Okay, so maybe that’s an overstatement. But if you’re a human who scrolls or swipes on the semi-regular, you’ve surely noticed the TikTokification of just about everything. And as a B2B brand, you can’t ignore this shift in how people consume and share ideas.

Scroll through any feed and you’ll see the power of this now-ubiquitous format. A sharp, 20-second video clip can extend the half-life of your best ideas; it can pull a key takeaway out of your latest report, give it visual and emotional context, and send it rippling through executive feeds within hours. It can turn depth into reach, and thought leadership into momentum. And in 2025, the brands mastering this balance between insight and immediacy are the ones shaping the conversation.

This playbook lays out a practical framework for scaling short-form production without sacrificing your sanity (or your brand voice).

Why Invest in Short-Form Video Now?

In recent years, three converging forces have made the format indispensable.

1. Platform algorithms reward native video content. LinkedIn’s algorithm favors native uploads and visible engagement (likes, comments, and reshares) over external links. That means a short video posted directly to the feed will almost always travel farther than a link to your blog or YouTube page. YouTube itself is doubling down on Shorts as a discovery engine, logging over 70 billion daily views and driving new traffic to longer videos on the same channels.
2. Buyer behavior has fundamentally shifted. Short-form videos work because they fit into micro-moments: the scrolls between calls, inbox breaks, or quick research before a pitch. A single, well-edited clip can become both an external thought-leadership post and an internal enablement asset.
3. The ROI proof is in. HubSpot’s annual State of Marketing report notes that short-form leads in ROI, engagement, and lead generation compared to other video formats.

Here’s an example of why this format is so critical in 2025: Imagine your team hosts an insightful webinar that draws a few hundred live attendees. The response is positive, but small scale and contained. But a day later, your marketing team clips a 30-second highlight from the event, and suddenly, the insight is everywhere on LinkedIn — it’s even picking up traction on TikTok. Same idea. Same audience. Different velocity.

Formats That Work in B2B in 2025

Successful B2B video strategies rely on repeatable formats that teams can batch-produce efficiently.

These might include:

• Expert snippets and micro-takes (30–45 seconds) can work well for sharing perspectives on industry statistics/trends/reports or highlighting customer insights. Tap into your organization’s own subject-matter experts or internal data storytellers to surface fresh insights that customers or peers actually care about (e.g., a surprising trend from your latest benchmark report or a question your sales team keeps hearing).
• Explainer videos cut into digestible nuggets (30–60 seconds) break down complex frameworks, demonstrate before-and-after scenarios, or define emerging trends in three clear beats. The winning structure follows a simple pattern: Hook (identify the problem) → Core insight → Actionable step → Clear CTA.
• Behind-the-scenes content humanizes expertise while strengthening employer branding. For instance, show how customer success managers solve real client issues or how research teams uncover insights. Clips like these remind audiences that your company is made up of real people solving tangible problems.
• Series formats create viewing habits through familiar cadences like “60-Second Whiteboard,” “One Metric Monday,” or “3 Slides in 30 Seconds.” Consistent naming and timing can lower the cognitive load for viewers while simplifying planning and batch production for content teams.
• Strategic thought starters grab and maintain attention through provocative openings: “hot take” cold opens, “We were wrong about…” admissions, or direct challenges like, “If you only change one thing this quarter, make it this.”

Think of these formats as your highlight reel templates — they make it easier to share what your brand already knows, one clip at a time.

Production Techniques to Prioritize

In social feeds, clarity and pacing matter far more than cinematic production value. The most effective short-form clips hook viewers within the first second or two.

Smart editors also build in “pattern interrupts” every few seconds, swapping angles, adding B-roll, or flashing quick on-screen stats to keep attention from drifting. Because most platforms autoplay videos without sound, captions are critical. Burn them in, highlight key words for emphasis, and use visual cues like progress bars to nudge viewers toward completion.

Remember that you’re not striving for perfection; rather, you should aim to keep up momentum. An “80%-there” version published within 72 hours of a webinar or interview will outperform the flawless cut that ships a month late.

Finally, keep in mind that authenticity almost always beats polish. A quick, well-lit phone recording that feels human will connect better than a high-production shoot that feels staged.

To keep your process sustainable, treat short-form production like a feedback loop: Publish quickly, learn from watch-through data and comments, and adjust pacing or framing as you go. With accessible tools like Descript, CapCut, Adobe Premiere Rush, or VEED for editing — and Riverside, Zoom, or Loom for capture — teams no longer need full studio setups. Even AI-assisted repurposing tools such as OpusClip can help jump-start edits (though a human pass for quality and tone is still essential before anything goes live).

Platform-Specific Distribution and Optimization

Each platform has distinct engagement patterns and optimization requirements. To get the most out of every clip, tailor how you publish and frame it to match where your audience actually consumes content.

For instance:

• LinkedIn optimization centers on native uploads with strong opening lines and specific questions that encourage comments. Pin top comments with resource links and encourage authentic internal engagement within the first hour of posting to boost algorithmic distribution.
• YouTube Shorts require keyword-rich titles, series naming conventions, and dedicated Shorts playlists that encourage binge-watching while connecting to relevant long-form content on the same channel.
• Website integration through dedicated “Video Briefings” archives improves SEO through schema markup and interlinking with related guides and resources.
• Sales enablement packages should compile the top five performing clips monthly with specific use case guidance for prospecting, objection handling, and deal progression conversations.

No matter the platform, consistency beats complexity; the brands that show up regularly stay more visible.

From Long-Form to Shareable Short-Form: A Step-by-Step Guide

The most efficient B2B teams start with a single, insight-dense “anchor” asset, then break it into smaller, platform-ready pieces that keep the conversation going long after the original launch.

Here’s an example of what this process looks like step by step:

1. Choose the right anchor.

Start with something that already carries weight: a webinar, research report, executive interview, or customer roundtable. The best anchor content offers a clear point of view and connects directly to your broader marketing themes. Think: “What’s our take on this trend?” not “What can we summarize?”

2. Map out the moments worth sharing.

Before you ever hit record, list 8–15 potential short-form clips (“video atoms”) you could create from the anchor. These might include:

• A single strong stat or takeaway
• A myth your expert can debunk in 30 seconds
• A customer soundbite that illustrates impact
• A quick “how-we-did-it” tip from your team
• A question your audience asks again and again

Each one should have a rough script skeleton: a hook, a core insight (two or three lines max), a visual cue, and a clear call-to-action (CTA).

3. Batch record and assign clear roles.

Get everyone involved on the same page early. Strategists should identify anchor assets and tie them to upcoming campaigns. Subject-matter experts can block a short monthly recording session to capture multiple takes at once. Producers will handle editing, captioning, and versioning by platform. Social leads can write titles, schedule uploads, and engage in the first-hour comment window.

4. Build guardrails that let you move fast.

Nothing kills momentum faster than a 17-step approval chain. To avoid the death-by-approvals spiral, set up pre-approved brand templates for all the components you can. Maintain a short “greenlight list” of safe, recurring topics that can skip full legal review, and agree internally on a 48-hour turnaround standard from clip completion to publish.

5. Distribute and track smartly.

From one anchor asset, aim to create 10–15 video clips, a handful of static visuals, one short newsletter embed, and a quick sales-enablement reel. Assign each piece to a specific channel and goal (awareness, engagement, lead generation, or internal enablement) and monitor how each performs to refine the next round.

Turn Big Ideas into Bite-Sized Impact

The next time you publish a major report or host a webinar, keep the momentum going. Find the 30 seconds that say the most, put it in motion, and give your audience a reason to stop scrolling.

Attention may be fleeting, but influence compounds. Each short-form clip is a small opportunity to reinforce what your brand stands for — in your voice, on your timeline, and in front of the audiences that matter. When those moments stack up, they start to shape perception long after the video ends.

Learn how Contently helps B2B marketers turn depth into reach, and reach into measurable ROI.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

Q: What if my subject-matter experts hate being on camera?

Remind them that realness often performs better anyway. Try audio-over-PPT, screen recordings with voiceover, or micro-shorts where the expert speaks one idea directly. Over time, confidence follows repetition.

Q: Do I have to publish across all platforms at once?

Nope. It’s smarter to start where your audience already is (LinkedIn, Slack communities, internal channels) and scale gradually. Use your top-performing formats there before branching into Shorts, newsletters, or website archives.

Q: How do I make sure short-form video doesn’t become a siloed half-effort?

Embed it into the bigger content strategy. Map each clip to themes, campaigns or buyer stages. Use the same language, link back to related content, and integrate clips into newsletters, sales decks, or blog posts so they reinforce—not distract from—your core narrative.

The post The B2B Brand’s Guide to Short-Form Video in 2025 appeared first on Contently.

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

Why Is B2B Storytelling Important—and Challenging?

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

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

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

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

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

The Customer as “Hero”

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

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

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

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

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

The Customer Journey as Narrative

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

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

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

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

Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel

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

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

4 Storytelling Tips for B2B SaaS Content Marketers

1. Know your customer.

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

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

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

2. Know your company.

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

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

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

3. Think of your story from a holistic perspective.

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

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

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

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

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

4. Get in the storytelling mindset.

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

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

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

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

A few years later, I witnessed a similar sourcing snafu from a different perspective. As a managing editor for a tour operator, I passed along the contact information for a marine biologist the writer was supposed to interview. Unfortunately, the source was traveling and didn’t have internet access. The writer ended up sending her increasingly panicked emails—which annoyed the source, who was doing us a favor by participating in the first place.

Seamlessly integrating quotes and insights into your content can be tricky—you have to consider all the moving parts. That said, featuring experts can add journalistic flair and credibility to your content marketing stories.

“On the whole, sources [I’ve interviewed] have been happy with the work of ‘translation,'” said Michelle Seitzer, a writer and editor who works with healthcare brands. “By that, I mean taking their input and insights and crafting it into a piece of content.”

After lots of trial and error, here are some best practices I’ve learned during my years in the digital marketing world.

Step 1: Develop a system.

A casual approach to the sourcing process often results in ruffled feathers. Be sure to develop a set of operating principles that work for your particular team or client, and remember that different procedures will work better for different companies. Follow these guidelines whenever you need to connect a freelance writer with a source.

What’s more, you’ll want to ensure the writer understands your reasoning for including a particular source. Even if a writer has excellent bylines in impressive publications, they’re not immersed in your marketing strategy on a day-to-day basis. Let them know the details of your target audience, what you’re trying to accomplish with the interview, and how you want it to fit into the piece.

Step 2: Communicate with internal sources ahead of time.

Even internal sources at your client’s organization may not be familiar with your marketing goals. When reaching out to request an interview, you’ll want to explain how their participation benefits the brand, as well as why they should take time out of their busy workday to participate in the project. You’ll also want to familiarize them with the interview process and ask them what format works best for them. Shy sources might prefer answering questions via email, but you might warn them that writing out responses can be more time-consuming than a 20-minute call.

If you’re working with an internal source, you may also want to give their team leader or department a heads up. This is especially key if you plan to feature someone’s direct report in your content. Explain your project, why it’s important, and ask them what they can spare in terms of time and resources. You’ll be using some of their team’s energy to create content, so you’ll need their support.

Step 3: Stay involved in the interview scheduling process.

As evidenced by the miffed marine biologist I mentioned earlier, letting writers go rogue with source reach-out can have consequences. Writers who cut their teeth in the journalism world can sometimes go overboard in their quest to schedule an interview—even at the risk of alienating sources.

At a bare minimum, give the writer an email script to use. Or, even better, reach out to both the source and writer yourself to schedule the interview at an agreed-upon time. Include your contact information in case the interviewee has any questions or concerns.

Seitzer has even worked with some managing editors who participate in calls or video meetings to record them. This is a good tactic for difficult or sensitive subjects. “When it’s a tough topic and both the source and client liaison are ‘uninitiated,’ sometimes it’s helpful for the whole team—managing editor, writer, liaison, and source—to be on the interview call together,” she said.

Finally, if your source prefers a phone or Zoom call, ask the writer to submit interview questions ahead of time—this way, you can give your source some time to think through their answers before the call.

Step 4: Keep your editorial calendar flexible until all interviews are complete.

It seems like an easy task to assign to a writer: complete a quick interview with a specific source, then submit the draft on time. But keep in mind that source availability fluctuates, especially when everyone is in different time zones or has a busy schedule.

There’s no point in finalizing the publication date if the entire piece hinges upon an interview. Consider pushing back editorial deadlines until you know the source’s schedule. After completing the interview, you and the writer can agree upon a reasonable date for draft delivery—think anywhere from two days to a week, depending on the piece’s complexity.

Step 5: Let sources review quotes before the story goes live.

Finally, it’s a good idea to give your sources a heads up about how their insights will appear in the final piece. Editorial policies here differ from publication to publication—some may allow the source to view the entire story draft, while others will ask that writers simply confirm the raw facts/figures and direct quotes.

Regardless, don’t skip this critical step. After all, your source’s reputation—and ultimately, your client’s—is on the line.

Original reporting creates stronger content marketing

Although it’s not always a smooth process, including quotes and commentary from experts is an excellent way to add value to your content. Original reporting can also make for a richer learning experience for the writer.

The post 5 Steps to Minimize Sourcing Snafus in Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Enter the B2B Influencer

B2B influencers are just like traditional influencers. They have a significant following and a high level of authority and trust among their audience. The difference is B2B influencers are industry experts.

Why should you consider influencer marketing for your B2B business?

• They help you tap into niche customers you couldn’t otherwise reach.
• They can guide a customer’s purchase decisions without sounding salesy, since they have a great rapport with their audience
• They humanize your brand by creating unique, easy-to-consume, and entertaining content that centers on your product.

And the best part? You don’t have to build trust from scratch in your potential customers. The influencer has already done that legwork for you. Their followers feel they’ve been introduced to your brand by a friend—the trusted influencer.

It’s no wonder more than 38 percent of B2B companies are planning to explore influencer marketing for lead generation. And the global industry revenue is projected to reach a whopping $11.7 billion by the end of this year.

How to partner effectively with a B2B influencer

At this point, you’re probably starting to see the light; you can see how B2B influencer marketing works. You’re ready to get started. But where do you begin?

1. Define what you want to accomplish.

Forming quantifiable goals and KPIs will help you make data-driven
decisions and accurately examine your influencer marketing campaign’s
success.

Set goals

How do you succeed when you don’t know what you want to achieve? Maybe you want a bump in sales. Or perhaps you plan to build a community or boost brand awareness. Establishing well-defined goals for your campaigns helps to:

• Track your influencer marketing ROI
• Form a seamless and transparent relationship with the influencer
• Learn what influencer marketing tactics and channels work best for your company

Eighty-four percent of B2B marketers see measurable benefits in brand awareness by partnering with the right influencers, followed by 69 percent saying their most prominent benefit was lead generation.

