benchmark statistics in the first part of the report came from an internal dataset of 86,270 pieces of content across all industries, measured by Contently’s content marketing platform. Of that sample, 25,544 pieces of content came from financial services companies.

Data in the second part of the report came from StoryBook, Contently’s content strategy tool, which measured top-performing topics, formats, social shares, and more for 2,292 pieces of content from financial services companies.

Key Findings

For visual learners, here’s a high-level breakdown of what we found:

Part I: Financial Services Benchmarks

Competition for attention has never been higher in content marketing. Legacy firms are battling against each other while trying to hold off a surge of new fintech competitors and startups. Consumers, meanwhile, want financial guidance; they’re just not sure who to get it from.

According to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, financial services ranked last out of 15 industries. On a positive note, trust in the industry is on the rise, increasing 8 percentage points since 2014. This means there’s an opportunity for finserv companies to step up and support their customers. Content is a key tool in those efforts.

Financial services vs. all other industries

Recently, finserv companies have made noticeable progress with content performance. In 2018, audiences spent an average of 1:26 seconds with financial services content. A year later, average attention time jumped to 1:51 seconds, which marks a 29 percent increase

Over that same stretch, though, average engagement rate (the percentage of people who spend at least 15 seconds with a piece of content) and finish rate held stagnant. On one hand, the average finish rate in our data set is impressive in comparison to Chartbeat’s scroll depth benchmarks for all content. Brands are creating longer content, but there’s still room to improve the finish rate.

Financial services companies also took strides compared to brands from other industries. Average attention time for all other industries in our data set only moved from 1:32 seconds in 2018 to 1:34 seconds in 2019. However, the other industries like travel, technology, and healthcare boasted a better average engagement rate (70 percent) and finish rate (60 percent) in 2019. Finish rates in fields like travel and tech may be higher because their topics aren’t as technical as those found in finance.

Consumer Finance vs. Institutional Finance vs. Wealth Management

Next, we examined engagement benchmarks for the three of the biggest subcategories in financial services content: consumer finance, institutional finance, and wealth management.

Consumer finance covers personal money tips and financial literacy, like this Bank of America article about getting the most out of your checking account.

Institutional finance content spans B2B coverage about investment banking and global markets, like this Goldman Sachs report on geopolitical risk.

Wealth management concerns individual portfolios and investing, like this Morgan Stanley profile of a female financial advisor’s philosophy.

To compare the effectiveness of the three subcategories, we looked at average attention time, average finish rate, and average social shares.

Consumer finance, unsurprisingly, dominated the social metrics with an average of 2,046 shares per story. When done right, helpful budgeting and saving tips can go semi-viral because they’re more universal than content from the other subcategories.

However, personal finance advice is also a saturated space. It’s harder to stand out with unique advice since many companies recycle the same topics, headlines, and themes. That may explain why average attention time registers at just 1:18 seconds, almost a minute shorter than the average benchmark for institutional finance.

The success of institutional finance content goes to show that B2B marketing doesn’t have to be dry or boring. There’s a real need for that expertise. And generating 190 shares, on average, is very respectable for B2B content of any kind. These numbers suggest that companies cornering the institutional finance beat are finding creative ways to tie their analysis to relevant news and trending topics people care about.

Lastly, we see that wealth management has room for improvement, particularly the 38 percent finish rate. Marketers creating content about wealth management may not need to drive a lot of social shares, since it’s tailored for a niche audience. Yet there’s still an opportunity to create more fluent and accessible content that holds people’s attention and builds trust.

With that in mind, let’s move to the second part of the report and explore ways financial services companies can build better trust and drive more engagement.

Part II: 5 Keys to High-Performing Financial Services Content

The benchmark data raised a few big questions. First, what are the most valuable financial services companies doing to differentiate themselves? Second, what tactics can financial services marketing pick up from them, regardless of budget? And third, what recommendations could we offer to help finance marketers improve in areas they weren’t doing so well?

To answer those questions, we used Contently’s Storybook technology to analyze 2,292 pieces of financial services content from Fortune 500 brands. Here are our biggest takeaways.

1. Create social videos and infographics
2. Invest in paid distribution on Facebook
3. Develop buyer enablement content to drive conversions
4. Focus on employee education and advocacy
5. Get creative with compliance

1. Create social-friendly videos and infographics

Marketers default to creating written content because it’s easier and cheaper. But brands that rely on churning out generic blog posts are failing to give people what they want: visual content.

Our industry analysis found that videos and infographics outclassed other content formats in terms of average social shares. In fact, video drove eight times as many shares as articles. Infographics, meanwhile, saw twice as many shares as articles. (We’ll get to social distribution trends in the next section.)

(Note: Our dataset excludes LinkedIn shares, because LinkedIn has closed off their API from all third-party analytics tools.)

Most people working in marketing today understand there’s value in video, but many are hesitant to invest in the medium.

When done well, it’s worth it. Visual content is the most effective way to simplify complex technical information, especially for visual learners. One of the most budget-friendly tactics is to produce short explainer videos optimized for social channels. Mint, for example, launched the WTFinance series a few years ago, breaking down major personal finance concepts in 45-second clips that are easy to digest.

If you get the green light for video, the last thing you want to do is stock your YouTube page with clips of two people talking on stage for an hour. To produce videos that resonate with your audience, pay attention to these three areas.

2. Invest in paid distribution on Facebook

Reports are Facebook’s demise are largely overblown. It still attracts over 2 billion people every month, and remains the most effective social distribution channel for both B2C and B2B content.

According to Instapage, the average CPC on Facebook for financial services ads is $3.72—more than double the average ($1.72).

However, this pales in comparison to the CPC on Google for top finserv keywords.

Using SEMRush, we found the average CPC for 10 of the most popular content-adjacent search keywords in financial services for comparison:

Here, we see an average CPC of $16.39 for paid search, meaning Facebook is almost five times cheaper. Not only does referral traffic from social posts help organic search rankings, but you’re also likely to drive additional traffic from the “social lift” of people resharing that content on Facebook.

3. Develop buyer enablement content to drive conversions

When done right, content marketing impacts the entire customer journey. To tie content to revenue, your stories should eventually spark an action—filling out a form, opening an account, signing up for a credit card. In other words, your work assists the customer until they’re ready to make a smart decision related to your company.

We used StoryBook to analyze the most shared content by topic. The most engaging topics—such as reducing risk, insurance 101, and tax planning—tie back to buying decisions. Some news content related to mortgages and insurance also finished near the top of the list.

It’s fitting that content about risk and planning resonated enough for people to share. This kind of advice tends to be practical and applicable to a large audience. State Farm, for instance, drove thousands of shares by packaging together “a collection of articles to help your teen be a safe driver.” The series includes insurance advice for students, info on the costs of certain driving violations, and tips for driving in different conditions. State Farm also includes a calculator tool at the bottom of every article to get a quote, creating a clear path to purchase.

Focusing on enablement content helps brands invest in evergreen financial tools like calculators. These tools empower buyers, letting people navigate a complex decision without explicitly selling to them.

For example, Bank of America built a dedicated page to hold 25 user-friendly tools and calculators that cover retirement, investing, college planning, and personal finance. Creating this kind of content typically doesn’t require a lot of money or time. Take a look at the after-tax return calculator above, which only asks users to fill out two fields before giving them a personalized report.

4. Focus on employee education and advocacy

The success of financial content depends on trust. A blog post full of uniquely insightful 401(k) tips can miss the mark if it doesn’t come from the right source.

The National Foundation for Credit Counseling found that only 25 percent of U.S adults would turn to a bank or credit union if they needed financial guidance, a number on the decline in recent years. However, 35 percent of adults would have no problem trusting a financial planner or accountant.

The same study revealed that 76 percent of U.S. adults said they could “benefit from advice and answers to everyday financial questions from a professional.” The data highlights a sizable gap of people who may not receive the answers they need simply because they don’t trust big financial organizations.

When looking at share of voice results from our research, a related trend caught our eye.

State Farm was dominating in terms of social shares, driving 70 percent of all social shares among 10 companies including Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae, and Wells Fargo. Did State Farm have some incredible content marketing secret weapon?

It turns out the answer is yes—although when we started to look around, we saw it wasn’t much of a secret. A lot of their social activity was seeded by company’s insurance agents. For most of the last decade, State Farm has used a tool called Hearsay Social to make it easy for thousands of agents to find and post relevant content on Facebook. This system led to a snowball effect for social sharing.

Marketers love to talk about personalization, but their plans fall flat because of logistics. It’s hard to justify spending a lot of money to create content for a specific audience. That’s how finserv companies end up with general listicles meant for a general audience.

State Farm, meanwhile, incentivized agents to share content by arming them with specific stories that could subtly remind people of the benefits of being insured. According to our research, a short interactive article titled “Frozen Pipe Losses Up in 2018” has generated almost 13,000 Facebook shares.

The article offers clear tips for avoiding frozen pipes and calls out the states with the most frozen pipe water insurance claims. It’s not going to win a Pulitzer, but it’s a helpful piece of content ideal for increasing share of voice.

5. Get creative with compliance

Marketers find few things as grim as compliance. So before we get to the keys of compliance, let’s talk a little bit about death. (Trust me.)

When a famous person passes away, The New York Times can publish a detailed, reported obituary immediately. When Steve Jobs died in 2011, the Times had a 3,500-word article up within an hour. The obituary writers don’t possess other-worldly typing speed; they’re just well prepared. While covering Jobs’s death, for instance, the writing started in 2007. When the time came to let the story go live, all they had to do was give the article a final check.

Mastering the content approval process isn’t as fulfilling as writing an important longform article, but it’s important nonetheless. And with some creative thinking, it doesn’t have to be a headache that gets in the way of your job. You can still publish content at the speed of news.

In highly regulated industries like finance and insurance, you can’t just publish whatever you want, whenever you feel like it. Brands have to deal with oversight groups like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). You can, however, work with your compliance team to find reasonable solutions instead of always treating them like a nuisance.

