“Funny story,” Eat24 wrote in an equally hilarious post-mortem. “App installs from the week following our breakup letter totaled 1.75x more than we got from all our 2013 paid Facebook ad campaigns combined. So… if we add the breakup installs to the paid ad installs, the ROI for that $1 million Facebook budget actually looks pretty good!”

Eat24’s breakup coincided with an industry-wide freakout after publishers discovered Facebook was shrinking organic reach for brands to one percent or less, and they started a bit of a Facebook-page–deleting movement that is gaining momentum today.

For most brands, Facebook is pretty much useless as a platform for organically reaching an audience; anyone who would rather have 100,000 Facebook fans than 10,000 email subscribers is insane. The paltry organic reach and engagement of some of our own Facebook posts have made me want to either punch the Hootsuite owl right in its beak or use his feathers to dry my tears. I mean, look at the depressing below chart from Forrester:

However, even with those sad numbers staring me in the face, I would never consider deleting our Facebook, and most other companies shouldn’t either. That’s because while Facebook sucks for organic reach, it’s a fantastic platform for paid content distribution and, in turn, for getting more email subscribers.

If you’re a content marketer or publisher who’s creating high-quality content, chances are your big concern is getting more readers. And if you’re smart, you’re not just relying on search and social for traffic; you’re also building an email newsletter so you can consistently deliver content to your readers and keep them coming back.

At Contently, that’s the position we’re in. We’ve grown to north of 200,000 monthly readers and 50,000 newsletter subscribers. Just by the nature of the compounding returns on content marketing, those numbers should increase if we keep publishing three or four stories each day. But of course, we always want to find a way to accelerate our growth.

That’s where Facebook comes in. We test out most of the stories we post on Facebook with an unpublished Facebook dark post. Basically, we pay $5–$10 to deliver each story to a target audience of marketers and see how it performs. And if it performs really well—like our recent interview with Seth Godin—we put more money behind it. (We have a relatively small budget for this kind of thing, so we spend it carefully.)

The CPC for these posts typically ranges from $0.15–$0.20, which actually undersells their cost effectiveness, since the numbers doesn’t account for the organic reach and clicks that occur when readers share your sponsored Facebook post. Our Facebook sponsored post for our Seth Godin interview, for instance, was shared 449 times, which resulted in 800 additional clicks and an organic reach of over 18,000.

However, we’re not just buying clicks; we’re investing in our long-term audience. The new readers we’re driving to the site stick around, spending nearly three minutes engaging with our stories on average—and per Chartbeat’s data, readers who spend three engaged minutes with a story are more than 50 percent likely to return within a week. Additionally, we try to make sure these readers return by prompting them to sign up for our daily newsletter, and nearly 5 percent do. Crucially, these new subscribers tend to be more engaged than our list as a whole.

Here’s what the whole thing looks like in a hastily-made flow chart that will likely make our design team very mad at me:

So through Facebook ads, we’re getting engaged readers who are likely to return. We’re getting email subscribers who will probably come back. We’re bringing tons of new people to our site who might opt to find out more about Contently’s services. In that light, the $0.15 CPC investment starts to look like a steal. And we haven’t even considered the fact that those new readers tend to share our stories like crazy on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Considering its targeting capabilities, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use, Facebook is one of the most important paid content distribution weapons marketers have. And brazenly deleting your Facebook page removes that weapon from your arsenal. Even if you’re not ready to jump into paid distribution today, you don’t know if that’ll be the case in six months or a year.

So, bottom line: You probably shouldn’t delete your Facebook page. Unless, of course, you can get your breakup to go viral. And if that’s your game plan, may I suggest a clever remix of “No Scrubs”?

The post Facebook’s Reach Is Terrible, but You’re Crazy if You Delete Your Page appeared first on Contently.

At the center of it all is Fishkin, who’s built a uniquely personal relationship with the marketing community through thousands of blog posts, hundreds of White Board Friday videos, and some deeply intimate pieces, such as this fantastic essay about his year battling depression while running Moz. Content is the engine that drives Moz’s inbound marketing machine, but it’s also more than that. As Rand likes to say, it’s part of their DNA.

I spoke with “The Wizard of Moz” to find out more about how he built an audience of over 300,000 monthly readers, where SEO is headed in 2015, why licensing content doesn’t work, and, of course, who his favorite wizard is.

Moz has been making a really strong commitment to content marketing for the better part of a decade. Why has content continued to be such a priority for you?

I think there’s two things. One is it’s part of our DNA. We believe in sharing and being transparent in putting out there the things that we’ve learned. Then the second piece is just that it continues to show tremendous return on investment for us. We have a pretty thorough content team in-house. We have a small team of three folks who work on our content team. Then we also have people around the company who contribute on a semi-regular basis, myself included.

We’ve become a hub for content and tactical and strategical advice for our industry. That platform has meant that many other contributors of content from around the marketing world want to share their stuff on Moz. We got a lot of terrific donations of content and could get contributions as well.

What about your three-person in-house team? How is that structured?

Cyrus [Shepard] leads that team. He’s our head of content and SEO. Then Isla [McKetta] and Trevor [Klein] both report up to him and they work on editing, they work on content ideas, and on filling in gaps and holes. They work on the content schedule, with external writers and our internal folks to get stuff, and promotional marketing posts about stuff that Moz is launching.

You guys post at least one thing every day. Why do you think it’s valuable to offer your audience something new on a daily basis?

Actually, we are testing whether it is the case that it’s valuable.

Interesting.

It’s a habit that we’ve had since 2004, when I started the blog. It’s one of those things where I was writing every night. I think one of the big reasons that that worked so well in the pre-social-media era was because the Moz comments and the Moz blogs were like the Twitter or Facebook for our little communities.

We’d post every night and there was active conversation on topics the next day. I’m not sure that, within the era of social media and the era of content, that quantity is the best thing in the world versus quality. We’re actually going to try going down to two or three posts a week and going up to eight or nine post a week and seeing what effect those things have.

Do you feel like, with two to three posts a week, you could do higher quality stuff than you’re doing right now with daily posts?

Maybe. We’re not sure about that but we want to try it.

What key metrics will you look at to determine whether that experiment is successful?

We actually have this little system called One Metric at Moz that basically collects all of our metrics and looks at how content historically has performed over time in our funnel—how visitors who touched certain content or performed in our funnel and then we correlate all the metrics. We link those up so that we can basically assign a single metric score to any given piece of content. after its first seven or eight days of performance.

[Editor’s note: Read more about One Metric here. It’s really cool.]

How much of an advantage is it to have that owned audience and community that Moz has?

I think it’s almost indescribably huge. I think if we didn’t have it, we’d be constantly working on building it.

What are the key benefits that you’ve seen?

I think that a bunch of them include cost of traffic. That’s absolutely a big one. There’s the tangible and obvious benefits of having an audience that is pre-disposed through sharing and amplifying your content. Even just hitting the publish button means that thousand of visits are going to come your way, which is crazy but pretty awesome.

