That’s right. After a decade killing chain restaurants, marriage, and the McDonald’s McWrap, millennials have grown strong and are entering their peak earning years. Simultaneously, Gen Z—which you may know from the popular mobile application, TikTok—is graduating college and taking over the coveted 18-25 consumer segment.

I’m a card-carrying millennial. I’ve survived graduating into a recession and strangled an Applebees with my own two hands. And you know what my generation wants? To buy stuff from companies that reflect our values, so we can feel good about ourselves when we pop a CBD gummy and start clicking on Instagram ads.

The age of conscious consumerism is here, driven by the under 40-set. According to 5Ws 2020 Consumer Culture Report, 83 percent of millennials say that it’s important for the companies they buy from to align with their beliefs and values, and 76 percent of 18-34 year-olds like when the CEOs of companies they buy from speak out on issues they care for.

Edelman’s 2020 Trust Barometer also found that values are driving purchase decisions. The most important attributes to consumers today being able to trust that what the brand does is right, reputation, values, and environmental impact. As climate change worsens, sustainability is only going to become more important; turns out, we really want a planet to live on.

Companies today not only need to do good; they also need to tell stories about the good that they’re doing so consumers know about it. It’s not a nice-to-have anymore; it’s a necessity.

That’s why social impact storytelling was one of the top content trends I presented in our State of Content Marketing 2021 trends webinar (which you can get on-demand here.)

One of the coolest things is that telling these stories will not only help your company’s bottom line—it’ll help the world, too.

That’s because when you tell great stories about the good your company is doing, it creates a positive feedback loop that encourages your company to invest more in CSR efforts.

Skeptical? Then say it to the face of this awesome diagram.

Social impact storytelling needs to be a part of your content strategy in 2021. And in the webinar, I suggested taking three steps:

1. Put on your reporter’s hat to find compelling social impact stories

Companies don’t often do a great job of talking about the good that they’re doing—even to their own employees. That means that you need do the dirty work to find them.

This is something that GE Reports does extremely well. Led by chief storyteller Tomas Kellner—a former editor at Forbes—GE Reports has amassed a loyal audience of over 100,000 subscribers through what Kellner calls “shoe leather reporting“—developing sources inside the company to break stories of the amazing innovations happening inside the company.

While its sustainability storytelling has often gone viral on Reddit, GE Reports shifted focus in the spring to cover how GE Healthcare—and the rest of the world-was fighting back against COVID-19.

GE Reports did a remarkable job telling the stories of employees who were going above-and-beyond in the fight against COVID, and the role GE Healthcare was playing in combatting the pandemic. Just check out this story about GE Healthcare employee who traveled 1,400 miles through an earthquake and blizzard to help step up the production of ventilators at a key plant, or this story about a breakthrough in AI-enhanced ultrasound that was saving lives during the darkest days of the outbreak in Italy.

They also published a weekly roundup of five ways the world fought back, which included non-GE stories, and was my daily dose of optimism as I hunkered down in downtown Manhattan, clutching a bottle of hand sanitizer like it was the last Infinity Stone.

GE Reports’ coverage not only made me feel better—it helped me see GE Healthcare in a new, extremely positive light. If I was in the market for an MRI machine, I would definitely buy it from them!

You can follow Kellner’s lead, especially if you work inside a large corporation. Find out who’s in charge of your social impact and CSR initiatives, and who else is working on them. Bond with them. Interview them. Do the same thing with your product and engineering teams—your company’s product might be doing good and serving people in ways you don’t even know about. Put on your reporter hat, and get to work.

2. Tell narrative stories that communicate your company’s values and how they set you apart from the competition

The morning after the 2016 election, Rose Marcario, the CEO of Patagonia, woke up at 4 AM and decided that it was time to double down on the company’s activism.

As Fast Company reported, by 9:30 AM, she had penned a company-wide call-to-action to “defend wilderness, to defend air, soil, and water.” Facing widespread rollback of environmental regulations, she galvanized the company around its mission to protect the planet—a mission dear to not only employees at the company, but Patagonia’s customers, too.

Ever since Marcario took over as Patagonia’s CEO in 2008 and made a huge bet on sustainable manufacturing and design, the company’s revenue has grown more than 500 percent.

Much of that is its mission-led marketing; the outdoor apparel brand donates 1 percent of all profits to environmental causes, turns its stores into a repair shop for used gear on Black Friday, and tells stories about sustainability in Hollywood-quality films and four-word rallying cries on its clothing. Patagonia’s ethics and values are the competitive differentiator that shines through in every story they tell, and their customers are fiercely loyal to the brand as a result.

A big reason that Patagonia’s approach works so well is the ridiculous quality of their storytelling. One of their latest documentaries, Public Trust, about the battle to save public land from development, won awards at the Big Sky Documentary Festival and Mountainview.

They tailor their content to the channels where their audience spends their time—short films on YouTube, compelling 30-second sizzle trailers on Instagram, climate news and calls-to-action on Twitter—and truly stand apart, growing their business at an exponential rate.

3. When possible, align your social impact storytelling with a product

In recent years, Bank of the West has been doubling down on ethical and sustainable investing through its Impact Solutions investment arm. In 2019, it became the first bank to empower customers to track the CO2 impact of their purchases, and this year, launched its 1% for the Planet account to donate 1 percent of revenues to environmental non-profits.

They tell the story of their sustainability initiatives through Means & Matters, its sustainability-focused content hub. The site covers everything from how the private sector can step in where the public sector has failed to how to work in sustainability. It even puts other banks that invest in arctic drilling on blast.

(Disclosure: Bank of the West is Contently client, and partnered with Contently on Means & Matters.)

This content communicates a clear reason why people like me who care about the planet should invest with Bank of the West over competitors. There’s also an added bonus, as all of this sustainable investing content is an SEO goldmine, helping attract potential buyers who would be extremely interested in investing with Bank of the West—making it much easier to tie the content to business results.

This all, of course, leaves one very important question: What if your company isn’t investing in any initiatives worthy of social impact storytelling?

Well, then hit your leadership team with the stats and examples in this post, and make the case why it’s just good business to stand for something and do good in the world. And once they do, tell the story of how you made it happen. I can’t wait to see it.

The post Why Social Impact Storytelling Will Be 2021’s Hottest Content Trend appeared first on Contently.

If a writer even introduced the concept of rain or mist or even splash-back from some rapids, there would be hell to pay. Danger, too, was totally out of the question. Anything that even hinted as a bad time was a no-go.

Unsurprisingly, the project was a disaster. The editing process was excruciating, and every half-decent writer quit after one story. Actually, the stories weren’t really stories. Without tension, they were just milquetoast diary entries, so readers never returned. The lower-level managers running the day-to-day of the program knew it was insane, but their hands were tied. Their bosses shrugged off the failure by blaming an entire industry. “Content marketing just doesn’t work,” they said.

I’ve worked at Contently, one of the pioneers in content marketing, since 2013. I’d love to sit here and tell you that the industry has seen smooth sailing, but that’d be a lie. The truth is a lot of companies have figured out content marketing and turned it into their secret weapon, driving hockey-stick growth and leaving their competitors lingering in the shadows. But even more companies have struggled to get their programs off the ground and dismissed great content as “just too hard.”

As Contently’s head of content strategy, I spend most of my time as a content therapist, traveling around the country to help prospects and clients work through their biggest marketing challenges. After hundreds of meetings and workshops this year, I feel confident that content marketing is about to take a big leap—thanks to a few key factors.

1. Creativity strikes back

Back in 2013, brands started hiring journalists to work on their content programs. Many of those folks found themselves totally alone, surrounded by people who had no idea how to develop good editorial content. Basically, they were this guy:

Some of those journalists quit and went back to their old world. But a lot of them stuck it out. They painfully got buy-in across their org and learned about the business side of marketing. Slowly, they brought on other smart people with great storytelling skills to join them in the fight. Now, five years later, they’re ascending to powerful leadership positions.

The epitome of this person is my friend Margaret Magnarelli. She’s the former editor of Money magazine and now the VP of marketing at Monster.com. Millions of people read Monster’s content each month. The brand has won or been nominated for just about every content marketing award on the planet. And content is a big driver of business. But it didn’t come without a ton of hustle.

“The first thing I did was go around to every person I thought could possibly touch content in any way and say, ‘What do you think I should do, and how can I help you do your job?'” she told me. “That really helped me understand a lot of things that I didn’t understand coming from journalism—how I could work with these people and if I could align my KPIs with their KPIs.”

As she’s proven the business value of her program, her team has steadily grown, and she’s brought in some great editorial minds. (Her B2C content manager, for instance, is the former editorial director of Conde Nast Traveler.)

Pictured above: Margaret Magnarelli, VP of Marketing at Monster, who will hate me for this.

There’s good reason to be optimistic about the future of content marketing because more people with the special combination of storytelling skills and business savvy like Margaret are now in charge of major marketing programs. And they’re investing in great content.

2. The brand purpose craze

If you’re looking for a buzzword of the year—let’s just assume you are—it’s “brand purpose.” I even made a trophy in Clipart.

Pictured above: My design skills, once again proving that I am a true triple threat.

Brand purpose has been percolating in the most inner circles of marketing buzzspeak for years now, but in 2018, it really took over. The big driver was a group of studies that showed brand purpose was a business imperative, particularly if you want to reach Gen Z, those pesky youngsters who grew up with iPhones for hands and YouTube for parents.

The stat that really gets everyone going is 67 percent of Gen Z would stop purchasing from a brand that doesn’t align with its values. (A separate Edelman study found that number at 57 percent, across age groups.) This left brands scrambling to figure out their purpose—which really shouldn’t have been such a mystery in the first place.

Just look at GE Reports, which has built a dedicated newsletter of over 100,000 people and regularly goes viral on Reddit by covering the company’s amazing new inventions and initiatives across renewable energy and air travel. Or look at Hubspot, which has built a dedicated following by helping millions of people master inbound marketing and grow their businesses.

Whatever your mission or purpose, remember that content is the best way to show people what your brand really cares about.

3. The content center of excellence

This year, I’ve seen enterprise brands started to come to grips with the harsh reality that they have dozens of departments and LOBs creating content in silos, with little brand governance and quality control. In many cases, groups are undermining each other, creating contradictory or repetitive content. It’s chaos.

The good news: A lot of these brands have had a come-to-Jesus moment. To avoid the chaos, they created centralized teams or content councils for all parts of the org. Often, these councils are led by the star team that’s already figured out content for an individual line of business. As a reward, they get to go through the painful process of spreading their expertise to the rest of the business, setting clear content strategies, measurement frameworks, and processes for creating content. Yay!

This process is painful, but it also:

a) is a big sign that brands are taking content marketing seriously

b) will ensure that content performance is mapped to real business outcomes, which will only help it grow in performance.

This is so significant. Honestly, content marketing shouldn’t be its own discipline. We’ve reached a stage where brands need great content at every buyer touchpoint—from their Instagram posts to sales enablement emails to pitch decks—to win people over. Great content is an inherent part of good marketing. And in 2019, we’re going to see that become true. It’s been a messy adventure, but who cares if we got a little wet?

The post State of Content Marketing 2019: Creativity Strikes Back appeared first on Contently.

Instead of curling up with the Sunday edition of the Times, I spend my Sunday mornings with my iPhone, reading scalding Twitter takes from the nerds I follow. And this past Sunday, an unexpected article was getting clapbacks in my feed—a Washington Post story about the “death of business reporting” thanks to brands deprioritizing media relations and stonewalling journalists.

Columnist Steve Pearlman vented about how uncooperative corporate comms had become, refusing to participate in even positive feature stories. Pearlman identifies two culprits: a lack of trust in the media, and the rise of “owned media,” in which brands to hope to set the narrative about their companies.

As both a freelance journalist and head of strategy at Contently, where we help brands build internal newsrooms, this story cut deep. As a reporter, I’d felt Pearlman’s pain many times. But were we to blame?