In financial services, savvy companies tweak their workflows to avoid approval timelines that can last upwards of three months. If you meet with compliance at the start of the project, they’ll at least be aware of what you’re working on and can flag potential issues ahead of time.

An adjusted workflow might look something like this:

Marketers have started to figure out how to build better relationships with compliance teams. If you’re looking for more efficiency, here are a handful of help exercises that can help you increase productivity.

As a final piece of advice, it helps to use some sort technology platform when figuring out compliance. Given that compliance issues often result from a lack of transparency or communication, relying on manual processes doesn’t always work. Technology can handle the logistics, freeing up marketers to focus more on the creative parts of their job. Additionally, it’ll automate certain things like record-keeping, version control, and workflows if you need to review anything down the road.

Conclusion

In 2020, capturing attention is only going to get more competitive in the financial services industry.

The good news is there’s still an opportunity for companies of all sizes to create meaningful content and build long-term relationships with customers. People need financial advice. They crave that expertise. They’re just looking for it to be delivered in a thoughtful way.

The companies that want to stand out and lead the industry need to concentrate on the entire content lifecycle. They have to put as much energy into content distribution, compliance, and sales enablement as they do the creative process. It takes time to build a high-performing content program, but if they put in the work now, their investment will pay off.

If you’re interested in creating high-performing content, click here to set up a free consultation with one of our content experts.

The post Financial Services Content Report: Industry Benchmarks & 5 Keys to Success appeared first on Contently.

I searched through Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and Indeed for traditional internships at media companies. But after browsing hundreds of postings, I quickly saw similar positions at brands. The skill overlap was similar, but not identical. And when I showed up for my first day at Contently, the marketing team had a list of links ready for me to read through.

As I got more comfortable in the role, I picked up more nuances. Aside from the core responsibilities of writing and editing, content marketing has its own ecosystem of terms and disciplines. New interns will have to learn everything from the confusing marketing lexicon to email marketing and ROI (that’s return on investment).

The point is: You’ll learn a lot. Colleges may be getting better at adapting to digital media and digital marketing, but graduates interested in content marketing would benefit from a guide. The more you can research going in, the better you’ll be.

To help all the new and aspiring content marketing interns out there, I decided to create this syllabus. It’s basically what I wished I knew on day one. Now go forth, excel at your internship, and get your content career off to a promising start.

A Marketer’s Guide to Decoding Social Media Algorithms in 2019 | Buffer

Having an online social media presence is very important for any company online.

Buffer, which offers clients social media management tool, also has a weekly podcast about all your social needs. This episode in particular, on social platform algorithms, is exceptionally useful for figuring the algorithms of the four social media giants: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn.

The episode (which also includes an edited transcript below the fold) covers user interaction with social content in detail. Commenting and liking a post is basic, but what about engagements through chat apps like Messenger or private DMs. How about posting things natively instead of trying to bring people back to your site? This podcast will answer all of your pressing questions.

The Beginner’s Guide to SEO | Moz

Showing up on the first page of a Google search is one of the most important aspect of building a business today. If your audience can’t find you, it doesn’t matter if you think your products and services are great. That’s where SEO (search engine optimization) comes in.

Moz, arguably the top SEO expert out there, created this guide that covers almost everything you need to know about search engine optimization. Though the world of SEO optimization is ever-changing, understanding the basics of it can go a long way as a content marketing intern.

Divided into seven chapters, the guide includes practices, step-by-step visuals, and a glossary. It covers background knowledge about how search engines think about your content before getting into useful technical advice for topics like titles, URLs, meta descriptions, and snippets.

Though the content can be a lot to digest, it’s incredibly detail and should be an easy enough read if you’re looking for something specific. You can even just thoroughly go through chapter one if you’re solely creating blog posts for your brand.

A Marketing to Media Translation Dictionary | Contently

Content marketing is its own language. Sit through a marketing meeting, and you’ll hear at least one acronym that means nothing to you. With that can comes fear and confusion. What does it mean when your boss says, “Don’t forget to include a CTA” or “Make sure your piece is for a B2B buyer”?

Sometimes marketers use a ten-dollar word and then later preach that simplicity is important. They tend to use phrases and buzzwords that are due for retirement. But to make sure you can decipher your responsibilities, it pays to understand what they mean—even if you have no intention of ever saying the word “snackable.”

Lucky for you, we have exactly what you need: A Marketing to Media Translation Dictionary. These 13 phrases should help you figure what “map against your KPIs” means and more.

Though this dictionary will still apply to most recent content marketing interns, we might have to make a new one as soon as next year. Who knows what new buzzwords marketers will come up with next?

B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends | Content Marketing Institute

As a content marketing intern, knowing industry trends and benchmarks will help you conquer the learning curve so you can contribute to your team quicker. Every year Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs put out a survey on content marketing priorities from B2B companies of all sizes.

Each report compares the data to the previous year on topics like team size, preferred content distribution channels, content strategy, and more. Here’s an important insight from this year’s findings: Companies are prioritizing their audience’s information needs over the brand’s sales/promotional message.

The reports are free to access, so to trace the growth of content marketing, I’d recommend looking through the last five years.

How to Use MailChimp | MailChimp

The amount of email service providers can drive you insane, but at Contently we use Mailchimp for its reliability and user-friendly interface. You can’t guarantee that your company will use MailChimp, but this beginner’s guide can still give you a good primer for the basics of email marketing and company newsletters.

Even if you’ve never sent an email campaign before, MailChimp will walk you through picking (or designing) templates, adding content, selecting your audience, and sending. This will make your life so much easier.

If, like me, you’re tasked with setting up your brand’s newsletters, it’ll take some time to get the hang of any tool. But once you’re comfortable with more advanced projects like A/B testing campaigns, you’ll build muscle memory to set emails up quickly so you can focus on more creative projects.

The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing | HubSpot

Marketers love to talk about the rise of video (for better or worse). Even if you’re angling for an editorial or marketing-specific internship, understanding video will give you an advantage over other applicants.

Everyone watches videos online, but marketing videos (just like marketing terminology) are their own thing. HubSpot’s guide to video marketing offers basics on shooting, editing, and posting videos—all through the lens of marketing best practice. You can learn the difference between demo videos, how-to clips, brand overviews, etc.

If you’re not familiar with video production in any way, this would be a great place to start. I’d also recommend you go to YouTube for additional help on deciding editing software, establishing shots, and tips and tricks you’re going to want to know during production.

Podcasts Marketing Best Practices | Podcast Motor

If anything gets talked about more than video, it’s podcasts. People of ages listen to podcasts, and people of all ages want to start their own podcasts. But career marketers shouldn’t just hop on the trend because everyone else is doing it. As a content marketing intern, this is one area in particular you could offer a crucial perspective that your team lacks.

If your brand has decided to jump on the podcasting bandwagon and create one of their own, you need to be aware of the best practices of podcasts marketing. Helping out your brand through all the stages of production starts with understanding what makes podcasts so sought after right now. Don’t be afraid to aim for niche ideas either. The more passionate you are about the subject matter, the more interesting it will be to the right audience.

All these resources should help you tackle your internship head on. The truth is, the best place to learn is hands-on. Pay close attention to your boss and the rest of your team. Ask to help with new projects even if you’re not an expert yet. Being an intern gives you the opportunity to learn as you grow. Before you know it, you’ll be knowledgeable enough to teach someone yourself.

The post The Content Marketing Intern’s Syllabus appeared first on Contently.

Every brand wants to release a product video that’s received like Game of Thrones. They want Modern Love download numbers on their podcasts. But that’s not going to happen. We all have to keep our definition of success relative.

To shed light on what marketers should try to learn from their media brethren, I’ve broken down some common (and successful!) media strategies across ideation, production, and distribution. When you add them all together, these skills will help you create content your customers actually want.

Be patient with your audience

It’s useful for marketers to think of top-funnel content as the “dating” stage. You wouldn’t tell a first date you’re planning on naming your future children Huey, Dewey, and Louie, so don’t jump down a reader’s throat with your product the first time they read an article.

 

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A post shared by The Dodo (@thedodo) on Oct 21, 2019 at 6:21am PDT

Use audience data to serve people relevant content on the platforms they already use. Group Nine Media posts social video from two of its sites, The Dodo and Now This, on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The company found that uplifting animal videos (Dodo) and informative, emotional political videos (NowThis) connected with viewers scrolling through their social feeds. As a result, they specialize in content that lives directly on these heavily trafficked channels—you don’t see a ton of investment on search.

Marketers should focus on subjects and channels that matter to your audience. Leave the “do you wanna get out of here?” moment for further down the funnel.

Do some shoe-leather reporting

The internet connects most of the globe, but it also tends to flatten and hollow out the definition of “news.” Many full-time reporters receive tips from remote sources, and they’re so caught up in the existing news cycle that they don’t have a spare moment to find their own stories.

Social media has made it harder to break the cycle. What might seem like a globally trending topic may only just be “trending” on Twitter for a small bubble. You don’t really know what your target audience cares about if you’re only scrolling through social. To bridge the gap, you have to talk to people.

That’s why it’s important to treat your content marketing job like any journalist would approach a beat. Take contacts out for coffee and pick their brains. Ask them questions on background and get their numbers in case you need a quotation down the road. Show up to community events, trade shows, and trainings ready to ask questions.

If you’re looking for a model from media companies, consider how local news websites cover their beats. In addition to features, BKLYNER sends a reporter to every town hall meeting and small political event in Brooklyn, anticipating that interested readers may not have the time or wherewithal to attend themselves.

Since you’re a marketer, you can always start by talking to existing customers. If someone is paying your company money, you should know their experience inside and out.

Choose your public figures carefully

Even if your audience likes the gist of your articles, humans are pretty unforgiving when it comes to listening to someone speak. When the focus is on video and audio content, you don’t have to be Daniel Day-Lewis to know the difference between a great actor and an uncomfortable performer.