You will also have a barometer. I think with a lot of folks, when they publish content, it’s tough for them to tell whether they didn’t promote it well or whether the content didn’t resonate. For us, it’s pretty easy to know that if a content resonates, it will be promoted and shared and reach lots of people.

I think it also means that our content is perceived more authoritatively because of the community behind it and because of the track [record] and history we’ve built up in the market leadership. I think there’s a high standard that the content is held to—which can be a really tough thing when you have let folks down.

Over the last 10 years, how has your approach to content marketing changed?

I’m not sure that our fundamental underlying approach to content has changed much over time. I think we still taken it to a tune of, “Hey, we want to invest in content regularly. We want to share what we learned and know. We want to collect the best opinions from people, whoever they are and wherever they are in our industry, and share them.”

We want to try and help marketers first. That’s our underlying goal. Then if it so happens that they end up becoming customers of Moz, that’s great too, but that’s a side benefit. We really don’t think about content marketing as being part of our funnel. It’s part of our mission.

What are some of the key tactics you guys have used to grow your audience over the years?

Email is certainly big, most of all the Moz Top 10, which is our bi-weekly newsletter. So is investing in different kinds of media. Obviously video with Whiteboard Friday, but also illustrations and bigger interactive pieces, like “MozCast” and “The Google Algorithm Change History.”

Big content pieces like “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO” [have also helped]. I think it’s important to balance out between daily content and big content investments that take a person or a team months to work on. Social media has been huge for us over the last five, six years as well.

We still get a good amount of referral traffic from other people blogging and sharing our stuff on the web. SEO has been terrific.

Speaking of SEO, it seems like, as Google evolves quite rapidly, there’s a lot of misconceptions out there. What do you think is the biggest misconception right now about SEO?

So many misconceptions. One big one for sure is that all SEO is manipulative and evil, and if you intentionally invest in it, then you are doing something wrong or bad. I think one of the most visible holders of that opinion is Matt Mullenweg over at WordPress. He speak at conferences and if he hears the word SEO, he’s like, “Get off my stage. You’re evil!”

Another interesting and odd one is that SEO will take care of itself—that if I publish unique content, then the search engines will rank it. Nothing could be further from the truth. SEO is a process: the way things earn attention, how they are amplified; who amplifies them; how they earn links; whether they’re targeted at things that people actually search for. Whether they solve those search queries is the user experience you provide.

I think there’s still a lot of [misguided] belief around quantity over quality. The vast vast majority of links and shares and amplification signals of all kinds are going to only the top five or 10 percent of content that gets put out. There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent blog post anymore. [There’s not a lot of value] unless you can be pretty extraordinary.

Ask [this]: If they’re searching for an answer to a question, would they rather reach your piece of content than anything else on the Internet right now?

Unless the answer is a slam dunk, “Yes, this is 10 times better than anything else out there,” I’m not necessarily sure it’s worth publishing.

What advice would you give brands who are stuck publishing a lot of mediocre content?

Prior to deciding you’re going to publish on a topic or coming up with an idea, I would go research everything that’s out there and make sure I have the ability to say that this piece is better than this other piece, and here’s why.

Then I need to be impartial, and just passionate enough to apply that same logic to my own work. That can be done by looking at what ranks in search engines. You can also see what’s been shared in a particular topic or niche with BuzzSumo.

I think both of those processes can help you. I’d also probably urge you to get some harsh internal critique. Find some harsh critics who can bring their judgment to bear on your work. Get them to take a look at what you’ve done.

A lot of brands are still looking for an easy way out when it comes to SEO and content marketing by simply licensing content from other publishers—like the AP, Forbes, and The New York Times—to populate their blog. Do you think that has any value?

I think certain forms of re-publishing content can add value for certain publishers and media outlets, but it’s very rare.

If you’re a small or mid-sized website and you’re licensing content from the AP and the Times, you’re probably sunk. That’s not going to do much for what you’re building. That’s not going to do much for your SEO. You may be getting some stragglers of traffic when Google accidentally thinks you’re the original source, but yeah, that’s not a great model.

On the other hand, I see folks like Slate and Salon and The Washington Post and this fantastic blog post that was written by this author in this smaller space. That can be awesome. They have a huge megaphone and they can amplify a great piece of work that maybe has only been seen by a very, very small niche community.

So licensing works for big media companies, but not for brands.

Yeah, unfortunately. I think some brands are pretty smart about this. Some brands do say, “Hey, we’ve been building an audience with content. We have an audience, we found this great niche thing, we asked this person to contribute a unique piece for us—or we got their permission to republish it—and we shared it with our audience and that helped our credibility.”

That can work, but if you’re licensing from the AP, I don’t get it. I have not seen that work.

What do you think is going to change in SEO this year? What does 2015 hold?

I think we’re seeing a few big trends ongoing. One certainly is dark traffic and loss of data. More and more search referrals are coming through without a referral strain, which is very frustrating because it means a lot of your search traffic is being reported as direct. The search traffic that is coming, through, 95 percent of it is coming without a keyword referral, so you don’t know what people searched for.

I don’t think technology has caught up to this yet. We don’t have something out there where analytics are getting predictive about saying, “Hey, this is why we think the search traffic landed on this page; it probably came with this keyword.” You see some SEOs technologies doing that, but not web analytics technologies.

I think we’re going to keep seeing trends of growth in mobile search and flatter growth in desktop search, which is okay, and we have still an insane metric ton of desktop search going on. Mobile is growing much faster and I think that is putting different requirements on publishers of all kinds—especially in terms of the formatting of content, and what the content is intended to accomplish. Because your conversion rates on mobile are just [bad]—for anything other than the most simple transactions with brands you’ve already transacted with, mobile is not a transaction-heavy device. We’re all going to have to make changes there.

With conversions so difficult on mobile, how should brands approach change?

I think what you’re trying to convert people to is familiarity, trust, or a relationship with your brand. Hopefully maybe some social sharing, maybe an email address if you’re very lucky, but not “Fill out this 10-field form” or “Go through this three-step transaction process.”

You guys are really honest and transparent talking about your successes and your failures and your challenges as a company. It’s really rare. What benefits does that bring?

I think it has both benefits and drawbacks. We don’t do that because we believe it will make us more successful or because we believe it has a high return on investment. We do that because that’s who we are. That’s what we believe in. That’s what we wish other companies and organizations and governments and people of all kinds and sizes and shapes would do. It’s not a business requirement; it’s a values judgement.

Nonetheless, it seems to work. It feels like all those type of pieces get an incredible amount of comments and engagement from your audience. It seems to resonate.

Yeah, I think they do. I would say that they have benefits and drawbacks. When we’re growing and Moz is looking really good—when even if we struggle to raise capital, our customer keep us going and we have a terrific year —I don’t think it’s anything but positive. It tells a great story.