Earned, owned, paid

Go to most marketing conferences, you’ll hear a common trope of “owned, earned, and paid” media. Owned media is content that your brand makes. Earned media is when journalists write about your brand. Paid media is when you spend money to get your message in front of people. The idea is that this holy trinity, when used together, will unlock marketing glory.

In recent years, the focus has shifted sharply toward “owned,” which makes sense. After all, if you want journalists to write about your brand, you need to tell a good story about the interesting things your brand is does, or at the very least put out newsworthy research, entertaining campaigns, and other content into the world. And paid media isn’t likely to be successful if the content sucks.

But one of the unintended consequences of the content marketing craze is that less sophisticated companies often expect owned content to be magic. That simply by creating content, they’ll completely own the message around their brand, skyrocketing to the top of search engines and amassing loyal followers on social media that only listen to what they have to say.

It’s an intoxicating idea, especially since there’s no risk of negative, “Oh crap I’m gonna get fired” stories about your brand. But this simplistic view of magical content is a pipe dream.

Why owned needs earned

Backlinks are the biggest factor in Google’s rankings, which means that your content won’t rank if trusted sites (i.e. publishers) aren’t linking to your site. And on average, less than 3 percent of a brand’s followers will see a post on Facebook or Twitter.

Brands certainly can—and do—amass a strong owned audience with great content. On GE Reports, GE breaks news about new innovations inside the company. Its posts go viral on Reddit and serve as the source material for articles across the web. Parse.ly and Newswhip are most follows for media junkies thanks to the awesome, data-backed stories they publish about how Facebook and Google are affecting the media landscape. Red Bull is now the biggest extreme sports media company on earth.

But these brands built their audience by creating great, non-promotional content that other sites covered and linked to, which introduced their content to a new audience and made it easy to find on Google and social. Case in point: Pearlman’s story was inspired by him wanting to write a feature about Clorox because they won a bunch of marketing awards for really good content.

If your content isn’t getting the attention of other sites, there’s a good chance you’re doing something wrong. And if it is winning attention, you should do everything you can to nurture media relations. If you want to build a loyal audience, you need that external validation. Not just to win over Google, but also to win over people.

This is important enough that it’s worth repeating: In a world where any brand can publish anything it wants, external validation from the free press is as important than ever.

“The unbiased objective reporting from a trusted news source is far more powerful for a business than paid marketing or paid content,” explained Sloane Humphrey, president of Powell Communications. “And that’s because of trust. Consumers know the difference.”

But not everyone sees it this way. In Pearlman’s piece, Fortune editor Alan Murray summed up the attitude of corporate comms towards journalists this way: “One, they don’t trust us. And two, they don’t need us.”

So is content marketing to blame for this attitude? Certainly the control that technology now gives brands to own their message is intoxicating. But content marketing works best when it becomes fuel for media relations, not a replacement for it. To save business reporting and brand marketing alike, that message needs to sync in.

For those on the brand side, the trust issue can be largely solved by comms pros prioritizing doing their job well, instead of just keeping their job.

As for not needing journalists? Now that’s something for all of us to rage about on Twitter, because it’s just not true.

The post Should We Blame Content Marketing for the ‘Death of Business Reporting’? appeared first on Contently.

Tomas Kellner has built GE Reports into one of the hottest tech publications around, with over half a million monthly readers, and though his content regularly goes viral on Reddit and Tumblr, he really perks up when he talks about email.

[Full disclosure: GE is a Contently client]

“We love email,” Kellner gushed. “It may sound old-school, but email subscription is really a hardwired link to your audience. For us, email subscribers are an extremely valuable audience that we want. Every day 15,000 people get the blast from GE Reports that a new story is out.”

When Kellner came over to GE Reports from Forbes, building a strong newsletter was his first mission. “We started with zero subscribers just like anyone else,” he said. “With any brand, really, you start with employees, and then you build the list from there.”

Since then, how many email subscribers come from each story has been one of the most important metrics for GE Reports. Talk to most successful publishers and you’ll hear a similar sentiment.

“Email is huge,” said Neil Patel, a serial entrepreneur who’s built audiences of over 100,000 monthly visitors for three separate blogs: KISSmetrics, Quick Sprout, and Crazy Egg. “In terms of distribution, it’s the biggest thing you can do.”

Patel’s blogs are filled with real estate devoted to collecting email addresses. Usually, he’s offering something in return for a sign-up, like free access to his “Advanced Guide to SEO.” It pays off. For one of his blogs, email accounts for 28 percent of traffic—and this doesn’t even take into account the second wave of traffic as those readers who came from email share his posts with their followers on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

This wave of readership is an incredible phenomenon, and it’s one that we experience every day at The Content Strategist. Our daily email newsletter drives thousands of readers to our site each day. Simply put, the email newsletter is the old-school engine that could.

Here’s a quick look at the effect an email newsletter has on driving readers to your publication:

This may seem incredibly obvious, but a lot of brand publishers fail to develop a dedicated newsletter for their content. It’s one of the most common mistakes new brand publishers make.

In truth, the technology stack needed to make this all work is ridiculously simple; it’s more PB&J than Italian sub. At Contently, we use MailChimp to build and send our newsletters, and Sumo.me’s List Builder and Scroll Box tools to intelligently collect email addresses. Both MailChimp and Sumo.me come with well-designed templates that are easy to set up—no coding required. (For another option, Patel uses Maropost for both.) There are a lot of effective technologies out there for building your email newsletter, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The important thing is that you pick one and start building your list.

This is an excerpt from the “Ultimate Content Strategist Playbook No. 4: Engaging and Building an Audience.”

The post Why the Newsletter Is the Most Important Part of Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

What I’m hearing is actually “Pivot,” a new experimental podcast from General Electric. Made with developers in mind, Pivot explores what it would be like to create world-changing apps for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) using GE’s software, Predix.

Unlike most of today’s popular podcasts, GE’s creation isn’t strictly nonfiction. It has a fictional story and characters, but also includes documentary-style interviews of real-world technology experts. In the plot, an earthquake inspires two developers, Sam and Ethan, to start thinking about building apps for disaster response. As the show’s tagline reads: “‘Pivot’ is a semi-fictional podcast about a very real opportunity.”

If that premise sounds strange to you, you’re not alone. Before “Pivot” got off the ground, the idea was pitched to a focus group of developers for feedback; it did not go over well.

“The skepticism and the silence in the room—it was unbelievable,” said John Perry, GE Digital’s content marketing director. “It was incredibly discouraging. We thought we had a total dud on our hands.”

But four episodes later, GE’s content team was able to change those engineers’ minds. “What’s been wonderful is that some people who participated in those early discussions are some of our biggest fans and proponents,” Perry said.

How exactly did that tectonic shift happen? Through open discussions with the show’s unique target audience.

Resonating with a tough audience

GE is known for producing high quality content via its brand magazine, GE Reports, which reaches over half a million readers with stories on emerging technology. Soon, the brand will also be part of an upcoming television series on National Geographic.

While these storytelling efforts are meant for a general audience, “Pivot” differs by going after a very specific niche: developers working with big data or consumer IoT projects who want to graduate to something bigger. It just so happens that this audience is one of the most skeptical demographics out there. According to a study by Metia, a marketing agency, developers “distrust marketing” and are more likely to research new technologies based on peer recommendations rather than good PR or marketing.

“We will never succeed with our platform if we don’t win the hearts and minds of developers,” Perry said. “We’re trying to convince them that the Industrial Internet is real, that it’s accessible, fun to work in, and that Predix is the way to do it.”

To win these hearts and minds, GE first had to get a peek inside them.

The creative agency that worked with GE to produce the podcast, SNP Communications, held different focus groups with developers—not just to understand the technologies they were working with, but also to find out what drives their interests. According to SNP’s Dave Imperiale, who produced and co-directed the podcast, “We asked a bunch of tech and semi-personal questions and just used some of those snippets to influence the characters we were developing.”

In the focus groups, developers talked about the early experiences that drove their passion for technology. Some developers said that when they were children, they would take devices apart and put them back together just to learn how they worked. Also, they were excited about large machines like airplanes and trains.

“That’s also been written into the podcast,” said Amy Maloof, the podcast’s writer and co-director. “The characters want to do successful, big things that they would get excited about as little kids.”

These conversations gave GE and SNP Communications an inside look into a group that’s hard to crack. According to Perry, “This is a tough audience. If they think you’re bogus, you’re gone. You don’t get another chance.”

Marketing something that doesn’t quite exist

Reaching a skeptical audience is hard enough by itself, but GE also had another challenge on its hands with “Pivot”: How do you market something that’s so esoteric?

While the Industrial Internet of Things already exists, it doesn’t generate the same mainstream attention as the consumer-focused Internet of Things. For example, most people can understand the data from their personal fitness trackers, but if you asked them about accessing data on the status and location of a fleet of ships, they wouldn’t know where to begin. As for GE’s Predix software platform that works with the IIoT, it’s only used by GE’s partners and industry customers for now, and won’t be available to the public until 2016.

This is where the semi-fictional format of the podcast comes in. After realizing that he couldn’t make a documentary podcast in the vein of “Serial” or “StartUp,” Perry thought, “What if we made it up? What if we made a story about developers, with developers as heroes who happened to have access to Predix?”

A totally fictional story, however, wasn’t enough for GE’s audience of developers. According to Imperiale, “From all the research we did and all the discussions we had with developers, everyone’s feedback was that it had to be somewhat educational. While we would have loved to do something that was just pure entertainment, if there’s no educational component, we would have lost the audience right off the bat.”

That’s how expert interviews came into the mix. During each episode, Pivot’s unnamed fictional host gets in touch with an IIoT expert—such as Dr. Richard Soley, executive director of the Industrial Internet Consortium, and Tim Connors, who leads AT&T’s Internet of Things Service—to ask them about real-world applications for complex technology.

The interviews also proved to be invaluable during the writing process. “We’re creative types, we’re not coders,” Maloof said. “As we talk to developers, they’ve been really helpful giving us accurate tech details that are realistic and cutting edge. So even if our plot is fictional, it could be real.”

The podcast also got an additional dose of reality once GE introduced a crowdsourcing element. The “Ideation Challenge” encourages listeners to submit their IIoT app ideas for cash prizes and the chance to be featured in future episodes.

While it’s too early to tell whether Pivot will be as earth-shattering as the quake that sets off the entire story, it’s refreshing to see a giant company tackle the seemingly impossible task of marketing a yet-to-be-released product to a skeptical audience. “Pivot” might not take over the media world like “Serial” did last year, but as long as GE can connect with developers, it doesn’t have to.

The post GE’s Crazy, Experimental Podcast Is ‘Serial’ for Coders appeared first on Contently.

B2C marketers can’t have all the fun. Sure, they can get an SNL star to spoof Fifty Shades of Grey like Audi did, or create a blockbuster movie entirely about their product like LEGO. But just because B2B technology marketers aren’t selling something as sexy as a new car doesn’t mean they can’t engage their audiences in equally exciting ways.

Aside from their products, companies in the tech and enterprise industries have something that their consumers will always want: information. And one of the best ways for brands to deliver that information is through content marketing. It’s much easier to grab people’s attention with a helpful video or infographic than a dry press release.

According to the Content Marketing Institute study “B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America,” 86 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing, but only 38 percent believe their efforts are effective. Still, 70 percent say they are creating more content than they were last year, and 55 percent plan to increase their content marketing spend in 2015.

For B2B companies to succeed as publishers, a few crucial questions have to be answered: What will they spend that budget on? How will they use it to create more effective content campaigns? And what types of content will marketers produce in an attempt to engage consumers?

In this e-book, we’ll dive into popular B2B marketing trends that have emerged in the B2B tech industry. We’ll also look at brands—HubSpot, GE, Buffer, and SAP—whose impressive campaigns offer models for those looking to pack a punch. As we’ll cover in greater detail below, these leading brands are showing others that they don’t need to sell a shiny car in order to create high-quality marketing campaigns.