While setting goals, be as specific as possible. Instead of aiming for the a vague goal like “increasing traffic on your website,” aim for something like “attracting 500,000 visitors per month in Q3.”

Establish KPIs

Next, make your goals solid by establishing metric-driven key performance indicators (KPIs). For instance, if your goal is to increase website visitors, you can track how much of your website traffic is coming from an influencer’s backlink.

Your goals can differ for every influencer marketing campaign. For example, when Microsoft partnered with National Geographic for their #MakeWhatsNext campaign, their goal wasn’t just to boost positive brand perception. They also wanted to shed light on a cause they truly care about—encouraging women to pursue jobs in STEM.

They also strategically aligned their campaign with International Women’s Day and highlighted authentic stories of real women in STEM. The result was more than 3.5 million likes and reaching National Geographic’s 91 million followers across their five accounts.

It’s vital to have these game plans for every step in the process—from outreach to deliverables.

2. Find influencers who fit your brand like a glove.

“Identifying the right influencers for your brand will serve as the beginning or end of your program where it will either thrive or die,” says Taylor Lagace, the co-founder of the influencer marketing agency, Kynship.

And he’s not wrong. It’s impossible to get your desired results with the wrong partner. But 61 percent of brands report struggling to find the best influencers for their campaigns. So, what’s the secret?

Step 1: Define a set of specific criteria for your ideal influencer.

They should include:

• Expertise in the subject matter and authority in the field
• Followers overlapping with your target customers
• An ability to create B2B content in an easy-to-understand way

Lagace also recommends studying an influencer’s ability to create videos. Why? Because as video becomes the future of media and marketing, you want to ensure the influencer you partner with can sell your product on video. How can you do that? Use Taylor’s three-question assessment:

1. Does this influencer create video content that’s thumb-stopping?
2. Does this influencer create video content that captures my attention in the first three seconds?
3. Is this influencer articulate? Charismatic? etc.

Remember: Unlike B2C influencers, B2B influencers should be credible experts in their niche who work knee-deep in their industry.

For example, when Klaviyo partnered with influencers for their Less Stalking, More Talking campaign, they chose only relevant influencers, like Eli Weiss, who share their customer-first philosophy and have high authority in the e-commerce industry.

79 percent of marketers say subject matter expertise is an essential quality when choosing an influencer. So, while forming your criteria, remember expertise comes before influence in B2B.

Step 2: Source influencers.

You can mine social media, online communities, and industry news to find B2B experts with a significant audience. Consider niche leaders your customers already follow—via newsletters, podcasts, and social media—and see if you can partner with them. For example, if you’re an SEO software company, your customers likely follow Rand Fishkin.

If the manual process feels time-consuming, try this:

• Use tools like Traackr, Onalytica, or BuzzSumo to source the best influencers in your industry.
• Make a list of prospective influencers and rate them based on your criteria decided in the previous step.
• Shortlist influencers who meet most of the qualities you’re looking for.

You could also choose to hire an influencer marketing agency like TopRank. Again, working with experts helps you hire pre-vetted influencers and easily manage relationships with them.

Pro tip: Use a social listening tool like Hootsuite to track brand mentions online. It can help you identify influencers who already love your product.

Step 3: Narrow down your influencer list based on engagement insight.

Validate the size and authenticity of the A-list influencers shortlisted in Step 2. Ensure they haven’t purchased fake followers by using tools like GRIN.

This is also the step where you ask influencers for more insight into their social media metrics—including engagement rates, demographics of their followers, and success of past campaigns.

Note: Skip this step if you’re working with an agency that shortlists and evaluates the influencers for you.

3. Leverage influencers (and their content) beyond social media

B2B influencer Jason Fall‘s partnership with influencer marketing platform Tagger isn’t limited to his podcast Winfluence. He also regularly writes blog posts on their website, moderates their panels, and speaks at their events.

And he’s not alone. According to a study by TopRank Marketing, B2B influencers partner with brands in a variety of activities, like collaborating on content, serving as advisors, participating in media interviews, and more.

No one said influencer marketing has to breathe and die only on social channels.

You can also repurpose influencer content on your website, share their graphics on your emails, and highlight their insights in your blogs.

Influencers are expert content creators. You don’t want them to build amazing, high-quality, relevant posts for your brand once and never let it see the light of the day again.

Pro Tip: Be sure to add a clause in your influencer contract about reusing the collaterals an influencer has created for you. It might have an additional cost, but it’s worth the money.

4. Build long-term influencer relationships (not one-time transactions)

At its core, influencer marketing is about people. It’s not like buying ad space—you can’t just buy, analyze, and forget about it. Jason Falls says treating influencer relationships like a transactional media buy is the biggest mistake brands make.

“The thing you’re buying with an influencer is the trust and authenticity they are willing to share with their audience about your product. That can’t come across well in a single sponsored post. You have to invest with them over time, so the audience sees genuine proof that they truly are a partner with your brand and the brand is with them.”

The Always-On Approach

It’s in the data, too: Only 5 percent of B2B marketers who do periodic campaigns are “very successful” compared to 60 percent of marketers who implement ongoing influencer marketing campaigns.

LinkedIn is one of the best examples of leveraging long-term influencer marketing. It regularly asks for content contributions from influencers, features influencers in marketing assets, and nurtures long-term relationships with them.

LinkedIn asked various sales leaders to weigh in on their priorities for 2020—building solid influencer relationships and driving social conversations. Using this always-on approach, LinkedIn has built relationships with more than 75 sales and marketing influencers, garnering 2,000+ brand mentions and 84 million in social reach.

Be a Dream Brand for a B2B Influencer

In order to work with high-quality B2B influencers, you need to bring your A game. So what’s it take to be a brand an influencer loves to work with?

1. Craft a high-quality outreach message.

Finding the perfect match is a two-way street. Influencers don’t partner with every brand that comes their way. Instead, they care about maintaining the credibility they’ve built with their audience.

Amanda Natividad, a B2B influencer and VP of marketing at SparkToro, says she says yes to partnering with a brand “if I could see myself buying the product/service if I had the problem for which they provide a solution.”

So, when she partnered with the decentralized advertising company, Groupshop, for her newsletter, The Menu, her 3,000+ subscribers knew she truly believed in their product.

As much as you’re examining the influencer, the influencer is also examining you. So, do your due diligence before reaching out to an influencer. How is the partnership mutually beneficial? Why should they partner with your brand over others? Do their values align with yours?

2. Pay them well and on time.

With websites like F*** You, Pay Me, and Instagram accounts like #influencerpaygap, influencers have greater transparency about what they can potentially earn.

Low-balling your offers and delaying payments doesn’t fly anymore. Fair and prompt compensation also shows an influencer you appreciate the quality of their work and their efforts.

3. Focus on co-creation and allow creative freedom.

Influencers are professional content creators. They know what resonates with their audience. Stringent rules around content creation might hinder their creativity and dampen your relationship. See influencers as co-creators and allow for creative license.

Does this mean you have to lose the reins completely? No. Offer general guidelines, ask for revisions before publishing, and send a loose brief. Your approach should be to hand them the canvas and let them paint on their own terms. Remember, while this is an official partnership, it’s not officially coming from your company. So, many of the rules your company must adhere to, the influencer may be able to ignore.

But Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither are influencer relationships. If you nurture them, you can create an army of advocates who speak well of your brand online and offline.

The bottom line

Don’t overlook influencer marketing as part of your overall strategy. It’s a solid way to break into new markets, establish your brand’s domain authority, and partner with experts in your industry. Because the truth is, today’s consumers want real input from real people who are relatable—it doesn’t matter if you’re B2C or B2B. Influencer marketing is all about people.

The post How B2B Companies Can Leverage Influencer Marketing in 2022: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on Contently.

“What are you talking about?” I’d say to every bartender or Lyft driver or artisanal ice cream entrepreneur who asked if I was going to the flugtag—this was Portland, after all.

Though I was still years from accepting a job in content marketing, I got a mini-education in the field each time someone brought up the stunt. It wasn’t as crazy as Stratos, everyone said, but Red Bull was helping to “Keep Portland Weird” with the marketing stunt. Though the scaffolding was obvious—it was impossible to talk about the air show without mentioning the brand by name—no one really seemed to care. If anything, they respected Red Bull’s candor.

At the time, I wondered how much money the brand was actually going to make on the stunt. Would it make any difference? (Most likely.) Was there a catch? (No.)

Now, most companies want to be like Red Bull. But we often hear from clients and prospects that their products and services don’t feel as conducive to big, viral stunt marketing like Red Bull. They see consumer-facing brands working in exciting areas like retail, beauty, and food, and many clients think, “Content works for companies like that.”

But Red Bull didn’t build its reputation just by being cool or extreme. The marketing efforts worked because the brand’s purpose aligned with what consumers wanted. That style of content marketing was also unheard of at the time.

There are a ton of companies out there waiting to benefit from content marketing, and most of them don’t sell exciting energy drinks. Here are four types of brands that can benefit the most.

A company starting a content project from scratch

Five years ago, a lot of companies were just creating content without a plan. Today, with so many helpful guides on tactics and strategy available, brands new to content marketing have more of a roadmap for success.

If you’re a marketer starting a new content initiative, you’re in a fantastic position to build a relationship with your target audience. As you’re developing a strategy, you’ll be able to see what your competitors have already done and where you can stand out.

Take California Closets, for example. The company could have aligned itself with bargain retailers in the industry, but by going all in on a new print magazine, Ideas of Order, it attracted an audience searching for high-end, luxury closet organization. It’s clear from the content that they’re not selling ugly plastic tubs for college students.

At Content Marketing World, the magazine won awards for Best New Print Publication and Project of the Year. As Stephanie Stahl pointed out on CMI’s blog, after only a month, Ideas of Order had already driven $42 in revenue for every dollar California Closets spent producing and distributing it.

A company with something to prove

Maybe your company sells a taboo product (Poo-Pourri). Or maybe your CEO has just stepped down after a series of unfortunate controversies (Uber). Maybe you’re trying to disrupt an industry and you need to convince customers to change their habits (Netflix). Look at those core challenges as a blessing. They give you the conflict you need to tell a good story.

Now, a brand doesn’t have to be in “damage control” mode to break into content marketing. But correcting a misconception in the market can be a nice place to inject some honesty or even humor. Your brand might benefit from a funny, informative video about what you do, or you could always write blog posts to set the record straight about something in the press.

One recent example of a brand side-stepping a silly product with humorous content is Steak-umm launching a rebirth on Twitter. “[Young people] might have an inkling of [our] name in their mind, but they’ve never actually seen it advertised in a modern context,” Steak-Umm’s social media manager Nathan Allebach recently told us, “So we have that innate advantage working on social, which lets us [try to be] goofy and kind of ‘out there’ with the brand.”

A company expanding somewhere new

Expansions can take many forms, but no matter what you’re rolling out, content can bolster the effect it has on the market. If you’re a European financial brand expanding into Asia, you’ll want transcreated content lining the runway when you arrive.

The last thing a marketer wants to hear from potential customers is, “Wow, I know your company, but I had no idea you guys did this too.” You’ll need well-crafted stories to prove that you understand your new market.

If you’re a Manhattanite, for example, you’re probably familiar with the men’s health company Hims. Their tongue-in-cheek, stylized subway ads were ubiquitous last summer. When Hims announced they were launching a brand of vitamins and medications for women, appropriately called Hers, it seemed like an obvious move.

The Hers product line was accompanied by a new branded blog called Savoir Vivre. The Hims blog, Savoir Faire, features content about sleep deprivation, menswear, acne, and cholesterol. The Hers blog, in contrast, is hyper-focused on women’s sexuality, which matches the brand’s primary product offering for women: prescription medication Addyi. You can see the adjustments strategists made mo the Hims/Hers copy before the women’s line launched. It’s clear the brand concluded that women were more accustomed to reading about sexual health, so they were able to skip the innuendo.

Still, the playful tone is obvious on the blogs. “it’s french,” both homepages read, “say it how it’s supposed to be said. it’ll make your mouth feel funny.”

A company solving a complex problem

Some companies just can’t cram their product marketing and brand messaging into 30-second ads. The rise of content marketing has benefitted these brands significantly, giving them enough space to answer complicated questions and address pain points that can’t be summed up with 8 words in a banner ad.

Whether you’re B2B or B2C, informative content doesn’t have to be dry. We tell clients and prospects in B2B industries that they’re still marketing to people. C-suite executives with purchasing power still need to be educated and entertained.

That’s the driving force behind everything we create on The Content Strategist. We don’t want to rely on overt promotion to sell our product. Instead, we want to answer questions about thought leadership, content strategy, and the ROI of video marketing. Without the freedom to talk through that complex story on our blog, I just don’t know how I’d explain it.

Content marketing, it turns out, is a discipline best used by marketers who have a lot to say.

The post The Types of Companies That Benefit Most from Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

It’s easy enough to recall legitimately funny marketing campaigns. NBA on ESPN nailed its RV series. “Shaq playing Scrabble” is still one of my favorite commercials ever. And I do find myself amused by OKCupid’s winking “DTF” ads on the subway. But breaking content down into its small parts and analyzing what laughter does for a brand’s voice is a much more complex affair.

Enter Dr. James Barry, a humorist, professor at Nova Southeastern University, and co-author of the research paper “A typological examination of effective humor for content marketing.” While teaching a course on social media humor, he realized he had inadvertently gathered a sizable sample of online branded content while looking for content to show his students. From there, he narrowed the focus to study brands as they attempt to be funny.

Barry told me that infusing content with humor has a lot of potential for B2C and B2B companies alike, provided that they avoid re-inventing the wheel. “Seriously, humor works very well in B2B spaces,” he said. “As long as the creator knows exactly what type of humor strategy they’re using. Why wouldn’t CEOs want to be entertained? They’re just like anyone else.”

Though content marketers tend to categorize brands by their target audience, the data Barry collected led to a new set of classifications. “The difference between an individual making a joke and a brand making a joke is that the individual’s only aim is to entertain,” he said. “A brand has to entertain and connect the joke to their brand image. They’re using laughter to leverage brand familiarity.”

According to Barry, brands fall into three categories when it comes to humor in content marketing: red, yellow, and white industries. He recently spoke to me about why B2B brands should be funny, how to start using humor if you’ve never done it before, and when companies can go too far.

So what makes a brand red, yellow, or white? How can I tell which brands belong where, and which have the easiest time using humor?