Just because someone is a great leader or writer doesn’t mean they have to be the face of your brand. You never want to put a marketer in front of a camera or a crowd without being sure they’re the right person for the spotlight. Not every reporter is great on camera, and not every video host is a gifted writer, but all of the above are technically journalists.

Borrow this concept as you structure your content team. If your managing editor is hyper-organized and great at breaking data into actionable, creative insights, but he’s too anxious in front of crowds to lead an in-person event, that’s fine! Your brand is allowed to tag in media-trained professionals for hosting videos, MCing events, and giving keynote speeches. You can also invest in media training for internal employees. Some professionals don’t become good on camera until they’re given enough practice reps

Use additive or divisible content to keep things fresh

As Marketing Showrunners founder Jay Acunzo puts it, media companies “promote their shows by taking an existing asset, then using that asset to create an endless stream of useful assets, all of which are used to grow the original asset. Everything they create compounds in value.”

According to Acunzo, no one is better at making people care about impressive content than media companies. “They know how to publish a core asset, like a show, then get a serious return on their investment on that show—building a passionate fanbase for the program as they do so.” He believes marketing falls short when it comes to promoting and packaging great content.

One way to promote and repackage content is to break a successful piece down into smaller chunks (aka divisible content). When I was a reporter in a newsroom, I knew it was going to be a good week when my editor said, “Hey, that story last week was great. See if you can get me a follow-up ASAP.”

Sometimes I’d have stray quotes left on the cutting room floor, which I’d work into a second piece on the same topic. Sometimes I’d call up my sources again to see if they’d sound off on something else for me. If all else failed, I’d research ancillary news stories in the same general area.

When I published a feature on the commercial success of Adult Swim’s cartoon Rick and Morty, the traffic was compelling enough to merit a follow-up. I investigated the question “what’s wrong with Rick and Morty fans” because it was a key search term that came up in Google Trends. From there, I interviewed the creators of a different Adult Swim cartoon to see if the interest carried over—it didn’t. I stayed on the Rick and Morty beat for a while, writing up news from my skeptical point of view.

Wait until you have a truly good idea for a podcast or video

Never make new content just to show you can. I know it’s enticing. You read a piece in Adweek about how podcasts are the new frontier, or your LinkedIn feed says TikTok is taking over the world, and you start to get that itch to try it out for your. But jumping into a new format without a strategy is a mistake.

That’s not to say you have to avoid every new platform. Just do some reconnaissance and figure out who’s flocking to the space. Your brand doesn’t have to exist on every social media platform, but it should be on all the channels that naturally fit your voice. The Washington Post led the way for other media companies when it joined Reddit and TikTok, but you’ll notice that publications like Financial Times and Money haven’t followed the siren’s call. What they have done is develop strategies for promoting their content via channels their target audience already uses: FT makes podcasts, and Money focuses on email newsletters.

Keep your eye on the behaviors, preferences, and desires of your audience, and you’ll never go astray. When marketers or media professionals go off the beaten path and start creating content to feed their own egos, that’s when things spiral out of control. As in any industry, the customer knows best.

The post 5 Useful Skills Marketers Should Learn From Media Companies appeared first on Contently.

As a discipline, content strategy is new; it’s only become a focal point inside most enterprise orgs over the last few years. It’s also been made to seem incredibly complicated. Go to most analyst conferences, and you’re inundated with content strategy frameworks that feature 30 different boxes and arrows, and it all threatens to induce a mild panic attack. Most teams just give up and say, “Screw it. Let’s just post some stuff to our blog and social channels and see what happens.”

It’s the biggest problem most content marketing teams face. And it’s killing the industry.

When I was named Contently’s Head of Marketing a few months ago, there was a lot I wanted to tackle. Messaging! Lead scoring! Sales enablement! The freaking website! But more than anything, I wanted our team to remember that great marketing means putting a single goal above all else—helping your audience solve their biggest challenges.

That’s why I’m incredibly excited to announce the launch of Contently’s Content Strategy Series—an in-depth educational course to simplify content strategy and help our audience build an actionable framework for their content marketing programs.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/348187522?api=1

Our first module covers brand awareness and thought leadership. It features four video lessons, accompanied by exercises, worksheets, and templates to complete with your team each week.

The full course will cover the entire customer journey, with a new module released each month. I can’t take the credit; it’s the brainchild of our marketing team, particularly our two brilliant professors: Executive Content Strategist Deanna Cioppa, and Associate Editor Emily Gaudette.

Sign up here—we’ve made the course free to the entire content marketing community for a limited run. And stay tuned. When it comes to helping solve your biggest challenges, we’re just getting started.

-Joe Lazauskas, Head of Marketing, Contently

The post The Content Strategy Course You’ve Been Waiting For appeared first on Contently.

Videos shorter than 14 seconds can often feel irreverent, disturbing, or evocative, simply because they don’t offer any context. One of my favorites is this clip of a Greek Orthodox baptism ceremony (which looks pretty intense for the baby), cut with audio from The Big Lebowski.

Why is this such a great video haiku? It begins with action (baby being dunked in holy water), and within just a few seconds, the conceit of the joke is obvious. The baby is Lebowski, and the priest is interrogating him. By the time you’ve realized what’s happening and you begin to laugh, the video’s over. This short runtime encourages a replay, and it’s exactly the kind of weird dissonance that would inspire me to share in a group text.

Now, I’m not telling marketers to start putting Coen brothers audio on weird clips they find online, but I am asking you to borrow a few tactics. Video, whether from Reddit meme-lords or media companies, is the backbone of the internet. You shouldn’t forge ahead into video production without analyzing what the greats have done before you.

Here are 10 tips for video marketers, straight from movie studios, pop stars, mainstream publishers, and media companies.

1. Create video you’d actually want to see

We often counsel brands to value customer experience over intuition. However, before you start creating a video strategy, you should still take some time to prioritize yourself and your team. When you’re brainstorming, try to think of videos you would actually watch if they came from somewhere else.

Allow yourself to get a little weird too. This is the internet, after all. If you’re into something, odds are you’re not alone. W Magazine took a chance with its ASMR Interview series, and by challenging celebrity guests to create beloved cult content, the video team found a few unexpected gems. Rapper Cardi B, it turns out, is a fantastic ASMRtist, as evidence by her W ASMR video, which has almost 25 million views. If someone on W’s team hadn’t already been an ASMR fan, they wouldn’t have known to pitch the series.

2. Make different cuts for different social platforms

It’s a good rule of thumb to avoid uploading long videos to social channels. People scrolling through feeds aren’t likely to stop and watch something 10 minutes long. If it looks good, they’ll either click through to your site or save it for later.

Use social to drive readers to your site. Post flashy images or “sizzle reels” from your video product and encourage those curious to hit the “link in bio,” if you’re on Instagram. You can put the link right in the post on Twitter or Facebook.

Chopping up video in different forms for social distribution is a strategy used by modern pop stars and movie studios alike. You can see how Taylor Swift’s social media team prepped for the release of her 2019 single “You Need to Calm Down.” Before dropping her music video, Swift posted eight still shots, one short clip, and one GIF from the video to her Instagram. Her team also evidently distributed this text-based clip to all the guest stars in the music video, and they each posted it to their feeds in the hours leading up to the release.

My friend @TaylorSwift13 asked me to be in her new music video, “You Need To Calm Down.” It premieres tomorrow! Now I need to calm down. pic.twitter.com/NQFMY0e12q

— The Ellen Show (@TheEllenShow) June 16, 2019

If you’re launching a video campaign that your team is especially proud of, borrow a page out of Taylor Swift’s book (as bedazzled as it is) and get your stakeholders involved in promotion. Hand them the assets they’ll need, and produce these assets by chopping up your primary video.

3. Action and dialogue in the first three seconds

Although you should make video with your target audience in mind, you can’t create video hoping that every viewer gives you undivided attention. Your target audience won’t be settling into a home theater with a beer and no extra devices, ready to focus solely on what you’ve made. Realistically, they’re watching on their phone on the subway, or they’re scrolling on their office desktop while picking at a salad.

For this reason, you don’t want to start off with a company logo or some unnecessary filler. Viewers are supposed to care about the story in the video more than the source. You can simply drag that logo to the end of the video and leave it there.

The first few seconds of any video are prime real estate. Just look at how all movie studios now place five seconds of flashy action before every trailer on YouTube. It’s like a mini trailer for a trailer, which is a condemnation of our shrinking attention spans, but don’t think about it too long. It’s just the reality of the internet now, and your brand needs to create accordingly.

4. Give your video series time to take off

There’s an understanding among publishers of comic books and serialized novels that stories with several installments can take time to ramp up. That’s especially true in TV, where shows, even ones with significant hype, build up a viewership over time thanks to word of mouth.

You can see the lasting effect in this graph depicting Game of Thrones viewership:

When you’re creating episodic video in a series, you want to wait until the third installment to figure out your ROI. Then you can decide whether you want to axe the project or green-light more episodes. In short, give people a chance to get on board.

5. Cultivate an audience by listening to what they have to say

One great example of a video campaign that addresses the audience’s desires directly is Wired’s Autocorrect Series. The conceit is simple: Celebrities answer the most popular questions about themselves that people type into Google. That’s it.

It’s a genius formula: Beloved celebrity + exclusive on-camera interview + only the questions average people want answered. It works because Wired values search data over editorial opinion.

When you’re in the drawing board stage, be conscious of digital habits. Make note of the angles and styles that give you pause. Keep in mind, even if you’re working for a B2B brand, your target audience is ultimately people. They may be watching your videos about software or business solutions, but they still need to be entertained.

6. Showcase your best on-camera talent, not your execs

Although GQ certainly has a robust team of editorial strategists, writers, and hosts, the men’s lifestyle publication often outsources its video content to hosts who can explain things with optimum charisma and insight.