Download your free copy of State of Content Marketing: B2B Tech.

The post State of Content Marketing B2B Tech: Trends and Case Studies Transforming the Industry appeared first on Contently.

B2C marketers can’t have all the fun. Sure, they can get an SNL star to spoof Fifty Shades of Grey like Audi did, or create a blockbuster movie entirely about their product like LEGO. But just because B2B technology marketers aren’t selling something as sexy as a new car doesn’t mean they can’t engage their audiences in equally exciting ways.

Aside from their products, companies in the tech and enterprise industries have something that their consumers will always want: information. And one of the best ways for brands to deliver that information is through content marketing. It’s much easier to grab people’s attention with a helpful video or infographic than a dry press release.

According to the Content Marketing Institute study “B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America,” 86 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing, but only 38 percent believe their efforts are effective. Still, 70 percent say they are creating more content than they were last year, and 55 percent plan to increase their content marketing spend in 2015.

For B2B companies to succeed as publishers, a few crucial questions have to be answered: What will they spend that budget on? How will they use it to create more effective content campaigns? And what types of content will marketers produce in an attempt to engage consumers?

In this e-book, we’ll dive into popular B2B marketing trends that have emerged in the B2B tech industry. We’ll also look at brands—HubSpot, GE, Buffer, and SAP—whose impressive campaigns offer models for those looking to pack a punch. As we’ll cover in greater detail below, these leading brands are showing others that they don’t need to sell a shiny car in order to create high-quality marketing campaigns.

Trends

Image via Syda Productions

Good old-fashioned blogging

For all the talk about exciting and innovative new content formats, blogging remains the most common content marketing outlet for B2B marketers—and for good reason. According to Demand Gen Report’s 2014 “B2B Content Preferences Survey,” out of 11 different types of content, blog posts are most likely to be shared by B2B buyers, with 40 percent saying they share them frequently. Blogs are great platforms for showcasing many different types of content: text, video, infographics. These blog posts can be any length, although the industry is trending towards a mix of longform and shortform. BuzzSumo found that long content is more viral than short content, and as a result, experts are predicting that medium-sized content will die out.

One of the biggest advantages of company blogs is that they provide an easy way to showcase a range of expert voices—from staff and executives to freelance writers and guest writers from other companies.

For example, Moz, an SEO software company, has been building a blog audience for a decade with insights for marketers and an honest, transparent look at the successes and challenges of its business. Pieces like its “Beginner’s Guide to SEO” have generated a great deal of buzz and positive feedback, and have provided a constant source of inbound leads. Moz’s blog is composed of content from a community of freelance writers, guest contributors, and its three-person in-house content team.

Though not in the tech industry per se, one of the great examples of this is American Express OPEN Forum. The credit card company took blogging a step further by creating an interactive content hub and opening it up to its community of small-business owners, cultivating an audience of millions by publishing advice from experts and inviting entrepreneurs to submit questions for the writers and other OPEN Forum members to answer.

LinkedIn

In addition to a blog hosted on your own domain, another great platform B2B companies are leveraging to establish thought leadership is LinkedIn. The social site is built for professionals to connect with one another, and now that LinkedIn has given every user the opportunity to publish content directly to the platform, marketers can share their insights with colleagues and potential customers. With paid distribution, marketers can also sponsor content like e-books and blog posts, and hyper-target that content to a very specific readership.

According to the CMI’s studies, 87 percent of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content (tying Twitter as the most-used platform) and cite LinkedIn as their most effective social media platform.

Case studies and white papers

According to Demand Gen Report’s 2014 survey, white papers are the most popular form of content among B2B consumers (78 percent), with case studies following at a close second (73 percent). These two types of content allow B2B marketers to fully explain the benefits of their products and outline how they can help potential clients; they have stronger narratives than press releases and are often more structured than blog posts.

These more detailed pieces of content have become so beneficial that Genpact, a business services company, built an international brand newsroom to churn out over 40 high-quality case studies and white papers per month.

In-person events

Skype sessions and digital hangouts have their appeal, but it’s hard to beat face-to-face communication. According to the CMI’s study, 90 percent of B2B enterprise marketers use in-person events as a marketing tactic. In fact, they’ve replaced videos as the tactic B2B enterprise marketers use most often.

In-person events can take various forms, including conferences, trade shows, and networking parties that bring people together and spur real-time discussion.

Webinars

If you can’t sufficiently get your point across through text and don’t have the resources to throw a party to meet potential clients in person, webinars can be a simple way to communicate with your audience and generate leads. According to the CMI’s report, 70 percent of technology marketers say webinars and videos are the most effective tactics they use.

HubSpot, an inbound marketing and sales platform, uses webinars as a key component of its successful marketing mix. HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe said on Quora that he believes HubSpot was the first company to hold a webinar about using Twitter for marketing and PR. That webinar, launched in 2008, had over 3,000 registrations and helped HubSpot build its social channels, as it used Twitter to generate questions and fuel discussion. Just a couple of years later, in 2010, HubSpot’s most popular webinar, “The Science of Facebook Marketing,” had a whopping 13,000 sign-ups.

Email marketing

In 2012, 59 percent of B2B marketers said email was the most effective channel for generating revenue, according to BtoB Magazine. Now, more brands continue to jump on that bandwagon as they become better acquainted with marketing automation services. Email marketing can help B2B marketers retain readers and send informative content directly to the inboxes of those who have already expressed interest in a brand. This idea is echoed by Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin, who cites the company’s biweekly email newsletter as one of the most effective tactics Moz has used for growing an audience. On that same note, Buffer also doubled its sign-ups month over month in the summer of 2014 by using email marketing.

Best-in-Class Examples

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HubSpot

HubSpot has created one of the most dynamic B2B blogs in the content marketing space with its Hubspot blogs. Google anything related to inbound marketing and you’re likely to see a handful of HubSpot pieces near the top of the search results. Rightfully so. As GrowthHackers points out, HubSpot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah literally wrote the (e-)book on inbound marketing in 2009.

Segmented into three main blogs—Marketing, Sales, and Agency—HubSpot’s content hub features unique and informative pieces like “14 Mesmerizing Cinemagraphs That Show Off Facebook’s New Ad Format,” “The ABCs of Finding the Hottest Prospects,” and “18 of the Best Email Subject Lines You’ve Ever Read.” HubSpot’s content drove over 2 million views in January 2015, which is an impressive stat for one of HubSpot’s key content metrics: visits.

Along with traffic, however, HubSpot’s main objective for its blogs is to drive leads. Over time, the company has optimized them for this purpose. Volpe said on Quora that placing a call to action at the bottom of every post tripled the number of leads that came in from Inbound Hub.

Joe Chernov, VP of content at HubSpot, told Contently, “I’ve joked that content is to inbound what theArc Reactor is to Iron Man. Content drives search, search generates traffic, traffic yields readers, readers become leads, and leads fuel sales. Without content, that very fundamental process stalls.”

“Content is to inbound what the Arc Reactor is to Iron Man. Content drives search, search generates traffic, traffic yields readers, readers become leads, and leads fuel sales.”

The driving force behind this process is HubSpot’s in-house content team, which is split into two groups: one for shortform blog content and another for longform offerings such as e-books and podcasts.

What are the benefits of producing content that lives on your own site? Chernov likes to quote Volpe on this one, who’s fond of saying, “We don’t like to build houses on other people’s land.” In other words, constructing your own content hub from scratch will take more time and resources than just publishing to a third-party site. However, its benefits will be far greater because you will develop a loyal audience of consumers returning to your brand’s domain looking for information that will help their own businesses.

“We don’t like to build houses on other people’s land.”

Speaking of owned media, the company also spun off HubSpot.tv, a video hub dedicated to inbound marketing that’s also associated with Inbound.org, a community discussion site for marketers, founded in 2012 by Shah and Moz’s Rand Fishkin. It has since grown to over 30,000 members.

“HubSpot is not only a company, but it’s also the catalyst of a movement,” Chernov said. “And as a community has coalesced around that movement, it’s our job to nurture and foster it.”

As B2B marketers are coming to learn, the best way to do that is through content marketing.

GE

Six years ago, would you have associated General Electric with awesome stories about robots and 3D imaging of the human body? Probably not. But you can now, thanks to GE Reports, the tech conglomerate’s online magazine.

“I basically ignored press releases and really focused one hundred percent on storytelling,” Tomas Kellner, GE Reports’ managing editor, told Contently. “My stories have real protagonists who are trying to solve real problems and reach real outcomes.”

“I basically ignored press releases and really focused one hundred percent on storytelling,” said Kellner.

For example, last year he published a story about the development of new software that allows machines to talk to each other. These machines can even tell operators if something is wrong or if their systems are going to break down. It’s not a piece that blatantly promotes GE, but it does tell a cool story that should be relevant and interesting to almost every tech field.

Kellner said, “[The stories] have to be newsworthy enough so a person who is in no way connected to GE or interested in GE or owns GE stock would still walk away and say, ‘This is a really cool piece of information, like I said, I didn’t know before, and this is a really cool company. Maybe I should come back and check on them more often.'”

The GE Reports content team is based in-house and works with marketing firm Group SJR. Kellner handles most of the reporting, but he’s developing a team of writers to help research and develop content. “There has to be somebody inside who understands what you’re trying to do and who can manage the copy and [make sure] that the tone is just right, that it fits within the company’s strategic goal,” Kellner said.

Fittingly, the CMI’s recent study found that 86 percent of the most effective tech B2B marketers have a dedicated person who oversees the content marketing operation.

GE Reports’ recent story of note, “Body of Knowledge,” did the near impossible for brands: It dominated Reddit, which is curated by moderators who are notorious for cracking down on any kind of marketing effort. The story focuses on an innovative CT scan machine that produces 3D pictures of a patient’s organs and bones without exposing them to harmful amounts of radiation.

In addition to Reddit, “Body of Knowledge” was picked up by Newsweek, Time, and The Washington Post, as well as by other international outlets. The story’s viral pickup became a catalyst for new readers to discover the amazing stories GE Reports has to offer. Now, Kellner has people coming to him with stories about the latest developments in technology.

Stories like these also establish the benefits of owned media: They drive direct feedback and encourage readers to explore your site, increasing the likelihood they’ll return to your brand for more helpful and interesting content.

“When our CT scan became old news, there were journalists out there who still wanted to run on the story, so they went for the next thing. The way they found out about [other GE technology] is because that story was featured below our CT scan story,” Kellner said. “When you publish a discrete piece of native content, you can’t really do that.”

Buffer

When Buffer, a social media scheduling app, launched three years ago, it gained almost 100 percent of its new users from content marketing. Buffer’s nascent content operation started with its blog, run by co-founder Leo Widrich, who gained momentum for the company by guest-blogging for as many publications as possible. As detailed on The Content Strategist, Wildrich wrote about 150 articles for other blogs in less than a year, which helped give Buffer the credibility and notoriety it needed to draw in 100,000 users.

The thinking was if Wildrich couldn’t get big sites like Mashable and TechCrunch to write about Buffer’s product, he would just have to take matters into his own hands and write about it himself.

Since Buffer began as a Twitter scheduling app, the blog primarily focused on tips for using Twitter. But as Buffer’s product grew to encompass Facebook and LinkedIn, Wildrich expanded the coverage to include best practices for using those social networks, as well as productivity hacks, psychological studies, and any related stories that readers might find useful. This shift introduced pieces such as “How Much Sleep Do We Really Need to Work Productively?” and “Why We Have Our Best Ideas in the Shower: The Science of Creativity.” As a result, Buffer quadrupled its social reach from 250 shares per post to more than 1,000 shares per post.

The thinking was if Wildrich couldn’t get big sites like Mashable and TechCrunch to write about Buffer’s product, he would just have to take matters into his own hands and write about it himself.