Red industry stories are highly emotional, and using humor can come off as offensive. These are the brands asking their audience to make high-stakes decisions on luxury items like a Lexus or a diamond necklace. Maybe their audience is researching a high-cost vacation over time or they’re imagining these products being present in intimate family moments. Content in this space usually reaches for an inspirational feel. These are the tear-jerker commercials, and people don’t appreciate feeling surprised by humor.

Yellow industry content is often boring without humor. The stakes involved with a purchase are much lower. If your brand offers snack foods or beer or candy, it’s almost mandatory that you use humor in some way. Everyone is doing it, and many are doing it well.

White industries is where B2B comes in. These brands have to try to tell technical, complicated stories about their products, and they’re usually selling us a version of something we need anyway. Insurance companies, non-luxury appliances, anything that’s just a tool in your daily life. The process of purchasing these products is still really involved and there are a lot of little steps, just like a red industry product, but no one wants to hear you go on and on about a white industry product at length. That’s where humor can really help.

So humor in B2B content marketing is actually a good idea?

Yes. If simplification and audience engagement is the goal of your content, you could do worse than trying to entertain. The key is using humor right off the bat, and white industry audiences especially love self-deprecating, insider humor. Something like, “Boy, isn’t it crazy what Facebook makes us do now?” or “Most of us don’t actually know how QR codes work, right?” is going to kill. People don’t just love funny content—they love the sensation of thinking, “Hey, I have that problem too!”

If you make a joke like that early on, maybe in the first piece of content your audience sees, you’ve made yourself into an authority. You know the industry so well that you can joke about it.

Does that mean humor works best as a top-funnel technique?

Our brains respond to anything novel. In order to make that psychological experience happen, yes, it’s best to use humor to grab an audience early on in your relationship with them. All your competitors are using the same language and data to market themselves, so you have the element of surprise.

What you don’t want to do is say, “Hold on, folks, mid-way through this clip you’re going to get a surprise!” People don’t want that suspense in comic content. It works best if it’s part of your initial move, and then if it’s integrated fully into your brand messaging from there on.

What if you can’t joke about what you’re selling?

There are still a few ways to use humor, especially if your audience isn’t expecting it, but the risk of offending or alienating your audience is higher here. I’ll use insurance as an example. Before Geico introduced the “So easy a caveman could do it” slogan, insurance companies tended to avoid humor completely. People couldn’t even imagine how to make something like that funny, so all the content was Allstate’s “Are you in good hands?” or State Farm’s “Like a good neighbor” shtick.

It went deeper too. No one thought insurance companies specializing in, say, care for cancer patients could use humor, but then out of nowhere came Aflac with the duck. It trickled down from there, and Progressive came on board by introducing Flo.

But those are ad campaigns, which is a different beast than content marketing, no?

Content marketing actually has unique advantages when it comes to branded humor. Back when a TV commercial was the only viable form of content, a brand could make a joke and it only had to land once or a handful of discrete times. In content marketing, serial is the standard.

In content marketing, serial is the standard.

The fact that we’re all constantly fielding messages online means that a brand can complicate a joke once they’ve got your attention, and they can reference it as part of their story. It’s not just about getting a single laugh anymore—you want your audience to feel like an insider because they already understand the bit you’re doing. They’ve been with you for a while.

Let’s say I run a brand that has never used humor in content marketing before. How do I start?

First, there are pros and cons to trying this out. Let’s start with the pros. Our world is filled with so much noise, and your brand has billions of potential followers on social media. We considered all the content that reaches viral metrics, and about two-thirds of that work gets there because it’s funny. The other third of content that goes viral is reaching for awe-inspiring, breath-taking, astonishing. The numbers show that using humor—or even just a light-hearted tone occasionally—is the only surefire way to stand out in a crowd.

The con, obviously, is a joke falling flat, but that’s not even the worst-case scenario. Everyone’s heard a bad joke. We just tend to forget them and move on. What you really don’t want to do is offend someone with a stab at humor. That’s the kind of thing that sticks around.

Is it worth the risk? How do you make sure your brand’s humor isn’t offensive?

By not trying to reinvent the wheel. At no point in creating funny content should you be trying to do something no brand has ever done before. There are 10 types of humor as I’ve defined them in my research, and the two most dangerous types for brands are:

1. Pointing out differences and stereotyping

2. Outrageous interruptions

The first type, whether it’s parodying social norms or roasting someone, is going to play worse in homogenous populations. Americans, to some degree, are used to having differences pointed out. But in cultures abroad that value uniformity of thought, that’s going to read as offensive.

The second type does very well online, but no one necessarily wants to see it coming from a brand they trust. Incongruity humor, extreme irony, an unexpected surprise, gross exaggerations that capture your attention … these are all very effective attention-grabbers, but they’re risky for brands. Crazy images like people suddenly screaming, throwing fits, maybe authority figures bursting out into dance, that stuff is only going to play well in the yellow industry, and even then, it’s not a guarantee.

So you’ll know right away if you make a mistake?

Yes, and it’s difficult to recover from offending someone. You can see companies recasting their video strategies for content that will live on YouTube, as opposed to TV ads. The comment section is extremely important, and the last thing you want is a video that has more downvotes than upvotes.

The user comment phenomenon is a positive, though, because people tend to discuss your content amongst themselves. To a degree, that’s brand reinforcement. If an audience member doesn’t necessarily get the joke you’re making, they can always just scroll down and learn the context from commenters, which can actually help you in the long-run. We’ve never had such immediate feedback from our audiences, so it will shape what we make next.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

The post When to Use Humor in Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

At first glance, the narrative makes sense. Mobile ad spending has surpassed $58 billion this year, accounting for 70 percent of all digital spend, per eMarketer. This “mobile-first” mindset gives consumers the ability to access information wherever they want to research and make purchases. So if you don’t invest in mobile, you risk getting left behind.

But it’s time for us to rethink this blanket advice. Mobile optimization and investment may be necessary for a lot of brands, but for B2B companies, its importance has been wildly overstated.

To debunk this misconception, let’s talk about the desktop computer. Sure, everyone owns a smartphone, but that doesn’t mean everyone uses it for business purposes. So while smartphones are great for scrolling through social media and looking up directions, desktops still play a huge role in research. Forrester found that only 20 percent of B2B web traffic originated from mobile devices, per the Internet Retailer Q2 2016 B2B Sell-Side Online Survey.

On Search Engine Journal, writer Clark Boyd dug deeper into this topic by looking at the Consumer Barometer, a survey tool. According to the research, more than twice as many people in the U.S. rely on computers over smartphones for product information.

Workplace email habits could have a big impact on the mobile divide. This summer, Adobe released survey data that shows a majority of professionals prefer to use desktops or laptops to check work email. For personal email, however, 59 percent of people primarily use smartphones, compared to just 35 percent of people who use desktops or laptops.

So if you work in B2B, think twice the next time you see a headline or an article touting the rise of mobile. Desktops and laptops aren’t going anywhere.

The post Why Your B2B Team Is Investing Too Much in Mobile appeared first on Contently.

According to a recent study from DiscoverOrg, a sales intelligence platform, not many B2B salespeople are successfully walking this tightrope. The company, along with researcher Steve W. Martin, surveyed more than 230 decision-makers across industries and departments about their experience with B2B sales processes.

Judging by the results, one takeaway is clear: Buyers aren’t happy with B2B salespeople. Overall, only 35 percent of buyers have a “favorable view” of salespeople. And only 54 percent said that salespeople they met with could “clearly explain how their solution positively impacts” their business.

Interestingly, approval levels change dramatically depending on whom you ask. Departments that are more risk-averse—such as accounting, engineering, and IT—were much more likely to rate salespeople as “poor” than marketing departments.

The report wasn’t all bad news for salespeople, however. Let’s take a look at a few other takeaways marketers and salespeople should know.

Sell to the “dominant influencer”

When dealing with a large organization or a complicated deal process, salespeople can get caught up trying to please everyone they meet. But DiscoverOrg’s research shows that about 90 percent of the time, you really only need to convince one decision-maker. If you get that person on your side, closing the deal becomes much easier.

Savvy salespeople know this already, but it bears repeating since they’re still going to communicate with multiple people during any sales process. Hone in on finding and convincing the person controlling the decision, don’t turn off everyone else, and you’ll set yourself up for success.

Cost tops functionality (most of the time)

One of the reasons B2B companies constantly strive to be market leaders is to simplify the sales process. Once a brand dominates all of its competition, the “market leader” label implies legitimacy and success. For salespeople, throwing around that phrase is supposed to make it easier to sell.

In the study, however, market leadership is only part of the buyer’s equation. Of course, there’s also cost, which can matter more than you think. For instance, 62 percent of respondents said instead of paying top dollar, they would rather buy a product with “85 percent of the functionality at 80 percent of the cost” of a top brand.

These preferences can vary depending on the industry. Prestige companies that charge a lot tend to appeal to the fashion and finance verticals, while industries like healthcare and manufacturing are less enamored by the big names.

Buyers like different styles

There are different ways for salespeople to approach a prospect. Some like to get to know the buyer and tailor the sale to specific needs. Others like to be more assertive, pushing their vision of what they think the buyer needs. Some may even present themselves as advisors, ensuring that they’re committed to helping the customer in any way possible.

According to the research, there is no “right” way to approach a buyer. Forty percent prefer a salesperson who listens and matches to need, 30 percent prefer to be challenged and prescribed, and 30 percent like when salespeople operate as a long-term partner. If you’re a salesperson, that means it’s critical to find out which approach the buyer prefers as quickly as possible.

Your website is really important

No one buys a product without doing research, especially in the B2B space. The first place people go is often your website—and DiscoverOrg’s research shows that it’s an extremely influential part of the buying process.

Only 2 percent of buyers said that a company’s website doesn’t influence their vendor evaluation. If it wasn’t obvious before, B2B marketing teams should always make their websites a priority by doing things like refreshing copy, updating design, and checking for broken links.

Buyer’s remorse isn’t usually the salesperson’s fault

Buyer’s remorse can happen in every sales situation, but it can be particularly painful in B2B. Someone buys an expensive product, then something goes wrong. Perhaps they misunderstood the product, didn’t buy the right features, struggle using it, and so on.

Whatever the reason, 90 percent of respondents claimed their remorse had nothing to do with the salesperson. Instead, it’s often the buyer who made a mistake with research or implementation. Additionally, the product or customer teams can also be at fault for not helping buyers succeed with whatever they purchased.

The data should serve as an important reminder that a lot of the stakes in B2B sales go beyond the scope of the salesperson. For a customer to get value out of a product, a lot of things have to go right, many of which are out of the salesperson’s control. It’s hard to sell a product that doesn’t match up to its messaging, and it’s even harder to make sure that a customer actually puts in the time to use a product correctly.

So perhaps B2B buyers aren’t as displeased with salespeople as they are displeased with the complicated process of purchasing B2B products. Either way, there are a lot of things marketers and salespeople can do to make that 35 percent approval rating rise in the future. And once they do, maybe their jobs will finally get a little easier.

The post Study: B2B Buyers Aren’t Too Happy With Salespeople appeared first on Contently.

In turn, content marketing hiring is on the rise. Content management is one of the most sought-after marketing skills, and content strategists have one of the highest-rising salaries in America. Content marketing job listings grew 350 percent on Indeed between 2011 and 2015.

Whenever managers ask me for advice about filling these roles, I usually have to explain that, no, I can’t help them poach from Contently’s network of 100,000 freelance creatives. But once that’s out of the way, we usually end up having a deep conversation about what they should look for in the hiring process. Here are the five rules I preach every time.

Rule 1: Don’t obsess over domain expertise

Recently, I was having lunch with a friend hoping to hire a content marketing manager, which is the catch-all job title for a writer and editor who has decent video instincts.

“I need someone who really knows ad tech,” she said.

“No you don’t,” I said.

I encounter this exchange in just about every hiring conversation. While it’s crucial to hire freelance writers who know your industry inside and out, you don’t have to hold your full-time hires to the same standard. That may sound counterintuitive, but one of the benefits of full-time hires is you get to coach them up. That learning curve gives you the luxury of prioritizing other factors: storytelling ability, passion, and strong instincts for creating content that’ll perform well on different distribution channels. You can absolutely teach someone everything they need to know about ad tech or martech or content marketing. It’s much harder to teach someone how to write.

I have an amazing team. They’re the biggest content marketing geeks on earth. When they started at Contently, none of them knew much about content marketing. But they could write, edit, and craft a good story. That’s what matters.

Rule 2: Put their skills to the test

Rule 1 comes with an obvious risk: What happens if your hire never develops an interest for your industry? After all, demand-side platforms aren’t for everyone.

To mitigate this risk, I highly recommend putting potential hires to the test. Give them (paid) freelance assignments that mirror the work you want them to do, and see how much they master a subject on their own. For instance, when we were interviewing Erin Nelson for our marketing editor role, I assigned her a 2,000 word explainer on best practices for mid-funnel content marketing in B2B tech. She had a solid base of knowledge coming from the B2B events world, did a ton of research on her own, and knocked it out of the park.

There are too many great storytellers looking for work to settle for mediocrity.

I’m also a big fan of using paid internships as a feeder program, kind of like a minor league team. There’s no better way to evaluate someone than by working with them for three months. Even when editorial interns don’t earn a spot on your content team, the ability to tell your company’s story makes them a great fit for accounts, sales, product marketing, and other departments that may have an opening.

Rule 3: Hire people who challenge the status quo

Our CMO Kelly Wenzel has a favorite saying: Don’t assume we’re going to keep doing something just because we did it before. She reminds me of this every week, and it helps keep me on track. But challenging the status quo isn’t just for CMOs. One of the biggest benefits of a new hire is they’ll look at your operation with fresh eyes—from the type of content you create to how you deliver it to your audience and measure the results.

I always press interviewees to tell me their impression of our content and what they’d do to improve it. If they come up blank, it means that they either didn’t do their research or don’t have strong analytical skills. Either way, it’s a big red flag.

Rule 4: Know the role

When you’re an early-stage startup, you need a bunch of Swiss army knives who can run around, do a dozen different things, and not screw up too badly. But when you mature and pass the 100-employee threshold, as we have over the past 18 months, you need machetes, daggers, and scalpels. As your company grows, people who are exceptional at one or two roles often become more valuable than people who are decent at whatever you throw at them.

When you’re a small content marketing operation, you may need someone who can run social, manage the newsletter, build landing pages, run AdWords, and still produce content for the blog. In this case, you may be willing to stomach someone who’s not as strong of a writer or videographer, because they keep the trains running.