GQ could have had its film editor or pop culture reporters break down actor Jon Hamm’s career on camera, but that video would never have gotten as much traction as the alternative. In GQ’s popular video series, actors and creators comment on their own resumes and portfolios, which makes for a far more interesting trip down memory lane than a critic’s round-up.

7. Figure out what your competitors are doing and do it better

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and every dog knows how to use Final Cut Pro. To get ahead, check out the multimedia offerings of your competitors and one-up them.

them, a queer publication from Conde Nast, nabbed the drag makeover series idea from Logo, the queer television network. When the drag queen reality competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race was originally airing on Logo (it later moved to Vh1 for Season 6), Logo had a complementary web series called “Drag Makeup Tutorial.” In that series, contestants from Drag Race take viewers step by step through their face-painting process. The videos were loosely based on YouTube’s popular make-up tutorial trend.

Conde Nast did Logo one better when it launched “Drag Me,” a video series in which Drag Race contestants make-over other celebrities using their signature styles. This way, viewers get to see their favorite contestants in drag as they show off their make-up skills. They get the bonus of seeing more celebrities undergo the drag transformation. It’s a pretty clear improvement on the original.

8. Optimize for mobile and use closed captions

NowThis, one of the most successful social video production companies, understands the value of catering to mobile viewers. Most of the company’s snippet-long videos are set to stock music, and they loop original footage alongside stock and archival clips.

Ideally, you’d watch the videos with the volume on to digest all the info. However, they’re designed to be accessible even if you’re scrolling on your phone with no headphones too. Every brand that distributes content on social media should take note.

Thousands of Swiss women walked out of their jobs and into the streets to demand equal pay (In partnership with @TIMESUPNOW #TIMESUP) pic.twitter.com/MAV3KBGe8l

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) June 17, 2019

9. Stick to ideas that inspire strong emotions

The Dodo, owned by Group Nine Media, is another video production company that specializes in social feeds. The Dodo team produces videos about animals, including wildlife, domesticated farm animals, animal rights, and everything related to pets.

https://www.instagram.com/p/By0tqR0FzXb/

Their content is optimized to be as emotionally resonant as possible. Most videos feel like someone chemically engineered them to make you feel giddy or furious. When it comes to The Dodo and emotional stories, there is no in-between.

10. Carve out a space for exclusivity

In addition to on-camera interviews and music explainers, Pitchfork sends reporters to sold-out concerts and posts the stylized footage on its YouTube channel. The publisher knows its audience. If you’re a regular Pitchfork reader, you’re probably into under-appreciated bands who aren’t playing arenas yet, which means you’re a great candidate to watch concert footage.

By securing the rights to concert footage and uploading it, Pitchfork makes itself into an exclusive destination for visuals that would otherwise require travel, ticket money, and the strain of standing in a crowded mosh-pit for four hours. In this way, they’re providing viewers with new value that’s difficult to access, which builds trust and commands authority.

The post 10 Video Tactics That Marketers Should Borrow From Media Companies appeared first on Contently.

All these creators have been able to tell stories in innovative mediums because the companies they work for see multimedia as complementary to the written word. Video isn’t just an optional medium for duplicating the original information.

Unfortunately for many video producers, some brands can’t see past social video in its most basic form. They only want to turn their most heavily trafficked articles into social-optimized clips, cutting a post into captions to place on top of B-roll. They splice in stock music, throw the videos on Facebook, and repeat the process, ignoring all the ways multimedia creators can work in concert with writers. This isn’t inspiring stuff for video producers or your audience.

Trust the video creators you hired

A few months ago, I attended an event for Vox Creative’s Explainer Studio, the media company’s branded content arm. Ezra Klein, Vox founder and editor-at-large, and Joe Posner, Vox executive producer, said that empowering their video producers to create content independently from their reporters paid off in multiple ways. When video producer Estelle Caswell pitched an explainer mini-doc on the prevalence of Grey Poupon references in hip-hop lyrics, Posner and Klein said her passion for the weird subject won them over. She made the video, it laid somewhat dormant for months. Then Kendrick Lamar released his album Damn., referencing the condiment on the first single, “HUMBLE.,” and engagement exploded.

Looking back on the video’s success, Klein and Posner attribute it to an empowered video team that felt comfortable creating on-brand content based on their own passions. By hiring a video producer and researcher who cares deeply about hip-hop, Vox was able to benefit from Caswell’s natural affinity for the subject. The editors even claimed that having a video team comfortable pushing back on initiatives was an asset.

If you’re interested in producing top-quality video projects that get results, here are a few other important steps you can take.

Complement your writing, but don’t copy it

Turning articles into videos might seem like a no-brainer, but audiences can tell when a video was just churned out without a clear purpose. Plenty of publishers just take an article and clone it as a short video with stock clips and text captions. That approach lacks creativity and isn’t going to add much to your content strategy.

Your teams may ultimately decide that some projects are best delivered as a single video or a single blog post. In some cases, you’ll also be able to cover a topic in both mediums. But being selective here is key.

For example, I wrote an article last year for Inverse about Michael Myers. At the time, Inverse was experimenting with adding conversational videos clips to every article, which meant I had to record one for my story. It fell flat, in my opinion, because my partner and I were tasked with recounting the body of my research-heavy article in a punchy, concise way. It just wasn’t a natural fit, and you can tell watching the video that I’m feeling out of my element. If I could go back, I’d bring my article notes to Inverse’s video team and we’d come up with an original video idea together; maybe a supercut of all the times Michael Myers should have died, but didn’t.

On the other hand, when editors asked me to pick a couple of my published articles to turn into videos, that approach tends to lead to better content. In those situations, the video team was able to collaborate with me on choosing the right subject matter, scripting, and animation. The process isn’t as forced. When Newsweek asked me to turn my Marvel explainer article into a short video, I was able to inject a sense of humor by speeding through explanations, which happened to be a better match for the written component.

Let creators own the story—and the results

One way to ensure your creators are inspired and interested is to keep your content calendar filled with stories they pitch themselves. Contently’s head of strategy, Joe Lazauskas, puts it this way: “Your greatest weapons are passion and creativity. To bring that out, you need a system that lets people on your team pitch stories that interest them the most.”

Once videos go live, encourage creators to analyze engagement metrics. They will pitch more effectively if they’ve grappled with the results their videos drive. Ideally, your video team will reach a point where their pitches are partly inspired by their own passions within your industry and partially inspired by audience insights. If, however, your video team ends up trying to satisfy no one but your brand’s target audience, things will get worse than simple burnout. Your team will stop innovating, and your audience will end up bored.

Consider the uber-popular YouTuber Jake Paul. If you don’t know who he is, your kids definitely do. H3Productions, another beloved YouTube channel co-run by Ethan and Hila Klein, recently analyzed what’s become of Paul after too many years trying to please the same exact audience. The 21-year-old YouTuber has built an insane, lucrative empire through video content aimed at children. In order to retain that audience, Paul has become very reliant on things he knows will get their attention: gamification, high-energy stories, and shocking imagery.

In Paul’s most recent video, which Klein analyzes here, he comes off like a desperate salesman, screaming at his young audience to spend money on what looks like a shady online scam. With Klein’s help, you can trace Paul’s trajectory over the years, his likability deteriorating as he became more insistent on growing his channel as quickly as possible. In 2013, he began uploading goofy, day-in-the-life vlogs, but in 2019, he exclusively posts heavily edited, frantic, get-rich-quick advertisements. If he had been encouraged to try out new formats or dip into a more mature market early on, he may not have become one of the most reviled figures on the internet. Is he still making millions in ads? Probably. But his target audience will soon grow up. He’s also alienated most of his creative team, making him a cautionary tale for publishers and marketers hoping to retain their staff and target audience.

Schedule check-ins between video creators and writers

Though it might seem appealing to hire video producers who work on assignment and never ask questions, demanding compliance from your team will damage your reputation. That’s not just an artistic mistake, it’s a revenue mistake.

Encouraging your video team to frequently collaborate and compare notes with your writers will ultimately boost your brand’s reputation. You’ll be investing in the creation of interesting stories in multiple mediums, and the creators you empower will be far more likely to invite creators from their networks to get involved.

In these meetings, encourage your writers to bring published articles they believe might work as videos. On the flip side, invite your video team to sift through evergreen stories in your archive and pitch the ones they find interesting as video content. Your video creators can also explain to writers what they’re looking for: Maybe a subject that requires clips and on-site footage, or detailed explainers that could use animation. Deep dives tend to work well as long explainer articles and videos, as do interviews with charismatic subjects.

Like Vox, you owe it to yourself to assemble a video team that brings more to the table than simple editing skills. If you lead them in the right direction, they’ll work as curators, too, recycling your best written content into something new and worthwhile.

The post How Brands and Publishers Can Empower Their Video Creators appeared first on Contently.

This story is all too common for marketers. Unfortunately, hoping to go viral is not a video strategy.

The online video space is a deeply crowded market. Everyone from big brands to middle schooler vloggers flood the space with content. Every minute, 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Marketers are taking notice of the boom, and they’re expected to spend $83 billion on online video this year just in the U.S. alone. That reality means your content will get lost without a clear video strategy.

How do you break through the noise? It takes an adjustment in thinking. The painful truth is that there isn’t a single, magic method to finding an audience. Television networks and movie studios spend millions trying to pull audiences in and they still miss the mark all the time. Did you catch Melissa McCarthy in Happytime Murders? Yeah, neither did anyone else.

Here are some nuances to think about to increase the odds your video gets seen by the right people.

Put people first, products second

If you want to get your message out there, the first thing you should do is eliminate bad marketing habits. Start thinking like a wise TV executive, instead, and ask yourself a simple question: Would a person really watch this?

We get caught up with target personas and product specs and optimizing for algorithms. Those factors all matter. But imagine your audience scrolling through their feeds and think about what would make them stop and watch. Then, consider what would keep them watching after a few seconds. Though it can be tempting to make a flashy video that runs through all the benefits and features of your product or service, our customers tend to see better results when they focus on the elements of good storytelling.