Like HubSpot, Buffer developed enough content to divide its blog into categories: social media, company culture, and engineering. Now, Buffer can cater its content not just to new readers but also returning ones, encouraging brand loyalty.

“For instance, those who may have read blog posts about some of our transparent resources like salariesor pricing will know a bit about our values,” Kevan Lee, Buffer content crafter, said in an email. “Those who read about our social media tips or strategies will understand we’re here to help people and share everything we know about how to help others succeed on social media.”

The site is run by a dedicated team of two: Lee and Courtney Seiter, Buffer’s head of marketing. However, they plan to let anyone from Buffer’s internal team have the opportunity to write on the blog.

“In this way, we kind of look at content as a task force that anyone can join or leave at any time,” Lee said. “In doing so, I’m hopeful that we’ll have the privilege of featuring different voices on the blog and encouraging a wide variety of teammates to share their perspective and learn more about content.”

As Lee writes on Kapost, his team typically publishes four or more 1,500-word posts per week on the blog, with six or more hours of work going into each piece. They also pump out at least one unique visual per post. How do they do it? In order to write 6,000 words each week, Lee wakes up at 5:30 a.m. every morning to write, and he splits each post into a three-day routine: research on day one, writing on day two, and editing on day three. He also recommends minimizing distractions by using a WordPress editor or just writing in a notebook.

Does that sound tough? It’s not so overwhelming if you look at the results. One of Buffer’s most popular pieces of late is the giant listicle “30 Things to Stop Doing to Yourself,” which received more than 500,000 Facebook likes, 20,000 tweets, and 400 comments. Not bad for a social media company that had no readers three years ago.

When it comes to measuring the success of Buffer’s blog posts, Lee noted that his team uses a variation of Moz’s One Metric score, which combines data from Google Analytics, on-site metrics, and social metrics to determine how successful a piece of content was by comparing it to the average performance of the content that came before it. At Buffer, they factor in unique visitors, social shares, time on page, and comments, and they’re looking to include syndication and conversion numbers.

As always, the way for Buffer to keep driving up those numbers is to listen to what questions its audience is asking, identify what information that audience craves, and devise the best way to deliver it to them.

“They’re incredibly helpful in sharing feedback, and they’re able to see the blog from a perspective that I can’t,” Lee writes. Readers don’t just provide feedback about the content itself, but also about the reader experience on the blog. Buffer sent out a reader survey at the start of 2015, and many respondents requested an easier way to browse the sections of longform articles. So Buffer added a table-of-contents plugin to its site.

This communication between reader and content creator is essential to building a loyal, engaged audience through content marketing. As Buffer has proven, marketing shouldn’t just be about pushing a product—it should foster an open exchange of knowledge between brand and consumer.

Autodesk

While many B2B brands are still trying to get one content hub up and running, Autodesk currently has about 200, including one blog for each of its more than 170 products.

Ali Wunderman, Autodesk’s marketing communications manager, said the company’s content operation “gives our audience more than just a product. It’s a platform for thought leadership so that we can help inform people why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

Among the hundreds of blogs, there are a few standouts.

“While many B2B brands are still trying to get one content hub up and running, Autodesk currently has about 200.”

For example, the Line//Shape//Space blog is aimed at helping and inspiring small businesses and exploring “the future of making things.” Divided into three categories—Ideas & Vision, Success Stories, and Business Advice—the site publishes stories such as “Aha Moments: 5 Biggest Epiphanies Every Startup Should Have,” and “Ready for a Space Elevator? Carbon Nanotube Applications Push the Boundaries of Aerospace, Infrastructure, and Medical Fields.” With a niche publication, Autodesk is not just stimulating the conversation around the future of design technology—it’s also leading it. Line//Shape//Space allows Autodesk to develop an owned audience that can return to the company’s microsite in order to learn how to grow their businesses with forward thinking.

In terms of establishing thought leadership, In the Fold, Autodesk’s corporate blog, features insights, news, and opinions from inside the company, curated by the PR department. A recent post by Autodesk President and CEO Carl Bass addresses a competitor that made some bold statements about Autodesk’s products.

Across the content operation, internal talent—including everyone from engineers to marketers to executives—produces content for the blogs. Some teams hire freelancers and contractors to contribute, and others work with content platforms such as Contently, which provides talent for the Spark 3D printing blog. Wunderman, who manages the Spark blog, currently publishes twice a week, but plans to double that in the near future.

Autodesk has also used gamification to incentivize trial users to make a purchase. As Dawn Wolfe, Autodesk senior digital marketing manager, and Andy Mott, Autodesk senior marketing manager of growth, explained at MarketingSherpa‘s B2B Summit 2012, in order to drive sales for its 3ds Max entertainment software products, the company teamed up with Badgeville’s game mechanics platform to create a gaming platform.

To motivate trial users, Autodesk designed a series of missions that guided users through different 3ds Max features. Users who completed missions were rewarded with points, achievement badges, and a place on a leaderboard among their peers. They were also incentivized to earn more points by sharing their achievements on Facebook and Twitter.

The result? Autodesk saw a 10 percent increase in trial downloads and a 40 percent increase in trial usage. This is an incredibly positive sign: Autodesk’s data suggests those who use a trial more than three times are twice as likely to buy the product. Autodesk also won the 2013 Integrated Marketing Award for its customer-centric approach to marketing. Since then, the company has expanded its gamification strategy to engage users with content about other products. Trial users exploring AutoCAD Design Suite Standard were invited to play the game The Apocalypse Trigger.

As noted on Kapost, Autodesk also crowdsources some of its content creation from its community of users. Its Showcase microsite reads, “There are a million stories. Tell us yours.”

Through this platform, Autodesk encourages its consumers to submit content created with the brand’s products. Members of the community are invited to browse these creations and vote on their favorites, and Autodesk chooses one artist to feature each month. February’s artist of the month, Juan Siquier, described the inspiration and process of creating his 3D sculpture “Mad Hatter,” which he produced using Autodesk’s 3ds Max.

Autodesk’s content marketing strategies of gamification and user-generated content are prime examples of how brands can integrate users into their content conversation and dig into the great pool of stories that their consumers already provide.

What the Experts Are Saying

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“Informing buyers and constituents about your technology solutions isn’t enough to be competitive in the B2B space. Humanization of B2B content is essential to differentiate and create more relevant and meaningful experiences.”

—Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank

“Are B2B marketers starting to enlist their customers and advocates to tell their story? We are seeing this happening. For example, our friends at Socialtext, an enterprise social software provider, are increasingly using their customers as the basis for white papers and webinars.”

—Carter Hostelley, Founder and CEO of Leadtail

“Content marketing hype and discussions will turn to more of the importance of customer experience from acquisition to advocacy—especially for SaaS companies. That will, of course, be dependent on delivering the right content at the right time, to the right person for the best experience.”

—Meagen Eisenberg, VP of Customer Acquisition and Marketing at DocuSign

“Twitter’s business advertising platform has added several ways to grow followers and drive engagement, clicks, or conversions by promoting high-value content. We ran a test campaign for our enterprise storage client this fall to see what the ROI would offer. We were impressed by the variable targeting and performance-based payment options Twitter allows. … [W]e predict Twitter’s advertising platform will grow in popularity for B2B brands in the coming year.”

—Taylor Long, Communications Counsel at McClenahanBruer

“Employee advocacy is picking up steam and will become the next big social mega trend as the C-suite in B2B companies wake up to the importance of social business transformation and looks across the organization to integrate social into core business functions.”

—Susan Emerick, Founder and CEO of Brands Rising

Predictions

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Predictive marketing

Predictive marketing is by far the most hot-button prediction for B2B tech and enterprise marketing in 2015. As Monica Wells notes on B2BMarketing.net, predictive analytics identifies leads from much more data and sources than traditional lead-scoring models, and, as a result, are more predictive of the consumer’s buying intent. Predictive marketing will be a huge game-changer for lead acquisition in the B2B space.

Sam Adler, senior director of demand generation at Zend Technologies, writes, “With the recent announcement of Infer’s $25 million round of funding, it’s glaringly obvious that predictive analytics is a space that a lot of companies have their eye on.” He cites several vendors who are already offering predictive analytics solutions, including Lattice Engines, Mintigo, and Leadspace.

Mobile

According to Demand Gen Report’s study, more than 85 percent of buyers require their preferred content to be optimized for mobile devices, up from 69 percent in the previous year’s survey.

Glenn Taylor notes for Demand Gen Report, “Executives are using mobile devices to research, communicate, and browse the web—as a brand, you need to meet them where they are.”

B2B brands can get boost their mobile strategy by launching an app or setting up a mobile-friendly website and taking advantage of personalized geo-location targeting in order to deliver shortform content that audiences can consume quickly and on the go.

Marketing automation

According to a 2014 study by SiriusDecisions, only 16 percent of North American B2B companies were using marketing automation, but its adoption was increasing at an annual rate of 22 percent. Marketing automation should only increase since, according to Aberdeen Group, brands that use it convert 53 percent more leads into qualified leads. Additionally, Lenskold Group reports that 78 percent of successful marketers claim marketing automation is the asset most responsible for increasing revenue.

According to Jay Famico, SiriusDecisions’ technology practice director, it’s virtually impossible to execute personalized messaging at scale without a marketing automation platform for email marketing, social media distribution, or software integrations. These services will help content marketers manage their time more efficiently while freeing them up to pump out consistent, relevant content to their consumers.

Documented content strategies

If there’s one simple thing B2B marketers need to learn, it’s the three magic words that Copyblogger’s Jerod Morris emphasizes: Write. It. Down.

In its 2014 reports, the CMI found that less than 50 percent of technology and enterprise marketers have a documented content strategy. And yet those who do report their strategies are more effective in all aspects of their marketing strategies, and they also face fewer challenges in these areas. For example, 62 percent of B2B tech marketers who have a content strategy believe their organizations are effective at content marketing, but only 14 percent of those without a documented strategy say the same. Also, only 32 percent of B2B enterprise marketers who have a documented content strategy are worried about an inability to measure content effectiveness.

It seems that in order for B2B marketers to be more successful with their content campaigns, they need to move past the discussion phase, put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, and clearly record their strategies and goals.

Conclusion

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A well-executed infographic about the benefits of your software might not hold up on a mass scale against a seductive, puppy-filled beer commercial. But for that executive who’s seeking just the right solution for his business, it could mean the difference between five leads and 50 leads in a brand’s marketing funnel. The best thing B2B tech and enterprise marketers can do for their consumers is to share their knowledge and create conversations not just around their products, but also their industries. This way, they can emerge as thought leaders and earn people’s trust to ultimately drive those coveted conversions.

The post State of Content Marketing: B2B Tech appeared first on Contently.

Over the years, the company has done some pretty out-there stuff, like the time it made a song out of noises found in its research labs. It’s also been an early adopter of experimental video platforms like Instagram and Vine.

Recently, GE has been bringing its scientific and creative approach to YouTube viewers with a series of videos created by the company’s new “Creator-in-Residence,” Oxford biology PhD candidate Sally Le Page. The series has explored the science behind popular films like Chappie all the way to the molecular gastronomy of Texas barbecue. It represents just one of several recent efforts by GE to bring high-quality science and technology video to its audience—regardless of where they happen to be watching.

“Video is consumed by such an increasingly large number of people, and it’s such a good vehicle for storytelling that we’re certainly doing a great deal there,” said Linda Boff, GE’s executive director of global brand marketing. “We want to make the video content that we do accessible wherever people might run into it or have the opportunity to see it.”

To be fair, GE has been invested in video content for some time now, having been on YouTube since September of 2005. In that time, the company has worked with various influencers to craft content that merges its expertise in science and technology with the sense of whimsical fun endemic to the YouTube creator community. One video, featuring an experiment with popular creators The Slow Mo Guys, netted more than 8 million views.