As we grow, we often find ourselves loyal to these versatile employees, even as we hire other specialists to take over some of their responsibilities. But if what you really need is a great writer or videographer to produce breakthrough content, hire the best damn writer or videographer you can find. Don’t worry if they know anything about Marketo.

Rule 5: Bonus points for multimedia skills

The amount of time we spend each day watching digital video has tripled this decade. Increasingly, multimedia content is just table stakes. You need to hire accordingly.

That means when you’re evaluating someone’s writing skills, don’t just consider their ability to crank out a blog post. Can they write video scripts? Are they an engaging on-camera personality? Do they have a knack for making badass social videos? These skills matter.

Bonus points for other multimedia skills as well: data visualization, photoshop, infographic design. The ability to spice up blog posts through visual assets is a huge help when you’re trying to win over reader attention.

Most of all, don’t settle. It’s a great time to make a content marketing hire. The job market for creatives remains pretty terrible, and the stigma around branded content is fading. There are too many great storytellers looking for work to settle for mediocrity.

The post 5 Golden Rules for Your Next Content Marketing Hire appeared first on Contently.

“Oh, we’re B2B,” someone said. “We don’t think anyone’s looking for our content on Facebook. We only want to use LinkedIn.”

I hear this response meeting after meeting. I get the instinct to assume LinkedIn is the only worthwhile place to pay for content distribution if you’re a B2B company. LinkedIn has incredible ad targeting for B2B brands. When you’re selling a very specific product (say, enterprise content marketing software) to a very specific buyer, it’s incredibly useful to be able to target someone by job title, location, and company. On any other social network, it’s a crapshoot that people will accurately provide that information. On LinkedIn, it’s pretty much required. If I want to target the CMO of Pepsi with an e-book, LinkedIn is the first place I go.

But B2B marketers don’t eschew other social networks just because they love the targeting LinkedIn provides. They also believe users won’t be interested in work-related content on other social networks—particularly Facebook.

From all the data I’ve seen, the idea that people don’t care about B2B content on Facebook is a myth. Our strategy team runs content analysis for hundreds of niche B2B marketing topics each month, and consistently, we see that people love to share work-related content on Facebook. For topics ranging from demand generation marketing to logistics, Facebook accounts for the majority of shares for specialized B2B content.

This trend shouldn’t come as a surprise. Facebook accounts for over 40 percent of all traffic to publisher sites, eclipsing Google. Over 90 percent of all content sharing occurs on Facebook, compared to just 2.5 percent for LinkedIn. It’s the biggest media empire in the world, and people share and consume every kind of content through the Facebook feed—wedding pictures, political analysis, cat videos, and yes, even white papers and articles about the insurance industry.

While Facebook seems like a network that’s separate from our work lives, it’s really not. Think about the people you engage with most on Facebook. You probably see a ton of content from college classmates and coworkers—the people you’ve spent most of your life with since Facebook came on the scene. These also happen to be individuals who likely have similar professional interests. I don’t think twice about sharing a work-related piece about marketing or tech, because half of my “friends” work in marketing or tech.

If you’re still skeptical about using Facebook for content distribution when you already have LinkedIn, consider these two additional reasons: It’s cheap, and the targeting is really good.

The incredible amount of time that people spend on Facebook (50 minutes per day) means that Facebook has a supply of attention that no competitor can match. In most ad campaigns we’ve run for Contently, Facebook is consistently 10 times cheaper than LinkedIn ($0.20 – $1.00 per click on Facebook versus $2.00 – 10.00 on LinkedIn).

This isn’t to say that marketers should ditch LinkedIn. Far from it. As I’ve written before, one of the biggest problems in content marketing is brands don’t allocate enough of their budget to distribution. They create a ton of content, put it on a blog, and expect people to just show up. But they’d be better served creating fewer stories and investing extra money in paid distribution to ensure their target audience actually reads them. Unless you already have a mature audience and dominate the conversation in your industry, you probably want to allocate at least 25 percent of your budget to content distribution.

That means using LinkedIn and Facebook in conjunction. While LinkedIn only accounts for about 2.5 percent of social shares of all content, it still drives at least 25 percent or more of shares for content focused on B2B topics. Clearly, users look for more work-related content when they’re on LinkedIn. The targeting capabilities are especially helpful if you’re running an account-based marketing program. To oversimplify a bit, the strategy mix I usually recommend looks like this:

Top-of-funnel content: Facebook, since it’s a very efficient way to build an audience.

Gated lead-gen and bottom-funnel content: LinkedIn. When the payoff is bigger, the targeting and context make up for the price tag.

This year, B2B marketers need to experiment more aggressively with paid content distribution. But if they view LinkedIn as their only option, they’ll be doing themselves a disservice. Whether you love or hate Zuckerberg’s empire, it’s still one of the most powerful tools content marketers have.

The post B2B Paid Content Distribution: Facebook vs. LinkedIn appeared first on Contently.

Every year, the shockingly low number of marketers who have a documented content strategy has been the most troubling stat in the robust report. I always expect to see a dramatic rise, but it usually lingers around 33 percent. It finally jumped a bit this year—to 37 percent for B2B marketers and 40 percent for B2C marketers.

But that’s still pitifully low.

Two-thirds of content marketers are straight-up sabotaging their efforts by failing to create a documented content strategy. They simply don’t bother to outline their target audience, voice, style, and goals. If I could fix one problem in the content marketing industry, it might be this. And that’s because it’s so crucial to everything we do, especially if you want to evangelize your content efforts within your own company.

Why we’re obsessed with documented content strategies

I lead our content strategy team at Contently. One big change we made over the past year is ensuring that every new client has a documented content strategy in place. Some clients have a robust, documented strategy already, but for those that do not, we create a detailed content plan for free. That’s because we truly believe that a documented content strategy is critical to success. Not having one is a recipe for disaster.

It’s just logical. For starters, if you don’t have a documented content strategy, there’s a good chance you don’t have a clear sense of your goals. And without goals to hit, it is impossible to know whether you’re successful or not. Right now, this is an epidemic within the content marketing industry. According to CMI’s report, 60 percent of B2C marketers and 59 percent of B2B marketers are not clear on what an effective content marketing program looks like.

This is ridiculous, and it needs to improve.

Overcoming your fear of a documented content strategy

I have a simple theory for why marketers struggle to document their content strategy: It’s scary and daunting. Some people may not know what a content strategy is supposed to look like.

We bake content strategy directly into our platform, but anyone can create a reasonably successful strategy by focusing on 10 key components:

Content Mission: The purpose of your content.

Goals: The clear objectives you’d like content to achieve for your organization.

KPIs: How you’ll measure those goals and the benchmarks you’d like to reach.

Tone and Style: A clear, detailed description of what your content should sound like, with examples.

Target Audience: Who you’re trying to reach.

Content Topics: The subjects you’ll cover.

Content Formats: The different types of content you’d like to create. Text, video, infographics, shortform video, etc.

Tagging Structure: A system for tagging content so you can track what’s working and optimize over time.

Content Allocation: How much content you’ll create each month, and how you’ll divvy up your budget between each topic and format. (ex. below)

The process is relatively straightforward, but it forces you to think critically about your content marketing program, pursue some data-driven research [note]We use a set of internal and external tools[/note], and ask tough questions.

As a company, we’ve come to believe in content plans so much that we baked them right into our software so any contributor working on a project can see it. A lack of planning is the biggest reason that content marketing programs fail. We’re excited to be part of the solution.

Content marketing is still a young industry, but it’s heading in the right direction. CMI’s report revealed that 62 percent of B2B marketers and 63 percent of B2C marketers thought their content marketing programs were more successful this year than last. Imagine how much higher that number could be next year if everyone just sits the hell down and plans ahead.

The post Marketers Are Sabotaging Their Content Programs appeared first on Contently.

Of course, CMI loves playing up that stat because the organization can help you build a strategy. But it is legitimately a problem for marketers—or anyone in business, really—to pursue an initiative without a documented strategy. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark, not knowing if what you’re doing actually works.

CMI’s latest study, which was sponsored by the creative collaboration company Hightail, suggests that marketers are finally getting better at content strategy. Below, you’ll find out why, in addition to five other major takeaways from CMI’s reports on B2B and B2C marketing.

1. Marketers are getting better at documenting content strategy

Both B2B and B2C marketers got better at documenting their strategies this past year. In 2016’s study, 37 percent had a documented strategy, versus 40 percent this year. B2B marketers, meanwhile, improved from 32 percent last year to 37 percent this year.

In both cases, it’s still stupefying that the numbers aren’t higher. As CMI pointed out in last year’s study, more than 50 percent of the most effective marketers have documented strategies. 70 percent (for B2C) and 72 percent (for B2B) said strategy was a factor in improving their success in the past year. Creating one has no downsides yet plenty of benefits.

So what exactly are marketers including in their strategies? The number one element was “a plan to operate content marketing as an ongoing business process, not simply a campaign.”

Overall, marketers seem to find their strategies effective. Nobody said their strategies were “not at all effective,” while more than 80 percent said their strategies were either “moderately effective” or “very effective.”

That’s a testament to how useful strategies are to a content marketing program—now, the question is if the more than half of content marketers without a documented strategy will see the light.

2. Social is the most popular type of content

As mobile usage explodes and the mobile web stagnates, social media has become the best place to reach customers. Not surprisingly, companies are using more social media content than ever.

In general, marketers are planning on creating more content: Only 2 percent said they were expecting to produce less, and 73 (for B2C) and 70 percent (for B2B) said they were planning on creating more compared to last year.

3. But email is king

For B2C marketers, Facebook and email take the top spot when it comes to content distribution. 89 percent of marketers said they use the channels for their content, 26 percent above the closest channel, Twitter.

B2B marketers put email at the top for usage, at 93 percent, followed closely by LinkedIn, at 89 percent.

In terms of pure importance, however, email blasts its competitors out of the water. As the charts above show, no other channel comes close to email’s importance as a distribution channel. That makes sense since email is one of the few channels that provides a loyal, recurring audience that you own. Also, it doesn’t hurt that customer email addresses are key for a variety of martech tools, such as CRMs.

4. Content software is underused

Data collection and analysis are at the heart of digital marketing, which is why analytics tools are the go-to resources for most marketers. Implementing a content marketing program without any analytics software would be like taking a class without any feedback—it would be impossible to know if you’re successful.

However, analytics aside, it’s somewhat amazing how many content marketers don’t use critical tools such as email platforms, calendars, and CMSs. Perhaps they’re sending out email manually, or using a physical calendar tacked to the wall? CMSs are required to publish content, so the fact that only about half of marketers are using them is difficult to square.

No matter the explanation, it’s obvious that software is a big area of improvement for content marketers.

5. Promoted posts are booming

Across B2B and B2C, promoted posts saw big leaps in usage, particularly for B2C, which jumped from 52 percent last year to an incredible 89 percent this year.

Social promotion also took the top spot for effectiveness according to B2C marketers, while B2B marketers put it four percentage points behind search engine marketing (SEM). It’s safe to assume that much of these gains are a result of recent targeting improvements introduced by Facebook, LinkedIn, and their ilk.

6. Brand awareness and website traffic are still top goals

Even though some marketers are obsessed with finding one-to-one ROI, plenty of others still want brand awareness more than anything. Even B2B marketers, whose ultimate goal is always direct sales, named brand awareness a key content marketing goal.

So how are marketers tracking these goals? Website traffic, mainly: 73 percent of B2C marketers named it their top metric, versus 78 percent for B2B. Website traffic was also named the main metric for providing “truly measurable results of content marketing efforts” by both B2C and B2B marketers.

That’s somewhat surprising because website traffic can be unsophisticated and lean on the side of vanity. For B2B marketers, one would think lead generation would be tops (though “sales” and “sales lead quality” did take second and third).

Perhaps the biggest takeaway of all, however, is that a significant portion of marketers don’t measure ROI at all: 25 percent of B2C marketers and 28 percent of B2B marketers aren’t tracking ROI. It’s baffling that B2B marketers measure ROI less than B2C marketers, considering how much easier it is (and considering that lead generation was named the most-used metric).

It’s obvious from the report that—despite certain improvements—content marketers still have plenty of room to grow.

[Correction: An earlier version of this article used data from CMI’s report that was released last year. All figures have been updated to reflect data from this year’s report.]

The post The 6 Most Important Takeaways From CMI’s Annual Study appeared first on Contently.

That pressure has had detrimental effects on agency employees.

According to a new study by Campaign US, the American offshoot of a British ad trade magazine, morale in the agency world has sunk to dramatic new lows. Almost half of employees claim to have “low” or “dangerously low” morale, and 63 percent of those with low morale are hunting for new jobs.

“These findings are sobering, but—sadly—not surprising,” Douglas Quenqua, Campaign US editor-in-chief, said in a press release. “Conversations with people at all levels of the industry reveal widespread frustration and even despondence about the industry and their own jobs. But seeing the numbers really crystallizes how serious an issue this is for advertising, particularly as it fights with other industries for tech and creative talent.”

What’s behind the low morale? Bad leadership.

Seventy-three percent of respondents cited “company leadership” as the main contributor to low morale. “Lack of advancement” was second, with 45 percent, while “dissatisfaction with work” took third, with 38 percent.

Though the study didn’t provide specific reasons for the drop, it’s safe to assume that frustration with company leadership stems from inertia at the top of many agencies. Perhaps bosses are stubbornly pushing for traditional agency practices, while younger and mid-level employees may want to pursue newer strategies but lack the power to create change.

Almost half of agency employees did not list having low or dangerously low morale, however. Among that more satisfied group, “work/life balance” was the top reason for satisfaction at 62 percent, which studies have shown is particularly prized among millennial workers. “Satisfaction with work” was second with 49 percent and “creative freedom” was third with 44 percent.

Compensation seemed to have little effect on morale. The highest dissatisfaction came from employees making $101,000 to $250,000 a year, and the lowest came from those making $50,000 a year or less.

Instead, dissatisfaction correlated with experience. Cynically, you could argue that older employees understand the industry’s problems better than junior employees. It’s also possible that younger employees are more optimistic.

The agency world isn’t alone in its morale malaise. Globally, only 13 percent of employees are engaged with their work, according to a longstanding Gallup survey. In America, however, that figure jumps to 32 percent. Other reports, such as this job satisfaction survey from nonprofit research group Conference Board, have pegged American job dissatisfaction at 52 percent.

While the low morale is cause for concern, keep in mind that lots of people dislike their jobs, agency or not. Gallup’s survey, like Campaign US’s, showed that poor management is consistently the number one factor in employee dissatisfaction. For agencies to turn things around, investing in improving leadership would be a great place to start.

The post Agencies Have a Morale Problem appeared first on Contently.