Determine how you can show your brand, product, or service impacting people’s lives. In other words, focus on characters. Let them guide the narrative. That way, your videos can strike a balance between being informational and relatable.

Eni, the global energy company, partnered with Contently on a video program to educate consumers who may not even know their lives are touched by the brand. For example, “Powering Mozambique,” the first documentary, told the story of how increased electricity and drinkable water in villages changed the day-to-day life for people living in the African nation. Better infrastructure impacted everything from healthcare to education to job training.

To come up with these kind of ideas, seek out video production talent with a strong portfolio of narrative videos that grab attention. They’ll be able to help develop storylines that emphasize the problems you solve.

Create a program, not just a video

Getting attention is a good place to start. But the point of investing in content marketing is to hold attention, right? However, for some reason, there’s a strange dissonance between how we view written content and video content.

It would be really strange to see a brand blog with one article. Content marketers publish there consistently. But when it comes to video channels, brands may only have a sparse page. It’s hard to break through with a one-off video. Take a look at successful YouTubers and Instagram influencers and you’ll notice one thing very fast: They post a lot of content on a regular schedule.

Granted, budget plays a factor here. You can create a lot of blog posts if they each cost $500. You may only be able to set up one or two video shoots for $10,000.

Even if that’s the case, you can still make a few smart tweaks to maximize your output. Once you know the parameters of your shoot, plan out multiple deliverables. If you are aiming for a 15-minute documentary with interviews, siphon off some of the footage for 30-second interviews with experts. Prepare 15-second clips for social distribution (more on this in a bit.) Maybe even split that original documentary into two or three parts.

If you just have one video, the audience’s journey ends right there, even if they want to stay engaged. If you have even a small batch of interesting, relevant content on your site or social platforms, you provide your audience an incentive to stay and learn more about your brand.

Invest in paid social distribution

Remember that great video from the intro that only had 12 views? Here’s where you turn that 12 into 1,200, 12,000, or 120,000.

Paid distribution on YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms ensures your content will be seen by the right audience. You can target ads based on location, industry, job title, and more. As the data comes in, you can optimize frequently to boost the efficiency of your ads.

Short snippets, targeted the right way, can pull your audience in. Work with your video team to find ways you can utilize what you’re already created to craft some divisible content. Use these quick clips as promos that drive viewers to the meatier stuff on your channel or blog.

When editing your videos, pay particular attention to the first couple seconds of, well, everything. We make up our minds very quickly when deciding whether to watch something or click away. Ask yourself, would I keep watching this or would I skip ahead? Ask some trusted coworkers at your brand to weigh in.

B2B content gets boring when people make these common mistakes: https://t.co/deR5ty9wf8 pic.twitter.com/hM2LC0enlV

— Contently (@contently) October 2, 2018

We do this a lot internally at Contently with our Content Marketing Minute videos. Since each clip only runs 60 seconds, they play well on social, racking up hundreds of views every time we post. Eventually, users became familiar with the series and took action by clicking through to existing content on our site.

When you’re planning your video strategy, avoid the temptation to rely on the false promise of viral success. That’s like building your entire life around the idea that you might win the lottery. Instead, take the time to plan out a strategy that uses relatable, character-driven video, commits to consistency, and captures the attention of the right viewers with effective paid social. Test content and optimize your approach. Video content takes time, but when done well, it can invite and engage new audiences and help your message stick.

The post Going Viral Is Not a Video Strategy appeared first on Contently.

Though many marketers just consider YouTube a free video hosting service, it actually has a dedicated audience comparable to Netflix, Hulu, or any cable network. In 2016, YouTube surpassed the top 10 cable programs in regular viewership, and as of this year, the platform averages 1.9 billion monthly users. I’m one of those people.

For more than a decade, I’ve been an extremely dedicated viewer of ASMR YouTube channels. ASMR is the autonomous sensory meridian response, which is a needlessly fancy way of saying “my skin feels tingly when I watch videos of people whispering and delicately handling random objects.” My foray into the world of YouTube ASMRtists (as creators call themselves) is a great example of what you and your brand want followers to do.

I began watching ASMR by plugging the term into the search bar anytime I wanted to calm down. After clicking around for weeks, I found a few creators whose work I liked, and I subscribed. When those creators collaborated with others, I followed the CTA to those channels and subscribed if I liked their uploads. Without making the conscious decision to do so, I recalled details about each channel and what they liked to talk about. Watching them for years, I saw their divorces play out, with one particular ASMRtist moving into a new apartment, describing her new job, and eventually getting married again. I joined the chorus of supportive commenters when one ASMRtist was incarcerated, and felt a surge of happiness when, nine months later, I got a notification that he had been released and was making videos again.

There are a ton of platform-specific quirks to keep in mind if you’d like your brand to have a real presence on YouTube. If the idea of joining a large community puts you off, you can always keep hosting your videos quietly, and no one will be the wiser. However, if you want to rack up subscribers and eventually hang a silver, gold, or diamond play button on your company’s office wall, here are some guidelines, starting with the simplest one.

Trick out your channel and leave no field empty

Before you post any content to YouTube, make sure your channel’s about page looks professional. Starting a YouTube presence without an on-brand header image, avatar, trailer, and channel copy is like having an unverified company Twitter account. You can make it work, but you’re cutting yourself off at the knees by giving your audience a chance to doubt you.

Check out Nintendo’s YouTube channel, but keep in mind the entertainment brand has been on the platform since 2005. The header art is specific to the platform, and the people managing the channel pin timely ads to the company home page. They also list the brand’s sub-channels in a sidebar. If you click Nintendo’s “Playlists”, you’ll see related content gets grouped into small packages. These videos auto-play, one after the other, similar to the way Netflix simply fires up another episode of The Office if you’re binging through it. If your YouTube channel operates like any other TV channel, your playlists are your programming. Present them with as much gusto as HBO does for Game of Thrones.

Get your audience to watch regularly

Your editorial calendar on YouTube should look a lot like the calendar you use for your blog. Not every piece of content has to belong in a larger collection, but planning out a series can keep you on track.

Volvo manages a YouTube channel specifically for its trucks, and one of the best series it released on its channel was 2016’s “The Search,” a full season following professional driver and fuel efficiency advocate Christian Scheiflinger as he interviewed like-minded people. The episodes referenced the season’s larger narrative arc, which led up to the moment Scheiflinger picked three of his subjects to enter the Drivers’ Fuel Challenge World Final. It’s certainly possible to watch a single video, but the way the content is structured, you’re going to want to see the season through if you start.

Though “The Search” felt like a docuseries, Volvo’s longer running series “Welcome to My Cab” recalls MTV’s stylized reality shows from the early aughts like Pimp My Ride, Room Raiders, and Next? Each episode focuses on a professional truck driver as he or she gives viewers a tour of their cab, which is more interesting than it sounds. Thanks to Volvo, I learned the cross-country truckers spare no expense decking their cabs out with their hobbies and passions, whether that’s Rihanna or death metal bands. Because “Welcome to My Cab” episodes are short, funny, and rarely mention Volvo’s products outright, it’s exceedingly easy to take in more than one episode in a single sitting.

Don’t be afraid of CTAs

For a while, it was a somewhat of a meme to mock how Youtube creators end videos by saying “be sure to like, comment, and subscribe!” But, compared to other social media sites, the platform is the most amenable to asking outright for engagement. Occasionally, you’ll see a brand tweet something like “RT if you agree,” or an Instagram influencer will ask followers to “sound off in the comments,” but YouTube’s capacity for calls to action is unrivaled.

Even if you don’t want to mention your brand in your videos, you can always promote other series on your channel. For example, GoPro tags related content throughout its clips using YouTube’s editing tools. If someone mentions a subject, links to related videos pop up for a few seconds, not necessarily interrupting the flow. This is a commonly used tactic on the platform, and it doesn’t tend to carry the same negative connotation that pop-ups and banner ads do.

The same way you’d never publish a blog post without filling out meta-data for SEO, you shouldn’t publish YouTube videos without a full explanation of the series in the description box. Link to other episodes, link to your company’s website, and use that space as a resource doc attached to every piece of content. Since YouTube content can occasionally be distracting, do all you can to keep your viewer engaged with your work. They should never have to dig around to find it.

Join the community and engage with other creators

It’s very rare for a YouTube channel to take off and build an audience in a vacuum. Because most independent creators are entrepreneurs, they’re able to negotiate collaborations with other influencers by avoiding public relations red tape. Below, watch two insanely popular YouTubers and authors, Hannah Hart and John Green, collaborate on a video for Hart’s channel, My Drunk Kitchen.

If you’re a company publishing content to your YouTube channel, take your brightest stars on tour and feature them in your other series. Reach out to other YouTube creators in your industry and see if they’re taking submissions for guest spots.

And don’t slouch in the comments section! Make a practice of watching content from other creators in your field and let them know what you think. Link to the channels of creators you admire, let them know you’ve subscribed, and consider filming reaction videos to their biggest features.

Commit to a variety of video formats

If someone set an egg timer and said, “Name every type of YouTube video in thirty seconds!” I guarantee you wouldn’t even scratch the surface, no matter how deep into the platform you tend to get.

Among the video formats appropriate for branded content are docuseries, live Q&As, unboxing videos, comedy sketches, event coverage, how-to explainers, animated explainers, and man-on-the-street montages. Below, you’ll see Samsung’s UK channel collaborating with Slashgear.com in an “extreme unboxing video,” a blending of several genres

Make sure your YouTube channel has video content of every run-time, format, and tone you think works for your brand. Of course, if you’re a financial brand, you probably don’t need to do an unboxing video, but you can certainly upload short, lively Q&As with one of your funniest advisors alongside a serious short documentary about getting out of debt. That way your audience always has something to sink their teeth into, regardless of how much time they can devote to engaging with your work.

The post What Popular YouTubers Can Teach Us About Video Marketing appeared first on Contently.