For its three-month Creator-in-Residence program—the brainchild of director of global content and programming Katrina Craigwell—GE wanted to find someone from outside the company to provide a fresh perspective on the work its scientists are doing. So far, Le Page has interviewed Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson about the probability that we will experience a post-apocalyptic future similar to the one portrayed in the latest Mad Max movie, and took a deep dive into the science of the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator.

The company worked with the muti-channel network Fullscreen to find Le Page, whom they liked for her Oxford bonafides, her enthusiastic curiosity, and her ability to serve as an example to young people as a successful woman in the traditionally male-dominated science field.

“I think unfortunately it’s still unexpected to see women featured in some of the [marketing] communications, and as a result, I think if we have the opportunity to do it, and it’s real, and we can help sort of show a little girl—or a little boy—what that looks like, then that’s the kind of thing we should do,” Boff said.

The brand is also pumping up its video efforts on television, announcing last month that it was partnering with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment as well as “30 For 30” production company Asylum Entertainment to create a six-episode documentary series on National Geographic Channel, starting this November.

The series, entitled “Breakthrough,” will feature stories about innovation, science, and technology that will each be directed by a different Hollywood luminary (so far, Ron Howard, Paul Giamatti, and Angela Bassett are all signed on for the project). GE is responsible for helping determine which stories will be included in the series and developing the themes that run throughout the different episodes.

Boff said that the GE brand’s integration into the series will be “very organic” and will occur only when there is a logical connection like when an episodes discusses a discovery made by the company’s scientists.

The series has taken nearly three years to come together, a time period GE has spent developing the concept and lining up the right partners. Though the company is not expecting “Breakthrough” to drive product sales, it hopes to provide people with compelling, uplifting stories that will inspire them to solve big problems.

“Our brand has been about science, invention, engineering and discovery since day one. It’s important for us to make that clear in our marketing and communications,” Boff said. “It’s important to make sure people understand who GE is, and that’s a big part of why we want to do something like this.”

As for the rest of the company’s video efforts, it tries to make sure that it has something for every channel on which a person might consume content, regardless of whether that’s a social media network like Tumblr or one of its own platforms like the tech publication “GE Reports.”

While GE sometimes will run the same video on different channels, each piece of content is created with a specific platform in mind. For instance, a recent video celebrating mothers in science and engineering was designed for the Facebook audience, but it was also posted on YouTube. Depending on whether its videos go viral organically, GE will sometimes pay for distribution beyond its owned channels.

Once the videos have been published, GE measures their success based on shares, engagement time, and completion rate, metrics it will often compare against benchmark data covering the rest of the marketing industry.

“There are times when we’ve put something up, and it’s taken off organically and we’ve held back on paid. And then there are times when we’ve sprinkled a little bit of paid and that’s sort of the jet fuel that something needs,” Boff said. “It is so dependent upon the timing of when something goes out, the topicality, and whether it catches fire organically. Even if it does catch fire organically, there are times when we’ll want to pump a little more paid into it just to give it a second wave.”

And, just like the rest of GE’s marketing strategy, these decisions around which channels to use are all about keeping up with how society—and the technology it runs on—is evolving. With a fragmented media environment, the firm sees it as extremely important to go to consumers wherever they’re spending time.

In this sense, content marketing is just one more way that GE is working to stay ahead of the curve.

“Today, it’s all about being in the places with the right content, at the right time, in the right context,” Boff said. “For us, leaning into content is really leaning into today’s behavior.”

The post If GE’s Video Strategy Doesn’t Inspire You as a Marketer, You’re Probably Dead appeared first on Contently.

However, despite this sharp increase in overall quality, many marketers have been hesitant to move beyond text-based articles and unleash the web’s full potential as a multimedia storytelling platform.

To some marketers, the specialized skills needed to produce visual content—whether video, infographics, or interactive media—make doing so seem like an excessively expensive proposition. And as a result, the same brands who have used written blog posts to dip their toes into the content waters consider the cost of multimedia an unfortunately high barrier to entry.

But instead of being overly cautious, brands should perhaps take a piece of advice from Matt Damon’s character in the 1998 poker movie Rounders. As Damon’s character says: “You can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle… But you can’t win much either.”

Indeed, brands have much to gain by playing their cards right when it comes to multimedia.

No place is the sentiment more applicable than on Facebook, where autoplay video ads allow brands to showcase great content in a place viewers are bound to see them. Last week, Just Media’s president Brandon Friesen told us he was seeing click-through rates of up to 8 percent for video ads on Facebook, compared to rates of around 0.1 percent for the average banner ad.

Meanwhile, a 2014 Quintly study of more than 72,000 Facebook pages found that video posts generated the most user engagement of any format, with about 2,200 interactions per update. Photo updates came in second with about 1,400 interactions per post.

Of course, Facebook isn’t the only place companies have reaped the rewards of visual content.

The marketing software company Moz found that the video content it published on its website generated three times as many inbound links as content that was text only. Likewise, the enterprise software company Attivio found that once it started publishing video on its site, the average visitor started spending 100 percent more time with its content.

Bigger publishers also seem to agree. Just this past week, Jay Lauf, publisher of Quartz, told me he frequently encourages marketers to let his branded content team produce interactive features for them since it usually leads to higher user engagement.

And visual content isn’t only effective for producing engagement and clicks—it might also create more direct sales than other types of content.

A report created last year by Vidyard and Demand Metric found that 71 percent of marketers claimed video drove higher conversion rates than other forms of content. What’s particularly impressive about this data point is that while some marketers think of video as a big-budget branding tool, more than half of the respondents to the survey worked for B2B companies.

For even greater returns, some brands have found success creating video content that is customized for the individual consumer who sees it, according to a report from Forrester Research.

For instance, when Sass Global Travel sent customers an email including a video about an Argentina ski trip that integrated their names and locations into the content, people clicked on it 19.5 percent of the time and spent an average of three minutes on the video landing page. For those scoring at home, the company’s previous average click-through rate was just 1.8 percent—marking a 985 percent improvement. Not too shabby.

What this all goes to show is that when it comes to high-quality multimedia content, brands should consider channeling their inner Matt Damon and push their marketing dollars to the middle. Because after a while, as brands continue to invest in publishing, strong multimedia projects will merely be considered table stakes.

The post Rising ROI: Why Brands Are Going All-In on Multimedia Content appeared first on Contently.

“Here we are; we’re 130 years old,” GE Reports Managing Editor Tomas Kellner told me. “We were founded by Thomas Edison, and guess what? We are still working on really hard problems that the entire planet has to be dealing with, whether it’s the future of energy or whether it’s the future of electricity or whether it’s new propulsion for planes that will get you from New York to Tokyo in four hours.”

But GE isn’t only interested in the future of technology. Embracing that 130-year-old history also means creating content that looks at the past. Specifically, I’m talking about a GIF of boxing kitties from 1894 shot by Thomas Edison on one of the world’s first movie cameras. Look at this GIF. Study it. Be mesmerized by it. This is the greatest piece of content marketing you’re going to see today.

In a post about Edison’s early films, GE Reports explains the technology of the device that made this wonderful film (and resulting GIF) possible:

Fresh from inventing the recording and playback machine (1877), and the practical light bulb (1879), Thomas Edison focused on moving pictures. In 1889, he filed a patent for the Kinetograph, an early movie camera. The wooden box didn’t look like much. Inside was a complicated mechanism that used a sprocket powered by an electric motor to pull the perforated edge of unexposed celluloid film—it had been recently invented by George Eastman—in front of a lens at a speed of 46 frames per second. The device was so large that Edison called it the “dog house.”

If you’re prepared for even more cuteness, check out the full video below:

I think this pretty much proves that even if Thomas Edison were alive today, he would have invented BuzzFeed. With instincts that said, “I’m going to build a wooden box so I can film two kitties fighting each other,” the Internet would have been his oyster.

Recently, GE Reports covered another emerging medium that the company got right: comic books. In the 1950s, GE used comic books—a medium growing in popularity—to hook “juvenile delinquents” on science.

Via GE Reports

“What I like is that it shows that the idea of content marketing has been around for a long time,” Kellner wrote via email. “Here’s a big company in the 1950s embracing a viral and somewhat controversial phenomenon to reach an audience it didn’t have. 3M print run is gigantic!”

To dig into these comics more, check out the full story. It even has details on the legal approval process! But before you head over to GE Reports, stare a bit longer at that boxing-kitty GIF. Seriously, if we ever figure out how to resurrect the dead, Jonah Peretti better watch out.

The post This Boxing Kitty Video From 1894 Proves Thomas Edison Would Have Invented BuzzFeed appeared first on Contently.

But when you’re doing it well, it’s also an incredible amount of fun. As David Carr said, “Creating media content is a diverting activity that rarely resembles actual work.” Every day, I remind myself of that, and how lucky I am to lead a team that spends its days telling stories here on The Content Strategist and on our other publication, The Freelancer.

Last February, we shared 25 quotes that inspire us. This year, we’ve added 25 more from great thinkers, writers, and marketers that get us pumped to tell better stories every day. Hover over each image for easy sharing.

Images by Noah Smith

The post 50 Quotes That’ll Make You a Better Content Marketer appeared first on Contently.

While virtually every major digital media property seems to have a branded content studio these days, none has pinned as much of its success on native advertising as BuzzFeed, which does not run traditional display ads on its site.

As such, you would have to think the company’s financial stakeholders were displeased to read that, according to one major ad buyer, only 15 percent of clients who syndicated sponsored content on BuzzFeed in 2013 returned for 2014.

From the sound of things, brands have been hesitant to return to BuzzFeed because they have not yet been able to directly link sponsored stories to product sales—a line of thinking that fundamentally misunderstands the role content marketing plays in a company’s long-term success.

As DigitasLBi’s chief investment officer, Adam Shlachter, put it to The Wall Street Journal, “Social lift and buzz is great, but I have to know if that means I will sell more toothpaste.”

While yes, the ultimate goal of any kind of marketing is to make more money, it is extremely rare that a single piece of content will lead directly to sale. Rather, content marketing is about building a long-term relationship with customers so that the next time they are in the store looking for toothpaste, your brand will be one they recognize and trust.

Moz’s Rand Fishkin smartly illustrated this point in a slideshow on some of the myths surrounding content marketing.

Here’s how some ad buyers imagine content marketing will immediately lead to sales:

While that dream scenario would certainly be nice, Fishkin points out that content marketing takes a little longer to work its magic:

It’s understandable that marketers want to be able to link their ad spend to sales, but sometimes even trying to measure the conversion rate of sponsored content can backfire.

Contently’s e-book “The New World of Content Measurement” lays out the tension between quick sales and more sophisticated content marketing approaches well. Optimizing content for direct sales might create a few conversions, but those sales will likely be canceled out if you’ve created a large group of people who will never buy your brand again after being turned off by an over-the-top sales pitch.

A more effective way of building a relationship with consumers is to focus on creating engaging content that people will want to read all the way through—and then come back for more.

This isn’t to say that BuzzFeed’s sponsored content offering is a perfect product. In fact, it’s unfair to place the blame entirely at ad buyers’ feet. Much of the onus is on publishers to prove their value. Like marketers, studios have to present their content’s effectiveness with the right kind of data—pageviews and clicks aren’t going to be enough to demonstrate a native ad’s impact for a brand.

The Wall Street Journal also reports that each campaign at BuzzFeed costs at least $100,000. At that price, brands might be better off driving people to owned brand publications like General Electric’s GE Reports or Dell’s Tech Page One.

Contently’s research shows that readers trust stories on brand-owned websites nearly as much as they do sponsored stories on news sites.

And while sponsored content on BuzzFeed gives brands immediate access to a large audience on a mainstream site, there’s no guarantee that readers will find the next post a brand sponsors on the site.

By comparison, a branded channel provides consumers with a destination they can return to, as well as giving brands the opportunity to create additional touch-points when readers consent to sharing their email addresses or choose to follow the brand on social media.