But over the last year and a half, we’ve grown at a much much slower rate than the prior six years. We’ve encountered hardships and launched some buggy software and spent months fixing it and those kind of things. [So] I think being transparent maybe has had its drawbacks too.

People love an underdog with a story, but they don’t necessarily love a company that became a market leaders and then stumbled. I think it doesn’t matter. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s the right thing for us.

Do you think content marketing is going to continue to grow in importance or is it the flavor of the day?

We’ve been doing content marketing since the dawn of the Internet and way before that. We just didn’t call it content marketing. I think SEOs called it linkbait for a while and they certainly did lots of that. I’m not sure what the Guinness Brewery Corporation called The Guinness Book of World Records, but that was certainly content marketing.

I think it will continue to be with us for a long time because great content is a great way to earn attention and awareness and trust, and to get people to engage with your brand and spread your message.

Final question: Who is your favorite wizard?

Well, probably Gandalf. He’s awesome.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post Moz’s Rand Fishkin on Why Licensing Content Is for Suckers, His Favorite Wizard, and the Future of SEO appeared first on Contently.

And just as my mom is never going to stop nagging me about using 50 SPF sunscreen, I’m not going to stop talking about why building an audience is so damn important. But today, I will talk about it with pictures since, lucky for us, the Quick Sprout blog has shared an excellent infographic on how to build a loyal audience.

What you’ll learn:

— Why email, not Facebook, is the key to building an audience.

— The reasons all readers and all clicks are not created equally.

— How Richard Marriott started building the hotel brand’s content empire.

— Why A/B testing is the key to earning loyal readers.

— What Elon Musk looks like in shark-themed lingerie.

Okay, that last one isn’t included. But there are tips about influencers, and Elon Musk is definitely an influencer, even if he doesn’t wear shark-themed lingerie.

Via Huffingtonpost.com

Check it out below!

The post Infographic: How to Build a Loyal Audience for Your Company’s Content appeared first on Contently.

Patel launched his first entrepreneurial venture—an online job board called Advice Monkey—when he was 15. And by the time he was in college, he had co-founded an SEO and marketing company called Advantage Consulting Services that counted Fortune 500 companies like Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft, and Viacom amongst its clients. Before he turned 21, Patel had made enough money to invest a million dollars in a hosting company, Vision Web Hosting. He lost all the money from that investment, but it didn’t really slow him down.

Today, Patel is 29 years old, and he’s already the founder of two successful marketing software companies—Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics—as well as Quick Sprout, a site that started as Patel’s personal blog but has quickly turned into a million-dollar consulting business.

The most impressive thing about Patel, though, might be the fact that he’s managed to build blogs with over 100,000 readers for all three of his major ventures, leading the charge by personally writing eight blog posts a week. He dishes out an unbeatable combination of content marketing hacks, practical advice, and measurement secrets that have made his posts a must-read for anyone in the industry.

I caught up with Patel to discuss how brands should measure content marketing success, the ways SEO has changed, and how to create passionate content that resonates with readers.

Serial entrepreneur Neil Patel

Do you ever sleep? Because your career is absolutely insane so far.

Thank you. Yeah, I sleep well, but I probably work a bit too much.

How did you manage to launch a million-dollar marketing consulting business when you were still in college?

It took some hard work. The thing I learned from it was that people will pay for results. If you can actually get really good at something and provide results and aren’t full of crap, you’d be shocked at how much business you can generate.

That makes a decent transition to the topic of content marketing, because a lot of content marketers are struggling to show their bosses that what they’re doing works. What advice would you have for them?

When it comes to showing that it works, all that you have to do is go through the analytics and you can show them how many more visitors that they’re getting. That’s one way, and that’s extra brand reach.

Two, if you’re collecting emails, you can show them how many more emails you’re collecting—because emails are worth money. Corporations know that if you get emails, then you’re going to get sales.

Third, you can show them how many more leads or sales or conversion points that you’re actually getting through the content marketing. Through any analytics tool you can actually track conversions based on entry sources. You can see, “All right, here’s all the people that came through from the blog, and here’s all the conversion that went through.”

Do you think with that kind of methodology it’s possible to tie a piece of content to a hard revenue figure?

Yes, I do. You may not get a full figure in which there’s more revenue, but you can at least track directly: “Here’s all the traffic we got from the blog and here’s how many leads it generated, and here’s what a lead is [worth to us], or here’s how many sales were generated.”

We do it with our own businesses. We know how much a lead is worth based on what our sales team quotes back, et cetera. We can actually see content marketing as a cash-flow positive.

For a lot of brands, tying content to revenue is a little bit of a chicken before the egg situation, since many are struggling to build a loyal audience. You’ve been able to grow three different brand blogs to over 100,000 readers. How did you do it?

It comes down to going above and beyond. If you look at most people in the content marketing world, all they’re doing is writing content to get traffic or sales. They’re not going above and beyond. If you can actually make your design way better or create content that’s much more detailed and actionable, people take notice and are more likely to share and tell others about it.

Why do you think that most big brands with way bigger budgets than you struggle to even approach a six-figure audience?

Because most big brands and blogs look at how much money can they spend to actually get the people over to the site, to create a popular blog or whatever it may be, versus actually thinking in different ways.

It’s not how big of a budget or what you can do with the money. It’s “What is your target audience or ideal customer, what are their pain points? How are they struggling?” Then, from a blogging perspective, you need to go in and solve those pain points.

Big brands are just throwing money at things and they’re not necessarily thinking it through fully. Just like anything else in marketing, it’s all about solving problems. If you can help people solve their problems through your content, you’re much more likely to get them to read your blog and pick up much more traction than if you’re saying, “Hey, let’s spend 100 grand on content marketing.” All right, what are you going to do with $100,000?

You work with a lot of big brands. Is that essentially the advice that you give them? How do you get them to change their behavior?

The way I get them to change their behavior is, I say, “Hey you know what? Before we decide how much we want to spend and what we want to do, let’s survey people—your potential customers, your current customers—and let’s find out what they want.”

It doesn’t matter what you want to do or what I want to do. All that matters is you want to make your customers happier. From there you take the data and show them based on the data that here’s what we should do. You’ve got to make them create decisions based on the data points versus just doing whatever they want.

One frustration I hear a lot is that a lot of brands tend to have an outdated concept of what SEO is. They’re still focused on keyword-stuffing tactics, as opposed to adjusting to how things have evolved with Google’s Panda algorithm. What’s important for SEO right now?

When it comes to SEO, you can’t end up erasing crap. That’s what I always tell big brands. It’s good product and good services that continually sell in the long run. If you ask Coca-Cola “Why are you successful?” [it’s] because people love Coke. The product is awesome.

You’ve got to focus on putting the best product out there. The same goes with the web. Whether it’s SEO, content marketing, whatever it may be, you’ve got to create the best product on the Internet to give to people. They usually understand that feel. When you pitch that to big brands, they get that and are like, “Oh, cool. It’s not just about keywords.”