To help brands understand what works best on Instagram, social media analytics company Quintly conducted a study of 44,432 business profiles and over 8.9 million posts.

Though a majority of posts were images, the study found that videos generate 21 percent more interactions. What’s also interesting is that carousels—posts that contain multiple images people swipe through—performed 2.2 percent better than single images. So if you have a whole album of stills after a company outing and you’re not sure which one to post, throw a bunch of them up for maximum engagement.

Despite Instagram’s reputation as a visual place, the study also showed that 31 percent of posts included lengthy captions of 300 words or more. Captions are almost as integral to the post as the image or video itself. Only one percent of the posts surveyed were text-free, and 71 percent of the posts used at least one hashtag. As for our favorite little cartoon images? About 55 percent percent of accounts surveyed didn’t use emojis at all, while 35.8 percent used between one and four in mosts posts.

As audiences become more accustomed to quality visual content, it’s important that brands don’t underestimate the impact Instagram can have. Whether your posts have long or short captions, slews of emojis or no images at all, your content needs to be original and honest to stand out among the millions of posts that users can come across every day.

The post What We Can Learn From 9 Million Instagram Posts appeared first on Contently.

To a marketer writing all day, event marketing might sound like a glorified series of networking happy hours, but in reality, the job requires a lot of collaboration. Event and experiential marketers oversee happy hours, sure, but they also plan and execute presentations at trade shows, client dinners, product demos, Jeffersonian discussions, and award ceremonies. For these investments to bring in ROI, they need support from content.

In 2016, the Event Marketing Institute and Mosaic partnered to study trade show and experiential program attendees and exhibitors, and they discovered a surprising sense of optimism on both sides. According to their study, 75 percent of companies with event budgets between $50-100 million say they expect an ROI of more than 5:1 for live events.

The key to showing up well at a successful marketing event is preparation. More often than not, the lead-in process can’t all fall on a single employee, which means event marketers need to convince their colleagues to roll up their sleeves and get involved.

With all that in mind, here’s a list of useful content formats for supporting your company’s event marketing.

Brand messaging

Before you take the stage or host a dinner, your brand needs to know who your customers are and what to say to them. Without that, any event spend will just be total guesswork.

Good messaging requires a lot of research and legwork—and it should all be documented. Your messaging should cover a brand’s story, pillars, taglines, ideal client profiles, and key messages. Because when your team is on the floor at a crowded convention, they won’t discuss industry analysis at length with everyone they meet. They need their messaging in short bites, and everyone should be able to deliver an elevator pitch at a moment’s notice. If you’re marketing a product that can support mid-level managers at Fortune 1000 finance companies, all the content you use, from the presentations to the menu, should be optimized for what you know about that demographic—how your consumer base speaks, what their pain points are, what they’re into when they’re not at work.

Pre-event coverage

Covering your events on a blog is tricky. It all depends on how many people are involved. If you’re going to workshop with 50 people, that audience is probably too small to warrant dedicated solely dedicated to the event. For a conference with 5,000 people, it’s a different story.

Either way, you can always create something to ramp up to an event. Let your team explain what they’re excited about. Discuss the major themes with your own spin. To differentiate this writing from a press release, don’t just talk about your own presentations. Who are you excited to meet? What other sessions look intriguing?

Lastly, if someone wants to find out more about the event, make sure all content links to a landing page.

Email

Event promotion is like content distribution—if you’re going to spend a lot of money on programming, you need to make sure people know where you’re going and how they can get involved. Given that our inboxes get flooded with reminder emails, your content team should take a long look at what they can do to stand out from everyone else, whether that means going with a bold subject line, getting a little something extra from the design team, or focusing on an exclusive giveaway or piece of content. (We raffle off Beats headphones to people who register for certain things before our events.)

You don’t have to throw out your entire email strategy while an event approaches—keep your regular newsletters going, but consider placing a nice little widget to register for your brand’s presentation somewhere in the body. If an upcoming event is focused on a certain theme, your email newsletter in the preceding weeks might include a round-up of evergreen blog posts on that same idea.

Presentation decks

A great slide deck and a great article call for a lot of the same things: research, interviews, narrative, editing, and proofing. But too many presenters stuff their slides with super granular information about their companies and read it right off the screen. That’s how you lose the audience.

Easily my favorite #CMWorld yet. An amazing week geeking out with @jayacunzo @AmandaChanguris @mmagnarelli @johnhall @marcgraser and many other brilliant content geeks. Thanks to everyone who packed the ballroom for my talk. It was unreal. pic.twitter.com/B7vRxVyU6l

— Joe Lazer (FKA Lazauskas) (@JoeLazauskas) September 7, 2018

Your speech needs to be more interesting than the prospect of networking with whoever else is at the table. A good content team should help flesh out the story ahead of time and cut out the narrative fat. An effective Powerpoint deck, for instance, will immediately communicate a brand’s aesthetic while keeping a speaker focused on high-level information. Use as little explanatory text as possible (save that for your speaker) and focus on simple sentences, images, and data visualizations.

One-sheeters

Even if your employees are fluent in your brand messaging and know how to make a good impression, it helps to have a physical handout that people can take home. If you’re at an industry conference, attendees are going to hear dozens of spiels and product pitches. The more they hear, the more likely they are to forget whatever your sales team said to them four hours ago.

One-sheeters should be concise rundowns of whatever you want people to remember from your brand. Think of them as a hybrid of a Powerpoint slide, a case study, and an infographic. One-sheeters tend to focus on product marketing materials, but they can also work well for new announcements, product launches, and rebrands.

Swag

I’ve waded through an infinite cornucopia of free objects at trade shows over the years, and most have ended up in the drawer where I keep silverware. I’ve been handed beer koozies, pocket protectors, pens, tote bags, stress balls, plastic water bottles, Livestrong-knock-off bracelets, bookmarks, and those little rubber pockets designed for your credit card.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnZTcIZF995/?utm_source=ig_embed

Instead of trying to draw everyone into your brand’s booth by bringing plastic trash with universal appeal, decide who your target audience might be at an event. If you’re hoping to nab women who work in marketing, bring insoles for high heels, oil-blotting sheets, and mints. And make sure whatever you bring is clearly associated with your brand. Effective branding doesn’t just happen on the fly, which means a marketing team needs to brainstorm, solidify, and execute ideas long before anyone from events takes the stage. All of the giveaways have to tie back to a central brand purpose, and that unity has as much to do with ideology and rhetoric as it does color and font.

Social copy + multimedia

Even if your social media manager isn’t on site for an event, your brand should make its presence at a trade show or awards ceremony known with a mixture of scheduled posts and live updates.

"Neurons that fire together, wire together." We hope you got plenty out of @JoeLazauskas demonstrating why great stories make our brains want to buy! #EVATL #DigitalSummit #thestorytellingedge pic.twitter.com/pYWckOjjtV

— Contently (@contently) October 23, 2018

Don’t just shout these announcements into the void, either. Have the employees working an event report back to the social media team in real-time with photos and key takeaways as they’re watching presentations. Did your VP of finance sit on a panel? Post a photo of the panel from the audience, get the panel members together afterward for a quick pic, and tag everybody who’s involved with a salient quote from the proceedings.

Product demo

This will apply more to larger events with booth space. When you’re plotting out your product demo, consider the possibility that new listeners might walk up in the middle. Your presentation needs to be as well-rehearsed and concise as it can be, especially because your captive audience might grow and shrink in size as you deliver it. An easy way to do this is to document a demo script that employees can reference, whether at the event or their desks.

Don’t be afraid to keep your demo super specific. If you’re going after a certain demographic, walk everyone on the floor through the steps your target user might take. Most people will be willing to extend the limits of their imagination and figure out how they might use your product to their advantage.

Post-event coverage

Similar to pre-event coverage, how you follow up with content after an event depends on how many people were there. Encourage your brand leaders to weigh in on events after they’re returned to the office, but don’t just list all the handshakes and lectures they attended. What were the break-out themes? Did they learn anything new? How will your executives use what they learned? Answer any and all of these questions in a blog post, and embed all the lovely social-friendly images you captured on the show floor.

For readers who weren’t able to attend, consider uploading a copy of your presenter’s deck onto your website. Bonus points if you were able to record the presentation!

Video

Video content from an event doesn’t suffer from the same limitations as written content. As long as you focus on the themes, topics, and recognizable names from an event, a clip can still bring in engagement long after it ends.

A great, recent example of a brand covering its own projects is the SYFY network’s live-feed at New York Comic Con, on which SYFY staff reporters and video hosts interviewed celebrities from the geek entertainment industry. The event, held in the Javits Center in midtown Manhattan, was a chaotic maze packed with geeks, but SYFY’s new green-and-black branding was visible nearly every direction you turned.

Even if you only choose to invest in certain formats on this list, you’ll benefit from letting your event marketing get more content support. Just as your regular content follows customers on their journey or guides potential clients through the sales pipeline, your event marketing should be accessible to attendees from the moment they register to the moment they’re back at their desk, holding a branded stress ball.

The post 10 Types of Content That’ll Make Your Event Marketing More Effective appeared first on Contently.

Facebook noticeably updated its algorithm earlier this year to prioritize content from friends and family over publishers. For the millions of Americans who rely on the social network as their source of worldly information, this inevitably means they’re already going to agree with a lot of what they’re seeing online. Facebook has already come under fire for perpetuating the spread of fake news, a problem the algorithm changes were supposed to fix. Instead, it’s ensured that users can stay safely in their existing filter bubbles.

To get a sense of just what my world would look like without any other social media influences, I decided to do an experiment: For one day, I could only get my news from Facebook.

A bubble unpopped

As a social media editor, this wasn’t the easiest task. Fortunately, we have tools like Buffer and Tweetdeck, so I can take care of my job without needing to see everything coming across Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, and the like.