Regardless of whether you choose to publish your brand’s content yourself or with a third-party media outlet, it’s important to make sure you’re measuring it the right way.

Otherwise, you’re just another caveman marketer waiting impatiently for clicks to immediately turn into sales. Ad buyers and studios have to realize that the process will never be as simple as “Them click, them buy.”

The post What Ad Buyers Still Don’t Get About Sponsored Content appeared first on Contently.

‘You Need Editors, Not Brand Managers’: Marketing Legend Seth Godin on the Future of Branded Content

I spoke with Seth Godin, the godfather of content marketing, and he taught me more in 45 minutes than I’d learned in the previous 45 days—including how brands should build effective newsrooms:

TCS: If you were trying to build a brand media property—if you were Gillette—how would you build it? Would you just give some really smart people the resources and creative freedom to go out and make great content?

SG: I think the most important thing is to have an office that’s not in your building. I think what kills brands who try to be interesting is to have meetings where they’re not saying to senior management, “How can we be more interesting?” Instead, they’re saying, “How can we play this more safely?” That’s not what happens when you want to make a hit TV show or a website that people care about. You need editors, not brand managers, who will push the envelope to make the thing go forward.

So one easy way to do that is to set people up in an office down the street, only visit them once a month, and give them really significant metrics—not about pageviews, but about mattering. And give them the resources—not too much, just enough—to go do work that matters. Read it.

Data: Real-Time Marketing Is a Giant Waste of Money

With the Super Bowl having just passed and the Oscars coming up soon, real-time marketing is on everyone’s minds. But few are asking a critical question: Is it worth it? Contently Co-Founder Shane Snow crunched the numbers and came to a surprising conclusion:

Under generous circumstances, the best real-time marketing ad at the Oscars was nine times the cost of the most expensive other kind of advertising, and the #10 real-time marketing ad at the Oscars is 200 times more expensive than the most expensive type of ad you can typically buy… and 1,200 times more expensive than just paying for ad impressions on the same social networks for which you’re building war rooms. Read it.

Are You Ready For Some X-Treme Content Marketing?! [Contently Comic]

And we end the week with your weekly content marketing comic. No need to click unless you want to read the crazy hot-take rant I wrote to accompany it.

Have a great Valentine’s Day weekend. Go ride that love train. We’ll see you on Monday.

The post Content Catchup: Get Ready For Seth Godin to School You, and More Must-Reads appeared first on Contently.

“We don’t want to overload our customers!” or “They’ll think we’re spamming them!” are popular justifications for hiding the “Sign Up For Our Newsletter!” widget in your blog’s lower right rail (a.k.a. Blog Siberia), or refusing to blast out your latest article to your subscribers. Some marketers will tell you that their email lists are “just too valuable” to risk flooding them with something as unessential, and potentially alienating, as content.

This line of thinking simply isn’t going to cut it. “Protecting” your email lists means your future may involve spending a significant amount of resources creating content, followed by an extended waiting period spent twiddling your thumbs—while no audience develops to read and share what you spent all the time and money developing. And then all you’ll have is frustration.

The creation of your content is really only half the work in content marketing—the rest is audience development. A robust email subscriber list that’s used strategically and often is a crucial tool in your audience development arsenal.

Media companies use email lists as a tentpole for audience development, as well they should—if content is your product, and consumers provide you with a direct channel to provide them with that product (their email address), then you should use it with maximum force.

Brands producing content have an opportunity to think more like publishers with their email lists. Like the best media companies, brands can use them as a tool to distribute original content to the community of people already interested in the brand.

The value of email lists as a method of disseminating content goes to the heart of why your brand is creating that content in the first place: You’re fostering a community that voluntarily engages with your brand on multiple levels, instead of disruptively plugging your product or service.

Certain brands may have legal considerations with using email lists for content distribution purposes. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, need to be especially careful about stepping on FDA regulations in their content marketing. And as with all emails sent for promotional purposes, your emails need to comply with CAN-SPAM. But none of these should take email off your list of content distribution tools.

For an example of a branded site using newsletters to thrive, look no further than GE Reports. According to Tomas Kellner, the site’s editor, the mega-brand started building its email list for GE Reports readers in 2008. Since then, it’s grown to 15,000 subscribers. You can tell that the site values email as an audience development tool from a quick glance at how the site is designed—the “Subscribe” bar is given prime real estate on every page.

Every day, the full subscriber list gets an email with the latest story. Kellner says that an article’s ability to bring in new subscribers is a key metric for success.

Despite all the benefits, I don’t want to imply that email lists can never be overused or mishandled. There is such thing as flooding people’s inboxes, and more than a few trigger-happy marketers have ticked off their customers. But, with a smart content distribution strategy and high quality content that relates to your subscriber base’s interests, all of these concerns can be erased.

From a backend standpoint, adding content newsletters doesn’t have to be a big investment. There’s no shortage of ready-made tools to build and send great looking newsletters to your email lists. Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Sailthru, Campaign Monitor, and others provide templates and built-in tracking software. There are even (free!) tools like Sumo.me to help increase your total subscribers.

Ultimately, seeing newsletters as a threat to your email lists, as opposed to an opportunity to deepen your relationships with current or potential customers, is an antiquated view. If you want your content distribution plan to succeed, there’s no room for waffling. Use your email lists, and use them well.

Melissa Lafsky Wall (@Lafsky) is the founder of Brick Wall Media.

The post Why Brands Need to Conquer Their Fears and Use Email to Distribute Content appeared first on Contently.

Kellner is the managing editor of GE Reports, which very well may be the best brand magazine on the planet. (Sorry, Red Bull.) Every day, GE Reports publishes fascinating stories on emerging technology that commonly rocket up the Reddit boards and are shared by a devoted audience of over half a million readers. Topping the homepage right now, for instance, is a story about an amazing new material that could revolutionize air travel and a report about tiny sensors inspired by butterfly wings destined to have a big impact on bomb detection.

Oh yeah, and these viral stories? They all tie back to GE.

At the helm of it all is Kellner, who has led GE Reports’ incredible rise while writing nearly every big story, all while expanding GE Reports internationally to regional editions around the globe.

I recently spoke with Kellner, who shed some light on GE Reports’ unique blueprint—from their audience-building tactics, to their measurement secrets, to how they rocket their content through legal, and much more—including why your brand is probably doing everything all wrong.

How exactly did you turn GE Reports into such an amazing tech site?

I really approached it as an online magazine, rather than thinking about it as a company blog. I wanted to produce an online magazine that tells people something new. I basically ignored press releases, and focused 100 percent on storytelling. My stories have real protagonists who are trying to solve real problems and reach real outcomes. That’s one aspect.

The second aspect is that the story has to be newsworthy to earn the right to be published on GE Reports. I want my readers to learn something new. When they come to a GE Reports story, it has to give them a piece of information, a nugget, that they didn’t know before.

These are GE stories in the sense that they’re always somehow connected to GE. But they have to be newsworthy enough so a person who is in no way connected to GE, interested in GE, or owns GE stock, would still walk away and say, “This is a really cool piece of information. Maybe I should come back and check on them more often.”

How do you go about finding those stories that have a connection to GE, but still have that newsworthiness?

It’s basically just old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. You have to go to the factories. You have to develop sources. You have to go to the labs and see what those guys are doing. It didn’t happen overnight for me. It took me a while to develop my network of sources, and to figure out who’s working on what.

Once you start generating attention to the site, and once you start seeing that the stories start traveling, things get easier. For example, two weeks ago, we had a story on the new Revolution CT scan that can produce these really crazy images of the inside of the body. It’s really similar to what you would see like at the Bodies exhibit—that kind of level of detail.

Via GE Reports

We published that story, and that story got picked up by everyone from Newsweek toTime to The Washington Post. It got picked up by Chinese media outlets and media outlets all over Europe. Literally, we’ve been everywhere. Once people inside GE started to see the type of success that you can have—well, now they come to me with story ideas.

Do you have total freedom to decide what to publish, or is there ever influence from inside the company saying to cover this or cover that?

Yes, I would say it’s about 75/25, in a sense. We usually have big company milestones that are things that the company wants to talk about, so we write about those. They are generally very newsworthy. One of the big things that we covered last year that fell into this category was the “industrial Internet”—basically developing software for machines so that machines can talk to each other.

That’s a really interesting area that’s permeating every field. If you went to the CES this year, everybody was talking about it. That’s one of the perks of running an online publication for a company like GE; they’re really working on stuff that’s newsworthy, that’s sort of badass.

How do you identify your target audience? Who are you trying to reach?

If you look at GE Reports, we are a science, tech, and innovation online magazine; sort of in the vein as Wired or Pop Science, or The Economist‘s science and technology section. Anyway, that’s how I fashion it.

Obviously, engineers—that audience is really big for us. We are also looking at shareholders—that’s potentially a really big audience. Most people will not buy a jet engine during their lifetime, but who knows what’s going to happen in 10 years? Maybe they’ll get smaller, and everybody will have a personal plane or a flying car. There are a lot of people who could buy GE shares. GE Reports is an important outlet to really lay out the business case behind GE, and we do that fairly often.

Customers are another important audience, especially in areas, say, like Asia, where people may not be as familiar with GE as they are here in the U.S. You really want to talk to your customers. Right now, we are really winning the hearts and the minds of people, and really shifting the perception of GE.

Here we are; we’re 130 years old. We were founded by Thomas Edison, and guess what? We are still working on freaking really hard problems that the entire planet has to be dealing with, whether it’s the future of energy, or whether it’s the future of electricity, or whether it’s new propulsion for planes that will get you from New York to Tokyo in four hours.

It’s really a strategic decision, who you want to talk to. Any editor has to decide who his audience is. We do the same thing. If you can boil it down, it would be investors, engineers, and customers. And, ultimately, everybody is a customer. It’s not just, say, the guy who runs the hospital. He is a customer, but the ultimate customer is you when you get an MRI. The customer is the airline that buys our jet engines, but the ultimate customer is you when you get on that plane and get off.

We need millions of readers to get the word out. Everybody can be a publisher, but in order to be a successful publisher you have to build your own distribution channels. Those distribution channels go through your readers, and you need a really large number of them to get the word out.

How do you approach distribution? Is it all organic? Do you go through paid channels?

Actually, no. We mostly go through organic. There’s very little paid. We put pay behind stuff that performs well, but one of the big assets for us, I would say, is email. We love email. It may sound old-school, but email subscription is really a hard-wired link to your audience. For us, email subscribers are an extremely valuable audience that we want. Every day 15,000 people get the blast from GE Reports that a new story is out.

Twitter is another big way for us to get the news out. Another distribution channel is Tumblr, and that’s why we got on Tumblr. It is inherently social, and that’s why we wanted to be there. Of course Facebook—everybody wants to get to the Facebook news powerhouse. I think really getting the organic groundswell behind your stories is really important.

The way a lot of brands have approached content marketing lately is to just rent an audience through native ad campaigns. Why do you think it’s so valuable to own an audience?

It’s amazing. Number one is that it’s your audience. You know who they are, and you can communicate to them directly. You know what they like, and you know what they don’t like. That’s number one.

Number two is that, once you have your site, it sort of weaves this seamless web over your content. No one story exists on its own. I’ll give you an example. Going back into this CT scan story, when it sort of ran its course, suddenly we noticed that media here in the U.S. and in Europe started publishing stories about another technology: this really cool microscope that we [covered] that can produce a really cool picture.

Basically, when our CT scan became old news, there were journalists out there who still wanted to run on the story, so they went for the next thing. The way they found out about it is because that microscope story was featured below our CT scan story.

That ecosystem is really valuable, and GE Reports allows us to build and nourish that ecosystem.

How do you guys measure success? How do you know you’re really winning that battle for the hearts and minds of people?

We start with the usual stuff—we look at users, we look at pageviews. Total time spent reading is really important for us, so we look at that. How many engaged people come to it? How long do they stay?