In the past, the company took an average of six weeks to ideate, produce, and release a piece of content. It was a torturously slow process, especially in a digital arena that values speed. Today, it has cut its creative process down to a mere 72 hours. It was, no pun intended, an amazing turnaround.

So how did the massive financial institution do it?

In a highly regulated industry like finance, the creative process—including approval—can often lead to suffocating bottlenecks that ruin the effectiveness of content marketing. Barclays decided that the only way to fix the issues plaguing its content operation was to completely rehaul the way its digital team functioned. So the company changed from having a marketing team to having a newsroom.

Barclays UK now has an editorial board that meets every Tuesday morning. No longer do people work on a lengthy campaign basis, signing off multiple times before content goes live. Now, it’s a day-to-day operation.

Meetings that actually work

Each Barclays editorial meeting has a clear objective: The 12-person team debates three to five story ideas before agreeing to produce at least one piece of content by the weekend.

“We have to be very clear on the roles of different people in each particular session,” Mark Brayton, Barclays UK’s content marketing director, said. “Some people will have the opportunity to share their opinion, some will have voting rights, and some will be there to make the ultimate call. Defining roles upfront is key.”

Employees also take turns filling the editor-in-chief role. This person ensures that the team reaches a decision during the meeting and has ultimate sign-off power. Once everyone selects an idea to pursue, the output team is entrusted to produce the content without the hassle of multiple meetings and approvers.

Additionally, the compliance team is now involved from the very start, which is a key adjustment compared to the old process. “We explained that we wanted to bring the compliance team on the journey, and that our output needed to be as fully compliant and meticulous as it has ever been,” Brayton said. “Having those guys there at the genesis of the content idea, rather than just before sign-off, has revolutionized the time spent.”

A data-driven team

The newsroom began its revamped content operations by focusing purely on Barclays’s retail customer base, a demographic the organization knew very well. The change in focus worked so well that even Brayton was a little surprised.

“I probably underestimated the power of using data as our creative muse,” he said. “The sheer impact it has had on—not only engagement—but also on the way the organization thinks, has been both impressive and really positive.”

One of the first examples of the customer data in action was for the Mortgage Market Review (MMR), new mortgage rules implemented in the UK in 2014 that fundamentally changed the way people assess real estate affordability.

“There was quite a lot of sensationalism, particularly in the tabloid press, around what MMR meant in the marketplace,” Brayton said. “There were stories suggesting that lenders would start asking people about their diet, for example, as part of their lending criteria. It quickly became apparent from our search data, social listening data, and calls to our centers that customers were asking questions about it.”

The editorial board saw an opportunity to take the lead and dispel any myths.

“We bought this data into the Tuesday morning meeting, debated the key findings, and talked about what information was available already,” Brayton said. “In the same session we commissioned a video to be shot the next day and distributed it across our owned, earned, and colleague channels.”

The entire process took 72 hours.

Keeping a finger on the pulse

In July 2015, Barclays saw another clear opportunity to make its mark. The interim UK budget was the biggest financial news story of the week, as people expected the government to introduce policies that tied to the promises made by the Conservatives during the general election.

“It could [have been] a very radical budget that had far-reaching consequences for many Barclays customers,” Liz Stephenson, marketing communications manager at Barclays UK, explained.

Within 24 hours of the budget speech, Barclays had published two articles, one for its core customer base and one for its more affluent “premier” customers.

“The articles specifically addressed customer interests and concerns by listening on social media to public reaction to the budget, and angling the articles accordingly,” Stephenson said.

Making history

Arguably the biggest opportunity for Barclays to test the effectiveness of its newsroom approach was in the aftermath of this June’s historic EU referendum, a vote that had a profound effect on the finances of Barclays UK customers. The company felt it had a duty to help its customers understand the implications—and people wanted information fast.

In just one week, the newsroom created 18 pieces of content in the wake of the Brexit vote. Detailed explainers like “Could the government’s new Help to Buy: ISA help you save?” offered insight and advice on new initiatives, while multiple videos were created for different customer segments, each designed to provide reassurance and an initial response to the most pressing concerns.

“The aims of the content were to increase brand trust and customer engagement,” Stephenson said. According to Barclays, the average time spent with Brexit content was 4 minutes and 16 seconds.

Evergreen content is important to just about every digital publication, but with a more agile creative process, Barclays UK has the flexibility in place to make sure all of its content is relevant to its audience before news gets stale.

“It is about constantly optimizing the approach,” Brayton said. “We will continue to look at how we adapt and change our content strategy, content plans, and content pillars to ensure we bring it to life.”

The post How Barclays Cut Its Publishing Process From 6 Weeks to 3 Days appeared first on Contently.

One might not think the National Association of Realtors would be on the cutting edge of the content marketing revolution. Yet the 106-year-old trade association was among the first to adopt a direct-to-consumer content strategy when it launched HouseLogic, a digital content hub, five years ago.

By the summer of 2015, HouseLogic had over 1.5 million monthly unique visitors, but the trade association wanted to tap digital writers and content strategists to increase reader engagement.

“We were amassing an audience, but we really wanted to deepen engagement with that audience,” said Anne Feder, managing director for HouseLogic. “To do that, we needed to adopt a new methodology and the right tools to measure the performance of our content.”

To drive more meaningful engagement, HouseLogic invested in a robust content strategy, partnering with Contently to access its editorial services, engagement analytics, and a network of 60,000 freelancers. From September 1, 2015 to February 1, 2016, HouseLogic developed and tested a heavily data-driven strategy within the framework of Contently’s content methodology.

“Contently seemed like the best solution for making content more contemporary and deepening engagement,” Feder said. “We needed tools that we could learn to adopt to create permanent change.”

Contently connected the brand with content strategist Jessica Adamiak, who developed a custom strategy for HouseLogic, leveraging Contently Analytics to measure progress towards the company’s content goals. “Contently seemed like the best solution for making content more contemporary and deepening engagement,” Feder said. “We needed tools that we could learn to adopt to create permanent change.”

Conducting a content audit

The first step in developing a content plan was to assess what content NAR already had at its disposal, so Adamiak performed a content audit of HouseLogic’s archive.

“A disturbing number of companies publish new stories without bothering to analyze their old content for valuable clues about what their existing audience wants,” Adamiak said. With the content audit, HouseLogic was able to clearly identify the story types that had performed well in the past and assess where it outperformed competitors. In addition to helping them understand what to publish in the future, the brand audit guided HouseLogic on what not to publish—which can be just as valuable when trying to maximize content ROI.

To obtain these results, Adamiak reviewed HouseLogic’s 100 best-performing stories from July 2014 to July 2015. The 100 stories were chosen based on unique views, shares, comments, and “prints” (yes, the actual printing of material, which is popular among HouseLogic’s homeowner audience).

The stories were then organized by content type, topic, and preferred audience. From there, Adamiak deduced the most popular article themes. At the top were stories about affordable DIY projects, guides for remodeling and home management, and tips for avoiding common homeowner mistakes.

Adamiak also conducted a gap analysis to see which topics were trending among 21 competitors and which topics were up for the taking. The analysis revealed there was an opportunity for HouseLogic to own specific buying and selling topics.

Developing a content plan

Armed with the content audit, HouseLogic developed a custom editorial program designed to fit the interests of a new target segment of HouseLogic’s audience: the growing number of millennials buying their first home. The company worked with managing editor Natalie Burg and a team of freelancers from Contently’s network to cover home-improvement topics with relevant expertise.

“Our goal was to tap a network of new writers and content creators fluent in the digital sphere, who could complement and partner with our team of homeownership experts,” Christina Hoffmann, HouseLogic’s content manager, said.

In addition to focusing on themes not yet owned by competitors, the content plan specified which story formats would be most intriguing for millennials. Alongside web-sourced and reported articles, HouseLogic invested in multimedia content, like video and infographics.

“Contently provided us with the rationale for multimedia content that justified its increased financial and resource cost,” Feder said. “It gave us a way to test and evaluate its value versus our goals.”

Defining metrics

According to Adamiak, engagement is one of those terms that means both everything and nothing. “In order to truly assess the value of engagement,” Adamiak said, “brands must identify metrics that are meaningful to their overall goals.”

“Contently’s analytics suite is built for content marketers to be able to assess engagement metrics in a way that makes sense.”

Since HouseLogic’s chief goal was to deepen engagement, it used the following four metrics to assess what degree readers were interacting with the site’s content:

1. Social actions: shares, comments, and likes
2. Story volume: unique visitors to a story
3. Attention time: how much time people spent actively reading a story
4. Average finish: how much of the story the average person read

“Having these metrics was a huge win for us from a content production standpoint,” Jessica Graeser, marketing manager for HouseLogic, explained.

“Contently’s analytics suite is built for content marketers to be able to assess engagement metrics in a way that makes sense,” Graeser continued. “It not only helps us compare the before and after, but also helps us decide which new content is resonating and how to optimize it.”

The experiment

During the first six months of the partnership, HouseLogic created a plan to test the performance of the new content program. The HouseLogic team distributed 76 stories and conducted an A/B split test. The performance of 38 older articles (Group A) was compared to that of 38 newer articles written by Contently freelancers and developed under the new content plan (Group B). The articles were shared on the same channels—Facebook and email—after the headlines were optimized through Outbrain.

In addition to the A/B test, Adamiak and the HouseLogic team looked at how the 38 newer new articles compared to the 937 existing stories on HouseLogic’s platform with at least 500 unique views. In both the A/B test and general assessment of old versus new content, Adamiak measured the content’s success based on the four key engagement metrics mentioned above.

Result 1: New Contently content vs. old HouseLogic content

So how did the performance of the 38 older HouseLogic stories (Group A) compare with the new Contently stories (Group B)?

Quite favorably, as it turns out. After six months of testing, Adamiak analyzed how each group of content performed based on HouseLogic’s four predetermined engagement metrics. Here’s what they found.

1. Contently content was shared 66 percent more than old content.

2. Contently content generated 14 percent more readers.

3. Contently content captured 6 percent more attention time.

4. The finish rate for newer articles increased by 10 percentage points (71 percent vs. 61 percent).

While all of these metrics were encouraging to HouseLogic, the uptick in finish rate excited the HouseLogic team the most.

“The finish rate tells us a lot about what kind of stories HouseLogic’s readers can’t stop reading after they click,” Adamiak said. “This info is ultimately more important for future content than total unique views or even shares.”

Though finish rates can be artificially inflated by publishing shorter stories, that wasn’t the case for HouseLogic.

“We have noticed stories over 1,000 words have better finish rates on average than the shorter stories, which is interesting,” Adamiak said. “We don’t have enough data to determine if that’s a definitive trend, but it’s something that we’re watching closely.”

The articles “Meet the Humble Shoe Organizer, Clutter’s Kryptonite” and “8 Ways to Use Old Stuff to Create Smart Storage,” for example, had finish rates above 80 percent—despite both being longer than 1,000 words.

“Before this [strategy], we were able to generate a significant amount of clicks with a good headline,” Graeser said. “But now, we know that the actual content itself is engaging, and we have the tools to measure it.”

Result 2: New Contently content vs. all past HouseLogic content

As we noted above, HouseLogic’s next experiment was to examine how the 38 new Contently articles compared to the 937 existing stories on HouseLogic’s platform with at least 500 unique views. Here’s what HouseLogic found:

1. When expanding the sample pool, 30 percent of the new stories landed in the top 10 percent of all HouseLogic stories across all four metrics.

2. HouseLogic grew its target audience of 25- to 34-year-old millennials by 10 percent.

“The new content really speaks to the millennial audience more than some of our older content,” Hoffmann said. “It’s written to appeal to a younger tone of voice and a different approach to the topics.”

Where to go from here

HouseLogic continues to optimize its strategy by maintaining a running spreadsheet to chart the topics that are consistently driving engagement—and those that should be scaled back.

Committed to producing high-quality content, HouseLogic will remain steadfast in deepening relationships with its readers and using data to understand how those readers engage with its stories.

“Sure, thousands or even millions of people may click on a clever headline, but if no one’s bothering to read the actual story, you’ve got a problem,” Adamiak said. “This is why it’s so important to define and track engagement metrics.”

The post Contently Case Story: These 4 Engagement Metrics Proved HouseLogic’s Content ROI appeared first on Contently.

As I was ready to become the VP of marketing integration of the IT division at Schneider Electric, a global company that specializes in solutions for data centers and critical power products, I had a clear objective: to turn a successful but traditional marketing operation into a content machine. At the time, the division was dealing with stagnating lead growth. We needed a more advanced strategy, fast. But before I started to shape this strategy, I read.

The two books that helped me were Welcome to the Funnel, by Jason Miller, and Epic Content Marketing, by Joe Pulizzi. Despite different styles, both books shared a common focus: a step-by-step practical guide for defining content strategy in a large enterprise. They took complex marketing methodologies and broke them down with clear lessons and best practices. The day I finished them, I told my content marketing director to read them as soon as possible. Eventually, we bought 15 copies of each book and shipped them from France to New England, where most of the marketing integration team is located.

From that point on, all of our marketing efforts evolved for good.

Starting the journey

When I started at Schneider, I was joining a company that already understood sophisticated marketing. Take Energy University, for example, our free, award-winning online education program that had experts from around the world developing courses about topics like data centers and energy efficiency.

So there was content—good content—but it was scattered across the company without consistency. My team and I started assessing the situation, thinking about how we could develop a content marketing program from a product-centric marketing model. We called ourselves the marketing integration team and set up a solid infrastructure by hiring new freelancers, teaming with agencies, and buying syndicated content.

Within months, we started simplifying the old marketing process to make our workflow more efficient. We absorbed several editorial boards into one. We cut multiple editorial calendars down to one. We educated our internal team by hosting workshops and events with major content marketing experts, and we drove innovation through continuous experimentation with different mediums like podcasts, videos, and slideshows.

You walk before you can run, and if your bosses are pleased with the initial progress, they’ll give you the money so you can sprint.

While the old guard had analyzed buyer personas, we took the process a step further, identifying five target personas for the department to focus on. For each persona, we analyzed the respective buyer journey, mapping it out with new and existing content. I still remember those exhausting and exciting months as we prepared to change the company’s marketing culture.

Then we set up an editorial board, one of the most important parts of our transformation. The board, which consists of 20 people from around the world, handles all content-related requests and issues, manages the editorial calendar, and oversees internal communication. In large organizations like Schneider Electric, which has 180,000 employees, the editorial board also has the key role of making sure content created across departments stays consistent with larger company messaging and branding.

