To get those insights, you need to make use of the best marketing analytics tool for your goals. The features that tool needs will vary depending on what those goals are. It’s less about finding one tool with all the features listed in this article and more about seeing which of these components fit your needs.

1. A user interface you can actually use

Here’s probably the most important quality a content analytics tool should have: You can actually use it.

Some tools like GA4, the newest version of Google Analytics, offer a ton of powerful features. You can get nearly real-time insights into big-picture topics like what a typical user journey looks like or dive into granular information like how many viewers scrolled through at least 90 percent of the content on a sign-up form page.

Unfortunately for everyone who’s not an analytics expert, understanding GA4’s user interface can feel like trying to read a dead language. Luckily there are marketing analytics tools out there built with ease of use in mind — there’s been a lot of good things said about Plausible, for instance. That and similar tools make great options if you’re looking for something to tell you how your content is performing at a glance.

2. Audience analytics beyond the basics

Successful content marketing is all about crafting pieces specific to your audience’s needs, preferences, and motivations. Good luck doing that if you don’t know who your audience is, though.

That means you need a tool with a solid audience analytics component. Most website analytics tools can give you a basic overview about things like the age and gender of web visitors. If you’re using a customer relationship management platform, though, you can get extremely deep insights through tools like Salesforce’s Audience Studio. The better you design your buyer persona, the better content you can produce.

3. Info on user behavior and experience

A lot of content marketing analytics tools can show you user journeys and content funnels, letting you determine what pages your readers entered and exited. That’s important information, but trying to understand a user’s experience that way is like trying to visit a city by looking at it on a map.

You can get a user-eye view of how people engage with the content on your site by using tools with heat maps and user session recordings. Heat maps are just what they sound like – they show where users are scrolling, clicking, and engaging the most with your content. User session recordings can show you actual recordings of users navigating a certain page. That means you can see from their perspective exactly what’s working or not working with your content.

If you’re looking for website analytics tools specializing in these areas, check out Contently’s Docalytics tool. You can use it to not only optimize your case studies, white papers, or blog posts, but improve the conversion rates of your landing pages for gated content as well.

4. Competitive keyword analysis

You can’t stand out from your competitors if you don’t know what they’re doing. Some analytics tools have features letting you track how your competitors’ content is doing compared to yours based on different variables. That means you can see how they’re ranking for different keywords you’re targeting, as well as where they’re earning backlinks.

Based on this information, you can determine where the whitespace is for upcoming content, helping ensure your editorial calendar stays unique. You can also determine what battles are worth fighting when it comes to certain keywords or phrases you’re trying to rank for – some may just not be worth the effort.

5. An SEO strategy assist

The key to successful SEO content is, first and foremost, quality content. That doesn’t mean the technical side of things doesn’t matter. You’re going to need a tool that lets you see how your site is ranking for various keywords, gives you word count recommendations to make sure you’re not publishing thin content, and whether broken links are torpedoing your traffic.

The good news is you’ve got a lot of great options here. Contently offers a ton of tools for planning out your SEO keywords using cost-per-click insights, info on search volumes, and more. Most of the other big players in this space like Moz or SEMRush will let you get some basic info like keyword suggestions for free.

6. Breezy reporting capabilities

Like most of you, I’m sure, I find the most rewarding part of content marketing is making decks showing how different assets are performing. I love it so much and don’t find struggling with Powerpoint soul-crushing in the slightest.

For real, though, a lot of different content marketing tools can generate automatic reports or dashboards that are easy to understand and visually interesting. That lets you spend less time wrangling decks and more time on the valuable parts of your job.

7. Channel performance data

Audiences are scattered across so many different channels these days. LinkedIn. TikTok. X (yeah, still, I know). However, not every content marketing tool is suited for tracking how different pieces are performing on social media.

The built-in analytics available on individual social media platforms offer some info, but that can make it hard to get a consolidated view of how your content is doing across each channel. Platforms like Sprout Social or Hootsuite can help bring together multiple channels into a single view.

Wrapping it up

Finding the right content analytics tool is a process, and knowing what to look for will help you align your needs with a product’s offerings. Contently’s content optimization tools could be what you’re looking for. If so, contact us to set up a product demo.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs

What role do content marketing analytics play when building out individual pieces of content?

Analytics tools can do more than just give you the lowdown on what keywords to include in your copy. You can use them to develop a better understanding of your audience, which is the foundation good content is built upon. Done right, the best marketing analytics tools help you write content that people and search engines will love.

What are some actual examples of how I could use heatmaps to improve content?

Let’s say you’re looking at a heatmap and notice a bunch of people clicking on an image. This may indicate that these users are expecting that picture to be linked to a different page – and that they’re getting frustrated when their clicks do nothing. That’s exactly what we saw when using heatmaps to review content. Fixing this led to a better user experience.

Other than analytics, what are some of the best ways I can get to know my audience better?

Marketing analytics tools aren’t the be-all-end-all for developing a better understanding of your audience. Make sure you’re regularly reading reviews, conducting surveys, and monitoring social media to see who your readers are and what they’re talking about.

Are you ready to build a data-driven content strategy? Contently Analytics has you covered.

The post 7 Features the Best Marketing Analytics Tools Will Have appeared first on Contently.

Technical SEO, on the other hand, might not be as fully understood. We know it’s important, but it’s often left up to SEO or IT teams, who may (or may not) have a comprehensive understanding of the broader marketing strategy. But that doesn’t mean content marketers can’t grasp and implement the basics of technical SEO to complement a great marketing strategy.

Why Does Technical SEO Matter to Content Marketers?

As you likely already know, SEO is key to online success. In fact, nearly 50% of shoppers today begin their research with Google—so ranking on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) can offer serious opportunities to reach your ideal customers.

That’s where technical SEO comes in. When you optimize your website’s tech aspects, you make it easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl, and rank it.

These behind-the-scenes tweaks might not be flashy, but creating a faster, more mobile- and crawler-friendly website can help your page rank closer to the top of the search results. Even if you have the best content in the world, if no web traffic stops by, you might as well be writing on paper and then tucking it away in a desk drawer.

So, if you want more eyeballs on your site, you need to do two things — create quality content and follow these technical SEO recommendations — to set your site apart from competitors.

Get Cozy With Google Search Console

First, take some time to get comfortable with using Google Search Console. It offers insights into your website’s overall performance—from the keywords it’s ranking for to how to fix performance issues and how it stacks up against competitors.

It’s especially handy for SEO recommendations related to your site’s Core Web Vitals, a report that uses field data—aka data from real-world users—to gauge the performance of various URLs on your site.

The report has much to do with site and page speed or how fast a page loads. According to Google, when a site meets the Core Web Vitals threshold, users are 24% less likely to abandon it before it loads. (After all, it’s not 1998 – we’ve gotten used to our internet moving lightning fast.) Following SEO recommendations to achieve better Core Web Vitals can also lead to:

• Increased page views per session
• Longer sessions per visit
• Lower bounce rates

A faster website means a better user experience. Combine a fast site with useful, interesting content, and you can improve consumer sentiments surrounding your brand, keep visitors on your website longer, and, ultimately, boost sales or conversions.

Embrace Structured Data and Schema Markups

Here’s where things get, well, a bit technical. However, as a marketing professional (who may have a limited understanding of coding), you can still use structured data and schema markups to your advantage.

Structured data uses a language called schema markups to explain the information on a webpage so search engines can easily understand it. Schema helps search engines crawl your website; it explains to Google and the other search engines what they can expect to find in the content that follows the code.

Basically, structured data is like adding labels to different parts of a webpage to tell search engines what each piece of information is about. For example, in a recipe, schema markups can tell Google which section contains the list of ingredients, which part contains the cooking time, and so on. Helpful, right?

By using structured data and schema markups, we can give search engines more context about a website’s content (try saying that 10 times fast). This helps search engines display richer search results, improving the user experience and making it easier for people to find what they’re looking for online.

People often forget useful SEO recommendations like using Schema markups. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to use structured data to help your website get found by search engines.

Schema Made Simple

Even though Schema has been around for a while, it’s still highly relevant to SEO recommendations. One experiment found that twice as many sites with schema markups gained rankings in search engine results.

Check out Schema.org, where you can find a list of coding terms that can help your SEO; it was founded in 2011 by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to provide a common language that leads to better and more consistent search results, and it has all kinds of schema types available for you to browse.

Pro tip: You can easily add schema markups to your website using WordPress plugins like Schema Pro. These plugins automate markups and can also create Custom Fields.

Know Your Link Strategy

A strong internal link-building strategy is one of the basics of a good SEO strategy. When creating a new piece of content, think about other content on your site that is valuable, relevant, and related to the piece you’re writing to include as a hyperlink. For example, if you’re writing about savings accounts and mention compound interest, linking to an article on the topic would help your readers understand the bigger picture.

Many SEO recommendations suggest five to 10 internal links for every 2,000 words of content, which is roughly one link for every 200 words.

You can add links to your higher-traffic pages to support them or lower-traffic pages to boost them. But don’t overdo it! Adding too many links could distract, overwhelm or divert your reader from reaching the CTA.

It’s also worth it to run a check every once in a while to make sure you’re not linking to URLs that have been changed, deleted or moved. These “dead links” do nothing to help your search ranking and decrease readability.

Understanding External Links/Backlinks

External links/backlinks are another matter altogether. They come in two forms:

• Outbound links, which go from your web page to an external authoritative page
• Inbound links, which go from another authoritative site to your content

Let’s first talk about the ones we can control: Outbound links.

Outbound Links

If you’re writing about a topic, you can add links to pages that aren’t part of your site. These outbound links give readers more information on the topic from an authoritative source, like a government site or scientific study. When you’re linking to other sites, choose ones that:

• Don’t compete with yours
• Have credibility as a primary or authoritative source
• Are trustworthy

If the site doesn’t meet these requirements, but you still want to link to it – for instance, in the case of a sponsorship—add a “nofollow” link. Google won’t acknowledge that you linked to the page, but your readers can find it with a click.

Inbound links

Just as you want to link to authoritative sites, you want other sites to link to your content as a helpful resource, too. Google frowns upon link trading, buying links, or other ways of securing links that do not happen organically. It considers them “Link spam”; you should mark them with “nofollow” or risk being penalized. So keep an eye on your backlinks (using your trusty Google Search console or other tool) to make sure you’re in line with Google’s rules.

Instead, you can offer to post guest blogs on relevant sites or ask partners or influencers to link to you. If another site references your content—such as the results of a survey or study—you can reach out and ask if they can add a backlink. Similarly, if someone posts a positive review of your brand on their website, ask them for a link.

Effective link-building is a lot of work, but it can offer a valuable boost in rankings.

Link Disavowal

If Google sends you a scary-looking manual action for “unnatural links,” you can log into Google Search Console and browse the list of sites that link to you for the offending links. You can then request that Google disregard those links. There’s no guarantee that Google will do what you ask, and this may impact your search rankings—for better or worse—but it’s better than having bad links slowly tank your rankings.

Put in the Time to Become a Technical SEO Pro

Following technical SEO recommendations requires patience, attention to detail, and determination—especially if you have to level up your knowledge along the way. But just like any other skill, mastering it adds value and insight to your content.

Don’t Skip the Technical SEO Audit

Most people’s shoulders tense up with the mention of the word “audit,” but in this case, it just means assessing the technical SEO methods your site already uses, how well it uses them, and what you could implement to improve it. If you feel like you might need some help along the way, there are always technical SEO consultants providing technical SEO services and plentiful online resources to help you out.

If you install the correct schema markup plugins, understand how to use the Google Search Console, and develop a solid link-building strategy, you are well on your way to climbing those rankings and reaching your audience.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQS About Technical SEO

What are the potential risks of relying solely on automated tools for technical SEO, and how can content marketers mitigate these risks?

Relying solely on automated tools for technical SEO may overlook nuanced issues that require manual intervention. Content marketers should supplement automated tools with manual audits and regular checks to ensure comprehensive optimization and mitigate the risk of overlooking critical issues.

How does user-generated content (UGC) impact technical SEO, and what strategies can content marketers employ to leverage UGC effectively for search visibility?

User-generated content can enrich websites with fresh and diverse content, potentially impacting technical SEO factors such as keyword density and content structure. Content marketers can encourage UGC through interactive features and community engagement, optimizing user-generated content for relevant keywords and ensuring proper technical implementation for search visibility.

What role does mobile optimization play in technical SEO, and how can content marketers ensure seamless user experiences across different devices?

Content marketers can ensure seamless user experiences across devices by implementing responsive design, optimizing page speed, and testing website performance on various mobile devices and screen sizes.