I’m going to keep talking about this CT scanner as an example just because it’s so recent. You’ve got tens of thousands of people coming to this site to look at a story, and they usually stay for almost 4 minutes—which, online, is a lifetime. It’s a really long time. We know that the people engage with our content. They’re not just popping in and popping out.

Organic pickup is also very important. It means that what we’re saying is actually newsy. The guys who are in the news business are finding it newsy.

Email subscription is big. We measure that, too; how much email subscriptions a certain story drives, and why. Which headline works, with whom, and why? Those are really important questions that you need to be asking, instead of sort of shooting the headlines of stories out there scatter shot to anyone who will listen.

Why do you think that most big brands struggle to create content that people actually want to read or watch? What’s holding them back?

Honestly, they have to forget about the press release. They have to forget about this content being about “me, me, me.” You can’t do that.

If you go to a dinner party, say, and you keep talking about yourself, people will think that you’re such a bore. They’ll be able to listen to you for 5 minutes, but then they’ll turn away. They won’t talk to you for the rest of the evening.

But if you’re at the dinner table and contribute a point of view that actually advances the debate around the table. They’ll say, “What a smart guy” or “What a smart gal.” That’s basically what we’re trying to do.

You guys publish a lot of stories. How long does it take you to get a piece of content from ideation to completely approved, through legal and all that, to published on the site?

It depends. Some stories move fairly quickly. Some stories actually move within a day. It’s sort of like working for a news wire, or for a newspaper. You really have to turn it around fairly quickly.

Some pieces take longer. For example, we recently had a story on robotics. We’ve invested in a company called Rethink Robotics, and they came up with this robot called Baxter. It’s a collaborative robot, so you can work with it. It works with you; it actually senses where you are. When it bumps into your hand, it’s not just going to break it. It’s actually going to stop.

That’s a fairly unique machine, and definitely out there. I don’t have a background in robotics, so it took me a while to really interview the different players who are involved and familiar with the robot—[the players] involved in developing the robot, and who are familiar with using him.

If it’s sort of a more involved, magazine-like piece, it takes you maybe four or five days to put it together. It depends—I would say most of the stories are done within two or three days. Most of it is basically like a newspaper.

Do all of your stories go through legal approval?

They do, or they get checked by the responsible teams against approved claims. You have to put in place. With health care, for example, you could not publish a story without legal approval. Our health care business and our life sciences business is really huge. Often, when you talk about a device, it actually has to go through two sets of lawyers. It has to go through the regular legal department, but then it also has to go through the regulatory lawyers that make sure that what you’re saying actually describes fairly what the machine is doing.

In the beginning, it was a difficult practice for me to learn. I didn’t know who these people were, and how to get the copy through efficiently. It often got stuck. It’s like building a house. You have to put in the plumbing. Once you know who these people are, you don’t have to go through the various gatekeepers—you can go directly to them and check on your story, and see how it’s moving.

I came in through journalism, and it’s often like fact-checking with sources. I find that experience really invaluable. When it comes to a company publication, and your stories get noticed by the top-level publications, you are under a special degree of scrutiny.

You must have a really strong relationship with your legal team to be able to get this stuff approved so quickly. It’s a huge road block for a lot of brands.

It’s not just me. It’s really a part of the culture that’s inside the company. I think we believe in content. We believe in stories. On this side of the business, which is communications and marketing, we do everything possible to be able to tell a really good story.

Do you guys use any particular technology platforms to keep everybody on the same page, especially as you expand internationally?

Yes, we are definitely looking at different technology platforms.Group SJR built the site for us on Tumblr and is helping us to run it day-to-day. You guys are constantly helping us with our internal blog for our internal audience.

But definitely, that is a big issue. It’s like, “Yeah, it’s fine to have GE Reports, but if you want to scale it, [it becomes more difficult].” We really believe strongly in the franchise model. When I was at Forbes, we had regional editions all over the world that published some content that was published in the U.S. edition, but a lot of the stuff was designed to cater to the local audiences and publish stuff that the local audiences wanted to see.At the same time, you had to have some visibility into what’s going on in the U.S. within these other markets.

It was fairly difficult, but when you publish every two weeks, you can do it. When you publish every day, as we do on GE Reports now, it’s harder. In order to scale it, and make it truly a global publishing platform, we need a tool that will allow us to do that.

One last question: How many monthly readers do you guys have now?

I’ll give you the latest. Right now we are halfway through January, and we have about 300,000.

Wow, that’s awesome.

That’s a good month. I have to say, it is a good month. When it goes well, that’s basically what it is. We had a couple good stories. It’s a number, and I’m willing to share that number because it’s repeatable. It’s not the most we’ve ever had. And it’s not the limit.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post ‘We Believe in Stories’: GE Reports’ Tomas Kellner Reveals How He Built the World’s Best Brand Mag appeared first on Contently.

@DennysDiner doesn’t need to wait for a ubiquitous American entertainment event to shine in all of its high-cholesterol glory. The restaurant chain is fluent in weird Twitter and racks up thousands of organic engagements on a daily basis. While scrolling through their feed, I realized this was the first time I thoroughly enjoyed reading a brand’s Twitter account, which is just about the highest compliment I can give.

Don’t get me wrong: It’s pretty weird to enjoy reading someone role-play as a sentient restaurant—h/t @BrandsSayingBae. But take, for instance, the six-tweet streak they’re on as I’m writing this. How can you not love these?

The brand uses Twitter’s 140-character limitation to their advantage. Instead of simply screaming self-promotional garbage into the abyss, they’re actually telling stories—weird, funny, timely, self-deprecating stories.

To truly appreciate the Denny’s social prowess, compare their Twitter account to a competitor’s Twitter account like @Friendlys, which settles for posting screenshots of bland, depressing food porn. There’s really no competition.

Hell, even Denny’s sponsored ads about pancakes are pure Twitter with their sass:

All that pancake love also gives Denny’s an inherent advantage. It’s much easier to thrive on social when your product inspires passion. Folks love their breakfast food, and pancakes are the most ‘MERICA thing there is, a loophole that’s made it totally acceptable to eat five thin, fluffy cakes—smothered in syrup, whipped cream, and butter—as a meal. Hash browns are just French fries that you don’t have to feel bad about eating. And bacon is freaking bacon. As a result, people are excited to rep their breakfast food, particularly when it’s from Denny’s, the cheap 24-hour diner that’s always there for you when you have the drunchies.

But still, Denny’s work on social is worth applauding. They’re doing as good of a job as a brand can do on Twitter. And I’d really like to be able to report that it’s all thanks to one sharp 25-year-old in-house social media editor who’s kicking ass and taking names right now. That’d be a much better story than reporting that it’s the work of some ad agency that probably charges $5 million a year to send two tweets a day.

But of course it’s the work of an ad agency—Erwin Penland, to be exact. And it isn’t the work of just one or two people, either. “Day to day, we have a core team of five or six folks that really keep the ship sailing,” VP of Digital Strategy Kevin Purcer told MarketingLand.

In various interviews, Purcer has explained that his team tries to mimic the conversations that would happen at a Denny’s restaurant. Credit his team for hitting the right notes, and credit Denny’s corporate team for not freaking out when their account starts tweeting bizarre candy-themed Katy Perry fan fiction or when their popular Tumblr keeps posting mysterious missives about a broccoli apocalypse.

But most of all, give them credit for being the first item in our roundup of the best branded content of January. Props to Contently Assistant Editor Dylan Baker for compile this month’s selections.

Denny’s: “The Grand Slams”

In January, Denny’s released the seventh episode of “The Grand Slams,” their Adult Swim-esque mini-web series that’s quickly developing a cult following. The series follows four characters—Pancake, Sausage, Bacon, and Egg—on 30- to 40-second adventures inside a Denny’s restaurant. It’ll take you about five minutes to watch the entire series, and it’s well worth it. Things get pretty wild once everyone starts hittin’ the syrup, and the latest episode turns into a bit of a sausage fest.

GE Reports: “Body of Knowledge”

Brands usually have a hard time making headway on Reddit, but not GE, which is quickly becoming the darling of the front page of the Internet. GE Reports, the brand’s excellent online tech magazine, is getting a particularly large amount of love from the Reddit, largely thanks a story about an innovative CT Scan machine that creates stunningly detailed 3D pictures of a patient’s organs and bones while exposing them to very little radiation.

GE’s story had legs and blew up far past Reddit. It was picked up by many other media outlets and quickly became a gateway for journalists to discover the other amazing stories on GE Reports.

“When [the CT scan story] sort of ran its course, suddenly we noticed that media outlets here in the U.S. and in Europe started publishing stories about another technology we covered—this really cool microscope that we made in life sciences, that can produce a really cool picture,” GE Reports Managing Editor Tomas Kellner explained to me. “When our CT scan became old news, there were journalists out there who still wanted to run on the story, so they went for the next thing… the reason they found out about [other GE technology] is because that story was featured below our CT scan story.”

To Kellner, that kind of continued reader discovery is the big advantage of creating an owned media publication like GE Reports as opposed to buying native ad space on another publisher’s site. “When you publish a discrete piece of native content, you can’t really do that,” he said.

Newcastle: “Band of Brands”

The pomp, circumstance, and price tag of Super Bowl advertising is just begging to be made fun of, but for the past two years, Newcastle has been the only brand willing to capitalize on that opportunity in a big way. Or maybe it’s just that they’re the only brand with Aubrey Plaza on their side.

Throughout January, the Parks and Recreation star has been the perfect celebrity shill for Newcastle’s campaign to get a bunch of brands to band together and blow their marketing budget on a big-time Super Bowl ad. The final product is pretty much what you’d expect when you try to cram 37 brands into a 30-second spot, but the real gem is Plaza’s sarcastic, self-aware hype (anti-hype?) in the videos leading up to the finale.

Skittles: Marshawn Lynch Press Conference

Star Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch has been refusing to talk to the press all year—and getting fined for it—but Skittles struck viral gold when they got him to open up. Since Lynch’s refusal to talk to the media has been a major topic of debate among narrative-starved sportswriters the past two weeks, every sports publication on earth had no choice but to share this Skittles video. That’s led to a big win for Skittles, and for Lynch, who comes across as a funny, awesome dude here instead of the crotchety, selfish caricature many talking heads have made him out to be.

Shareaholic’s Q4 Trends Report

Shoutout here to Danny Wong at Shareaholic, a content amplification platform, which releases one of the web’s most fascinating reports each month: an analysis of social referral traffic trends across 300,000 sites and 400 million visitors. Their latest report in particular stood out, as it showed how drastically the social media power balance has evolved in the past three years. Between the (chart) lines, you can track Facebook’s rise to power over the past three years. It’s a great example of a B2B brand doing something great with their unique data.

I have to admit I’m a bit biased: I geeked out over this report for 1,300 words last week, and it ended up being one of our most popular posts of the month.

Gillette: “Shave Test”

It’s got to be tough being a razor brand right now: The scraggly facial hair trend has long broken out of its Brooklyn quarantine and spread across the country. I’ve had a half-assed beard for 15 months now and I have no idea why. It feels like something that’s outside my own free will. Gillette must miss the ’80s more than Meatloaf.

But credit Gillette for not sitting on the sidelines and targeting the only thing we men value more than convenience—sex. For their latest campaign, Gillette teamed with Tinder to analyze who wins—scruffy dudes or clean-shaven chaps. The analysis of 100,000 guys between 18 and 24 found that those who keep it clean get 37 percent more matches. To take things a step further, Gillette recruited those scruffy dudes, shaved them, and added some clean-shaven pics to their Tinder profiles. The result? The clean-shaven pics led to a 19 percent lift in right swipes.

These results are, of course, 100 percent reliable because why would a razor brand want to mislead us about girls preferring clean-shaven guys? But still, it’s fun, compelling stuff—the kind of data-driven content that’s straight out of the OkTrends playbook.