Our emphasis on internal alignment paid off when we were able to coordinate a content production schedule with our Data Center Science Center (DCSC). The DCSC acts like a content factory, where talented experts focus on creating blog posts, whitepapers, and e-books, and help fuel Energy University. We immediately reached an agreement and set up common content-creation objectives, such as securing at least one “big rock” piece of content per quarter and doubling downloads.

The role of pilots

A few months after those two books landed on my desk, my team set up a pilot program. In his book, Pulizzi stressed the importance of pilots as a way to get buy-in with execs. Essentially, you walk before you can run, and if your bosses are pleased with the initial progress, they’ll give you the money so you can sprint.

Using our blogs as a content hub, we launched our first bedrock pieces of content on specific IT subjects like edge computing, the Internet of Things, and data-center planning. Our content targets readers at the very early stage of the buyer journey, and the blog was the perfect destination. More than 70 percent of readers who land on our blog come through non-branded organic searches. We capitalized on that momentum by setting up a newsletter and shoring up SEO. The final piece of the pilot was to invest in paid promotion to sustain the growth. We’re now planning to launch new pilots in Brazil, India, and the UK.

Content leads to three times as many downloads as traditional marketing campaigns.

Know that you will fail at times, and you’ll need to refine your approach before finding the right formula for success. That’s why the small size of pilots are so appealing. For example, we learned that email newsletters drive more traffic than other owned channels, SlideShare and YouTube are great for B2B content, and that we need weekly governance calls with employees from each country to solve any immediate problems that pop up.

Over time, the results let us know that we were on the right track. Now, internal data suggests that content leads to three times as many downloads as traditional marketing campaigns.

The power of divisible content

Another important tip I picked up from the two books is about repurposing content. In his book, Miller refers to “Big Rock” content, or high-value stories that can be broken up into smaller components.

This has a lot to do with budget. You can save a lot of money by recycling your work for different platforms. E-books can become infographics, SlideShare presentations, blog posts, and videos before being disseminated on social media.

The idea is to develop an all-encompassing guide based on your keywords and specialities, which is written strategically instead of instructionally. The top-of-funnel content should ultimately help SEO, fuel social and lead generation, drive sales enablement, and maybe even support events.

With this in mind, we have just launched our first Big Rock. It’s the “Practical Guide to Data Center Planning and Design,” written by the DCSC and launched only a few weeks ago.

Cooperation with internal communications gave birth to an internal content marketing newsletter, the “IT Division Content Strategist“ (hat tip to Contently), which goes out twice a week.

The objectives were to increase internal awareness for our new content marketing techniques, list all new content we created, and provide continued visibility to the editorial plan. In a company with 180,000 people, you must pay attention to internal communication. The internal content marketing newsletter has become a success: The initial audience has grown 4x and the average open rate is 60 percent.

In his speeches around the world, Joe Pulizzi likes to say that the “content marketing approach is a long-term commitment.” After one year, we are still at the beginning of our journey. Next year, for instance, we plan to launch a new content hub to capture a C-suite audience. But delivering a steady stream of high-quality content remains our first priority. Not more content, but high-quality content. This is the commitment we have taken on as we continue our journey.

The post How Content Increased the Effectiveness of Our B2B Enterprise Marketing by 3x appeared first on Contently.

You might remember Owen, the fictional engineer and star of GE’s cleverly self-deprecating commercials that launched last fall. The spots follow Owen as he tries to explain his new cool new job developing breakthrough code as a GE engineer to his befuddled friends and family, who think that he’s going to go work on a train or live a life of manual labor.

Owen has sparked one of the most successful recruiting campaigns in GE’s history—yet it wasn’t supposed to be a recruiting campaign at all, according to CMO Linda Boff. “We did not start off by saying, ‘How do we create a recruiting campaign?'” Boff told me. “We said, ‘How do we find an interesting way to talk about being a digital industrial company?'”

“Like everybody, we’re in a hunt for great talent.”

But the campaign turned out to be a boon for recruiting. “[It’s] increased applications to work at GE eightfold,” Boff said. “That’s a metric we’re really proud of.”

Indeed, an 8x increase in job applications is an incredible stat, especially at a time when large corporations like GE struggle to recruit against the allure of sexy startups.

“Like everybody, we’re in a hunt for great talent,” Boff said.

The Owen spots tackle that challenge head-on, parodying the startup world with a similar touch as Silicon Valley.

The campaign has also had a positive impact on internal employee communications and morale.

“People inside the company are just in love with the campaign,” Boff explained. “We have brought the actor who plays Owen to some of our internal events, and really you’d think we were bringing the Beatles back together. People are so excited that here’s a story about the company, but it’s really a story about them. They’re our Owens.”

The campaign reflects the fact that there’s no real boundaries between internal and external marketing and communications anymore. “My friends in communications have this great phrase, which is, ‘There’s less and less separation between internal and external when it comes to communications and storytelling,'” she said. “I think what we’re talking about now is a case in point for that.”

“How do we make sure that at a hundred and twenty-four years young we stay relevant, and we stay contemporary, and we’re meaningful to new audiences?”

It’s not surprising that GE, arguably the world’s most skilled brand when it comes to content marketing, found a way to promote working there in hilariously self-aware fashion. The company—which was one of the first brands on Instagram, Medium, Vine, Periscope, Twitter, and a slew of other social platforms—is obsessed with staying relevant to young, tech-forward audiences.

“It’s in the culture of the company,” Boff explained. “How do we keep the company fresh? How do we make sure that at a hundred and twenty-four years young we stay relevant, we stay contemporary, and we’re meaningful to new audiences?”

Ultimately, the answer to that question boils down to a relatively simple equation.

“There’s a freedom to experiment,” she said. “And a tolerance to fail.”

Check out my extended interview with GE CMO Linda Boff here.

The post This Content Campaign Increased Applications to Work at GE by 800 Percent appeared first on Contently.

When President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on March 23, 2010, it became a turning point in American health care. The federal statute established a shared responsibility between the government, employers, and individuals to ensure that Americans would have access to affordable and high-quality health insurance.

Yet for the most part, the health care system in the U.S. is still broken. In 2013, doctors warned there was a lack of transparency and too many dollars were wasted on poor treatment. A year later, the Commonwealth Fund reported that American health care was among the most expensive and worst-performing in the world. Today, patients are still frustrated with wait times and access, and medical professionals struggle to keep pace with digital advancements.

In the face of these systemic obstacles athenahealth is more committed than ever to its ambitious goal: “make health care work as it should.” The fast-growing, publicly traded company provides electronic health records and other cloud-based services to medical groups so that care is better connected and doctors are able to focus more on their patients. Over a period of nearly two decades, they’ve built a vast information network serving 80,000 providers nationwide—all connected via a single platform.

Despite its success, a major challenge for athenahealth was to establish the network as a leader in health care and as a valuable source for health information—not just a piece of software. Because athena manages financial and clinical transactions for tens of thousands of providers, the company sits on a wealth of health-related data. With 90 million patient records, athenahealth is the largest single network of clinical health information in the country.

That’s where content came into play.

“We are always trying to explain the network,” said John Fox, executive director of content. “What better way to explain athenahealth than to make the power of the network visible—to manifest stories through data and what we spring from it?”

On June 1, Fox and the athenahealth content team launched an impressive new digital magazine, athenaInsight. With this new focus, the company wants to emerge as a leading resource for real-time health care data and the context for why it matters. Like Vox, athenaInsight’s role is not just to report, but explain why those reports are relevant.

Using Contently’s editorial platform and engagement analytics, athenahealth looks to become more strategic about how to connect the right stories and data with its target audience. “Contently is going to give us the ability to really drill into the numbers,” Fox explained. “While we know our audience quite well, we don’t yet know enough on which topics drive [the most] interest and engagement.”

With Contently, athenahealth’s creative teams now have the tools to optimize their content and prove the ROI of content marketing. “Our team has always been on the hook for creating content that goes out and gets pushed out by other teams who have the analytics,” Fox said. “We are excited to have our own analytics where we can be on the hook and hold ourselves accountable.”

The company hasn’t just scratched the surface of business storytelling—it has poached top journalists to develop a sophisticated newsroom. Here’s a look inside.

The newsroom headquarters

Athenahealth’s Boston campus is the east coast version of Google’s professional playground. Nineteenth-century industrial buildings surround an expansive lawn where, on a sunny day, a healthy portion of athenahealth’s 5,000 employees have lunchtime picnics between frisbee games.

But that isn’t the only place where athenahealth is taking notes from other industries. The editorial team uses the network’s clinical, financial, and behavioral data to tell stories that inspire dialogue and action.

A journalism mindset

James Furbush, managing editor of athenaInsight, believes the publication can capitalize on a unique opportunity in health care. “There is a lot of green space to have a well-designed publication, to produce great content, and to tap into this data set that we have to provide valuable assets to executives and the health care industry,” he explained.

Showcasing a smart use of data and visual content, athenaInsight is off to a promising start. The story “So far, the ACA expansion is working,” for example, leverages athenahealth’s data and a series of graphs throughout the storyline to give life to the article’s findings that the law has improved health care access for low-income beneficiaries.

Similarly, “The ninjas of patient pay” puts athenahealth’s network data at the forefront of the story. These stories are just two of many data-first stories featured in the digital magazine.

With data-driven sites like FiveThirtyEight and Vox as models, the company hopes to use athenaInsight to establish itself as a leader in health news and health care policy. The site also provides rich ammunition for athenahealth’s marketing and sales departments, which can point to athenaInsight stories as evidence of the network’s superior data collection and insights.

While athenaInsight is data-driven, the company’s content strategy also relies on something more fundamental: Build a strong editorial team. “We need great storytelling,” said Fox. “That’s pretty much all it is.”

In addition to Fox and Furbush, the athenaInsight staff is made up of three full-time writers, a team of Contently freelance journalists, as well as video producers and information designers. Liz Kellogg, design lead for athenaInsight, works alongside the editorial team to create shareable data visualizations based on network findings.

This is just one of many ways athenaInsight resembles digital journalism outlets like Quartz, Vox, or FiveThirtyEight that have invested heavily in data storytelling.

“I wanted to pluck someone from the journalist world and say, ‘Be a journalist on this network. This is your beat. Your beat is called The athenahealth Network,'” Fox said. “They know what makes a great story, a protagonist, and a hero because they were either trained in school or they learned it by doing.”

Joanna Weiss, the publication’s executive editor, is evidence of this commitment to hiring staff journalists. Weiss started out as a reporter for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans before a 16-year stint at The Boston Globe. Furbush, too, came from a journalism background, covering Silicon Valley.

“It all comes down to the basics of journalism, which is curiosity, the ability to tell a story, general fluency with the language, and being able to interview and write,” said Weiss. “With Contently writers, we look for the same thing. Some of the writers have a background in health care, and that’s been helpful because much of the writing is very technical.”

Whether the stories are technical or discuss high-level policy issues, the key is to find writers who know how to turn data into a story. “If we have this bit of interesting information, but we don’t have the answer for what it means, we need someone to go out and do the discovery—to source and explore to find out people’s reactions to this data,” Weiss said. “You really need a journalism mindset to do that.”

The daylight studio

When you enter the athenahealth video studio, the first thing you notice is a large green screen situated next to a set that resembles Good Morning America‘s. Tall windows cast natural light on the set’s guests.

“You know how they do the morning programs with the window [in the backdrop]?” Jacqueline Mow, director of video production at athenahealth, asked. “Our thought was to create a daylight studio like that.”

The video studio, managed by Mow and video producer Laura Longsworth, is part of a larger initiative to use creative content to inspire and inform different departments. At athenahealth, this “culture of content”—as we describe in the Contently content methodology—is driven by a content leader who evangelizes its company-wide adoption and encourages creativity and risk-taking.

At the athenahealth headquarters, this leader is Pierre Valette, athena’s vice president of content and communications, who has a background in television production (he won an Emmy for his work at WGBH) and heads both the editorial and video teams. “The transition from public television to corporate isn’t necessarily obvious,” explained Longsworth, who, along with Mow, came from public TV prior to her work at athenahealth. “The fact that we are all here is partly because of Pierre and partly because we have freedom in terms of how we do things creatively.”

Mow and Longsworth’s creative work is so popular inside the company that they had to implement a formal vetting process for video requests. “Once we got here, everyone and their mother wanted a video for something,” Mow laughed.

Athenahealth’s video team began making client testimonials, product, and sales-enablement videos, but has since widened its repertoire. Today, Mow, five in-house producers, and freelance editors create videos to support client learning and internal corporate communication.

And while the health care industry gets a bad rap for being stodgy and antiquated, athenahealth has integrated humor into its video strategy. Among its top projects is (real!) doctor ZDoggMD’s parody of Jay Z and Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind,” which ran as part of athenahealth’s #LetDoctorsBeDoctors campaign.

But not all health content is a laughing matter. Athena’s client testimonials reveal the way the company’s EHR technology impacts people during times of hardship. One testimonial brought the team down to a free clinic in Texas, where athenahealth’s services helped keep the medical facility alive. The facility, which offered free medical treatment to low-income residents who fell in the crack between Medicaid and ACA insurance and were not covered under Texas state law, used data from athenahealth to prove its services were saving lives. The clinic maintained its funding as a result.

According to the video team, while the story ran separately from athenaInsight, it was well received because it highlighted health care as a political and personal issue. “Health care is one of the greatest challenges in this country,” Longsworth lamented. “There are a million things we can tackle because it touches everybody.”

A new standard for health care

In the next several months, athenahealth will test the effectiveness of its growing content program. For the editorial team in particular, there is pressure to prove ROI, which is why it will look to Contently Analytics‘ engagement metrics to guide its strategy. These analytics will not only serve as a business tool, but also a mechanism to empower the creative teams to ambitiously report on the health care industry.

Yet perhaps the reason the creative teams at athenahealth are so motivated to produce compelling health news is that their mission extends far beyond the company’s software.

“Working in public-policy journalism, you understand that if you can make health care work better, you free up resources to make everything else better,” Weiss said. “The ability to tell real-time health stories and also tell the stories about how to improve health care—that’s something I want to be a part of.”

The post Contently Case Story: Inside Athenahealth’s Quest to Launch the Vox of Health Care appeared first on Contently.

In the tech world, small teams run short on something all professionals wish they had more of: time.

At Better Weekdays, the career services startup that helps universities pair students with jobs, founder Chris Motley wanted to invest in content marketing. With a team of three, he just didn’t have the capacity to do it well. He needed a solution that would provide the technology, talent, and strategy to run a full-fledged content operation.

“We pulled the trigger on Contently when we had three people in our company because it was something I could literally run in ten minutes per week,” said the CEO. “I’m an okay writer, but I don’t have the time, and it’s not the same as people who do this for a living. The quality of the content and its structured approach is why I went with Contently.”