How do content distribution channels outside of search engines, such as social media platforms, impact technical SEO efforts, and what strategies can content marketers employ to maximize visibility across these channels?

Content distribution channels like social media platforms can indirectly impact technical SEO through increased brand visibility and referral traffic. Content marketers can maximize visibility across these channels by optimizing content for social sharing, engaging with relevant communities, and leveraging social media analytics to refine content distribution strategies for better search visibility.

Looking for more information on SEO best practices? Subscribe to The Content Strategist and follow us on Instagram.

The post What Is Technical SEO and How Does It Impact Content Performance? appeared first on Contently.

Creating this type of content is more of an art than a science, but there are general guidelines you can follow to help you out along the way. Here are some tips for writing a white paper, from choosing a topic to sharing your content with the world.

1. Choose a compelling topic

White paper topics should focus on things people actually want to read about. This seems obvious, but finding the right topic can be your biggest challenge. First, figure out who your audience is; who are you trying to reach? Then, choose an issue that’s interesting to them — perhaps a common problem they’re faced with, or a case study of successful companies in your industry.

Contently recently helped a staffing agency put together a white paper on the current talent landscape. It offered data and insights on how to attract talent, interview candidates, onboard employees, and keep staff happy for the long run. That’s exactly the type of insight the agency’s audience of employers needs to help fill roles. Plus, the white paper positioned the staffing agency as a go-to expert on talent recruitment.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to find white paper topics that will resonate with your audience. Take a look at the topics of content you’ve already created, like blogs, social media posts, and podcast episodes, for inspiration.

2. Write an outline

While you might be able to wing it with a blog post, long-form content like white papers require more planning. Knowing how to write a white paper outline can help you organize your content in a coherent way and make sure you cover the topic thoroughly.

Here are some common sections of white papers you can consider including in your outline:

• Executive summary
• Introduction and background
• Description of the problem (or problems) the paper will address
• Solutions
• Recommendations
• Conclusions
• References

Making sure your white paper is organized upfront can save you a lot of time at the writing stage. It will help you focus on exactly what you need to cover and where.

3. Gather your references

Writing a white paper requires you to use a variety of different materials to make your points clearly and effectively. Gather up everything you’ll need to lay out the problem and proposed solutions. This can include:

• Case studies
• Surveys
• Internal data
• Industry reports
• Research from third parties
• Historical information
• Academic studies

Some brands also include quotes from their executives or leaders to emphasize points and expertise in their white papers. If that’s a strategy that makes sense for your content, this would be a good time to conduct interviews or ask for quotes.

Having your research and references ready to go can streamline the writing process. You can focus your attention on craft and form rather than trying to dig up another source. Keep the materials organized by subtopic and where you expect to use them in your outline.

4. Craft an attention-grabbing intro

Be captivating when writing a white paper introduction. You want to catch people’s attention right off the bat. Pique their interest, and then tell them what they’re going to learn by reading your white paper. This means writing a summary of your white paper and including an organized list of topics.

Emphasize the value you will create. Your white paper is not a billboard for your business — it is an opportunity to create an image of expertise and insight that will help your readers.

Not sure where to start? Take a look at the most compelling statistics you found in your research. You can use a staggering number that illustrates the problem you’re covering or solution you’re proposing as the hook for your introduction.

5. Start writing

Armed with a body of research and a captivating introduction, you’re ready to start writing a white paper. Get your thoughts down while they are still fresh in your mind. Just start writing.

Your white paper can be as little as five to six pages long or extend well beyond 25 pages, depending on the subject matter and depth of the content. If you’re used to writing shorter pieces of content, it can feel overwhelming to try to fill all those pages.

That’s where your outline can come in handy, though. Think of each section as its own mini piece of content.

Be descriptive and professional. Writing a white paper is not the same as writing a blog. You need to use a business writing style and be fairly descriptive.

In your conclusion, explain how your company can help. If you are selling a product or service that will help your readers, make sure to mention it at the end. You shouldn’t use the body of the white paper to sell your product or service, so make sure to use a catch that is naturally incorporated when you summarize the paper.

Don’t worry about editing until you have completed the draft. You will have no problem going back and making everything flow well afterward. If you can’t think of ways to make a smooth transition between sections in your first draft, you can add them later.

6. List your sources

Citing your sources is not only important for crediting the sources of the research you used — it also helps establish transparency and credibility to your white paper. Showing that you looked at high-quality reports and research helps build trust with your audience.

You have a few different options for citing sources in a white paper. For its white paper, “Why Learning is Pivotal to Business Transformation,” Conduent used footnotes at the bottom of each page. This method gives white papers a more academic feel without interrupting the flow of the text.

You could cite your sources at the end in a “references section.” While this minimizes visual distractions in your white paper, it comes with the trade-off of forcing readers to flip to the end to see where you got your material.

Some white papers opt to use in-text citations. It’s a more editorial style that can make your white paper read like a magazine story. However, it adds a lot of extra words to the text, so avoid this method if you have tons of sources to cite.

The method you use depends on the style of your white paper and your audience. But as long as you cite your sources clearly and consistently, you’re in good shape.

7. Proofread your white paper

After writing your white paper, it’s time to break out your (digital) red pen and proofread it to perfection. Go back over your draft and see what needs to be done to make it read better.

Ask for other people’s opinions, because they may be able to catch mistakes you overlooked. Read it out loud to ensure there are no run-on sentences or awkward phrases.

If you have the budget, consider contracting with a professional editor or proofreader to give it a final read. A white paper is a powerful sales and marketing tool, so you’ll want to make sure it’s polished, professional, and free of typos.

8. Invest in a visually stunning design

The design of your white paper can make a big difference in motivating people to read it. Don’t take the term ‘white paper’ too literally — it’s often full of color and design elements that make it more enjoyable to read.

Start by choosing a clean and professional layout that aligns with your brand’s identity. Use consistent fonts, colors, and formatting throughout the white paper to maintain consistency. Make sure your heading and subheadings stand out to increase readability.

Break up big blocks of text with other visual elements. Images can go a long way to driving a point home and keeping your audience engaged. Incorporate graphs and charts to help data stand out. You can also use pull quotes from leaders at your brand to build expertise throughout the white paper.

Pay particular attention to your title page, too. It should include your company logo, the title of your white paper, and an eye-catching photo or image. This is your chance to make a great first impression, so use this space wisely.

9. Put it out in the world

After you’ve put the final touches on your white paper, it’s time to publish and distribute it. Promote the white paper to your network. Create enticing teasers to generate curiosity and drive traffic to a dedicated landing page where visitors can download the white paper in exchange for their contact information. This turns your white paper into lead-generating content.

Consider collaborating with industry influencers or partners to expand your reach and tap into their networks. This helps your white paper reach a wider audience and make a bigger impact.

You can also repurpose the content from your white paper to make it even more engaging. The insurance company Travelers transformed its white paper on managing the risks of AI into a multimedia webinar. Get creative, and think about ways to turn your white paper content into social media posts, videos, infographics, and even podcast episodes. It gives your audience more ways to interact with the content you’ve worked hard to create.

Writing a white paper is your brand’s chance to shine like a beacon of authority. With strategic planning, compelling content, and a striking design, you can grow your audience and spark genuine interest in what your brand has to offer.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs About Writing a White Paper

How can a brand measure the effectiveness of a white paper after it has been published?

Brands can measure effectiveness through metrics like downloads, social shares, and website traffic, while gathering feedback through surveys or feedback forms to assess reader satisfaction and comprehension.

What are some common pitfalls to avoid when writing a white paper?

Common pitfalls include lack of clarity in defining objectives, overloading with technical jargon, insufficient evidence, neglecting audience interests, and ignoring visual appeal.

How can brands ensure that their white paper content remains relevant and up-to-date in a rapidly evolving industry landscape?

To maintain relevance, brands should monitor industry trends, update content regularly, engage with experts for fresh perspectives, and encourage feedback from readers.

If you’re looking for more examples of great content, check out Contently’s case studies page.

The post Writing a White Paper Like a Pro: 9 Essential Steps for Success appeared first on Contently.

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

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

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

Slack | The State of Work Report

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

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

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

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

Buffer | The Science of Social Media

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

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

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

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

Blendtec | Will it Blend?

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

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

Bumble | The BFF Tour

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

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

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

Dell Technologies’ Perspectives | Girl Scouting for the STEM Age

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

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

Squanch Games | Branded subreddit and discord

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

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

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

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

My teacher had a charming way of wording things in English because her personal vocabulary was like a complicated French-accented soup: a linguistic bouillabaisse. That’s how complex and lovely things can get when you pour in terms from multiple cultures. In the marketing world, professionals tend to glom onto useful marketing buzzwords as a shared language, and those terms can actually prove useful to professionals in adjacent industries.

As the marketing and media industries continue to look more and more alike, their lexicons overlap too. Ultimately, marketers and media employees want the same thing—engaged audience members—but we’ve all been taught to talk about attention and audience using industry-specific terms.

For all you media folks out there who are planning a switch to marketing, we’ve put together an introductory translation dictionary for you. You can also use this dictionary as a lead tool, if you’re a marketing exec who wants to hire a team of Pulitzer Prize-winning writers for your brand’s blog. You’ll need to speak their language to recruit them, and veteran newspaper reporters don’t necessarily know what “map against your KPIs” means.

No matter why you’re reading this, these thirteen alphabetically listed terms should help you communicate across the divide. So let’s get started!

Call to action (CTA)

A call to action (CTA) is a bit of language in a blog post or piece of content that prompts the audience to do something specific.

The primary difference between marketing and the mainstream media (which I’ll call MSM from here on out) is that every single piece of marketing content should require a specific action on the part of the reader, even if that action is just”read more”. For a brand, it’s not enough if 1,000 people read a blog post—those people need to click through to more content, subscribe to an email newsletter, or make a purchase. Content marketers never make content for content’s sake.

Meanwhile, a media company like Hearst might publish a feature article in the print edition of Esquire magazine, and the sole “point” of that article might be “make the reader feel like they really get Chris Evans.” Functionally, it’s fluff. Artistically, it’s likely reaching for the standard of a classic celebrity profile like “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

To many, injecting a CTA into a piece of writing is to sully the art form. A CTA is what makes a piece into “sponcon,” or sponsored content. But increasingly, CTAs are looking like useful tools for the MSM. Many media companies have begun putting CTAs on their websites—the pop-up warning you that you’ve reached your third free article for the month and will soon need a paid subscription is one example. A lead form for a magazine’s free email newsletter is another.

CMP

A content marketing platform (CMP) is software for organizing the content marketing process. It looks a lot like a CMS (content management system), but a CMP is designed to help marketers do their jobs effectively. A CMS, on the other hand, serves many different kinds of professionals at once.

Most writers at media companies simply use the CMS as a place to paste in their writing. At media companies run by tech executives like Bustle Media Group, writers may routinely use a CMS for social packaging and basic SEO metadata too, but they still typically turn to platforms like Parse.ly and Chartbeat if they’re interested in their audience metrics.

Over in marketing world, all that audience data is usually baked into a CMP. At least, it’s there if you’re using a good one. You wouldn’t buy a CMP without data reporting capability, and the really stellar options have a transparent workflow management interface.

Content campaign

A content campaign is a plan for the strategic use of content marketing around a specific goal. This one is a pretty one-to-one translation of “editorial package.” I heard colleagues say “package” and “packaging” constantly while writing for magazines and media companies, and now that I’m in marketing, everyone says “campaign.” Why? No idea. But there’s your translation.

Just like an editorial package, a content campaign is a multi-format publishing plan that might comprise social media posts, videos, gifs, email newsletters, press releases, merchandising, print media, and blog posts. It is the central effort of several content-adjacent teams to get people’s eyeballs on a particular piece of content.

Data-driven

A data-driven strategy or program refers back to data gathered from different avenues on a brand’s target audience. In the MSM, journalists who routinely parse out study findings and crunch numbers in order to report on them often self-identity as data journalists. Not every journalist is a data journalist—that’s how Nate Silver was able to create FiveThirtyEight with a central data-breakdown “gimmick.”

It may be difficult to work as a journalist in the MSM without having any knowledge of statistics, but it is completely impossible to do similar work in marketing without those skills. Though a lot of media still relies heavily on anecdotal evidence like interviews, opinions, or criticism, marketing lives and breathes data.

In the mainstream media, one celebrity’s personal experience with divorce is a compelling enough story to stand on its own. No MSM writer is going to interrupt their lede about Bradley Cooper and Irina Shayk divorcing to dig deep into the national divorce rate, but a content marketer at a dating app company probably pumps out a blog post per week on that data.