How do you usually advise that brands go about actually creating the content? Should they build an in house team? Should they tap freelancers or an ad agency? What do you think works best?

I think all approaches work well and fail. It just depends on what a company wants to do. It’s just about finding the right people, whether they’re in an ad agency, or you’re hiring them as contractors, or maybe as full-time employees. It’s all about talent.

If it’s a good person, it doesn’t matter where they’re located or how you hire them. You want to get the right people working on the project. People with experience, and people who are passionate about the content that they’re creating.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post Neil Patel Reveals How to Tie Your Content Marketing to Revenue 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.

This existential alarm is all part of the job. The important thing is to be conscious of the horrible buzzspeak that’s spewing out of your mouth, lest you find yourself one day on stage wearing an orange jumpsuit and telling everyone about the value-adding revolution in conversation marketing.

Here are 10 content marketing buzzwords to watch out for the rest of the year. Some are very new; others have been lurking around for a couple years but are now primed to blow up. Regardless, these words are poised to sneak into your meeting rooms, board rooms, pitches, brainstorms, and even your brain, like the Yeerks in Animorphs. Except in this case, there will be no magical teenager turning into a lion to save you.

1. Storytelling

We’re to blame for this one. Specifically, Contently co-founder Shane Snow is to blame. Shane started writing about the importance of brands becoming storytellers in 2012, and then he just kept writing about it—Google “Shane Snow Storytelling,” and you get 330,000 results. Hell, he even used a story about Ryan Gosling and Justin Timberlake to argue why brands should become storytellers, and since he has 7 trillion LinkedIn followers, everyone read his posts and turned a perfectly nice word into an abominable marketing buzzword.

Now, every person, brand, and agency identifies as a “storyteller.” That generic toilet paper brand? It’s a storyteller. Jim the lead-gen guy? He’s a freaking storyteller. He’ll tell you a 90-minute story about his leaf-blower, but damn it, he’s in marketing and he showed up to work today, so he gets to be a storyteller too. “Storyteller” is the youth soccer participation trophy of the marketing world, and you’re only going to hear it more this year.

2. Snackable Content

Gary Vaynerchuk attempted to explain short-form social media content by talking about punching people in the face. For whatever reason, that didn’t really catch on. So instead, some social media agency came up with a more delicious-sounding way to talk about half-assed social media posts—snackable content! It’s a term I love to use simply because it fills Contently VP of Content Sam Slaughter with so much rage.

What is snackable content exactly? A snack, inherently, is relative; it’s simply defined as something less than a meal. If your usual meal is three steaks, can a steak be a snack? If your usual content meal is a buzzword post that runs 20,000 words, is this 1,500-word post on marketing buzzwords a snack? Is a Mila Kunis meme snackable if you print it out and cover it with Cheez Whiz? Discuss among yourselves.

3. Storyscaping

Storyscaping is a buzzword with its own tagline: “Stop creating ads, start creating worlds.” That makes it sound like it’s coming from someone trying to recruit a bunch of ad people to quit their jobs and play World of Warcraft all day, but, in fact, it was established by two of SapientNitro’s top creatives for their bestselling book, Storyscaping.

In the video below—after the authors get done calling themselves brave for introducing it to the masses—the concept begins to make more sense. Basically, you should help consumers become part of the story you tell since that’ll make them much more likely to remember it. So the big question: Are you ready to leverage UGC for a 360-degree storyscaping initiative that will engage a high-value audience in your brand’s core target demo?

4. Snap

Remember the early days of Twitter, when you’d use “tweet” as a verb and no one knew what the hell you were talking about, which in turn made you feel really superior? “Snap” is kind of like that and comes with the added bonus of making you feel young and hip. (I don’t know anyone over the age of 25 who uses Snapchat regularly, and I don’t know anyone under the age of 25 who doesn’t use Snapchat regularly.)

This year, brands are going to be “snapping” a lot more, as Digiday reported earlier this month. Amazon, Hollister, Macy’s, Samsung, Universal Pictures, and McDonald’s have all run Snapchat campaigns in recent months. Fifteen months ago, the idea of a brand “snapping” you would have sounded insane—everyone thought Snapchat was only used for sexting. That feels like ages ago; now, everyone’s realized that people use Snapchat the same way they use every other social platform: to share selfies of themselves and pictures of their dog in a Christmas sweater. Expect damn near every teen-targeting brand in the world to run a Snapchat campaign this year.

5. Conversation Marketing

“‘I just want to have a conversation with a brand’… said no one ever,” is an old social media marketing joke, but it might finally be proven wrong this year. I’ve been bullish on chat apps as the next great content distribution and marketing platform, and I feel even stronger about that after speaking yesterday with Paul Gray, the director of product at Kik. Teen-centric brands have seen some insane success over the past few months using Kik’s new Promoted Chats. SkullCandy, for instance, has amassed 400,000 conversations in two months while seeing click-through rates 15–20x higher than Facebook. The vast majority of these conversations are handled by robots, but kids seem to be really into that today.

Get ready to hear the term “conversation marketing” from the 19-year-old who’s going to take over your social media department in Q2.

6. Owned Media/Owned Audience

I will turn these into proper marketing buzzwords, even though neither variation is remotely catchy. But here’s why I think these will take off: Many brands are doing content marketing all wrong.

The wonderful thing about the Internet is you can hire some smart, entertaining, and creative people to develop an awesome online media property, and then you can use paid distribution channels to drive people to that content and start to build a loyal audience. You can do all of this relatively cheaply—at least as far as marketing budgets are concerned. And before long, you generate a following and don’t have to pay for people to consume your content, because they come there naturally through email, social media, and direct traffic.

But most brands aren’t doing this.

Instead, most brands are renting an audience. They’re paying six figures to put some content in front of another publication’s readers—readers they have no hope of reaching ever again unless they write another six-figure check. It’s not innovative; it’s no different than paying for a TV spot.

2015 is the year smart brands realize the true promise of content marketing and start creating robust media properties—and audiences—they own. Or at least I hope so.

7. Content Studio

“Brand newsroom” is out. Content studio is in, and forward-thinking brands that care about creating owned publications are building them. This buzzword was started by publishers who wanted to launch editorial teams to create native ads for brands but didn’t want to call those groups “newsrooms,” lest Jeff Jarvis have an aneurism on Twitter. Brands like Marriott are now adopting the term, too, and it’s probably more accurate. But still—R.I.P. brand newsroom.

8. Culture of Content

Do you have a culture of content? If you do, you probably know this buzzword features alliteration, a detail you won’t have to point out when you share this post in your company Hipchat, because everyone cares about content just as much as you do.