With Contently, Motley gained access to over 70,000 professional freelance journalists and multimedia creatives, each specialized in their respective field. The integration of this freelancer network left him time to focus on the other important responsibilities of a CEO.

And time, Motley said, echoing the old cliché, is money. “The thing ROI doesn’t account for is time—and that is the key point.”

Since May 2015, Better Weekdays has published over 100 long- and shortform stories on the Better Weekdays Blog, such as, “What Students Really Need from Career Centers” and “How to Help Unemployed Recent Grads and Alums.” Already, they’re making an impact. While online readers generally lose attention after just eight seconds, the average Better Weekdays reader stays engaged for over two and a half minutes—over 18 times the amount spent on general online content.

According to Motley, Better Weekdays’ stories are valuable because they cover a wide range of topics from the perspective of specialized freelancers—everything from an article aimed at helping students look for work in a marine lab, to one that explains what makes an engineering student competitive in Silicon Valley. “I don’t find ROI in writing content that adds to the millions of things already out there on job search,” he explained. “The only way to ‘skin the cat’ is to curate content specifically for an individual.”

Motley’s strategy is to use high-quality content to empower the entire organization, not just the marketing department. The power of storytelling, he explains, affects everything from a blog post to an investor pitch deck. “At the end of the day, it’s all connected.”

As Motley and his team expand their content program, he remains committed to investing in technology and talent services that promote efficient, high-quality storytelling.

“When you’re an entrepreneur in technology, and you’re building something out of basically nothing,” Motley said, “the only way you can get people to support you is by telling stories.”

And one of the biggest places he’s seeing support is from his investors.

“My investors know they will see the value of content strategy because when you’re trying to educate, inspire, and engage a segment of the market, the most efficient way to do it is through storytelling.”

The post Contently Case Story: How Better Weekdays Upped Its Efficiency and Redefined Content ROI appeared first on Contently.

As an employee of Spoon, the content marketing agency for Volvo Trucks, Glad is helping drive some of Europe’s increasingly ambitious content marketing projects. Across the continent, more than 70 percent of European marketers created more content last year than they did in 2014.

Volvo Trucks, which is one of the largest B2B truck companies in the world, may be best known for its 2013 video, “The Epic Split,” which featured Jean-Claude Van Damme doing a split across two vehicles moving in reverse. The clip became an immediate hit, racking up more than 80 million views.

Since that viral success, innovative content has been the fuel that keeps the marketing engine running for Volvo Trucks.

“To succeed with content marketing, you must have a multi-channel way of thinking simply because a brand’s audience is scattered among a lot of different platforms, channels, and media,” Glad said.

Over the last few years, Spoon has created a variety of big projects ranging from Swedish-language stories for Volvo Trucks Magazine, infographics about energy trends, animations, the Welcome to My Cab web series that takes viewers inside customized truck cabs, and even a demo companion piece for “The Epic Split” that received 1.7 million views of its own. (“The Epic Split” was created by another agency, Forsman & Bodenfors.)

Glad stressed that most of the content is meant to be repurposed for multiple channels. For example, a recent story titled “Keeping alive on one of the world’s most dangerous roads” was published on the digital version of the magazine last August, reformatted with a new layout for Facebook, adapted into a video, and accompanied by an animated GIF. The story was also expanded into an eight-page spread with the title “Close to Heaven” in the print version of the magazine.

While Volvo Trucks relies on a diverse output, video has become its biggest resource when it comes to engaging its target audience: companies with large fleets of trucks as well as small businesses looking for transportation solutions and a brand with a premium image.

“Video is a very flexible media where we can create a longer story for YouTube, which then can be cut down in shorter episodes and published in other social media channels like Facebook or LinkedIn,” said Agneta Malmcrona, the global content manager at Volvo Trucks. “We see this as a smart way to think broad and narrow at the same time, and it is also a very cost efficient way of working.”

A year after “The Epic Split” came “Volvo Trucks vs. Koenigsegg,” which pitted a Volvo truck against a high-performance sports car to showcase the dual clutch gearbox in the brand’s heavy-duty trucks. The campaign which ran for three weeks, took Spoon more than six months from concept to conclusion. But the effort was well worth it. The video only needed a week to get a million views online, leading to 412 earned media headlines in 35 different countries

Creating all of this content requires a colossal amount of manpower. According to Eric Lundekrans, a Spoon account manager, the company employs dozens of creatives, from editors to art directors to motion graphics designers to video reporters. “In a big project, all of these roles are represented,” he said. “But our editors should be able to do what editors at any modern publishing house are doing—write, handle photos, create GIFs, simple video editing, simple coding as necessary, publish on all digital platforms, boost posts in social, and analyze data.”

When it comes to collaborating, Volvo Trucks provides the direction for what it wants to communicate about a product, service, or core brand value while Spoon devises the concepts and executes. “It is very much a tight and transparent client-agency-relationship where everybody brings ideas to the table,” Lundekrans said.

“In bigger marketing campaigns, the aim is often to create broad awareness, but at the same time to create leads,” Malmcrona said. “We have been successful in creating leads in marketing campaigns simply by linking from video-based content in social media to a dealer landing page. This gives us a very good ROI.”

A little Jean-Claude Van Damme didn’t hurt either.

The post How Volvo Trucks Turned B2B Video Into a Viral Art Form appeared first on Contently.

When businesses start publishing, they’re always concerned with hitting a certain quota. But whether you put out one story a day or two stories a week, that cadence is irrelevant if you’re not driving a tangible ROI with your content marketing.

In the world of B2B marketing, quality dominates quantity.

“Of course the quantity helps for getting your name out there,” said Alessandra Ceresa, marketing director of GreenRope, a customer relationship management platform. “But that doesn’t mean those [readers] are qualified leads.”

Using content for sales enablement—the process of integrating sales and marketing in B2B companies—is all about increasing sales efficiency. Instead of asking salespeople to cold call, content does much of the job for them.

After six months leveraging sales-enablement content, Greenrope’s conversion rate doubled from about 20 percent to 40 percent while product cancellations decreased.

“The right kind of content can continue to move that lead down the funnel so when sales calls a lead, they are really close,” says Jennifer Burak, vice president of marketing for interactive video firm Rapt Media. “They are almost ready to buy.”

(Full disclosure: Rapt Media is a Contently client.)

And that’s not a working theory. Content’s power to drive sales has already proven its value for many B2B organizations.

Take GreenRope, for instance. After six months leveraging sales enablement content, the company’s conversion rate doubled from about 20 percent to 40 percent while product cancellations decreased.

Michael Passanante, marketing director at BESLER Consulting, echoed that point: “We make sales from these campaigns. It’s not just a matter of trying to get appointments or getting people to download things. We’ve taken people from not even being aware of us to closing significant deals with them in a relatively short period of time.”

The advantage of hyper-targeting

Successful sales-enablement content comes down to who it’s developed for and how it’s distributed. Audience targeting is critical for all content marketing, but that’s especially true for B2B sales enablement. Not only do marketers need to reach the right business at the right time, but they also need to target the right person within the organization.

“Are they sales managers? Are they business owners?” Ceresa said. “Each of those roles wants to learn different things about the software.”

GreenRope develops segmented drip campaigns to address the concerns and interests of each individual person within a company. These engaged readers, in turn, are more open to talking to salespeople.

For Passanante and BESLER Consulting, audience targeting gets even more granular. Since the firm offers consulting to only a handful of hospitals that use a particular inpatient payment systems, its sales team targets a single person—usually the CFO—at each hospital.

“We put together a focused program that includes both marketing and sales touchpoints to establish contact with those targets who tend to be firewalled a bit,” he said.

In many cases, the people BESLER wants to reach are hidden behind assistants who read and filter their emails and phone calls. However, the company’s research-backed thought leadership has helped the company get the attention of high-level decision-makers in a way that cold calls never could.

When content and sales join forces

Although some people misinterpret sales enablement as a one-way street toward sales, the process, when executed successfully, is symbiotic. It’s the partnership between content marketing and sales from beginning to end. Sales helps marketing know who to target, while marketing creates and distributes content that drives those qualified leads back to sales.

“What we’ve created is a program where marketing is not just saying to sales, ‘Here’s your campaign,'” Passanante explained. “What we’re doing is working with them in a very orchestrated way to say, ‘Here’s how and when we’re delivering content to prospects,’ and they agree to be an active participant.”

Many enablement campaigns are set up to alert salespeople when the lead is ripe for contact. But with the right analytics in place—like knowing who clicked on a link, how much info they read, and whether or not they visited the company’s website recently—marketing teams can gauge if their content is effective.

At GreenRope, Ceresa sends targeted emails to leads, giving them a chance to sign up for a demo or trial. When the leads request more information, they’re included in a separate drip campaign that supplies valuable content to the reader.

“We are really strict about not spamming our users and ensuring they want the content that we provide,” Ceresa said.

Delivering that useful content serves two crucial purposes. In addition to qualifying leads for sales, it gives the marketing insight into audience behavior. “I can see what they’re most interested in,” Burak said. “We can see how much of the content they got though.”

Creating great content for sales

Most great sales-enablement content starts with planning. Marketers, who may be unaware of customer needs, sit down with the sales team to learn about the pain points and desires of the target audience.

“I work a lot with our sales team, which is important to make sure what we’re doing is actually going speak to [the customers’ needs],” Ceresa said, “as opposed to just throwing content out there and hoping people like it.”

As for what to create, content generally ranges from broader thought leadership pieces at the top of the funnel to more specific product- or service-based information toward the bottom, such as why a particular service works well.

At Rapt Media, Burak maps out her strategy in advance using a 70-20-10 breakdown. Seventy percent of content relates to practical advice, 10 percent accounts for high-level thought leadership pieces, and 20 percent of the output deals with mid-funnel activities like licensed reports and webinars that go over company products.

“Even if you don’t know the specifics about the content you’re going to produce, you can arrange and allocate your resources to support those content bunches,” Burak said.

Though this type of content may not lead to skyrocketing traffic, the B2B benefits that come in the form of qualified leads, higher conversion rates, and greater sales efficiency are more valuable than a viral hit.

“We’re finding that the leads are coming to us more ready to purchase,” Burak said.

And that’s content worth its weight in revenue.

The post Want ROI on Your B2B Content? Embrace Sales Enablement appeared first on Contently.

The year was 1994. While much of the world was busy listening to a new Green Day album called Dookie, Wiles, a professor at Princeton, had just solved one of the oldest riddles in mathematics—a conjecture written in the margins of a book by Pierre de Fermat in 1639:

No three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than two.

Fermat noted that the proof was too big to fit in the margins, and for 355 years, it remained a mystery. To find the solution, Wiles toiled for over six years in secrecy and won just about every award imaginable when he emerged with his proof. Here’s how he described his journey:

“Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark, unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it’s completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it’s all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark.”

That brings me back to marketing analytics. Two years ago, we turned on the light in the first room when we built an analytics suite that could reveal how people engage with web-based content, tracking everything from engaged time to scroll depth to scroll velocity.

But we knew there was another room that remained shrouded in darkness, especially for a B2B brand like us: How were people engaging with assets that didn’t live on a web page?

Brands spend a remarkable amount of money each year creating dark assets like white papers, slideshows, pricing worksheets, and sales collateral, to name a few. But once these assets make their way to download folders and inboxes all over the world, they are essentially lost. Are people actually reading them? Are they dropping off at a certain point? Do they share them within their organization?

For web-based content, we have answers to these questions. But when it comes to downloadable content, marketers—especially B2B marketers who rely heavily on this type of content—have still been stumbling over furniture in a dark room.

It’s an incredibly frustrating problem, and one of the biggest holes in content marketing analytics to date. Not only is it something we’ve struggled with when trying to help our clients, but it’s also something we’ve wanted to solve for our own content marketing efforts.

Luckily, however, we’ve found the light switch.

With last week’s acquisition of Docalytics, we’re adding document analytics to Contently’s content marketing platform. In other words, we’re now able to measure the success of all marketing and sales assets. We can measure everything from how much of a document someone read to heat maps of where they clicked to conversion success and much more. That means content creation and marketing budgets can be optimized based on detailed results, not just educated guesses. It’s also a huge value-add for other departments—now, our sales team can actually know how much a prospect read of that deck or case study as well as whether or not the prospect passed it along to any colleagues.

Moving forward, we’ll continue to embrace our inner Andrew Wiles. The vision of end-to-end tracking of all types of content, the fully lit and explored mansion, will continue to be our guide. Hopefully it won’t take us 355 years.

The post Turning on the Light in Content Analytics’ Dark Room appeared first on Contently.

Today I’m pleased to announce that we’ve crossed another milestone off the list: We’ve acquired our first company, Docalytics.

What is Docalytics?

The short story is that Docalytics is a technology company based in St. Paul, Minn., that provides sales and marketing teams with detailed data on how people engage with downloadable content like PDFs and sales materials.

The slightly longer version is that they’re a company of incredibly talented engineers as well. We knew we wanted to work with them right away. (Well, after seeing their product… and then getting to know them in an old-school Minnesota bowling alley.) Not because we go around wanting to acquire every company we come across, but because it was obvious that we’re a perfect match.

Why we’re excited

This acquisition launches the next phase of Contently and shifts how we’ll be working to influence the content industry as a whole.

Now more than ever, we stand behind our mission to make the media world a better place—to support freelance creatives, to empower brands, and to produce better content for everyday people. We still believe that great stories build relationships. But we understand that creating an organization propelled by great content marketing is a big investment, and brands need hard numbers to prove that their investment is paying off. Downloadable content has always been a key part of content marketing—especially for B2B brands—but until now, there hasn’t been a way to see how potential customers are interacting with that content.

That’s where our acquisition of Docalytics comes into play. Integrating Docalytics into our software will allow Contently customers to track engagement on downloadable content, thereby getting a deeper understanding of how well their content investment is paying off.

Smarter decisions around content

Our brand clients use content to achieve a diverse set of business objectives, ranging from brand awareness to conversions to driving new revenue streams. These goals need to be tracked with metrics beyond engagement time, metrics that measure exactly how leads are generated and converted.

In the words of the Ninja Turtles’ wise Master Splinter, “What you know is dangerous to your enemy; what you think you know is dangerous to yourself.” In other words, when it comes to content marketing, brands can’t compete if they’re basing decisions on guesswork. Contently Analytics helps brands remove this guesswork from their content marketing. It includes features like contributor analytics, benchmarks that compare content across brands, and data-driven recommendations in one centralized location. Now, with Docalytics, we’ve added the ability to track downloadable and emailed content. No one else does that.