Gamification

Gamification is a psychological trick that inspires us to enter sweepstakes, pour hours into Candy Crush, and buy all our lotions at Sephora just to watch those loyalty points rack up. (Just me?) Even if you’re not a marketer, you’re probably familiar with the concept of gamification—it’s the way brands turn engagement into a game-like process that rewards active players with little incentives.

Some especially savvy media companies have played with gamification in recent years. Inverse.com’s email newsletter reward habitual readers by racking up points, which readers can spend in the media company’s webstore. The New York Times has published several stories that use interactive UX designs, and these psychologically “reward” readers for clicking around with funny animations. This gamification of a company’s own website is also a hallmark in data visualization journalism like the stories on FiveThirtyEight.

Hub and spoke

To use a hub and spoke model in content marketing is to center all pieces of content around a single enterprise project. It’s a metaphor: there’s a hub at the center of a bicycle wheel, and each spoke that supports the shape of the tire connects back to that central hub. Content marketers like to advise writers to focus on a “hub” piece—usually a longform e-book or whitepaper—and then build supporting pieces of content around it, like spokes.

If a writer in the MSM were to write a single definitive feature story and then spend the next few weeks writing short blog posts about the same story, well, they’d be accused of being derivative. There’s a vast cavern between reporting on a beat and repeating yourself, and that’s what keeps “hub and spoke” out of the minds of most media writers. The only time you’ll see editorial strategy of this kind in the MSM is if a newsroom is particularly attached to search traffic (as marketers are). When I worked at Inverse, a website modeled after Bryan Goldberg’s now-ubiquitous “search-driven” strategy, we called hub and spoke strategy “topic swarming.”

Ideation

Ideation just means pitching or brainstorming. Sometimes marketers use a ten dollar word when a ten cent word will do. (See also: “utilize” and “leverage” when you could just say “use.”)

Journalistic

To be “journalistic” in your content marketing work means that you operate “somewhat like a journalist.” You technically interview people at your company and write Q&As. You apply for press passes to trade conventions and cover them the way a journalist would cover a convention. It’s a sliding scale, though. Occasionally, “being journalistic” means you are close to a journalist as a bottle of orange Gatorade is to an orange.

Here’s the thing, though, and I say this from experience: a lot of professional writers in the MSM are just as “journalistic” as content marketers. If you cover the film industry, for instance, and you’re not at a trade publication, chances are you’re not actually breaking “stories” as often as you are publishing explainers and breaking down fan theories. That kind of writing is closer to “making content” than it is to “doing good journalism.” So in this case, marketers just found an apt word to describe a multi-industry phenomenon.

KPIs

Your key performance indicators (KPIs) are a group of measurable values that demonstrate how swiftly a marketing department is working toward its business objectives. Example: if your business objective is to increase your brand’s sales enablement program, your KPI for that goal might be “we will produce twenty four new marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) this quarter.”

Sidenote: you might be wondering why KPIs are “key” performance indicators instead of just “performance indicators.” The answer is that marketers love to say the word “key.” You’re not just gathering coworkers in a room—you’re inviting key stakeholders. You’re not just telling an audience what a slideshow is going to involve—you’re giving them key takeaways. Don’t ask me why “key” is key—it’s just one of those marketing industry mysteries we don’t talk about, like “how did they get Henry Rollins to speak at Content Marketing World?!” and “why am I the only one in this office who washes their own coffee mug?!”

ROI

You’ll often hear marketers ask for a project or story’s demonstrated return-on-investment (ROI), which is just a fancy way of asking, “How did this do?” If you’re a MSM writer or editor, you might associate ROI with audience metrics like page clicks and social shares.

Marketers tend to have a deeper understanding of ROI because they wear more hats than the average writer at a website or magazine. At a media company, functions like social media strategy, newsletters, video, UX design, SEO, and aud dev are typically split across a team of people, but in a content marketing department, everyone does a bit of everything. That’s why all marketers are responsible for proving ROI on their work, whereas writers are often just told how their stories are doing by other teams.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of formatting online content according to parameters set by Google’s algorithm, in order to make that content appear higher on a search engine results page (SERP).

Most writers know what SEO is in a vague sense, but they’re probably not responsible for implementing a strategy. Most media companies tend to separate search data from the pitch process, drawing a line in the sand between the science and art of publishing effectively. For marketers, that line is irrelevant, because the art of content creation will always come second to the science—however, you do need both to do content marketing well.

Because of a lack of education on the subject, many writers think of SEO as simply turning their headline into a question that readers might Google. Content marketing requires a more nuanced understanding of optimization, from meta data to keywords and longtail subject authority.

Snackable

If a piece of content is “snackable,” it means it’s designed to be engaged with in a single sitting. A longform piece of writing is not snackable, but an infographic posted to social media is snackable. Because content marketers typically work in a more diverse array of media formats than writers, they come up with ways to categorize these offerings.

Again, marketers fall in love with buzzwords, but you don’t have to say “snackable” to get a job in the industry. You can just call a social graphic or an infographic or a gif whatever it is.

Thought leader

Admittedly, this is the one content marketing buzzword that creeps me out. A “thought leader” is just an industry critic, talking head, or influencer, but something about that particular phrasing reminds me of Charles Manson.

I’m not alone either. In 2017, progressive outlet The New Republic published an op-ed calling thought leadership a hollow product of income inequality in the Western world. Thought leadership in a business setting, the article argued, is sort of a weaponization of TEDTalk-style presentations, and a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. “The rich have empowered a new kind of thinker—the ‘thought leader’—at the expense of the much-fretted-over ‘public intellectual,'” David Sessions wrote. “Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg ‘develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.'”

So, it’s up to you whether thought leaders are harmless LinkedIn influencers or agents of late-stage capitalism. You should just know the term if you’re working in content marketing, because a lot of folks fancy themselves thought leaders.

UGC

User generated content (UGC) refers to any online media created by the audience members following a brand. Because marketers want to inspire relationships with their audiences, even more so than the average writer, they tend to put emphasis on UGC. If a brand asks followers to tweet their own stories about a product, or take a photo at a branded event and share with a hashtag, they’re requesting UGC.

Interestingly, MSM writers like to joke about avoiding UGC—see the whole “reply guy” controversy, the “don’t @ me” mindset, or the persistent “don’t read the comments” meme. It’s all done playfully, but the punchline is that a MSM writer doesn’t really want to be bothered with feedback from random readers. Social shares are appreciated, but a modern critic or reporter doesn’t like to think of themselves as embroiled in a constant conversation with the general public. Marketers, on the other hand, are ravenously hungry for that back-and-forth.

Now, this is just a list of thirteen marketing terms that require a bit of context for the average media employee. There are hundreds more buzzwords, disappearing from industry conversations as quickly as they arrive, but if you know this set, you can have a productive conversation with a content marketer. So go forth and network!

Interested in learning more about content marketing? Sign up for Contently’s Content Strategy Series, a free course for content strategists.

The post A Marketing to Media Translation Dictionary For Journalists Turned Content Marketers appeared first on Contently.

As content marketing, product placement, and art blur together, there’s a space opening up for brands to make something unexpected. Provided, of course, it doesn’t come off like “My Journey to Self-Love, Sponsored by the J.M. Smucker Company and its Major Subsidiaries.”

Apple’s shifting relationship with product placement is s a microcosm of what’s happening in the industry. For years, the tech company quietly made deals to seed images of iPhones and Macbooks in popular television, but Fox has been running a message at the end of TV episodes featuring Apple products that cites “promotional consideration sponsored by Apple.” Now that Apple is developing its own TV shows, its executives are reportedly “squeamish” over the ways products will appear in programming.

Now that brands are creating their own content, many don’t need to pay for placement. In 2015, a movie about a toy brand (supported by that toy brand) was nominated for an Academy Award. The Lego Movie did not end up winning Best Original Song, but Lonely Island performed “Everything is Awesome” alongside several dancing, life-size mini figs. There wasn’t a huge to-do about The Lego Movie being an extremely successful bout of content marketing, partially because consumers aren’t always aware of corporate interests, and partially because the movie was just so damn good.

https://vimeo.com/318074749

We’re seeing even greater strides toward brands making content that’s recognized by prestigious, mainstream institutions. This spring, a documentary about a gay choir produced by the home-share platform AirBnB premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. What’s more, an original off-Broadway musical from Skittles was rumored to be in line for a Tony nomination, though it was eventually snubbed.

So, when will the first piece of content from a brand win mainstream accolades from a prestigious institution?

Who decides which content is prestigious?

It’s conceivable for a brand to produce a popular piece of art, and it’s possible for a brand to create good quality art. Consumers decide if something is popular. As long as the content is entertaining, the source isn’t as important.

Unfortunately for brands, defining prestige is up to the artists, critics, and influencers in the creative industry—you know, the folks who cringe when they hear the word “brand.” However, as that old guard tries to protect an outdated definition of prestige—being resistant to streaming networks and web series, for example—modern audiences are showing more flexibility.

Most modern audiences understand that entertainment is a business. Look no furhter than the widespread discussion on social media that erupted when Disney bought Fox. Any big Star Wars or Marvel fan knows their favorite characters are as much data points on a Disney spreadsheet as they are beloved heroes. You could argue that concepts like The Avengers or the Jedi, proliferated as they are across TV, social media, merchandising, comics, amusement parks, and video games, are just brands.

But that still leaves the lingering question: When will the first piece of prestigious branded content hit the scene? Using film as an example, I’ve mocked up a Venn diagram to explain where popularity, quality, and prestige intersect. Notice there’s nothing in the center—my best guess was Black Panther, but I welcome suggestions. Singin’ in the Rain is another possibility.

If a movie is popular with the masses and of pretty good quality, it’s usually not considered high art. See action comedies, superhero movies, and Star Wars. Meanwhile, if a movie is of good quality and considered prestigious, it probably didn’t blow the doors off the box office or earn mainstream appeal. See quiet indies, experimental art films, and period dramas. Finally, if a movie is popular with the masses and the Academy without actually being good quality, it is what one might call “Oscar bait.” Examples include The King’s Speech, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book, Argo, The Blind Side, and the definitive installment, Crash.

A brand could aim to make Oscar or Emmy bait content, but they could also try and create an irreverent, cult-beloved piece of art—the Skittles musical was an earnest attempt at that.

Rethinking the ROI of prestige

Charming the critics and art snobs of the world with content marketing isn’t an impossible feat; it’s just unprecedented. For marketers, achieving prestige isn’t a necessary objective, given that everything in their industry needs to hinge on measurable ROI. There is no measurable ROI for prestige or cultural impact or artistic clout—that’s kind of the point.

But what if a content marketing team hit the zeitgeist with a great piece of art at exactly the right time? It would have to exist purely for brand awareness, and the art itself couldn’t have any messaging about the brand—all the promotion and brand association would have to be implied. And it’s alright to imagine a marketing team developing a great film or TV pilot or novel—so many popular pieces of media are the product of fifteen songwriters or eight screenwriters, a gang of producers, and a director.

We may very well see a truly prestigious piece of content marketing in the next decade, whether that means it’s accepted into a film festival or wins a highbrow creative award. If a brand has any shot at creating art (as opposed to just marketing), it’ll be an argument for the melding of those two ideas. We know that popular franchises, characters, and creative projects can turn into brands, so why not the other way around?

The post When Will Content Marketing Count as Prestige Art? appeared first on Contently.

Chatbots are not a new invention, and in 2018, they’re everywhere. There are chatbot boyfriends, therapists, and a even a chatbot politician running for office in New Zealand, hoping to represent the country in 2020.

For businesses, chatbots open up a world of customer service possibilities. They help customers leave feedback, schedule appointments, and order products quicker. Some bots already live in messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and while they might not offer as much conversation as SmarterChild, they can help you book a cab or order your favorite Starbucks drink. Evocreative predicts that 85 percent of customer interactions will be managed by chatbots by 2020. This stat strikes me as a little high, but I don’t discount the larger implication here: The way we experience customer service is changing rapidly.

What’s spurred the branded chatbot takeover? Mutual benefits for brands and customers. Retale recently surveyed U.S. millennial adult consumers, and 70 percent said they had a positive experience with chatbots in the past. And almost half of all U.S. consumers said they’d prefer to handle customer service interactions via some sort of messenger.

In many cases, companies will implement partial chatbot experiences. Sephora, for example, rolled out a chatbot last summer that can handle the beginning of a customer interaction on its own. People can schedule appointments or leave feedback through the bot, but it has to connect users to a human representative if it can’t address a customer’s questions.