This buzzword has been making the rounds ever since Altimeter released its best practices report, “A Culture of Content,” which details how brands can transform their organizations into places capable of creating high-quality content. It’s an important topic because many brands are, quite honestly, labyrinths of bureaucracy where it’s nearly impossible to produce timely, original content that’s actually enjoyable to read or watch. That, in turn, makes it difficult to recruit top creative talent since that type of environment is suffocating to work in. (Tl;dr: You can’t succeed at content marketing without a culture of content.)

For now, it’s great that people are using this buzzword. But in six months, it’ll be insufferable.

9. Data-Driven Publishing

By this point, it’s becoming abundantly clear the fastest-growing media companies (BuzzFeed, Vox, Upworthy, etc.) are so successful because they’re obsessed with analyzing every bit of data available and using that data to ensure their content is optimally crafted and distributed in a way that will let it spread like wildfire. This is in contrast to the old method of throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks but then not really wondering why some things stuck and other things didn’t.

Shane Snow detailed last week why BuzzFeed uses data brilliantly and why a lot of brands will (or at least should) copy their techniques. This will be a big topic of discussion in 2015, though for most brands, consistently optimizing data is still a few years away. After all, it only works if you’re creating oodles of content to analyze and can justify the existence of a data scientist to your boss.

10. Growth Hacking

Once a buzzword reserved for startups, growth hacking is now a full-blown marketing term. Every brand is trying to build a following of some kind, and they’re looking for shortcuts. Personally, I feel bad for the verb “hack,” which is just being butchered at this point. Tweeting your content at relevant influencers, for instance, is not a growth hack. That’s a growth caress (which I hope to god never becomes a buzzword.) Yet every growth caress is being called a growth hack. Let’s reserve this buzzword for real growth hacks, like breaking into The Economist‘s Sailthru account and stealing their mailing list.

But we won’t. We’ll call every mildly competent thing we do as content marketers a “growth hack.” Because we are monsters. Buzzword-spewing monsters.

Got a buzzword I missed? Tweet me @joelazauskas. It’ll give me something to do while I avoid cracking the code on content marketing ROI, which is another buzzword that certainly should have been on this list.

The post 10 Marketing Buzzwords You’re Going to Hear Way Too Much This Year appeared first on Contently.

The question is: How do you accomplish that?

Altimeter’s new best practices report, “A Culture of Content,” written by Rebecca Lieb and Jessica Groopman, provides a framework for how organizations of any size can establish, evangelize, and foster a culture of content. Let’s take a look at the most important takeaways.

Establish a unified vision

Since your content helps establish your brand’s voice so you can build meaningful relationships with your readers, you need the right people championing your values. But before you can begin to find the best people to create your content, it’s crucial that you establish a content strategy to guide your future team of writers, editors, and strategists.

There must be a single, shared purpose that unites company members and everyone involved in creating content. This commonality will also help each person understand how their day-to-day tasks impact the big-picture business goals of your company.

The brand vision can be spread throughout the company with training and evangelism—more on that later. And above all, this unified brand message provides an editorial game plan. Creators should only produce content that supports this vision.

Invest in people and creativity

Not everyone in your company will be a content creator, but each employee can still contribute to the cause. Content marketers often receive tips and ideas about potential story ideas, strategies, and pain points from customer support and sales teams.

For example, here at Contently, we noticed clients were expressing interest in paid social distribution, so we launched the “Distribution 101” series, which serves not only potential clients but also readers of The Content Strategist who may be fortifying their own content operations.

At Wells Fargo, the marketing team noticed some employees were working on inspiring projects during their free time. Wanting to celebrate and share these good deeds, the marketers launched Wells Fargo Stories, an online multimedia magazine that highlights how team members are positively impacting communities across the world.

In a similar vein, quite a few companies, such as IBM and Airbnb, invite their employees to blog regularly.

Fill your company with these kinds of people—doers, makers, inspirers—and you have an internal pool of engaging stories ready to be mined for publication. In order to create this type of altruistic culture, qualifications for new hires will be less about aptitude and more about attitude. In order to contribute, company members must have a passion for participating in the brand storytelling operation.

Evangelize content

Company-wide enthusiasm for content marketing doesn’t materialize overnight—it requires constant communication and reinforcement. And this reinforcement is crucial because in order for a culture of content to thrive, each company member must play a part.

This responsibility generally falls on what the report calls the “Content Leader.” I’m more comfortable using the term “content team,” because, as the report also notes, there is much debate among companies about the definition of who the Content Leader is and how far that person’s authority stretches. At Contently, our content team consists of a chief creative officer, VP of content, editor-in-chief, associate editors, assistant editor, and a badass intern or two.

As the report notes, whoever leads your content operation should be responsible for proving the value of the content, creating and employing a strategy, coordinating across departments, and nurturing the creative talent. For us, that’s our VP of Content, Sam Slaughter.

Senior leaders, meanwhile, won’t necessarily implement the content, but their support is crucial to its implementation. They need to be on board with the marketing efforts in order to fund projects and back ideas that might go against the status quo. For us, that’s our CCO, Shane Snow.

How can the content team make this happen? “By providing metrics of actionable results,” the report states, “and proving that building a portfolio with small, well-performing projects over time can lead up to a larger, more ambitious campaigns.” If you can prove your content campaigns lead to increased sales and brand lift, how can any executive possibly say no? More importantly, why would an executive want to say no? That’s the challenge for us, just as its the challenge for every content team that’s telling stories on the business side’s dime.

The content team must also be sure that customer-facing groups within the company (support, sales, subject-matter experts, IT, researchers, legal) are a part of the process. Check out John McRory’s “How to Get Legal to Say ‘Yes’ to Your Content Marketing” for more on this.

How can the content team motivate these groups? Mainly by tying content into each department’s objectives and developing metrics everyone can easily use and follow. This is all much more effective than just saying, “Hey, can you do us a favor?”

Once the content team has the support of internal departments, they must get external partners involved in the culture. Homegrown content can be crucial to effective outreach, but sometimes in-house resources aren’t enough to scale an operation. Many brands are partnering with agencies, content services, and analytics platforms to build out their brand newsrooms.

Getting everyone involved in the culture of content will require certain education and training. Anyone who holds a stake in the company’s well-being has to understand the importance of content in order to support it. At Contently, we hold “Lightning Talks” during lunch on Fridays, when company members and departments can share their latest project developments or expand upon industry-related topics of interest.

For more on how to evangelize content, check out “A 4-Step Guide to Evangelizing Content Within Your Brand” by Natalie Burg.

Set up a system of communication

Once everyone is well-acquainted with the advantages of a culture of content, it’s time to integrate the operation across the company. A system of governance must be set into place, establishing who does what and when. It’s crucial that the content is accessible company-wide.

Make it clear all employees have the potential to be publishers. Each expert in his/her field can write a thought leadership piece exploring the nuances of their overarching responsibilities. Experts can’t just come from the marketing department. One of the best examples of this is IKEA’s “Home Tours” campaign, which assembled a squad of employees from IKEA stores around the world to visit their customers’ homes and document their experiences.