On Facebook, my feed is typically dominated by dogs. I follow groups like Dogspotting and Cool Dog Group because with so much insanity floating around the world on a daily basis, it does feel comforting when 80 percent of my newsfeed consists of animal photos and videos. (This is also a good time to remind everyone that Facebook groups are still an effective way to reach your audience.) As hard as the news can be to digest, however, I have found myself missing some of the timely, tougher stories that Facebook has deemed “less friendly.”

I do follow a fair amount of publishers, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vice, and the Guardian. But as expected, I had to scroll through all of the friend statuses, shared photos, and requests for recommendations before I came across a single news article. Even then, it was a New York Times clip my father had shared about the effect of the recession and housing crisis on the middle class—not a post from the Times directly. So before I could even register the title of the piece, I saw his commentary about it, which I happened to agree with. The bubble remained un-popped.

I embarked on this quest after the New York primary elections and in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, so after this link, I did start to see a fair amount of posts from my friends about those current events. However, it was always accompanied by their commentary. Going back to the bubble effect: Most of my Facebook friends still share my political and social beliefs, so I usually agreed with their comments, but it did take pages of scrolling until I found a post without any personal biases attached.

After a few more dog photos, event announcements, and advertisements, I came across my first post from an actual publisher.

The article turned out to be a two-year-old personal essay by a woman who worked as a housekeeper and discovered some very personal things about her clients. Was it a fascinating and entertaining insight into a facet of New York that I don’t know much about? Yes. Would I count it as news? Not exactly.

Video reigns supreme

Next up was a video from Vice teasing a new documentary about knife crime in London. Vice’s content is often some of the most interesting and entertaining on my feed, and this effective video was no exception. I paused my scrolling to watch the entire preview, which ran four minutes and 29 seconds.

During my experiment, I noticed that most of the publishers I follow—aside from The Guardian—were more likely to post videos than text articles. Every company talks about investing in more video, even if that increasingly means firing other teams to “pivot.” Additionally, organic reach for brands and publishers has dropped and stayed low over the last few years. But if there’s one area that can still bring in strong reach, it’s video.

Even as I scrolled through Facebook hoping to come across news stories, I found myself more likely to stick with videos than to click on an article if the excerpt didn’t immediately grab me.

What did grab me as I kept scrolling was a video about the rise of Korean beauty masks in America, courtesy of Travel Insider, an off-shoot of Business Insider that pops up on my feed a lot. The clip takes viewers through the benefits of the masks and where to get them.

Travel Insider’s appeal comes from posts that are quick, flashy, and non-controversial. Unusual trend stories like this are catnip for Facebook’s algorithm because they tend to spark conversations and positive reactions. As users grow fatigued from all of the political polemics, that widespread appeal on a safer topic may have more of a chance to stand out.

Breaking news

Just when I thought I’d scrolled through every publisher post, my notifications blew up as I got three breaking news alerts from followed publishers about Rod Rosenstein’s resignation. This feature does set Facebook apart from other social networks.

When scrolling through social media channels, I assume that I’ll find out more about the world on Twitter. That’s where media members seem to hang out the most. Twitter was the original platform to include a “trending” section, and you can search #BreakingNews for latest updates, but Facebook has a much more direct notification system when news breaks.

But while endlessly scrolling through Facebook, I did come across more news than I expected, even if most of it was shared by my friends. (I suppose it also depends what you classify as “news.” Do I think hurricane updates count more than videos about face masks? Yes, but trend stories do have their place.)

Despite the biases of its algorithm that edges out certain publishers, I still think of Facebook as a place to find out what’s going on in the world. Its homepage is still the original News Feed, after all. But you have to put in effort to balance out what you’re going to see. I’ve tried to follow more news outlets and publishers that may not share the exact same political views as me.

So what’s my takeaway from the experiment? It’s not the worst place to start if you want to find out interesting information … as long as you know what to expect and have a willingness to do more research on whatever you come across.

The post The News, According to Facebook appeared first on Contently.

“There weren’t that many people doing it,” Byrom. said. “The people who were doing it were bigger agencies and it wasn’t their core focus. It wasn’t really that easy to understand how much a video would cost, and the range of prices was also very high.”

Byrom saw an opportunity in the market to create videos for small and mid-size companies trying to explain their products and services. In November 2011, he established Wyzowl, a studio dedicated to animated video for brands. When business began to snowball, he hired his mother to take on administration and client management. Today he has a team of 25 writers, designers, and animators, and has produced 2,500 videos for 1,300 clients all over the world, including several Contently clients.

We talked to Byrom about working with big brands, the future of video in general, and how animation can impact marketing. Here’s what he had to say.

In a recent Wyzowl survey, 81 percent of marketers indicated they were using video in 2018, up from 63 percent last year. How have you seen the demand for this kind of content evolve?

Yeah, it’s still increasing. I think the market’s certainly maturing. People are definitely becoming more aware of using video in their marketing. If such big companies like Facebook and Twitter are effectively giving people more visibility for using video, then people are going to start using it in droves. Although it’s been growing since we started the business, it’s not anywhere near saturation yet.

Do you collect metrics on the videos that you produce?

We try to get as much data as we can from our customers, but it can be quite difficult because people use video in different ways. People have different goals and different measures of success. For one company, generating 10 leads through a video might be excellent. Whereas for another company, nothing short of 10,000 would be successful.

One of our clients, JotForm, wrote an article (we didn’t ask them to!) about how they actually tested side-by-side an animated video we produced and a live-action video we didn’t. They were about the same product launch, and JotForm used them side-by-side with the same budget. They posted them on YouTube and found that the animated video gave them a 20 percent higher click-through rate than the live-action video.

Why do you think that was?

It could be for lots of different reasons. I think the animated video just grabbed their attention more and was possibly more engaging. It’s not to say that all animated videos are more engaging. There’s certainly lots of live-action videos that are super engaging,

Do the majority of your clients use animated video as a product explainer, or are there other common use cases?

Explainers are the most common type. One benefit of an animated video is that the product doesn’t necessarily have to fully exist yet. It can actually be part conceptual and part real. So, if you’re explaining a website, it doesn’t need to be the exact design. It can be a mock-up version. If you create the video in the right way, it doesn’t date the product or site.

What are some of the common challenges for first-time clients working in video?

Some people come to us and say “We need a video for this event, it’s on Friday.”And we’re like “Oh, that’s not really how animated video works.” You’ve got to go through a scripting process, a design and illustration storyboarding process, and an animation process. A typical video could take about six weeks to create.

That hand-holding and support is really, really important to make sure people are part of the process, get what they want at the end, and let us capture that vision and imagination in the video.

What advice would you give brands who are maybe thinking about video but haven’t done it yet?

Start small. Don’t make commitments that are too big. Maybe create a 30-second, 45-second, or one-minute video that actually explains your product and service. Do the explainer video first because you can use it in so many different ways: email, social media, advertising, retargeting, or ads that are not even on social, like Google ads or display ads. One piece of content can be repurposed and used so many different ways and have such an effect that you get such a big ROI from one video.

As the market evolves, how will animated video change?

Over the last few years, particularly recently, the quality of clients’ expectations and the quality of output is really increasing at a rapid rate. Which is excellent. I think the quality of output and animation is constantly improving.

You might remember quite a while ago there was an Apple-focused skeuomorphic design, where it was all real to life with gradients and 3D. Then everything became very flat. We’re starting to see some interesting noise gradients and some half-frame type designs that are looking particularly cool. Some really interesting ways of morphing objects from one thing to another, so the video almost stays on the same object changing from piece to piece.

In terms of technology, I think the next piece in the journey to keep engagement moving is interactive video. So you’re not just clicking and playing and rewinding and fast-forwarding. You’re clicking play, and then you’re part of that journey so you’re actually either getting to the content that interests you most, or you’re able to dictate a journey to your preferences. The video’s really being tailored along the way to your interests. I think that’s really the next step in interesting and engaging video that captures viewers’ imaginations.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed. It was originally published on our sister site, The Freelancer.

The post Wyzowl’s Matt Byrom Explains Why Animation Works in Marketing appeared first on Contently.

But that moment also had some side effects. Suddenly, every marketer wanted to “go viral,” although none of them wanted to spend more then $5,000 to do it. Marketers also came to believe that content marketing was way easier for the “exciting” B2C brands compared to the “boring” B2B companies.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

People only want to read and watch content about their passions, and those things tend to fall into two camps:

A) Content that helps people enjoy their personal passions, like sports, gaming, wellness, fitness, cooking, travel, health, and, in my case, bouncy castles and large water slides.

B) Content that makes people better at their jobs, where they spend most of their days. These people desperately need to improve if they want to retire before they’re 85 years old and Boca Raton is somewhere under the Atlantic Ocean.

If you’re a B2C brand, you’re likely playing in the first camp. And the competition for attention there is fierce. If you want to stand out, you need to drop someone from space or tell truly unique stories—like Marriott or Dollar Shave Club—to stand out.

If you’re B2B, you still need to create content that stands out, but there’s much less competition. Condé Nast isn’t about to launch a magazine to help content marketers measure ROI. Meredith won’t start a new pub to help healthcare executives navigate the complex regulatory landscape. As a B2B brand, you likely have knowledge and expertise people crave.

B2B content gets boring, however, when people make some common mistakes. To learn how to use your content marketing advantage, spare 60 seconds to watch the latest episode of Content Marketing Minute.

And if you missed the first four episodes, check them out below.

Episode 1: Setting Content Marketing Goals

Episode 2: Building Relationships With a High-Value Audience

Episode 3: Finding Your Brand Voice

Episode 4: Building a Killer Channel Strategy

The post Video: Why B2B Companies Have a Content Marketing Advantage appeared first on Contently.

A big reason why is the incredible amount of data and insights we can collect on our audience, through both internal analytics and third-party data on search and social. As I wrote in my Ask a Content Strategist column last summer, those insights can unleash our creativity and help us figure out exactly what our audience wants.

In my latest Content Marketing Minute video, I cover how to use third-party search and social data to develop a content distribution strategy that fills a true need in peoples’ lives. Check it out!