Personally, I’m embracing the rise of the bots. Email and phone-based customer service interactions are often frustrating and full of terrible elevator music. I’m at least curious to see if bots can actually offer streamlined solutions to these woes. I also secretly hope that one day I’ll come across SmarterChild again, just to see another philosophical musing at the end of our interaction.

The post The Chatbot Revolution is Here appeared first on Contently.

“What are you talking about?” my cousin asked. She was looking at me like I was an alien from a planet where everyone was born with four tentacles and two MBAs.

This realization was particularly discouraging for me. Of the hundreds of articles I’ve written for this blog, the most popular were a series roasting marketing buzzwords. I’d been a crusader against them! But buzzwords are like terrifying, fleece-wearing ghosts that haunt your conference room. No matter how much you run and hide, they get everyone eventually.

Shook, I grabbed my third glass of white wine and snuck off to my grandma’s den to consult my online therapist, Dr. Draper. For legal purposes, I should point out that Dr. Draper is not a real doctor, but rather an Australian copywriter at Wellmark Health who makes fun of business jargon better than anyone on earth. On this day, I was thankful to discover his incredible chart that points out how classic taglines would be pitched today with modern corporate speak.

Update: Dr. Draper apparently is also a real doctor (see this thread). Who worked mostly in psychiatry. This is one of the best corrections I’ve ever had to issue.

When I got back to work, I pasted this chart over my desk as a reminder. Business jargon is incredibly easy to adopt; it’s the tribal language of officeland. And there’s nothing wrong with saying you want to TB on a 360-degree review of Q3’s ROE in the safe space of your own conference room. But if you’re not careful, corporate buzzspeak will creep into all your external communications—your videos, blog posts, tweets, press releases, and website copy. Heck, it might even infiltrate the footer. And in the process, you’ll completely lose all ability to communicate coherently with 97 percent of the population. (If you wanted to do that, you’d have gone into politics!)

So for the last five weeks of the year, let’s take a bold stand and hunt out buzzwords like they’re top-shelf liquor at the company holiday party. (Let’s also keep it together at the holiday party.) No one in your next meeting may notice, but the people you’re trying to reach sure will.

The post Everything Wrong With Marketing Speak, in 1 Chart appeared first on Contently.

At a recent networking event, I was talking to a marketer who’d just gotten married. Given her profession, she wasn’t surprised when her momentous life occasion triggered an onslaught of promos and offers. What she hadn’t prepared for, though, was when brands expected that she’d soon be expecting.

About 10 weeks after the wedding, this woman started receiving coupons from a well-known baby-goods retailer. And she was mad about it—really mad. She wanted kids someday, sure, but she also wanted to enjoy the honeymoon phase of her marriage and continue developing her career. She definitely didn’t want this store up in her business.

It’s not hard to see how we arrived at this point. The brand probably mapped out its touchpoints and discovered through research that a good percentage of couples conceive soon after their weddings. What the data did not account for, however, was the emotions of couples who had no plans to conceive on the same day they smash cake in each other’s faces.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use the vast amounts of data at our disposal to make informed decisions. But if we don’t combine facts with people’s feelings, we’ll end up surrendering revenue. (Guess who won’t be going to that baby retailer for future baby shower gifts?)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about empathic marketing. Since this is the last column in my four-part series, it’s time to look at how we as marketers earn our keep. How do we use empathy to persuade people that our products can solve their pain? How do we take someone from consideration to conversion by being more considerate?

As the just-married marketer can attest, brands have to choose the right moment to make their pitch. Here’s how they can do that in the future.

Look for signs of readiness

Have you ever complained to a friend about something and gotten annoyed when they interrupted with a quick fix for your problem?

Psychologist and California State, Chico professor Dr. Joel Minden has described the impact of interruption as follows: “Not allowing someone to complete a statement conveys messages like, ‘I want you to stop talking’ or ‘What I have to say in this moment is more important than what you’re saying.'” Not only do you feel disrespected, but you’re still stuck mid-kvetch with your pain.

Marketers can be like that overeager friend. We have good intentions! We want to help! We have a solution! But we come in too soon, interrupting our buyer.

Marketers can be like that overeager friend. We have good intentions! We want to help! We have a solution!

So what’s the alternative? Taking the time to read verbal (“I just don’t know what to do”) and visual cues (calmer hands) until you find the perfect moment to pitch. In the book The Marketing Power of Emotion, Columbia University business professor John O’Shaughnessy notes that some researchers believe knowing your customers’ emotions can help you “identify an emotional script that goes from the triggering event to the thought to the feeling to the action.”

O’Shaughnessy argues that this approach is not foolproof, because situational factors also play into decision-making. But this book was written in 2002, well before we had the technology to track situational factors. Seems to me like there is a way to take into account both practical and emotional cues—like “customer visited website three times last week” and “customer was excited on a call with the sales rep”—to determine whether when someone becomes a qualified lead.

Even if you can’t achieve that kind of data harmony yet, you can always conduct research to find out what buyers were feeling in the weeks, days, and moments before they made a purchase or signed a contract. Salespeople, merchandising teams, and account managers can all use your research to improve their timing on promotions or demos.

In the future, technology may provide an additional assist that makes empathic marketing easier. Cutting edge “emotional detection” or “emotional recognition” software is beginning to provide facial (visual), semantic (words), and sonic (speech) sentiment assessments. That sector is poised to grow 40 percent annually and be a $36B market by 2021, according to MarketsandMarkets. Some companies are already using these programs to test ad campaigns, so it seems plausible that one day we’ll use them to test buyer readiness in real time.

Show, don’t sell

Marketers tend to overuse the word “should.” It’s such an easy linguistic trap. If we tell people what they should do, they’ll listen, right? (Anyone who has a child knows this is not true.)

Thanks to my past life as a journalist, I’m extra conscious of the word. Craig Matters, former managing editor at Money, banned staff from using it. He didn’t want our readers to feel like we were being condescending.

There are other reasons not to use the S word. As British life coach Hannah Braime writes, when we use the word, “we are not accepting reality.” We’re trying to spur customers to do something divorced from their current situation.

Braime suggests that her script is more effective when she focuses on the benefits—so instead of “I should go to the gym” make it “I feel really energetic and powerful when I go to the gym.”

In psych terms, this is called the framing effect. It comes out of a study by Nobel-prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman. (The study details are fascinating if you have some extra time.) The basic takeaway is that focusing on the benefits helps your argument more than highlighting the cost of not doing something.

Marketers can easily apply that thinking to our calls-to-action. Instead of focusing on the urgency to buy or sign up, test language that speaks to the benefits of what you’re offering. You can see a good example in the image above from project management platform Basecamp. I like that it speaks to both the suffering of the target customer (the inability to get stuff done) as well as how the product contributes to solving the problem.

Empower buyers to make decisions

In “The Art of Giving and Receiving Advice,” Harvard business professors David Garvin and Joshua Margolis make the case that as someone in an adviser position, you want to “think of yourself as a driving instructor. While you provide oversight and guidance, your ultimate goal is to empower the [advice] seeker to act independently.”

That same logic could be applied to marketing. Wouldn’t it be best if your customer arrived at a purchase decision instead of feeling forced into something? Buyers want agency to make their own decisions.

If we don’t combine facts with people’s feelings, we’ll end up surrendering revenue.

So how do you nudge the buyer into an independent decision that’s in your favor? If your business has a high-touch sales process, your bottom-of-funnel stage might include a meeting with the client where you ask how your product compared to other vendors. The salesperson could then share facts about product differentiation (“they have X, but we have Y”) rather than trying to be persuasive (“you’ll be better off with us because…”).

If you’re an e-commerce business that would have difficulty doing this face to face, you could include a chart on your purchase page that compares your product to the competition. (Here’s a great delineation of that strategy from Meagan French, CEO of demand-gen consultancy Lotus Growth.) You could also work this chart into lead generation and sales enablement collateral.

By paying closer attention to the buyer’s journey, you could empower visitors to tell you exactly what it would take to turn them into customers. When someone comes to your site and doesn’t convert, an exit modal might appear that says “We want to be better. Can you tell us why you didn’t make a purchase today?” Then you can send customer service reps or retargeting solutions in to close the deal.

Give something to get something

Not too long ago, a friend teased me after I confessed that I sat through a demo after going to an event the vendor hosted. I was a victim of the psychological concept of reciprocity, which is when we feel compelled to pay back a positive action someone has done for us. In his pivotal book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Dr. Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University, named reciprocity one of the six key principles of influence.

The rule of reciprocity can also be a useful addition to our empathic marketing toolbox. Whether we realize it or not, the process of buying something actually causes us suffering, even if it’s something we really want. Our brains are wired for loss aversion, which means the negative feelings we experience around a loss are greater than the positive feelings that accompany a gain. Every purchase includes a loss since the customer has to part with money.

One easy way to ease the loss aversion would be offering a freebie or freemium option before you present your solution. That could be a personalized report, an initial consult, a 60-day trial, even a dinner at a fancy restaurant. (Slightly concerned that I’m positioning myself for a plethora of dinner invitations.) Keep in mind that it has to be something your customer will perceive as having real value (I value meals at fancy restaurants) rather than useless swag like flash drives and beer koozies. The file-sharing platform WeTransfer is one of my favorite examples of this. By offering something for nothing, the company tells customers they’re worth the short-term loss of revenue that comes from a free option. The user then has time to get hooked on the product. And WeTransfer is setting up the chance for reciprocity. I’m writing about them, aren’t I?

Speaking of the rule of reciprocation… it’s your turn now.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve shared plenty of ideas on how to practice more empathic marketing—some I’ve tried, some I haven’t. I’m definitely not an all-knowing guru. But I am a concerned citizen of marketing who’s frightened of a future in which we talk to humans solely through our marketing stacks.

Thanks for joining me on this journey on empathic marketing. I’d love to practice what I’ve preached for a bit and listen to what you have to say about empathic marketing. Have you tried any of these tricks and found they worked (or not)? Do you have your own strategies that would be valuable for others to know? What are your favorite examples of brands with heart? And most important, what will you do in 2018 to be a more empathic marketer? I’m looking forward to hearing your stories—and strengthening my own empathy muscles along the way.

Margaret Magnarelli is the senior director of marketing and managing editor for content at Monster. This is the fourth and final column in her series on empathic marketing. You can the first, second, and third installments here.

The post Show, Don’t Sell: How to Use Empathic Marketing to Win More Business in 2018 appeared first on Contently.

Lately, I’ve been paying closer attention to what resonates on my favorite accounts, which include @Betches, @Ship, @MyTherapistSays, and @GirlsThinkImFunny, among others. These accounts tend to play off the very millennial concept of “same” (a.k.a. “so me,” “also me,” and “it me”). For those not of the Instagram and Snapchat generation, all of these words or phrases basically translate to: “This describes me perfectly.” Below are a few examples that are, ahem, so me.

In an article in The New Statesmen, Amelia Tait calls this “relatable content.” Tait interviewed Dr. Grainne Kirwan, a cyberpsychologist, who said: “As we tend not to discuss many of the mundane aspects of life, either because we believe them to be boring to others, or so unusual that others might think us slightly strange, we frequently don’t realize that many others do and think exactly the same things, even in private moments…hence we seldom realize how common the feeling is.”

What’s making these channels so successful—with their hundreds of thousands of followers—is how they display an empathy for the audience’s deepest, darkest feelings. The accounts make people feel like they aren’t alone. And what’s pretty radical is they prove it’s possible to do empathy en masse.

As you know by now if you’ve been following this series on The Content Strategist, I’ve been exploring the concept of empathic marketing over the past few weeks. I’ve dug into existing psychological and marketing research that relates to empathy, in an effort to understand and synthesize this concept for other marketers. In part three, I’m going to look at what happens when companies validate the emotions of their customers.

My theory is that businesses can actually achieve better results by being kinder to their customers. All the research on empathy suggests that acknowledging another person’s pain is a cornerstone of building trust. That may sound like mushy psychobabble, but there are very practical ways to apply the lesson to our own work.

Emotional Validation

The process of reflecting back someone’s feelings has an official name in psychology textbooks: “emotional validation.”

Houston-based clinician Karyn Hall, Ph.D., author of The Emotionally Sensitive Person, has written extensively about this topic. As she defines it, “Validation is the recognition and acceptance of another person’s thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behaviors as understandable.”

But it’s important to note that validation does not mean flatly agreeing with everything someone says. It’s more akin to acknowledging what they say, holding a mirror up to their feelings.

Human nature is such that we find release simply in feeling heard; perhaps it’s owing to our evolution from caveman days in which there was safety in numbers. (Better to have that Neanderthal on your side than his rock between your eyes.)