Make sure all technology is streamlined for communication throughout the company. Set up an editorial calendar everyone can view so employees know when case studies and ebooks will be published and can be distributed to potential clients.

Final thoughts

A culture of content will benefit everyone. It will make the customer experience richer, flesh out the roles of every employee, create smoother channels of communication, pull in better engagement statistics, and convey a unified brand voice. Departments and specialists shouldn’t be duking it out for control of content. Instead, they should be combining talents and working together toward this common goal.

With 2015 being the year of owned media, it’s time to make your content count, make your voice heard, and make sure the voice people hear aligns with your brand’s values and your customers’ needs. If you create a culture from the ground up, your content will succeed organically.

The post How to Build a Culture of Content and Transform Your Marketing appeared first on Contently.

We’ve already created in-depth guides for navigating each of the four major platforms we advocate experimenting with: Twitter, Outbrain, Facebook, and LinkedIn. With our guides, you’ll learn the best Twitter campaigns for your marketing needs, how to grow an audience through Outbrain, hyper-targeting with sponsored Facebook posts, and boosting your thought leadership on LinkedIn.

Now, we present a tl;dr version of the four guides in one neat package to help you answer questions like: Which platform is best for B2B marketing? Which platform is best for hyper-local B2C content? Which platform is easiest to create ads for? Which platforms are still evolving?

Whether you’re just getting started or looking to run a mix of sponsored posts on multiple platforms, let this comprehensive guidebook light the way.

Twitter

Twitter is our go-to channel when we want to drive a little extra paid traffic to a post at Contently. Visitors from Twitter tend to be highly engaged and are very likely to share your content, creating an organic boost on top of your social distribution. But you can do a lot more than simply drive referral traffic on Twitter, and each type of sponsored campaign offers unique benefits.

Engagement Tweets: Use Engagement Tweets if you want to encourage more people to click on a link and read your content. This is the easiest type of campaign to put together. You can either compose a new tweet on the campaign page or just choose one you’ve already published.

Followers Campaigns: These campaigns are set up for the sole purpose of gaining new Twitter followers. They’re basic—just text, no links or multimedia of any kind.

Website Cards: If you want to add a call-to-action button to your promoted tweet, you can create a campaign for website clicks or conversions. It’s best to use this type of campaign to promote a piece of content that has an actionable conversion, such as an ebook that can be downloaded in exchange for an email address. You’ll have to create a Website Card, which includes an image, a headline, a URL, and a call to action for your reader to click. To track conversions from that call-to-action button on the Website Card, set up a website tag.

Leads Campaigns: Similar to conversions campaigns, except you’ll be creating a Lead Generation Card instead of a Website Card. The Lead Generation Card is optimized for gathering email addresses directly from Twitter, whereas the Website Card is best for adding a visual touch to a piece of content that readers can click that leads to a conversion on your website.

Still, no matter which campaign you choose, there are a couple of similarities across the board. In terms of scheduling, you can either start the campaign immediately and run it until you exhaust your budget or choose specific start and end dates. Twitter recommends using a few tweets for each campaign. This allows you to diversify your offerings and engage a wider audience, but, most importantly, it allows for trial and error so you can optimize future campaigns.

When it comes to targeting your desired audience on any type of campaign, there are some key tips to remember. If you’re targeting based on interests and followers, it’s smart to target followers of your competitors’ Twitter accounts. Try between seven and 10 and swap some in and out for future campaigns. There is also an option to limit targeting to specific devices or platforms. Website Cards are optimized for mobile, so it’s best to target users on mobile devices for these campaigns.

Setting your budget for a campaign includes three main parts: 1) a daily minimum budget 2) a bid range per engagement and 3) total spend for that campaign. The budget and bid can be adjusted while the campaign is running. For example, you might want to adjust the bid at different times of the day or week, such as when a buzz-worthy event takes over the conversation on Twitter. During these instances, you may have to bid higher to get eyeballs on your content.

Twitter allows you to view your campaign stats based on a certain range of dates, platforms, locations, and demographics. The “Engagements” tag will break down campaign performance by individual tweets, impressions, clicks, retweets, replies, followers, and engagement rate. Pair this information with the offerings from Twitter Analytics to see how your sponsored tweets are performing in comparison to your regular posts.

Facebook

It’s much simpler to create sponsored posts on Facebook than on any other social platform. Before or after you post a piece of content on Facebook, just click the blue “Boost” button and customize.

First, choose the audience you want to reach. If you choose “People who like your Page and their friends” or “People similar to people who like your Page,” then the majority of the targeting is done for you. You simply have to add a price and start the campaign. However, if you choose to target your own pool of users, you can narrow your audience by location, age, gender, and interests.

While a campaign runs, you can add money, but you cannot adjust your targeting specifications. Once the campaign is completed, click the “See Results” button at the bottom of your post to review how your campaign performed.

In our experience, CPC seems to be a bit higher on Facebook than on Twitter. However, hyper-targeting by location on Facebook has proven incredibly useful. For example, it’s a good place to target readers who freelance in Chicago if you want to promote a piece about the best coffee shops to work from in the city.

Outbrain

Outbrain, a content discovery platform, is a great option for publishers looking for an easy and efficient way to drive readers to their site. How do you do that? By generating lots of headlines. Outbrain places these recommended links next to and below articles on high-quality news sites like Hearst and Condé Nast publications, so they must be engaging enough for readers to click on.

To start, choose “Create New Campaign,” and submit the URL of the piece of content you want to promote. Name it, put in your budget, and define your schedule. Choose your type of campaign based on the format of the content or where you want it to appear: video, mobile, or desktop. In general, mobile CPCs do very well, especially with fashion and retail content.

The budget can be assigned on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis. According to Contently client services manager Amanda Weatherhead, you’ll often see lower CPCs earlier in the week, month, or quarter, and then it becomes more competitive to get eyes on your content. So budget accordingly. For example, if you have $10,000 allocated for a quarter, spend $5,000 in the first month, $3,000 in the second, etc. If you decide to set a daily, weekly, or monthly budget cap, Outbrain’s system will divide by each day to distribute content evenly.

Now, for the headlines: It’s best to come up with several variations for each link and include different images and subheaders. Oubrain’s algorithm will optimize and show the best performing ones more often.

When it comes to measuring the success of your content distribution, Outbrain primarily tracks clicks, but you can also track conversions through a code that you embed on your page, similar to Twitter. Outbrain recommends a CPC for each piece of content, and if you’re beating that with a lower price per click, it’s a good sign you have a strong content strategy and engaging headlines. But be sure to check the visit duration and bounce rate of your Outbrain referral traffic in Google Analytics to make sure Outbrain readers are actually sticking around once they land on your site.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s ad program is the holy grail of hyper-targeting—particularly for B2B marketers. You can target audiences based on location (down to the city), gender, age, LinkedIn groups they might belong to, skills, and even schools they attend or graduated from.