And if you missed the first three episodes in our Content Marketing Minute series, you can catch up below.

Episode 1: Setting Content Marketing Goals

Episode 2: Building Relationships With a High-Value Audience

Episode 3: Finding Your Brand Voice

The post Video: The 2 Keys to a Great Content Distribution Strategy appeared first on Contently.

Instagram’s new venture raises some questions—namely, what sort of content can we expect from the platform, and how should brands get involved?

Who’s on IGTV right now?

Most of IGTV’s publishers are influencers posting the sort of content you might expect to see from YouTube regulars. Makeup tutorials, daily vlogs from influencers, interview segments, and dogs doing cute things already make up most of IGTV’s regular feed.

Certain brands have already realized IGTV has the potential to be more interactive than YouTube. Bacardi partnered with dancers Les Twins to create an interactive video campaign. The twins asked users for advice ahead of their music video shoot using polls in their own Instagram Stories— questions about lighting, choreography, and the length of the final product. Once the polls closed, the twins incorporated the feedback before releasing the final video on their own account and Bacardi’s IGTV channel.

What do audiences want to see?

According to Netflix, people want to watch an hour-long video of Cole Sprouse eating a burger. While this particular use of IGTV may not appeal to everyone, it did get Netflix 676,000 IGTV views and nearly 5,000 comments. Chipotle posted a video of someone pulling an endless stream of burrito and taco options out of a bottomless Chipotle bag. It’s clear that brands like Netflix, Chipotle, and Bacardi are experimenting with ways of using the platform that differ from the commercials we’re used to seeing on television.

“IGTV presents a unique opportunity to engage with users at a deeper level,” said Kinzi Sparks, the lead for paid social at iProspect. “When your customers are thoughtfully seeking and opting into a more in-depth viewing experience, there’s a stronger chance that your brand’s message will be received with welcome captivation.”

What’s next?

“One area that the Instagram team needs to focus on is ensuring that IGTV doesn’t simply become a place for stories to live,” warned Neil Waller, co-founder of influencer marketing agency Whalar. “It should not be a place where users simply post their stories, unless Instagram’s end goal is for IGTV to become a replacement for stories.”

Brands like Everlane and publishers like BuzzFeed have posted repurposed Instagram Stories to IGTV, but perhaps this is just an attempt to establish a presence until they have the resources to create new longform video.

Chipotle remains an outlier by hiring Day One Agency to produce its inaugural video. “It’s a different format, so we want to make sure we are designing specifically for longform and vertical content,” said Tressie Lieberman, Chipotle’s executive director of engagement marketing. IGTV seems built to entertain larger audiences, rather than offer the short personal and educational updates that we’ve come to expect from the stories feature.

Currently, IGTV isn’t showing ads, but that will probably change as the platform figures out the best way for its contributors to monetize their videos. If marketers and advertisers want to take advantage of the platform, for now they’ll have to work with brands that already have Instagram channels and explore longer content that tells engaging stories.

The post What Instagram’s IGTV Can Offer Brands appeared first on Contently.

While there are so, so, so many answers to this question, the top choice is pretty obvious. Most brands get in trouble by focusing too much on what they want to say, and not enough on what their audience cares about.

[Click here to watch the first episode of Content Marketing Minute.]

A great content strategy requires a deep understanding of your target audience—one that evaluates both quantitative and qualitative factors to learn what your audience wants from you. All marketers should figure this out before they create content that’s new, expensive, and potentially off the mark.

In the second episode of our new Content Marketing Minute series, I reveal the content strategy secrets to building strong relationships with a high-value audience. There are special guest appearances from Lonely Island and Drake. Check it out below, and please try to ignore the creases in my shirt.

The post Video: How to Create Content Your Audience Actually Cares About appeared first on Contently.

According to a 2017 study from Arkadium, which helps brands create interactive content, 78 percent of respondents prefer text to incorporate multimedia components. (The number rises to 87 percent among millennials.) Those components could include everything from photography and infographics to GIFs and video.

But which content formats will work best for your company? And once you choose another format, how can you make sure each piece of content supports the rest of your work? If you invest in quality, listeners who find your podcast on iTunes or see your infographic on Reddit will seek out your company to find more.

So while you may start with blog posts to build a foundation for potential customers to find, that doesn’t mean every member of your audience wants to read a 600-word article. Once you research whether your customers are into videos or white papers, you can start giving the crowd more of what they like.

1. Infographics

Good infographics are like Sesame Street segments for grown-ups. They’re colorful, insightful visualizations that can break down data into a language that anyone on the internet can understand. They’re also a great tool for illustrating your content with metaphors.

The upside to infographics is they typically bring in a larger audience than a regular old blog post. The downside, of course, is they require design fluency. They’re more expensive to produce than strictly written content, and they typically take more time.

Even more daring than a garden variety infographic is an interactive one. If you have the team to pull one off, well, what are you sitting around reading a blog post? For inspiration, check out dumpark’s plastic pollution infographic or The Economic Policy Institute’s visualization of how systemic economic inequality works.

2. Shortform social video

Some marketers call short social videos “snackable content” if they’re sociopaths. You may know them from your Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn feed: the punchy clips optimized for mobile, often watched with the sound off. Shortform tutorials are popular, as are quick recaps of timely information or personality-driven updates from a company.

Short videos are a lot like improv comedy—a more immediately accessible form for amateurs, which means there’s a lot more of it out there. It’s also usually the first kind of content that comes to mind when a media company says they’re “pivoting to video.”

An effective shortform video should focus on a single memorable actor or subject and be optimized for social sharing. When Netflix needed to drum up fan excitement for the fourth season of Orange is the New Black, the streaming service’s marketing team and hi5.agency had the dramedy’s likable cast act out clips for Facebook and Instagram. The resulting clips used only non-diegetic music, and the social campaign won a Shorty Award.

3. Longform video

Just about any longform video will require significantly more planning and a higher production value than a shortform creation. That’s why it’s important to outline your longform goals and strategy before you head into production.

Last year, a number of web series began streaming on Facebook Watch only to crash and burn. According to data analysis firm Canvs, the businesses that fared worst on Watch were in the travel, TV criticism, and educational STEM fields. The videos weren’t watched as often, but more importantly, users tended not to react using Facebook’s “emotional” buttons (like the heart or the “sad” tear-stained face). In a span of two weeks, videos in less-successful genres struggled to earn more than 50 reactions.

However, the same report revealed that companies in education, gaming, and horror entertainment managed to pull off successful Watch series. These videos racked up 4,000 emotional reactions in the time it took others to nab less than fifty.

It’s not all about Facebook Watch, though. In 2017, the financial app Square produced a short film about Yassin Terou, a falafel chef and Syrian immigrant to the United States, as he used their app to run his small business and support his family. Through its short documentary, Square communicates their brand’s values and identifies itself with an entrepreneurial, wholesome spirit.

4. Print

A successful print publication is a bit like a unicorn, yes, but if you work in travel, hospitality, design, beauty, fashion, or lifestyle, even a quarterly print publication can upgrade your brand engagement. Print magazines released by media companies need to prove a return based on subscriptions and ads, but when brands put out their own print publications, the experience doesn’t have to be as transactional.

Ideally, that leeway should help brands be more creative and thoughtful with their approach. Most airlines now produce magazines which they simply make available on flights. Cosmetics company Lush hands out free, lightly scented catalogs detailing new products and how they’re constructed.

It’s not just for the tastemakers either. There are so many examples of successful, branded print work in industries including finance and transportation, and early studies have shown a direct correlation between engagement with print media and brand awareness, familiarity, and trust. Amtrak’s American Way boasts incredible writing; AirBnb’s The Magazine cues travelers into a local, alternative-feeling lifestyle; and fashion line Acne’s Acne Paper associates influencers with the brand by profiling them and dressing them in products for photoshoots.

5. Event content

When Refinery29 unveiled its pop-up art gallery and Instagrammable festival 29Rooms, it had the digital media world’s rapt attention. Years before, Tavi Gevinson’s teen girl blog-turned-media-company embarked on a live tour called the Rookie Roadtrip, which built a lasting connection between content creator and fan.

Of course, your company’s pop-up shops or events might look more like a booth in a trade show, but that doesn’t mean your enthusiasm should dwindle. To make the most out of event marketing, content teams can produce a whole new body of work, from Powerpoint decks and landing pages to flyers and giveaways. Your company’s messaging should be consistent and creative across all those forms. (That goes for B2B just as much as B2C.)

6. Podcasts

A note of caution: Because they’re free to download and comparatively easy to launch, podcasts are a dime a dozen. Actually, they’re more like a penny for three dozen, so think very carefully before you launch your company’s take on Serial.

That being said, it’s hard to replicate a podcast’s fervent brand engagement. Podcast listeners are loyal, dedicated creatures of habit who find content through word-of-mouth. If your company produces a podcast, whether narrative or episodic, with a target audience in mind, you can assume that your loyal listeners will vocally support your content.

The highlights of branded podcasts include GE’s The Message, Slack’s Variety Pack, Sephora’s Lip Stories, and Tinder’s DTR. At their best, branded podcasts encourage storytellers to explore topics integral to a company’s mission, placing them at the center of a conversation audiences care about.

The post Beyond the Blog Post: 6 Content Formats Your Audience Wants appeared first on Contently.

As the director of content strategy for Contently, this is a question I ask marketers every week. There’s often a long pause on the conference line, followed by something like, “Well, we were hoping you’d tell us that.”

While I can’t tell them what their goals should be off the bat, I can certainly help them get there. Once they start working backward from their company’s main business objectives, that process is usually less daunting than they think.

In the first episode of our new video series, Content Marketing Minute, I explain the simple process content marketers can use to set clear goals that will excite their executive team. With the right blueprint, these marketers can become an indispensable part of their organization. If you have 60 seconds to spare, check it out.

The post Video: How to Set Content Marketing Goals Your CMO Will Love appeared first on Contently.