In an article from Psychology Today, Steven Stosny, Ph.D., explained that people require confirmation that their suffering or frustration is justified. If they don’t get that confirmation, they become “hyper-focused on the pain and the reasons for it. We know that mental focus amplifies and magnifies the object of the focus; the greater the focus on pain, the more intense and more generalized it grows.”

Translation for marketers: If you don’t acknowledge your customer’s pain, their pain worsens. They won’t hear the solution you’re proposing, because the noise in their head about the problem is too loud. So before you tell them about your great solution, you have to show them that you understand the problem first.

Building Buyer Trust

Robin Stern, associate director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, once told The Washington Post: “When someone feels seen and heard by you, they begin to trust you.” As you well know, connection and trust are keys to building relationships.

Here are a few ways to employ emotional validation:

Do a “validation review”

Back when my now-husband and I were doing premarital counseling, we were taught how to quell arguments (much-needed advice for people of Italian and Greek descent about to enter into a life together). The main tip we learned: Rather than immediately responding to conflict with a zinger that escalates the fight, you should repeat back the sentiment of what the other person said in your own words. For example, “I hear you saying that you don’t like when I leave the sponge in the bottom of the kitchen sink.” (Real scenes from marriage.) If the other person then said, “No, I meant…” you then have to repeat back the change. No inserting opinions until you’ve completed this exercise.

Verbal mimicry—known in psych circles as the “echo effect”—is scientifically proven to increase likability and rapport. There’s also evidence that it leads to better financial outcomes. Two studies have found that waitresses receive bigger tips when they repeat back orders to customers.

If you’re in a business with a high-touch sales process, you can use this tactic of emotional mirroring in one-on-one conversations with customers. But there’s also value in evaluating all of your external-facing marketing materials—website homepage, sales enablement docs, UX copy, social posts, thought leadership, webinars, speeches, press releases, et al.—to make sure they reflect your understanding of the challenges your buyers go through.

Let’s say you’re selling marketing automation software. If securing budget is your buyer’s biggest challenge, you probably want to acknowledge somewhere on your site, “We know how hard it can be to get sign off for an investment of this size, and we’ve worked with hundreds of customers to make the case to senior management.”

Act as your customer’s proxy

Contently’s editor-in-chief Joe Lazauskas is always on the lookout for brands doing funny things to engage—and he recently shared this tweet from Hamburger Helper, a brand I hadn’t thought of in years:

What made Helper’s response so amazing was that the doofy dinner-in-a-box mascot took on the persona of its core clientele. I for one felt a feminist kinship with this anthropomorphic glove. It spoke not just for a box of ground-beef accouterment but for women everywhere. The brand stood in to defend its customers. (Also, I don’t like this Chris fellow very much.)

There are other ways to act as a proxy without needing to defend customers or respond to something off-color. After Tom Petty went into cardiac arrest in the fall, Spotify immediately created a playlist of his work. To me, this was a way for Spotify to tell its users, “We get that you’re sad; we can’t solve this problem with you, but we can help you grieve.”

At Monster, meanwhile, our former social media director Patrick Gillooly had set IFTTT software to inform his team when someone tweeted that they were going on a job interview. Our folks would then quickly reply from the @Monster handle with a good luck message. I’ve always loved this one-to-one engagement because it takes a very solitary moment and helps people feel like they have someone on their side. (At the same time, it gets our brand name in front of people at a very crucial time, since those candidates may not get the job.)

Marketers can take a page from any of these examples. Look for moments like these impacting your audience, and respond in a way that shows you hear and support them.

Find an empathic influencer

I’m fairly skeptical of influencer marketing since it can feel unctuous if done wrong. That said, if you can find the right person to represent your brand, this tactic can help you make deeper connections via empathy.

The other day, I was served up a content-driven video ad on Twitter that was produced by Harper’s Bazaar for Dior 999, a red lipstick that supposedly looks good on everyone. First off, sweet job on targeting, HB, because I went from top of funnel to bottom in like 275 seconds. This ad focused on four women of different races who thought they looked terrible in red lipstick (“it me”). Celebrity makeup artist Daniel Martin listened to their concerns, explained why it would look good on each of them, and applied it using his special tricks. Of course, it worked for all of them, and clearly, the whole thing worked for me.

My point is, when you’re searching for an influencer to supplement your efforts, don’t simply look at reach. Also, do the legwork to see if that person has made empathetic connections with the target audience. Do they validate your customer’s problems through their work? A small audience that feels heard can help your bottom line much more than a large audience that’s only somewhat engaged.

In Traackr’s global research report Influence 2.0, Altimeter Group analyst Brian Solis emphasizes the importance of empathy and says, “The digital influencers that everyone covets are human beings who have built communities where others follow their updates for a variety of personal or professional reasons. The ties that bind are the very premises of relationships. These communities are rich with the exchange of mutual value and social capital.” He goes on to note that in order to have effective results from an influencer campaign, marketers need to know what their audience values first, then choose an influencer who aligns.

The right influencer will make the audience care about your message over time through validation. That can catapult you forward compared to where you’d be if you were starting from scratch.

Look no further than those Instagram accounts I can’t get enough of. They’ve built audiences through their empathy—audiences that are now receptive to a new product. Say, like this t-shirt, which is… also me.

Margaret Magnarelli is the senior director of marketing and managing editor for content at Monster. This is the third column in her series on empathic marketing. You can the first and second installments here. The final part will be published on The Content Strategist next Friday.

The post This Psychological Trick Can Make You a More Empathetic Marketer appeared first on Contently.

These are fundamentally human qualities: We like to be heard. We want to be understood. We seek a release from our pain.

There’s a lesson here for marketers. For a brand to truly provide a helpful solution, customers must have a pain point for you to address. With that pain point comes actual pain—whether frustration, anxiety, stress, confusion, embarrassment, or any other negative emotions.

Your goal, as a customer-obsessed marketer, should be not only to fix the pain point but to provide an antidote for the pain itself. As Spotify CMO Seth Farbman says in Josh Steimle’s excellent book Chief Marketing Officers at Work, “What we’re seeing when you release people from even small bits of anxiety or potential for regret or remorse is this explosion of this sense of freedom, and that freedom leads to a sense of empowerment, joy, and curiosity.”

In my last column, I made the case that the three stages of being an empathic marketer are not so different from those of being an empathic friend: Ask what’s wrong, show that you understand, and then suggest solutions.

In this column, I’m going to go explore how to use those questions in a way that helps both you and your customers. We often fail to even ask “What’s wrong?” because we think we know the answer already, which can get in the way of empathy. But luckily, as Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Dr. Helen Riess has found, empathy can be a learned behavior, and some of the following steps may help you train your brain to communicate better.

Go one-on-one

If you’re reading articles like this, you’ve probably done some research to better understand your customer. Maybe you reviewed existing buyer personas and journey maps, or created your own from scratch. Good on you in either case; these are foundational parts of your strategy.

But I also believe that these aggregations of human behavior can take away from our empathy. In one study, psychology researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University gave participants photos of eight children, only with names and ages, and asked how much money they’d give to save these kids’ lives. Participants were then shown just one child, told that kid’s unique personal story, and asked the same questions. On average, people gave twice as much to the individual child as they did to the eight kids grouped together.

Maybe marketers would benefit by paying more attention to the individual challenges of customers in order to trigger our emotions. As those psychologists discovered, an “identified victim”—their words for the one child—gives us more cause to open our hearts and our wallets.

Given the Ben Gurion study, you might want to systematize one-on-one interviews of prospects and customers. You could hire a journalist (hey, I know plenty!) to record an interview and ask below-the-surface questions about their buying process. Play it back for all the key people on your team to hear. That way you keep everybody focused on the customer’s need.

Put emotion on your map

At Monster, we’ve recently created new customer journey maps on both the B2B and B2C sides of the house.

On one side, the agency we worked with cleverly used emojis to identify the feelings customers felt at each stage. On the other, Caleb Brown, a journey mapping consultant who is also a professional cartoonist and a terrific moderator, helped us define the journey in terms of what he called “emotional valence.” He drew out a kind of musical staff and asked us to come up with words ranging from the most positive emotion our consumer might experience to the most negative. This exercise forced us to view the buyer’s experience through a lens of empathy.

Is emotion a part of your customer journey maps? If not, consider adding it. Take special care in defining the emotion, though: Instead of just writing sad, think about whether the customer is distressed or dejected or disappointed. Be specific. Go back to customer interviews to find the words people used.

Once you’ve named the pain, also map the opposite emotion (e.g. from “embarrassed” to “confident”) since that should be your north star.

So, if you’re that company Thinx that was barraging the NYC subway with advertising for period-proof underwear, your customer is embarrassed about leaks, and you know you want them to feel secure to do everyday activities (like whatever this woman is doing in the image above). Regardless of how you feel about the product, the messaging is not only memorable but emotionally on point as well.

Seek out complaints

Humans suffer from the unfortunate condition known as confirmation bias, when we seek out information that supports existing beliefs. Meanwhile, we also avoid information that challenges those beliefs, since as Jay Baer notes in an article on Adweek, our “bodies produce more cortisol [a.k.a. the stress hormone] anytime we encounter fear, rejection, or criticism.”

According to a 2017 survey by Clutch, only 10 percent of companies say “understanding customer sentiment” is a primary objective of their social listening strategies, yet this is a very useful way to get actionable insights. Instead of getting caught in an echo chamber of our biased perceptions, we have to force ourselves to have regular exposure to negative feedback.

You can learn a lot about your customers based on what they say to their friends over social media.

One low-cost way to do this: Send your social media team on a mission to gather complaints related to your products and major keywords. Focus groups are great and all, but participants may be eager to make moderators happy. The internet frees people of social convention, for better or worse. (See: Godwin’s Law.) You can learn a lot about your customers based on what they say to their friends over social media.

Poll throughout the process

If you want to know how someone feels, there’s no better way than to ask. Whenever we greet friends, the first thing we do is ask how they’re doing. But when it comes to our customers, we typically only ask how they feel at two points in the buying cycle:

1. In our initial research stage, when the question is conditional (e.g. “Would you buy this product?)
2. Following a purchase, with the question framed in past tense (e.g. “How was this experience?”)

But a buyer’s journey is not just two points. (It’s called a journey for a reason.) So another way to listen to your customers is by soliciting feedback during the middle of the process.

Setting up a one-question survey on the product page is an easy way to address this. It could reveal buyer motivations, challenges, and other insights. For example, you could ask: “Help us serve you better: Did you understand the benefits of X after reading this page?” You could also pair the poll with a discount for the next purchase.

If you’re worried that the survey would disrupt the flow of purchase, take a look at a study conducted by marketing professors Utpal Dholakia of Rice and Vicki Morowitz of NYU Stern. Using a pool 2,000 customers from a financial services company, the researchers gave half of the participants a brief customer satisfaction poll. The other half acted as the control group. A year later, the researchers reported that “the customers we surveyed were more than three times as likely to have opened new accounts, were less than half as likely to have defected, and were more profitable than the customers who hadn’t been surveyed.”

Steer into the pain

In some fields, empathic listening is a required skill. Props to reader Jessica Schimm for pointing me to a beautiful piece on Medium by a woman named Lily Benson, who recounts her experiences volunteering for a suicide prevention hotline—work that requires an immense amount of emotional generosity.

What I especially loved about this piece was her explanation of something she learned in training called “steering into the pain”:

I already knew, though didn’t (and don’t) always faithfully practice, the basics of how to listen well: being present, validating, asking questions, and sometimes the hardest part, not trying to fix things. Steering into the pain goes a step farther — when someone is telling you about something that hurts, not only do you stay there with them, and not minimize it or change the subject or talk around it or try to compare it to something or find a way to make it better, you stay there with them, and you go in deeper. You ask questions. Like: what’s the hardest part? What do you miss about him?

She goes on to talk about how this conversation becomes a release. People no longer felt alone with their suffering. As Benson writes, “Pain is this isolating thing, something that feels like it separates you. But it’s also one of the things that you share with every other human on earth. It can be an opening for intimacy, and for connecting with the shared humanity of the people around you.”

While I want to point out there’s a clear distinction between something as serious as saving a life and something as trivial as selling a product, I do think Benson is offering a universal lesson here about empathy and listening. You want to make people feel like they aren’t alone, and drive your inquiry directly (but gently) into their pain. I’d bet that Jeffrey Slater, Chief Listening Officer at The Marketing Sage, would agree with this idea—he has written that a core attribute of the empathic marketer is to “ask penetrating and respectful questions that dig deeply into the psyche of their audience.”

You want to make people feel like they aren’t alone.