However, the most unique and useful option that LinkedIn provides is targeting by company name, category, and industry size, as well as by job title and seniority. For example, if you’re looking to acquire in retail, you can promote a thought leadership piece relevant to retail marketers’ interests and target them directly, even going so far as to target the senior VP of a specific company.

The budgeting options are similar to those on Twitter, offering the ability to set a total budget for the campaign, daily maximum spend, and length of time you want the campaign to run. However, LinkedIn differs by offering the option of paying per click (every time someone clicks on your post) or per impression (every time LinkedIn shows your post, per 1,000 impressions). You can choose one and then enter a bid for the most money you want to spend when the action is completed.

You can also set up a few broader campaigns and assign multiple pieces of content to each. Continuing with the above example, say you want to target retail companies with multiple pieces of content and just a $500 budget. Set up one overarching campaign for targeting these retail companies and then simply choose that targeted campaign when you go to sponsor each piece of content. The results will show up directly under the sponsored post on your page with an option to further manage or adjust the campaign as it progresses.

Final thoughts

Each of these platforms provides unique opportunities for your needs in terms of boosting distribution and audience growth. By testing out each one, marketers can find the one that serves their objectives the best. For us, that’s Twitter. For Upworthy, it’s Facebook. For you, it may be Outbrain or LinkedIn. It’s important to experiment with each option and double down on the ones that are most effective for your content mix.

The post The Paid Social Distribution Playbook appeared first on Contently.

But content marketing is still in its infancy, and marketers have a number of challenges to overcome. As we discovered earlier this year, measurement remains a hurdle; our content measurement survey from this summer found over 90 percent of marketers were not confident that their key content metrics were effective in measuring business results. For the year’s end, we wanted to broaden our scope and ask our audience of content marketers some important questions related to their triumphs, failures, and future goals: What types of content led to the most ROI? What resources were in short supply? What are some of the biggest challenges marketers face on a daily basis?

What follows is a crucial snapshot of the content marketing landscape as we get ready to transition into 2015.

METHODOLOGY

Between November 5 and November 17, we surveyed 601 marketers with an 18-question online survey.

As the survey was answered by nearly our entire population target, the calculated margin of error was approximately one percent.

KEY FINDINGS

In the next section we’ll unpack the noteworthy results in detail, but at first glance, a few striking data points stand out:

— Sixty-nine percent of marketers back original content over licensed content.

— Fifty-seven percent of all companies have two or more people dedicated to content marketing.

— While a slim majority of marketers are devoting 25 percent or less of their marketing budgets to content, 23 percent are now devoting over half their marketing budgets to content.

— Fifty percent of marketers are looking at return on investment (ROI) and lifetime customer value (LTV) as the most valuable goals to measure.

— Seventy-four percent of marketers believe that they could drive 2.5x more ROI, brand lift, or LTV if they had an expert content team, indicating a strong level of optimism heading into the new year.

RESULTS & ANALYSIS

Publishing quality content over time requires a healthy investment when you account for the talent and tools required. Here, we see there’s a huge range in the resources companies are committing to content marketing. While 52 percent of marketers are devoting 25 percent or less of their marketing budget to content, a significant group—23 percent—have shifted over half of their marketing budget to content.

Over the past few years, it’s been common to see content marketing treated as an experimental marketing practice, often put in the hands of a single employee juggling other responsibilities. While that’s still the case for 43 percent of respondents, it’s promising that more than half of all brands have at least two employees dedicated full-time to content marketing. Companies like Coca-Cola have succeeded with a balanced model that teams a few full-time employees with dozens of freelancer working remotely.

Given the small teams who are dedicated to content marketing, it’s not a big surprise that approximately two-thirds of respondents are creating fewer than five pieces of content per week. Finding the right balance of quality and quantity is one of the biggest challenges marketers face today, but it’s one that needs to be tackled if brands want to compete with traditional media companies for audience attention.

Considering most marketers only publish a few times per week, filling those slots with the right content becomes even more important. Interestingly, respondents didn’t overwhelmingly prefer or dismiss one medium over another—save for infographics. Longform, shortform, video, and social media posts were all deemed the most effective medium by between 16 and 23 percent of respondents.

Of note: Almost one-fifth of those surveyed picked “I don’t know.” Perhaps the popularity of that answer choice echoes the idea marketers are still searching for the best way to link their content to business results.

A marketer is only as good as his/her tools, and those tools include time, money, and analytics. Fittingly, our respondents identified budget (34 percent), the inability to measure business results (22 percent), and lack of time (11 percent) as their biggest challenges.

Ostensibly, these challenges are all connected. A larger budget can open access to the necessary analytic tools and resources, and the right analytics help content marketers devote their time and money to the most effective tactics.

When it comes to publishing original content versus licensing content from other publishers—also known as syndication—the results are clear: More than two-thirds of those surveyed favor original content. That answer shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. If readers can get your content elsewhere, what would make them come to you specifically?

As Cyrus Shepherd, director of content and SEO at Moz, told Contently co-founder Shane Snow: “Syndicated content is like giving popcorn to children. It will keep them busy for a while, but that’s it.”

Moz, a robust content creator in its own right and a leader in search engine optimization, doesn’t syndicate any content in either direction. “I think all the value is having something original,” Shepherd said.

Licensed content from other publishers rose in popularity in the early days of content marketing as a one-click solution to populating corporate blogs and as a hack for boosting search rankings. But its clear from these findings marketers see limited value in it.

What if marketers could create content under ideal conditions? The responses here show how optimistic marketers are about the maximum benefits of their content marketing operations. Notably, a majority of respondents seem to think they could increase ROI or brand lift by 2x–5x with the right team producing high-quality content.

Interestingly, even though a plurality of marketers selected ROI as their most important marketing goal, lifetime customer value and audience growth were very close behind. When it comes to content, measuring success can be a complex endeavor, with ROI, LTV, and audience growth all intersecting at various points.

However, the results suggest marketers are embracing a nuanced approach when figuring out how content can impact their bottom lines. Cultivating a loyal audience takes time, but the benefits are long-lasting. Once you have a relationship with your consumers, the ROI should follow.

CONCLUSION

Though many still treat content marketing as an experimental trend, brands are quickly learning that there’s a science to creating content—and spending their sacred budget.

Clearly, there’s plenty of room for growth. According to a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute, only 23 percent of B2C marketers are successful at tracking ROI. Everyone points to Red Bull, GE, and American Express as the all-stars of content marketing, but aspiring content marketers likely need some of the resources afforded to those best-in-class brands—a stable supply of time, money, and analytics that take the guesswork out of their jobs.

Ultimately, the fate of content marketing isn’t in the hands of the marketers pushing for creativity on a daily basis. In reality, it depends on a dedicated investment from the executive level. For example, American Express President Ed Gilligan fully supported Open Forum’s initiative to publish small business content, and Marriott International Chairman Bill Marriott, who doesn’t use computers, still saw the value of telling his company’s story directly to consumers and has invested heavily in content.