Squarespace: Jeff Bridges’ Sleeping Tapes

In January, Squarespace decided to bring a wild idea to life: an album of sleeping tapes filled with “intriguing noises” and the soothing voice of Jeff Bridges. Why not? The microsite, DreamingWithJeff.com, is beautiful, and the tapes are weirdly comforting as Bridges’ coos things like:

“Sleeping tapes… I love that idea, and all that it implies, ya know? Sleeping tapes. Sleep, of course, implies waking up. Tapes implies recording. Sharing things. Sort of implies the past, the future, that’s recorded in the past and shared at some future time… I think that everything implies everything else here. Sleeping tapes.”

Best of all, if you buy the LP, 100 percent of the proceeds go to No Kid Hungry. Ultimately, I’m thinking that the hot new branded content trend for 2015 should just be letting Jeff Bridges do whatever he wants. Between this and his trippy spaceman cowboy Kahlua film, he’s earned it. For extra measure, Squarespace also turned these sleeping tapes into one of the weirder Super Bowl commercials we’ve seen in a while:

What was your favorite branded content in January? Tell me what I missed in the most condescending way possible @joelazauskas on Twitter. Responding to you will give me an excuse for not doing any actual work.

The post The Best Branded Content of January appeared first on Contently.

Each brand will necessarily reach different answers to fit its specific needs. There’s no definitive best way to build a brand newsroom, but top brand publishers seem to have settled on a similar formula of in-house teams and freelance talent that lets them create content that matters—and at scale.

The freelance factor

Indeed, when you examine the most successful brand publishers, you’ll find a common theme: All of them embrace outside contributors to varying—but significant—degrees.

“I think that brands are using freelancers a lot more simply because it’s a lot easier for them to scale based on what their content needs and requirements are,” explained Michele Linn, the Content Marketing Institute‘s director of content.

And brands are finding other benefits for outsourcing some content, too.

Brands might want to maintain a “vice grip” over their message, “but something magical can happen when companies look outside their own walls for ideas,” Natalie Burg wrote in an earlier post on the Strategist about how brands’ use of freelancers often means tapping a well of creativity. Freelancers with deep expertise brought a bunch of unexpectedly rad ideas to the table.

Jay Moye, editor of Coca-Cola Journey, recalled how freelance writer Laura Randall came to him with a story about Coke-themed weddings. “It’s a thing,” Moye said. “Believe it or not, it’s pretty popular.”

After having her pitch approved, Randall wrote about the phenomenon. Her story features a few happy couples and their Coke-red weddings—and one couple that touched up the Coca-Cola ambiance with vintage attire.“That was not an idea that we can take credit for. That was Laura’s idea,” Moye said. “And there are many more where that came from.” Coca-Cola Journey invites pitches, including from writers in the Contently network. (Full disclosure: Coca-Cola is a Contently client.)

General Assembly, which uses freelancers for some of their blog content, experienced similar benefits. “Freelancers are great for flexibility, but we can also tap more subject matter experts for content that way as well,” Erin May, head of content marketing for General Assembly, said in an email.

She added that freelancers get General Assembly more bang for their buck: “For instance, if we applied the same content budget to just one or two full-time writers, we could work with 10 or 20 writers (depending on how much content they write, of course) who are experts in 10 or 20 different topics versus having more generalist writers within say the tech or startup verticals.”

The glue that holds it all together

While freelancers are an important part of the equation, for top brand publishers, leaning on freelancers isn’t enough. They need a whole architecture that consists of the following three components:

Editors: Editors juggle many tasks. There’s the typical headline writing and grammar cleanups, of course, but in the brand world, an editor ties content to a brand’s voice and business objectives. The right editor works to build trust, which is important in an age where brands are still reeling from native advertisement missteps.

Editors also oversee freelancers and can mold the disparate voices of numerous writers into a cohesive brand voice. Nonetheless, successful content is contingent on choosing the right editor—one who can strike the right tone for the publication.

“I think that unless you have a very strong editorial group, and a managing editor specifically, it can be very difficult to train freelancers, to make sure that they’re all speaking on-message using a very similar tone and so forth,” Linn said. “Obviously, every business model is a little bit different. But I think there’s a lot of pros of having a person on staff who understands exactly what it is that you’re trying to do.”

Technology: Just as finding the right editor is necessary, so is finding the right freelancers—and it’s not a cake walk. While General Assembly has freelancers apply to write for their blog, many brands are looking to technology services to pool freelancers for them.

Coca-Cola is among the latter. “We’ve really tried to carve out a beat system with our Contently writers,” Moye said. “It’s nice to know who we can go to for certain stories.” Journey found a sports writer, a food writer, and business writers through the Contently network.

Moye calls Coca-Cola Journey a “virtual newsroom” since most of the employees, including Moye, work remotely. They communicate at a couple of weekly meetings, and a lot of the collaboration, especially with freelancers in the mix, occurs online.

Brands must also lean on other tools to coordinate digitally. BarkPost Editor-in-Chief Stacie Grissom calls their newsroom an “Evernote-style” setup, referencing the multi-device note-taking and productivity tool. “We have this gigantic Google Doc with the schedule where everyone can look at what everyone else is doing,” she said.

General Assembly uses “mad Google Docs,” May said, and Slack for real-time chat. Others noted the supremacy of ever-overflowing email. Tomas Kellner, managing editor of GE Reports, said he uses Percolate‘s cross-channel calendar for long-term planning.

A small group of in-house writers: Brands appear to be taking a hybrid approach to newsrooms: They have a few folks in-house, then staff up with freelancers for flexibility.

Kellner writes the bulk of the content on GE’s award-winning publication, but other writers contribute too. When they do, he prefers to tap in-house writers. “I think they do really do need people inside the company who really understand what’s going on,” he said.

Still, he pairs a half-dozen in-house writers with some work outsourced from the publishing company Group SJR. “I prefer the combination of inside writers—writers who live inside GE—with outside resources that can help with reporting some of the stories, or shaping or editing these stories,” Kellner said.

BarkPost, the mega-successful pub for dog lovers, also relies on the hybrid approach. The team consists of four full-time writers and 30 freelancers. Grissom manages roughly 20 herself, each at a different level of activity. While BarkPost relies on “typical writers,” she often taps people who just really, really love dogs.

For each brand, it’s a balancing act. While the stereotypical newsroom may resemble a heavily cubicled factory, there are a zillion types of brand newsrooms of all shapes and sizes. And the flexibility of a hybrid newsroom can make it easier, as long as the self-sustaining editorial architecture is in place.

So which way do you go? Freelance or in-house? May summed up the general sentiment: “Both are great. Ideally I like a combination of both.”

The post Build vs. Buy: Why Top Brands Are Leaning on Freelancers to Build Hybrid Newsrooms appeared first on Contently.

But as the quality of some corporate content has improved, it’s time to give brand editors their due. Here are 10 who got our attention in 2014.

Adam Aston — Editorial Director, T Brand Studio

The New York Times held out against native ads for a long time, but when they dipped their toes in, Adam Aston was at the forefront. As the editorial director of the Times‘ branded content studio, Aston helps coordinate writers, editors, designers, developers, and videographers for the website’s paid posts.

He’s worked on teams designing content for Netflix, Chevron, and Shell. A former Businessweek editor, Aston has put the newsroom at ease by making a commitment to content that doesn’t sacrifice quality just to appease sponsors.

Stacie Grissom — Editor-in-Chief, BarkPost

Subscribers of BarkBox, the monthly delivery service for doggy toys and treats, can’t get enough of their dogs. That may be why BarkPost, BarkBox’s blog, has 2 million readers each month. Or maybe it’s because of editor-in-chief Stacie Grissom, who leads the production of a steady stream—up to 20 posts a day—of shareable content, from heavily reported articles to light-hearted puppy pics and memes.

That’s what the Internet is for, right?

Tomas Kellner — Managing Editor, GE Reports

GE’s award-winning online magazine, GE Reports, succeeds by focusing on tech, business, and innovation—not on advertising. And Tomas Kellner, who holds master’s degrees in mechanical engineering and materials science, as well as a journalism degree from Columbia, has been a natural fit at the helm.

Prior to joining GE, he spent eight years writing about business and tech for Forbes and six years as a private investigator at risk consulting firm Kroll.

Dan Lyons — Marketing Fellow, HubSpot

Tech writer Dan Lyons, possibly best known as the creator of “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs,” wears many hats. In 2013 and 2014, he was a marketing fellow at HubSpot, where he helped the software company hone their content strategy as it launched an impressive IPO. In addition, Lyons spent the summer working with Mike Judge writing the second season of HBO’s Silicon Valley. In 2015, the former Newsweek tech editor will be taking over as editor of Valleywag, Gawker Media’s controversial tech gossip site.

It’s a clichéd buzzword, but “disrupt” is what comes to mind when you think of what Lyons has accomplished in the ever-evolving media business.

Jay Moye — Senior Writer and Editor, Coca-Cola Journey

Jay Moye edits Coca-Cola Journey, a global digital magazine and corporate website that gets 1.3 million unique visitors each month. The site combines brand-focused stories and non-branded pieces, with an emphasis on lifestyle and culture topics like history, music, sustainability, and innovation.

Journey’s impressive storytelling makes sense given Moye’s journalism background: He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communications. Prior to coming to Coca-Cola, Moye was president of PenPoint Communications, a consulting firm specializing in internal communications for brands like AT&T and General Electric.

Carrie Parker — Vice President of Content Innovation, American Express OPEN Forum

American Express’ OPEN Forum is an incredible resource for small business owners. It’s an interactive, advice-sharing platform where business owners can connect with one another while getting up to speed on relevant, timely business insights, resolve issues issues, find potential opportunities, and read profiles of small businesses.

Parker, who holds an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School, previously spent six years at marketing research firm Yankelovich, Inc., and has worked in other roles at American Express for six years as well.

Daniel Roth — Executive Editor, LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s content is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget there’s someone behind it all. That someone is Daniel Roth. As LinkedIn’s executive editor, Roth oversees the editorial team that works on LinkedIn Pulse’s editing and algorithms as well as LinkedIn Influencers, the program that offers original content from thought leaders, CEOs, VCs, NGO leaders, and politicians.

Roth earned a B.S. in Journalism, Economics, and Linguistics from Northwestern University. He has written and edited for Forbes, Fortune, WIRED, and Condé Nast Portfolio.

Robert Sperl — Editorial Director, The Red Bulletin

Red Bull Media House’s content marketing efforts—live music, video games, streaming events, an immersive app, an original video series—are widely considered among the best in the biz. The Red Bulletin, the brand’s popular print effort, is led by editorial director Robert Sperl, a 25-year veteran of the newspaper and magazine world.

A monthly lifestyle magazine covering sports, art, people, and culture, The Red Bulletin is available in four languages across 11 countries.

Steve Wiens — Managing Editor, Microsoft Stories

Microsoft Stories reads more like a magazine than a blog, complete with popping photographs and, more importantly, “engrossing, beautiful, longform narratives about the work going on inside the company.” Each post feels customized and unique, and each post is overseen by Steve Wiens, the lead and founding editor of Microsoft Stories.

An English major who learned the ropes as a newspaper reporter at The Bellingham Herald, he further honed his corporate storytelling skills at an advertising agency.

Ann Rubin — Vice President of Branded Content and Global Creative, IBM

IBM runs over 45 branded blogs and recently launched a series of commercials profiling its clients—and ignoring their connection to the company. No matter the medium, IBM’s focus is on making its content accessible—despite its technology’s complexity—through relevant, simplified, evergreen content.

Ann Rubin leads IBM’s robust, innovative content strategy, and has worked at IBM in various capacities since 1997. She holds a B.S. degree in Psychology and developed her marketing skills by spending more than a decade as an account director for two advertising firms.

The post The Top 10 Brand Editors of 2014 appeared first on Contently.