Scientific research supports Benson and Slater. The leadership consultancy Zenger/Folkman studied 3,492 people in a management training program, pulling out the top 5 percent of people perceived to be the most effective listeners to find out what they were doing differently. These top listeners weren’t just nodding along silently; they were asking questions that “promote discovery and insight.”

If you have a sales process with a lot of touchpoints, look for opportunities to guide your customers deeper into self-inquiry. I bet you’ll find they want to talk and will welcome the empathetic ear. If they don’t, they might not have enough pain to require a solution—and you may want to think about getting a different job. (Ahem, Monster.)

Here’s the best news: Even if you don’t have the bandwidth to implement these takeaways at the moment, simply reading this piece may have made you more empathetic. According to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, just believing that empathy is a learnable skill often leads to more positive feelings for those who hold conflicting views from us, people who are suffering, and people who are different.

Margaret Magnarelli is the senior director of marketing and managing editor for content at Monster. This is the second column in her series on empathic marketing. You can read the first one here. Part three will be published on The Content Strategist next Friday.

The post Why Understanding Pain Is the Key to Customer-Centric Marketing appeared first on Contently.

The post Quiz: How Well Do You Know These Marketing Acronyms? 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.

Every year since 2010, the Content Marketing Institute has put out one of those studies on the state of content marketing. CMI’s analysis of B2B content marketing is a prime example of how to get earned media. Positive statistics demand coverage and dominate headlines. But I wanted to dig deeper to draw out more unorthodox insights from the report—and not all of them are good.

Here are 4 takeaways that examine the state of B2B content marketing and point out some areas where marketers need to improve.

Centralized content teams are the norm

Traditionally, content teams have been siloed from the rest of the marketing department. The idea of a centralized content operation, however, is something analysts like SiriusDecisions have been advocating for years. And according to CMI’s study, that centralization is currently taking place across the B2B space.

Overall, 92 percent of respondents have some form of a centralized team running content marketing. That data point is a big deal, suggesting that brands are making alignment and organizational efficiency priorities. (It’s worth noting, though, that the individual answers may be a bit flawed since a “centralized content marketing group that works with multiple brands/product lines throughout the organization” overlaps a lot with “small (or one-person) marketing/content marketing team [that] serves the entire organization.”)

This graph struck me as an interesting starting point for further research. I’d be curious to know what kind of content these teams create: Are they mostly producing content for a blog? Or are they also heavily involved in sales enablement, event content, customer success content, and so on? Perhaps that’s something for next year’s study.

More content needs to map to the buyer’s journey

We talk a lot about the importance of mapping content to the buyer’s journey, and we’re not alone. Particularly in B2B marketing, ensuring that you have content for the right audience at the right time is key to achieving content marketing success.

Yet, per CMI’s study, only 41 percent of B2B marketers claim to create content based on the buyer’s journey. That’s particularly surprising given that 72 percent of respondents are concerned with how content impacts customer experience. Since customer experience is largely based on a buyer’s journey through the sales funnel, mapping content to each step should be an important part of ensuring a great experience.

B2B marketers aren’t using tech to manage email

If your inbox looks anything like mine, it shouldn’t be surprising that email is the most used content distribution tactic in B2B. Ninety-three percent of B2B marketers use email to distribute content. (Social media is right behind at 92 percent.) And 74 percent of respondents named email as the most effective distribution format, 29 percent above the next closest method (blogs).

Despite this, only 70 percent of B2B marketers are using email tools to manage their distribution. That gap of 23 percentage points is concerning because B2B marketers shouldn’t be wasting time and resources by manually creating email lists and sending out messages without any insight into their performance.

An ROI reckoning is coming

Measuring ROI is one code that plenty of marketers still have trouble cracking. Sixty-five percent of B2B marketers either don’t measure it at all or are “unsure” if they measure the ROI of their content marketing. Incredibly, the most given reason for why is that there isn’t a “formal justification required.” Thirty-eight percent of respondents also admitted that measuring ROI is too difficult.

There’s no getting around that measuring the hard impact of your content requires intensive organizational capabilities and lots of hard work. But the marketers who aren’t even trying to figure out how to track ROI won’t stick around much longer.

At some point in every competent business, executives will question the marketing budget, and content marketers will have to justify their work. If those 38 percent of B2B marketers aren’t prepared, they risk losing everything they’ve built. And if that happens, don’t be surprised if this normally rosy study suddenly gets much bleaker.

The post The 4 Most Important Takeaways From CMI’s B2B Content Marketing Study appeared first on Contently.

Its high-quality branded documentary series, like “Two-a-Days” for Russell Athletics, integrate well into Vox’s portfolio of sites. Most notably, the work feels true to the brand, and not like a cheap play for impressions and clicks.

This summer at Cannes, I sat down with Armando Turco, GM of Vox Creative, to talk about setting content marketing goals, measuring engagement, and the future of social media. Check out the interview below, which was created as part of our Accountable Innovation Series in partnership with Magnet Media, an industry-leading global strategic studio.

Transcript:

Joe Lazauskas: Welcome to Accountable Innovation at Cannes. I’m Joe Lazauskas, and I’m here with Armando Turco, the general manager for Vox Creative, which has been creating some really cool branded content lately. We’re going to put you in the hot seat, ask five rapid-fire questions.

Armando Turco: Cool, let’s do it.

Lazauskas: You ready?

Turco: Yep. Let’s go for it.

Lazauskas: Alright, let’s start. What is the biggest key to creating branded content that actually performs?

Turco: Wow. What we see often is clients sort of stopping, forgetting to stop, and asking themselves: What is this thing expected to do? So we’ve been much more disciplined lately about really orienting our content efforts around KPIs and having a very strict communication strategy that still allows room for testing but is always mapping back to a particular communication task—which seems like the simplest thing in the world to ask for, but often is overlooked, especially when you’re trying to generate so much content at great volume and at scale.

Lazauskas: What three KPIs do you find yourself using the most?

Turco: I’m asked that question by a lot of clients, like, “What do you think we should be measuring?” and my first response is always, “What are you trying to achieve?”

We find that branded content, in particular, and especially the kind of branded content that Vox Creative is creating, is deeply engaging and so it functions quite well at the top of the funnel, to be driving relevance and to be creating credibility for brands that are looking to establish roots in a particular realm of culture, or at least amplify their voice in a really interesting, engaging way. So I would say engagement and a particular depth of engagement, so we’re looking really closely at the amount of time that people are spending with content. I think we live in a world where three seconds is considered to be a benchmark, and we’re trying to hold ourselves at Vox to a much higher standard than that, especially when you consider that a lot of our video content, and a lot of the content that we produce in text, is engaging people for much longer than that.

Lazauskas: Snapchat or Instagram?

Turco: Instagram.

Lazauskas: Rosé or frosé?

Turco: Rosé.

Lazauskas: What’s one thing that you’ve seen here that gets you really excited?

Turco: I think convergence. It sounds a little bit cliché. It’s one of the reasons why I left the creative agency world and came over to a content studio and a publisher—to see how different capabilities and a convergence of data, audio, and great content, creativity, quality, scale, distribution, are all coming together in a really interesting way, whereas before they used to be quite verticalized and siloed. I’ve worked on teams where you have a client who has six different agencies—in fact, you want to ask me what I think marketers are doing wrong, is just fracturing and fragmenting all of their marketing efforts across so many different suppliers, when, in fact, there are a few simple solutions where you can converge, and all of those things can work in support of each other in a very real-time way.

Lazauskas: All right. Less frosé, more convergence.

Turco: That’s the theme of the conversation.

The post How to Create Content That Actually Performs, According to the GM of Vox Creative appeared first on Contently.

“People tend to think about content marketing or branded content as longform advertising,” Seetharaman, the global managing director of marketing solutions, told me. “You really have to look from the outside in. What problem are you trying to help somebody solve and do you have a right to play? Do you have a real answer for that problem? If you can’t deliver on that promise, you have no right to play there for a brand.”

At the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this summer, I sat down with Seetharaman to talk about the best B2B content brands, Snapchat vs. Instagram, and the vanity metrics to avoid. Check out the full interview below, which was created as part of our Accountable Innovation Series in partnership with Magnet Media, an industry-leading global strategic studio.

Transcript

Joe Lazauskas: Welcome to Accountable Innovation at Cannes. I’m Joe Lazauskas, Contently’s editor-in-chief, and I am here with Mina Seetharaman, the head of global marketing solutions for The Economist, which is one of the more impressive job titles I’ve gotten to say this week. Thank you so much for joining us here in the Index Exchange Suite.

Mina Seetharaman: There are definitely worse places to be than here with this view, I’ve got to tell you.

Joe: I know, and we haven’t even gotten any frosé yet, which is going to be our treat for getting through this interview.

Mina: Alright, I’m looking forward to it.

Joe: So we’ve got you in the hot seat, ask some questions about content marketing, about where you see the industry going. Are you ready?

Mina: Sure.

Joe: Alright. Who’s the best brand at creating content?

Mina: I work mostly with B2B brands. My two favorites are GE, not just because they were a client, but also because they’re willing to experiment on different platforms for lots of audiences and not afraid to just throw away things that don’t work and keep experimenting. And IBM because they have to traverse a lot of audiences at the C suite but also in the everyday population, and I think they do a good job of picking the right content for the right audience.

Joe: Two of my favorite too, GE Reports is incredible.

Mina: Yeah, that’s really good.

Joe: And still got to shout out my boy Tomas Kellner who runs that. Snapchat or Instagram?

Mina: I’m not terribly visual, I’m going to go with Snapchat, and I think it’s because a lot of publishers are doing interesting things on that platform. I think the key thing with any of the platforms is to figure out the best way to use your content and adapt it for that platform and really understanding it. And I think we’ve seen some great engagement with The Economist Discover.

Joe: What do you think is the key to creating branded content that actually maps back to delivering real business results and not just vanity metrics?

Mina: I think one of the big issues is that—and this is partly because we look at traditional metrics for a lot of things when we should maybe be thinking about the right way of measuring things—is people tend to think about content marketing or branded content as longform advertising. You really have to look from the outside in, so especially in the business space, what problem are you trying to help somebody solve and do you have a right to play? Do you have a real answer for that problem? If you can’t deliver on the promise that you’re making, you have no right to play there for a brand. I think that if you understand what your audience needs, promise them something that you can actually deliver on, and then really deliver it, I think you’ll see performance go up significantly.

Joe: And thinking about how you measure that impact, what are your three go-to marketing metrics?

Mina: So unfortunately, I think a lot of clients come to us wanting reach, and I always say that reach only matters if you’re reaching the right people and think of it as a really relative metric. If you have a very niche audience, you might not care about 100,000 views, and you might want the right 50 people to sign a one million dollar check. And then finally, am I helping to move the needle on some business metric. One of the trends that we’re seeing a lot at our panel this week, at Wake Up The Economist, is the idea that a CMO has to care about the business first and marketing second. And I think that we sometimes forget that in the marketing space. So remembering that we have to move the needle on the business is a key metric.

Joe: And now last question, hard-hitting one, we’ve got two days left here. What are the odds that we get a tweet from Trump about Cannes?

Mina: Unfortunately, I think they’re a lot higher than I would like, but I’m really hoping that that’s maybe around the 2 percent mark, but he’s surprised me before, so who knows what’ll happen.

The post The Best B2B Content, According to The Economist’s Top Content Marketer appeared first on Contently.

It’s a simple ask, but I’ve noticed that people have trouble answering it. And a lot of them sound the same. They mention things like truly caring about the customers and using an authentic voice. If all companies use those goals to guide their creative process, then they’re not really differentiating themselves in a meaningful way.

However, for the brands that do have a distinct voice, this question is easy. Marketers can rattle off specific adjectives like trustworthy, straightforward, or irreverent. Contently’s brand voice, which we aim to convey in every post on The Content Strategist, is supposed to be honest, smart, skeptical, and conversational, with a touch of humor.

That unique voice has become so important because of how much content gets posted online every day. Brands can control two factors: what you say and how you say it. But the “what” in that equation only has so much flexibility. If you’re a bank or news outlet that covers finance, you have to write about saving for retirement. How you do that is the difference between building a loyal audience and fading into the crowd.

Just take a look at articles from some major publishers to see the options out there. The New York Times has “A Quick-and-Dirty Guide for Retirement Saving.” The Wall Street Journal went with the very straightforward “What Is a 401(k)?” Refinery29 appealed to its audience with a more creative approach: “How Saving $8 Can Make You a Millionaire.”