We’re also welcoming aboard the members of Docalytics’ incredibly talented team. They’ll operate as employees of our new Midwest office, focused on continuing to grow our engineering team and Midwest sales efforts.

For our clients, this means:

• Key features added to the Contently platform, including the ability to track downloadable content, optimize lead capture forms, and integrate with marketing automation, CRM, and email marketing platforms.
• One centralized location for tracking, managing, and optimizing content production and performance.
• Understanding what content works to generate and convert more leads, helping both sales and marketing teams tie revenue directly to content.
• Flexible lead forms, which improve retention throughout the lead funnel and increase lead conversion rates.
• A larger product development team building and rolling out new features even faster than before.

Content everywhere

With our newly integrated software, we’re building what we’re calling “content everywhere” capabilities. This is centered around the concept that brands not only need to create great content on their own site, but they also need to be where their audiences are, from YouTube to email to LinkedIn.

This means integrating with the marketing systems that connect to these channels, and building a channel-specific experience for each step of the content process. Docalytics is supporting this by enhancing our integrations and our understanding of how specific pieces of content perform on each channel.

The ink just finished drying on the deal, but our engineers have been busy working hard on seamlessly integrating Docalytics into Contently Analytics. We’ll be making updates as we continue to build, but here’s a preview of what it’ll look like when it goes live in March. Notice the in-depth measurement of downloadable assets, including a heatmap, a breakdown of engagement by each page, downloads, sends, prints, and more.

Looking ahead

We think that enterprise companies will use content across every department, not just marketing. We’re seeing it already. We have clients using our platform to power high-level thought leadership content that supports brand awareness (PR), clients sharing bottom-funnel content to convert leads (sales), and clients using content to retain existing customers and help those customers succeed (account management).

Departments like HR, corporate comms, PR, and investor relations are using content to build relationships and meet business goals, and we’re building our technology to fill this need.

The Contently platform already supports sales teams that use content to build relationships, but we can do even more to help them use content as a tool. Docalytics is an important part of this sales enablement, as it helps track the success of content once it’s been downloaded or emailed.

One new company, one new celebrity pig

Along with Docalytics’ amazing software, Contently is also gaining access to YouTube sensation Hamlet the Minipig, who’s managed by Docalytics CTO Ryan Morlok. Hamlet, who has appeared on The Today Show and 30 Rock, will lead Contently’s influencer marketing efforts.

With our original to-do list officially completed (plus one celebrity pig), it’s time for us to tackle a whole new set of crazy dreams. We’ll be rolling out plenty more exciting news over the next few months. Without giving away too much, I can tell you that we’ll be continuing to build smart technology, doing it with integrity, and having some fun along the way.

The post We’re Bringing Data to Downloadable Content With a New Acquisition appeared first on Contently.

“I run my blog more like a television network,” Walker mentioned casually, as if this concept was intuitive. “Week to week, there’s a narrative that is very much like a TV show that’s in Serial format.”

Walker is editor-in-chief of the Shopify Plus blog, an editorial extension of the e-commerce software company. He uses a squad of vetted freelance and staff writers to publish stories that focus on technology, entrepreneurship, and marketing. As part of his process, Walker ensures the subject of each piece is well-researched, created for a specific audience, connected to other posts, and integrated into a cohesive distribution plan.

“This format helps people to tune on a regular basis and want to come back over and over again,” he said. “The reason television programming is called ‘programming’ is that you are programming people to come back.”

From e-commerce to publishing

Shopify was founded in 2004 to sell snowboards online. When the founders realized there was no existing software that could sell their product the way they wanted, they decided to build it themselves. Since then, what began as a five-person operation has become a comprehensive e-commerce platform for retail brands, representing over 200,000 online stores and responsible for over $12 billion in sales.

As Shopify has grown, so has its content strategy. In August 2015, the company expanded its online publication to cover enterprise-level solutions. In the introductory post, Walker declared the blog’s mission: “Write heavily-researched yet easy to understand essays to solve enterprise-level problems.”

The purpose was to provide engaging, informative, and actionable material specific to enterprises that could benefit from the new enterprise software product, Shopify Plus. The goal, as Walker clarified, was not just to cover topics that went over what works for enterprise companies, but to use “case studies, behavioral economics, buyer psychology, and industry data” to be able to tackle why certain tactics work.

Once Shopify honed in on the blog’s mission, it had an even bigger challenge: to reach the right audience.

Making a methodology

Walker’s process for conducting market research is technical and precise. In fact, it boils down to a near-science.

On LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, Walker finds enterprise CMOs, marketing directors, and other high-level executives, and scores them. Specifically, he evaluates them in two areas—knowledge and interaction—by rating them on scales of one to 10.

When calculating a knowledge score, Walker uses himself as a baseline score of five. If people share articles that help him learn new things on a certain topic, they get higher scores; basic content gets lower scores.

The interaction figure, meanwhile, rates the level of conversation, rather than the content itself. Administering a score, Walker determines if people are spamming the group, giving basic feedback (“Hey, great post!”), or responding with instructive and compelling replies.

By compiling the knowledge and interaction scores in a spreadsheet, Walker gets a clear idea of both the topics his target audience are immersed in and where to distribute Shopify’s original content.

For example, he found LinkedIn groups that discussed the speed of technological development, and when one person commented, “I remember when all we had to worry about were Facebook ads,” Walker landed on a topic he wanted to pursue, which led to “The Acceleration of Everything,” an article Walker wrote for Shopify before sharing it with those LinkedIn groups.

In addition to social group studying, Walker also follows trending hashtags in his Tweetdeck, reads Amazon reviews about similar products, and tags industry blogs in his Feedly as part of his audience research. “I follow these outlets to find out the cadence and the tonality that people are using,” he said. “With that information, I start to develop a marketing message … and construct a narrative that starts to stand out from that.”

The high-level strategy makes for a good quotation, but, when pressed about specifics, he revealed that the levers to influence people largely actually hinge on two crucial variables: age and culture.

“Culture is the thing that it comes down to and different age categories have specific cultures related to them,” Walker said. “You talk to someone from the ’60s and the media that influenced them is going to be vastly different than the media that influenced somebody who was born in the ’80s. Instead of looking at people as demographics, you need to understand what that demographic has actually been exposed to.”

In the case of this article on how rapper 2 Chainz made $2 million on Shopify in 30 days, the publication doesn’t just reference an iconic rapper to attract young demographic clicks. The in-depth case study also weaves in the history of hip hop, which is culturally relevant to some millennial entrepreneurs.

The inspiration for this approach came from Walker’s own experience as a music and movie buff. “All you have to do to appeal to me is play off that nostalgia and understand the editing and visual style of the things that I’ve grown up with.”

Turning data into consistency

When it comes to data, Shopify’s editorial operation focuses on four goals. Content meant to be shared, drive traffic and conversation, generate leads, or help sales.

According to Walker, each piece of content should have only one intention at a time. “If you’re creating a piece of content to be shared, every word you write needs to have that as part of its intent,” he said. “Because then you start turning phrases in a way that makes people go, ‘Oh, man, I really want to share this.'”

Shopify’s team uses this approach to structure the editorial calendar, making sure there’s a balance of all four types of content. The framework also helps Walker establish themes and consistency. For example, the site publishes multiple stories on one topic over time. Last August, Shopify published an article titled, “Add to Cart: How to Get More People to Take Action on Product Pages.” A week later came “How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment by Optimizing the Checkout.” Seven days later, there was a third installment: “Designing The New Customer Experience: What Happens After Checkout?” Then the site wrapped up the series with “How To Create a Memorable and Shareable Unboxing Experience for Your Brand.”

Four stories by three different writers over a four-week period.

“We’re creating this sort of universe where shares, comments, generated leads, and sales work together strategically because everything around that content calendar is designed towards very specific goals, but each piece is also bringing people toward other parts of the network.”

The result is a narrative in which each article can stand on its own but still leaves you wanting more—just like episodes from your favorite TV show.

Making a scene

Before Tommy Walker was an editor, he worked as an actor for 10 years. Being on camera and creating content for CMOs may not have much in common at first glance, but to Walker, his background has significantly influenced Shopify’s content strategy.

As Walker sees it, analyzing enterprise markets and dissecting scripts have a lot in common. While actors fill in the blanks by assessing dialogue and scene direction, marketers follow hashtags to pick up on industry and demographic trends. Ultimately, both are in the business of storytelling, relying on research to appeal to audiences.

“I firmly believe that we view the computer no differently than we did televisions or movie screens of the past. In marketing, we’re creating entertainment more than anything else,” he explained. “The idea of branding just came from building a character.”

The post ‘I Run My Blog More Like a Television Network’: Inside Shopify’s Next-Level Newsroom appeared first on Contently.

Last summer, however, HubSpot got on the wrong side of the news when it fired its CMO, fined its CEO, and watched its VP of content resign after word got out that high-level employees had violated the company’s ethics policies trying to get a manuscript of a critical tell-all book written by Dan Lyons, who worked at HubSpot as a marketing fellow for two years.

In the immediate aftermath, one of the world’s largest inbound marketing hubs had to undergo a major shift in leadership. Enter Kipp Bodnar, who worked as HubSpot’s VP of marketing for two years before inheriting the title of CMO. Following the departures of the executives, Bodnar had his work cut out for him—he needed to make people forget about the scandal and restore their faith in the company as one of the smartest players in marketing.

Since filling the role in July, Bodnar has put an emphasis on nurturing HubSpot’s loyal audience while continuing to use content that focuses on testing and innovation. We spoke to him about his responsibility to educate the marketing community, how HubSpot integrates content across departments, and why email marketing could fade quicker than you might think.

You inherited quite a sticky PR situation this past summer. Did content play a role in protecting Hubspot during the media firing squad?

I think what we’re really talking about is content going beyond marketing. Every organization in the company is responsible.

Some of the most important and popular content we’ve ever created is around our company culture. If you look at one of our most successful pieces ever viewed it’s our culture code text that co-founder Dharmesh Shah put together. It outlines the values and the culture of HubSpot, and I think that’s why it has been viewed millions of times.

I’ve definitely read that.

Right, it’s a great piece of content. It serves a marketing purpose, but it’s not a marketing purpose to generate new revenue to the business. It’s actually an even more important marketing purpose, which is to bring on really amazing and educated people who are in line with the core values and mission of the company. Our support team is just really awesome. They create a massive amount of content to make sure our customers have really quick access to the answers they need.

How have you led HubSpot as its new CMO?

My job is to help be a steward for the entire marketing industry because we hold an educational role—a trusted role—to help marketing and sales professionals learn best practices, but also the new trends and changes in the industry.

We’re a decade into inbound marketing, and I think we’re starting to see some shifts. It’s not inconceivable that there is a world where marketers could get more traffic from Slack than email in a couple years. It’s our job to understand those things and help educate folks on that. I think there’s a lot of changing trends in the marketing industry, and it’s my core responsibility to help be a steward for them and the industry at large.

How is content marketing different from 10 years ago?

I think if you look at the first decade of content marketing, you’ll find a major increase in transparency and trust. The buying process fundamentally changed.

People have become more reliant on user reviews and articles they’ve read on search engines than to a sales rep holding them hostage. Inbound marketing became a massive part of the entire buyer awareness and education process. A key part of that was blogging, and then came social media and, in recent years, infographics—much more visual content. Now there’s audio in the terms of podcasts and video in the terms of Facebook and YouTube.

How do you convince management to invest more in technology and services that can empower your content marketing?

Everybody has a quarterly goal, monthly goals, annual goals—they have very clear goals they’re trying to accomplish. A marketer’s job is to help them understand that leveraging content is going to align with those goals in very specific ways. It’ll enable them to over-achieve those goals because it’s a more efficient method of marketing.

How do you connect content strategy and social channel engagement to ROI?

For social, we look at if we are expanding our awareness and our reach at the top of our social media funnel. Are more people connecting with us on networks or are more people engaging with us? Because that’s going to grow our community.

We also want to understand how that community is turning into customers, so we’re looking at site visits, lead conversions and, ultimately, conversions into customers, as our metric for how successful we’re doing on social media.

There’s other things that you want to take in and consider, but, ultimately, when you’re thinking about allocating marketing dollars and allocating people’s time, you need some very specific revenue metrics to make those decisions.

How do you gauge the impact of individual pieces of content as part of this collective machine?

There’s a bunch of different content formats, messages, and strategies that are designed to accomplish different things. Our podcast is deeply engaging with a core audience of marketing and sales leaders, while on our core marketing blog, we’re a little more focused on reaching a large portion of the marketing-practitioner audience. For that reason, we care more about raw visits on that blog than we do raw number of listeners on the podcast episode.

The rise of podcast in the last year or two is really interesting to me. What stage of the buyer’s journey do you think it satisfies?

Podcasting is really just delivering audio via some type of subscription feed. So, it can accomplish anything. You could have a podcast that’s just dedicated to your customers—the people who have already paid you money—because you want them to be happy and get more value out of the product or service you’re offering. In that case, it’s the very bottom of that marketing funnel.

I think different people, different companies, use them for different purposes. It’s really the content and the message that you’re delivering through that platform that ultimately determines where it’s going to have that impact.

How can marketers take the customer from the early awareness stage and move them further along, like you’re saying, to this conversion stage?

What you really have to do is talk to people who have purchased your product. Understand what they used in that consideration process, what was most effective for them, and when it was effective to receive that information. Based on that buyer’s journey, you can build out targeted nurturing for buyer personas who are aware of the company but need some deeper education.

Verbal conversations are really important when you are trying to uncover information. As a marketer, you don’t want to go into those conversations assuming that you know exactly what every prospecting customer needs to make this decision. I need to have the ability to dig in and say, “Oh, so you came to our website. What pages specifically did you look at on our website? Was there anything that was specifically helpful? Did you know how to configure the price for the product that you’re looking for?” That’s really hard to do in an environment that’s not a one-to-one conversation.

What does the evolution of content marketing tell us about where we are headed?

If you look forward, I think you’re really seeing a decentralization of content.

If you’re a company today and you’re doing content well, you’re doing it across a lot of different platforms and in a lot of different formats. Just because someone reads your blog might not mean that they also watch your Facebook videos or they also subscribe to your podcasts. So you have different touch points with different people in your community.

What is the biggest trend approaching the marketing world? Or maybe one that’s already here?

It went from email to collaborative documents like Google and Box and Dropbox, and now we’re adopting Slack and WhatsApp and all of these different collaboration tools. I think that how teams collaborate and share information with each other is likely going to change, and that impacts how a marketer reaches those teams.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

The post How HubSpot’s CMO Stays Ahead of Content Marketing Disruption appeared first on Contently.