So how can marketers determine the right brand voice for their employers? It’s more involved than just sitting at a desk until the epiphany hits. At Contently, we’ve turned the exercise into a science, using natural language processing to give brands quantitative data on all of their content. Analyzing content this way has two key benefits:

1. It can identify trends and opportunities in your industry that help brands differentiate themselves from competitors.

2. It makes consistency an easier task if you can measure the tone of a single article against an entire archive of existing content.

To learn more about the impact of tone science and see how it works, check out the infographic below.

The post Infographic: The Science of Brand Voice appeared first on Contently.

“People would sort of just tilt their head nicely and be like, “Oh. That’s nice,” Holzer recalls. “But, like, how are you guys going to make any money?”

Since then, Matter Unlimited has thrived helping brands from Merck to Google to HP find and communicate their purpose. This year, the agency even won a Bronze Lion for PUSH, a video for Merck.

At the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, I talked with Holzer about how brands can take a stand about what they care about.

“Taking a stand is always hard, and especially if you’re a product because you just are so scared to alienate anyone,” Holzer told me. “But you know what’s interesting, especially in today’s political climate that we’re dealing with in 2017, brands don’t really have a choice anymore.”

Check out the full interview below, which was created as part of our Accountable Innovation Series in partnership with Magnet Media, an industry-leading global strategic studio.

Transcript:

Joe Lazauskas: Welcome to Accountable Innovation at Cannes. I’m Joe Lazauskas, editor-in-chief of Contently, and I’m here with Rob Holzer, CEO and founder of Matter Unlimited. But more importantly, the winner of a fresh, brand new bronze lion on Saturday in the healthcare industry. Congratulations first of all.

Rob Holzer: Thank you very much.

Joe: And the work you guys do, it’s focused on enacting positive change. It’s some of the most inspiring and innovative work in the industry. I’ve just loved binging through all of your work examples on your site. But a lot of people would think that’s a handicap from a business model perspective, right? To be so focused on doing work and its positive change. So how do you make that work as a business?

Rob: It’s funny being here in Cannes because I remember the first Cannes that I came to as Matter Unlimited about five, six years ago and I was telling people I’m going to start this agency and we’re only going to do good. We’re only going to work on purpose-led and positive social impact work. And people would sort of just tilt their head nicely and be like, “Oh. That’s nice. But, like, how are you guys going to make any money?”

Joe: Yeah, well but if he’s going to give up on that after six months.

Rob: Right. Right. And it was really my belief that the world was entering into this purpose-led economy, this time where companies are going to have to take a stand on issues. They’re going to have to take a stand on what is actually driving them from a deeper level. Because people are demanding more and more of that from the places that they work and the products that they buy.

So, we hung out our shingle and we started working. And it turns out it’s quite an interesting niche within the market. And we developed a set of expertise where we have a bit more sensitivity and understanding of what drives humanitarian development work around the world. And we bring that to bear on our creative work.

Taking a stand is always hard, and especially if you’re a product because you just are so scared to alienate anyone. But you know what’s interesting, especially in today’s political climate that we’re dealing with in 2017, brands don’t really have a choice anymore.

Joe: And now your talk yesterday was about VR and emerging storytelling formats. I think there’s a load of consensus growing in the industry that VR, while it’s super cool, isn’t showing a lot of returns for brands. That’s this cool thing to do to win some awards, but isn’t necessarily the best investment. So what do you think are some of the keys to making VR really work and be a powerful storytelling format?

Rob: When brands think about trying to drive reach, VR isn’t the best medium. I think that VR is really much more about thinking about your audience, and this is what I was talking about yesterday. You have to think about your audience, and how you’re going to distribute that content. And then what you’re trying to say and what’s the engagement piece after it. So, it’s really great for experiential use.

Joe: Imagine we’re jumping ahead to next year. What’s one big trend that we’re not talking about now that we’re going to be talking about a lot more in 2018?

Rob: We see this kind of, what we sometimes call the purpose-led economy developing and driving. And I see this as a super trend that’s hitting the world. Whether brands want to or not, they can get out in front of it or they can hide their heads in the sand, but it’s coming. And it reminds me a lot when I first started in digital. I remember going into meetings and people would say, “Yeah. The internet, that’s not for us.” I mean, you laugh, but it’s true. It was actually a lot of meetings like that. And it’s funny, you can’t even imagine that now, right? But companies were saying things like that.

So, for me, I think that companies figuring out what their north star is and starting to live according to that and driving all of their communication and all of their work towards something that not only has impact on the bottom line, but can marry financial with societal impact, is going to be much more of a trend as we move forward.

The post Why Consumers Want Brands to Take a Stand on Social Issues appeared first on Contently.

When you do find that marriage of topic and format, that’s when marketing can make its mark. LinkedIn and salary data? A perfect fit. A stock video company and a spoof of millennial ads? Now we’re talking. A dating site and 3D models of eligible bachelors? Okay, you’ll have to trust me on that one. Here are the pieces of content from August that gave us something we couldn’t find anywhere else.

LinkedIn: State of Salary Report 2017

One of the main reasons Microsoft acquired LinkedIn last June for $26 billion was data. The social network for professionals doesn’t generate engagement like Facebook, but it does house valuable insights about where we work and what we do. And LinkedIn’s new State of Salary is the perfect vehicle for that data.

This report is a richly detailed examination of how factors like industry, locations, education, and gender affect our paycheck. It also pairs well with the site’s new Salary tool, a helpful resource sure to reach millions of people for years to come.

Old Spice: Invisible World

The summer box office stunk this year. Why? Netflix, for starters. But also because studios keep betting big on boring action movies that all look exactly the same. Do we really need another film in the Marvel universe? (We really don’t.) We’ve gotten to the point where people are craving something different, even if that means watching an invisible two-hour movie.

Earlier this month, Old Spice and W+K released Invisible World on YouTube and Twitch. And even though the movie is basically a blank screen, save for a few moments with subtitles and quick easter-eggs, it’s been viewed more than 7 million times. This project may not be your typical multimedia project, but it’s attracting serious attention, and some would argue that a blank screen is still better than a lot of what’s in theaters.

Volkswagen: Pete Eckert’s Light Paintings

Car ads always flummox me. They all look the same. There’s a closed track with a nice backdrop, a buffed car, some juiced sound effects, and Jon Hamm explaining why this car is the best/fastest/safest option on the market.

I’ve already mentioned J.D. Power and his mysterious associates on this site, but its 2016 Auto Avoider Study is very clear: The appearance of a car, both interior and exterior, is the biggest influence on purchasing decisions. That’s what makes Peter Eckert’s Volkswagen photographs so effective. Eckert, who lost his eyesight as an adult, shoots photos that manipulate exposure and light. His work capturing the Arteon sportscar is elegant, unique, and artistically cool. If you’re interested in learning more about Eckert and the project, I’d recommend checking out Patrick Coffee’s Adweek profile.

Match.com: Model Males

3D printing has all sorts of practical applications—soap dishes, organizers, keychains—but who needs that when you can make dating site action figures? Last month, Match.com opened a pop-up shop in London full of toy models of bachelors from the site. (The figures weren’t for sale; people who came into the space could take them for free.)

Even though so much of our daily activity takes place online, it’s always interesting when brands go for an event or experiential marketing approach to show off their creative work. Pop-up shops are fairly common for companies that want to sell goods to people. That’s not the case for a dating site, though. As Jamie Rigg from Engadget points out, the campaign “would’ve almost certainly become national news if the genders had been reversed,” but the switch pays off here. Maybe we’ll start to see more digital-first brands finding ways to meet people in-person for a different kind of marketing interaction.

And/Or + Dissolve: This Is a Generic Millennial Ad

Stock video footage is never interesting—unless it’s used like this.

Think I missed anything? Have suggestions for next month’s roundup? You can email me at jordan@contently.com or reach me on Twitter @JordanTeicher on Twitter .

The post The Best Content Marketing of August: Generic Millennials Will Love This List appeared first on Contently.

Let’s create an infographic to show off our recent study, says the ambitious manager.

Sounds good, says the eager junior marketer.

Even though the project begins with the best intentions, challenges start to get in the way. Deadlines are pushed, messaging changes, another stakeholder doesn’t like the project. Things go wrong, and the once promising infographic dies in development. In large organizations, it’s even possible for completed content to sit unused because of bad communication.

At some point, your company will create content that never gets used; that’s a fact of business. That wasted content may even be out of your control.

But teams shouldn’t be complacent about content projects gone wrong. Every hour spent on a wasted piece of content adds up. When you account for the time of all the employees involved, the cost of software used to create the content, and the opportunity cost of not doing something else more productive, wasted content can be a massive weight on a team’s budget.

According to B2B analyst firm SiriusDecisions, 65 percent of content never goes public because it is either unusable (37 percent) or unfindable (28 percent). If you dissect these numbers to try to understand what’s causing these issues, the pie chart looks something like this:

Source: SiriusDecisions

There’s one buzzword at the root of most of these problems: alignment. Somewhere along the way, the creative process breaks down because of organizational silos. Perhaps the content team doesn’t understand customer pain points, so they create sales enablement content that doesn’t fit with what salespeople need. Or the content team produces an article for customer success, but customer success doesn’t have an easy way to access it.

This lack of organizational alignment is endemic. Seventy percent of senior marketers describe their content process as “middling” or worse, according to a recent Contently survey. SiriusDecisions reports that enterprise B2B organizations spend roughly twice what they think they do on content. When you consider that roughly 30 percent of a brand’s marketing budget goes toward content—and that these brands are producing more content than ever to meet digital demands—it’s clear that marketing teams are making a very costly mistake.

In its study “Establishing and Enriching the Content Supply Chain,” CMO Council summed up the issue well: “While content is the backbone of nearly every aspect of the customer journey, organizations are still failing to give it the attention it deserves.” Seventy-five percent of marketing teams don’t have a formalized approach to the content ecosystem. And while 98 percent of marketers believe “having and following” a content strategy is “important for content marketing success,” only 37 percent have a documented strategy.

Teams shouldn’t be complacent about content projects gone wrong.

So what’s the solution to avoiding wasted content?

For one, enterprise companies need to consider changing the way they create content as part of their organization’s larger digital transformation. Producing work ad hoc on Microsoft Word or Google Documents won’t cut it.

Teams also need to develop a framework for creating and distributing content to the right audience, both internally and externally. That means setting data-driven goals, consistently reviewing what works and what doesn’t, and using an agile approach to strategy. If you’re producing sales enablement content, for instance, you’ll want to track what content leads to converted opportunities. You could also refresh evergreen content so it’s readily available for quick and easy updating should your strategy change. Most of all, teams need a centralized location to manage every facet of their content process.

Some companies may struggle to adapt to this new reality. But for savvy businesses to get ahead, now’s the time to stop wasting time and money on unused content.

The post The Problem That’s Quietly Sabotaging Your Marketing Budget appeared first on Contently.

In 2017 alone, MTV News, Vocativ, Sports Illustrated, the Huffington Post, Fox Sports, Vice, and Mic have all pivoted to video, leaning on the euphemism to explain why they’re firing teams of writers and editors. Most people understand that the economics of publishing a blog post online aren’t great, so these companies have decided to bet that the ad dollars from video content can save their bottom lines.

While these websites prepare for their pivot to video, the rest of the media world wants to see them fall. This makes sense—writers hate watching other talented writers lose their jobs, especially when their employers continue to raise millions of dollars off of nine- and ten-figure valuations. (Earlier this summer, Vice’s valuation hit $5.7 billion.) Also worth mentioning: Video is hard. It’s incredibly expensive compared to writing, takes longer to do well, and requires technical expertise. But what if pivoting pays off?

According to new data analysis from BuzzSumo, Facebook could eventually force all companies to invest in video, meaning those that get comfortable with the medium now would have a distinct advantage over everyone else. As BuzzSumo director Steve Rayson points out, there are three major trends we should all pay attention to:

1. Since January, the average number of engagements on Facebook posts from brands and publishers dropped by more than 20 percent.

2. During that same period, engagement on video posts from brands and publishers held fairly steady while engagement on posts with images and links fell significantly.

3. The average video post now receives twice as much engagement as all other posts.

We’ve seen this type of action before. Facebook introduces gradual changes that limit organic reach and push brands and publishers to respond in ways that benefit the platform. First, Instant Articles were given priority in the News Feed over links that took users to external sites. Then, native video started getting better engagement than links to clips on YouTube and Vimeo. Facebook Live bullied away competitors like Snapchat and Periscope. This latest move tells brands and publishers they’d be silly not to invest in video at the expense of written articles, photography, and other visual content like infographics.

In moderation, nudging brands toward video could be good for content creators. Senior marketers plan to invest in video more than any other type of content in the next five years, per a 2017 Contently survey. So in an ideal world, videos and articles complement each other. The internet has proven to be a great place for interview clips and short explainer videos with motion graphics. The written word, meanwhile, works for breaking news, short analysis, and longform reporting. Since some people prefer to watch video while others would rather read, striking a balance could lead to bigger audiences. The real issue, though, is how this topic has become an all-or-nothing proposition.

In 2016, a Facebook VP said she believed the network will be “all video” in the next few years, arguing that “it conveys so much more information in a much quicker period.” I don’t expect media companies to rid themselves of good writing, but after reading those words, you can almost see the executives limbering up in their boardrooms, preparing their pivots. Adjusting to the whims of the most powerful distribution platform stings a lot when smart people lose their jobs, but it is, at the very least, a logical response.

So where does that leave us? For starters, in need of more innovative solutions like Scroll and Blendle—subscription platforms that offer publishers an alternative to the traditional advertising model most places use to scrape by. Video is the greener grass on the other side of the fence right now, but if all publishers ditch text for the moving image, then we’ll just end up in a similar position when everyone catches up. Eventually, Facebook will ask brands and publishers to give up a larger share of their revenue in exchange for greater reach in the feed, all while charging higher premiums for paid distribution. Companies that figure out how to create standout videos will thrive, but everyone else will just have to wait for the next pivot, whatever that may be.

It’s unfortunate all this pivoting has hurt the perception of video. Like writing is the pure artform while video is what publishers do when they’re stooping for clickbait that pays. That shouldn’t be the narrative. A great video can be just as impactful as a nuanced article. We’re going to emphasize video more on The Content Strategist in the future because of this opportunity for massive engagement. But we’re not going to scrap writing. Otherwise, in a few years, you wouldn’t even be able to read an article like this. You’d have to watch it instead.

The post How Facebook Could Force Brands to Pivot to Video appeared first on Contently.

To be clear, I’m not casting a stone. As a fellow editor, I’m often guilty of similar infractions, even if they’re unintentional. Right now, 1,285 unread messages sit in my inbox, including a few pitches from freelancers or marketers looking for a guest byline on The Content Strategist. Ideally, I get back to everyone immediately—and I respond to most pitches within a few days. But a few slip through the Gmail cracks, pushed down below important emails from colleagues and unimportant outreach emails with subject lines like “HUGE WEBSITE PROBLEM – I CAN HELP.” Then I forget about the pitches, until a week or two goes by and I receive a helpful reminder from the writer.

The system needs to be better.

When I launched The Freelancer in 2014, during my rookie year at Contently, I wrote that “becoming a freelancer is like choosing to fight a battle you know you’ll eventually lose.” Since then, the battle has improved. There’s more infrastructure for self-employed creatives and more places willing to pay them good rates. But if there’s one area that’s worsened, it’s the communication between freelancers and the decision-makers who commission work. That’s why Contently’s pitch feature has been such an important part of our platform.

The purpose of the feature is simple: It organizes freelance ideas in one place that’s free of clutter and distraction. Editors evaluating pitches can accept, decline, or start a thread if they have questions and want more information. There’s also a place for pitch requests, which companies can use if they already have a theme in mind and want to put out a call for new ideas.

From a creative perspective, pitches have fueled great content from brands and media companies alike. But a more structured system only helps these companies streamline the editorial process and produce better work. (Editors could always try to hack together a workaround by manually adding pitches to folders in Gmail, but that doesn’t solve the underlying problem in the way that a technology platform can.)

My biggest fear as a freelancer is never hearing back. A rejected pitch hurts, but at least you can move on instead of torturing yourself with the possibility that nobody looked at your idea. My biggest fear as an editor, meanwhile, is not having enough time. Editors handle so many small tasks that add up over the day, and I’m always running through a mental checklist to fill out that spreadsheet, schedule that meeting, and answer that forgotten email. Keeping both sides connected eliminates those fears.

Besides, as everyone in the media world obsesses over data and insights, shouldn’t we analyze pitches the same way we do audience stats? In our platform, I can sort pitches by contributor or category to see if any trends show up. So if John Smith submitted 12 pitches over the last year and I accepted four, then I should be able to give him better (and quicker) feedback. Maybe he succeeds when pitching stories about Facebook. Or maybe feature articles with multiple interviews fare better than proposed Q&As. Either way, looking at all of that information lined up in a central location should make us both better at our jobs.

I don’t expect editors to change their habits overnight. Even some of the best freelance advice out there makes it clear that contributors will have to get comfortable nudging editors about their pitches. But there is a better way that’s helped some brands become incredibly efficient and effective publishers. For everyone else, though, we’ll just have to wait and see … which, unfortunately, is something most freelancers are already used to by now.

The post Attention Editors: We Need to Fix the Pitching Process appeared first on Contently.

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

Imagination at Work: Lessons in Storytelling from GE

Sep. 6, 8:20 a.m. – 8:50 a.m.

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

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

Sep. 6, 10:15 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

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

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

Sep. 7, 4:15 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

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

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

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

We love this chart! It pops up in about 75 percent of all content marketing talks, showing the explosive growth in searches for “content marketing” this decade. I use it in three different presentations. It’s basically our industry’s version of the “Everything is Awesome” theme song from The Lego Movie. (Which was the Greatest Content Marketing Program Ever, as anyone in the industry will tell you.)

While the Google trends chart is very useful when you’re making the case for content marketing, it’s not nearly as telling as a different chart from Gartner, which maps the hype cycle of marketing technologies. Look where content marketing falls—smack dab in what Gartner calls the trough of disillusionment.

The “trough of disillusionment” is the most existentially depressing term in marketing, and new industries can’t really avoid it. First, everyone gets super excited based on fawning TechCrunch articles, Ad Age trend stories, and prophetic thought leadership from charming founders leading the way. A few early-adopters see massive success as hype builds. But then everyone joins the party, so resistance and road blocks crop up at every step, especially at large organizations. Brands need to wait as vendors scramble to meet their needs. Expectations fade and disillusionment sets in.

Through the Trough

The start of content marketing’s hype cycle, in 2012, shouldn’t have surprised anyone. By then, it’d become clear that consumers were spending less time paying attention to traditional advertising because of the rapid proliferation of smartphones and streaming. Publishers, desperate to stay afloat, choked web pages with display units, until display had begun to feel less like a channel and more like one of the 10 plagues.

Then along came content marketing, which posed a simple solution: What if brands just told stories that people wanted to watch, hear, and read?

The early examples were inspiring. Red Bull pioneered the idea of a brand as a media company, while early Contently clients like GE, American Express, and Mint showed that B2B organizations and companies in niche industries could get in on the fun as well.

In response, brands started building content teams and earmarking experimental budgets for content marketing. In hindsight, this was the wrong approach. Instead of serving as the fuel for a brand’s entire marketing operation, content often existed in a vacuum. Brands would launch a flashy blog hidden in the recesses of a corporate website and just expect it to work. Even if that content got little paid or organic promotion, audiences were supposed to find it anyway.

It’s easy to see why this happened. Few organizations had any sort of documented content strategy. (More than 60 percent of marketers still don’t.) Marketers couldn’t draw from established education or instruction. And most importantly, building a blog was a hell of a lot easier than undergoing a transformation to ensure that every team and channel had the strategy and means to engage its target audience with breakthrough stories.

However, based on what I’ve seen over the last couple of years, both by covering the industry as Contently’s editor-in-chief and by working with dozens of clients as Contently’s Director of Content Strategy, we are about to move past the trough of disillusionment. Brands are finally realizing that great content has to be integrated into every part of their marketing and communications strategy. And as a result, what those brands need to run a successful content program has drastically changed.

A Content Transformation

Next month, I’m giving a talk at Content Marketing World titled “The Future of Content Marketing Isn’t Content Marketing.” (September 7 at 4:15 p.m., just in case you want to mark your calendar.) That title is a clever way of saying that content marketing as we’ve known it is officially dead.

As we transition in the next phase on the hype cycle, it’s time for us to rethink the challenge of content marketing. It isn’t about “doing content marketing.” It’s about transforming the way organizations operate so they’re more successful. That means taking five steps to get content right:

1. Embracing the idea of accountable content so every action maps to high-level company objectives.
2. Developing a strategy that ensures you’re producing the right content for the right audience.
3. Gearing teams toward real business goals, not just vanity metrics like pageviews, impressions, and likes.
4. Investing in tech-enabled processes that helps you save time and make smarter decisions about what your audience actually wants.
5. Committing to a higher standard of storytelling, which I like to call “breakthrough content.”

I’m going to stop here so I still have enough insights to share during Content Marketing World. I hope you can make it to my session because I want you to hear what I have to say. But I also want to hear what you have to say. Together, we can spark a conversation about this new era of content marketing. Because the future of content marketing isn’t content marketing. It’s so much more.

The post The Future of Content Marketing Isn’t Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

While most believed the vase was clear as day, others argued there wasn’t a vase at all. In the black part of the image, they saw two men facing each other. Today, the phenomenon of Rubin’s Vase is part of gestalt psychology, a field exploring why some people prioritize different information gathered from the same image.

Rubin’s vase is an interesting way to think about perspective. Successful content marketers have to use the same thinking—seeing the critical details in what most people perceive to be the background.

This approach proves to be particularly useful when analyzing competitors. Brands that analyze their competitor’s content will yield valuable insights that can make or break a content strategy—especially since those competitors may not even have one to begin with.

It’s important to keep in mind that defining your competitors can be tricky when it comes to publishing. They may not be the same companies you’ve always sized up as business rivals. The best publishers occupy the biggest share of voice in their niche, defined by metrics such as share count or engagement rate. So be prepared to think of your publishing competition as traditional media outlets, other companies in your industry that don’t sell the same product, or similar businesses on another continent with a different customer breakdown.

To compile this information, you can start searching on Google and social media channels. You’ll want to see who dominates SEO, has the most followers or fans, and gets the highest engagement on social posts. You can get creative with your search, too, by looking at shares in industry-related LinkedIn groups as well as media preferences in Facebook Audience Insights.

Once you nail down your competitors, your first instinct might be to ask, “Well, what are they writing about?” and then slide your way into existing conversations. But in our experience, a quick glance at conversation topics generally doesn’t show you where to find an edge.

For example, if you work at a B2B tech company that sells machine learning software, your competitors might spend time covering technology at large or trending topics like artificial intelligence and virtual reality. But just mirroring these topics isn’t enough. Of course all the competitors in the AI space want to talk about AI. So how can you differentiate?

You have to be creative with how you analyze those competitor conversations. Yes, they may be talking about AI, but what approach works best? Figuring out this critical information is seeing the faces in the black “background,” instead of just the white vase.

Here are a few questions to ask that can help you identify unique approaches to content creation:

Are your competitors using profiles of industry leaders?

Do they examine how political or economic climates affect your industry?

Are they predicting what your industry might look like in the future? Or evaluating what worked or didn’t work in the past?

Do they analyze particular generations, genders, or other social demographics as they relate to your industry?

When they look at these subjects, are they critical, supportive, or informative? And how does each approach perform?

With certain content scraping tools, you can view the top performing pieces of any domain to get this information. I’ve also done it the old-fashioned way, by copying and pasting the titles and links from competitor sites with the most shares, which are a decent proxy.

Ultimately, you want to look beyond the broadest topics your brand can cover. The key is finding your niche within your area of expertise. Never deliver work that everyone expects to see from your industry, because content has value and gains traction only when it offers something new and unexpected.

You might already know your brand’s niche. Even if you do, and certainly if you don’t, it’ll be helpful to look at the niche topics your competitors like to discuss, in addition to their unique content approaches, in order to better inform how you craft your strategy.

Continuing with our hypothetical about the machine learning software company, an analysis of competitor content should yield all things having to do with machine learning as it relates to specific industries like health care, retail, marketing, etc. However, if you take a closer look, you may discover that the context of the content digs deeper, focusing on factors like sustainability or finance or customer success. These subjects are relevant to any company, but when paired with specific expertise, that’s how you end up with an interesting, new read.

Last but not least, all that insight is only as valuable as the performance it generates. That’s why it helps to visualize a cross-section so you can always point back to your research as you make creative decisions.

You might find that interviewing or profiling a business leader performs 20 percent better than a predictive article about the future of your industry. Or perhaps predictions about sustainability might fare 30 percent worse than predictions about innovation.

Creatively assessing what’s working in your industry is the best way to connect with your audience. By doing so, you adopt a data-driven process that can measurably improve your strategy in a significant way. It’s like seeing the men’s faces on a white background. The information that truly impacts your strategy is there, it’s just a matter of knowing what to look for.

The post The Secret to Finding a Competitive Content Advantage appeared first on Contently.