Thanks to an early commitment from the executive level, Red Bull now employs approximately 135 people just for their media house, and Nestlé’s digital editorial team consists of almost 20 community managers and designers producing content every day. And according to the Columbia Journalism Review, Coca-Cola “now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.”

In 2014, many brands tested the waters, and a few dove in headfirst. In 2015, we’ll see how many follow.

(Full disclosure: Coca-Cola, GE, and American Express are Contently clients.)

Charts created by Brian Meyers

The post The State of Content Marketing Heading Into 2015 appeared first on Contently.

You can do an “audience rain dance” and pray for a miraculous influx of social referral traffic, as our editor-in-chief, Joe Lazauskas, has been known to do from time to time. Or you could take advantage of one of the many paid content distribution platforms at your proposal.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be releasing detailed playbooks to our four favorite platforms for paid content distribution: Twitter, Outbrain, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

We’re going to start off with our personal favorite channel here at Contently: Twitter.

Twitter is our go-to channel when we want to drive a little extra paid traffic to a post. Visitors from Twitter tend to be highly engaged, and are very likely to share your content further, creating an organic boost on top of your social distribution. But you can do a lot more than simply drive referral traffic using Twitter advertising—each type of Twitter campaign is great for something different.

Which type of campaign should I use?

There are a handful of different campaigns that you can choose to promote your brand or publication, depending on how you want to grow your audience. Options for targeting and budgeting are also varied, but we’ll review those sections further down in the piece.

Still, no matter which campaign you choose, there are some similarities across the board:

-In terms of scheduling, you can start the campaign immediately and run it until you exhaust your budget, or choose specific start and end dates.

-All sponsored tweets will say “Promoted by [Your Business Name]”

-Twitter recommends using a few tweets for each campaign. This allows you to diversify your offerings and engage a wider audience, but most importantly, it allows for trial and error so you can optimize future campaigns.

Now, onto the types of campaigns:

Engagement tweets

What used to be called a Promoted Tweets campaign is now an Engagement Tweets campaign—and it’s by far the one we use the most. It’s also the easiest type of campaign to put together.

If you want to take a regular-looking tweet (like you’d find in your Twitter feed or send out to your followers) and put some money behind it, this is the campaign for you. You can either compose a new tweet on the campaign page or just choose one you’ve already published or have scheduled to go out through a third-party app like TweetDeck or Hootsuite.

We’ll often use this campaign to give a little boost of momentum to a tweet that has already gained a good amount of traction with our audience.

Follower campaign

These campaigns are set up for the sole purpose of gaining new Twitter followers. They’re not meant for promoting individual pieces of content, driving leads, or tracking conversions. That is why these tweets are very bare bones in their composition. Twitter suggests using only text for these—no links or multimedia of any kind—just a short description of why people should follow your account.

We’ve set up these campaigns on a monthly basis for The Content Strategist to promote our strongest pieces of content, and have used it sparingly to build an audience for our newest Twitter account, @TheFreelancer, which represents our sister publication at Contently.net.

Website clicks or conversion campaign

This is where marketers get to flex their call-to-action muscles. For this campaign, you’ll have to create a Website Card, which includes an image, a headline, a URL, and a call-to-action for your reader to click on.

For example, this is Website Card template we created to promote our healthcare e-book.

Back on the campaign page, you will then attach the Website Card to a tweet, and add text for the tweet to give a short description of the content you’re promoting.

To track conversions from that call-to-action button on the Website Card, set up a website tag. For example, if you’re promoting an ebook that has an email signup page, and you want to know how many people submit their emails via your Twitter campaign, you go to Tools > Conversion Tracking > Create new website tag, and set up the proper code.

Leads

This campaign is similar to the one directly above, except you’ll be creating a Lead Generation Card instead of a Website Card. The biggest difference is that these cards are mostly useful for getting e-mail addresses through direct sign-ups, whereas the Website Cards are great for jazzing up different pieces of content.

For example, this is a template we used to promote our e-mail newsletter.

How can I target my desired audience?

With the exception of the Followers campaigns, each campaign above allows you to target by the following factors: Keywords, Interests and followers, Television, or Tailored audiences. The Followers campaigns only include two categories: Interests and followers, and Tailored audiences.

These are fully explained on the campaign set-up pages, so here are just a few tips:

-For Interests and followers, it’s smart to target followers of your competitors’ Twitter accounts. Try 7-10, and swap some in and out for future campaigns.

-For Tailored audiences, if you have a larger list of e-mail subscribers than you do Twitter followers, you can upload your subscriber list, and target those readers and others like them. Don’t want to waste money targeting people who already engage with your brand? There’s a new targeting option that lets you exclude these tailored audiences, too.

-There is also an option to limit targeting to specific devices or platforms. Website Cards are optimized for mobile, so it’s best to target users on mobile devices for these campaigns.

How should I budget my spend?

Setting your budget for a campaign includes three main parts: 1) a daily minimum budget; 2) a bid range per engagement; and 3) total spend for that campaign.

To keep a campaign running for a certain period of time without setting start and end dates, simply set a daily amount you’d like to spend, and check up on your campaign as it progresses.

For example, when we ran a Follower campaign over the summer, we allocated a set amount of funds for it. I divided the budget by 30 days in the month, and made that price my daily cap.

The budget and bid can also be adjusted while the campaign is running. For example, you might want to adjust the bid at different times in the day or week, such as when a buzzworthy event is taking over the conversation on Twitter. At this time, you may have to bid higher to get your content seen.

After you begin running campaigns, Twitter will offer suggestions on how to improve them. These tips will often be to add more money to your campaign or up your bid for higher engagement. Sometimes we’ll do this to experiment with pieces that performed exceptionally well.

How can I measure the success of my campaigns?

Once your campaigns are up and running, you can track their performances in real-time on the campaigns dashboard.

As with most insights programs, you can view your campaign stats based on a certain range of dates, individual campaigns, platforms, locations, and demographics.

The “Engagements” tag will break down campaign performance by individual tweets, impressions, clicks, retweets, replies, followers, and engagement rate.

Pair this information with the offerings at Twitter Analytics to see how your sponsored tweets are performing in comparison with your regular output of Twitter content. Then, optimize. That’s when the real fun begins.

Have any questions on paid Twitter promotion? Tweet me @Contently. I’m the gal behind the account, all day, every day.

The post The Content Marketer’s Guide to Promoted Tweets appeared first on Contently.

1. What is “native” and what is “owned”? Which one is better?

2. Why would we create owned content rather than buy sponsored content?

These two questions are so similar that it makes sense to answer them together.

Let’s start with the basic definitions. Shane Snow, CCO of Contently, covered the definitions in our “State of Content Marketing 2014” report:

It’s hard to say which one (native or owned) is better in an absolute sense; they simply serve different purposes, and in an ideal world, they work in concert. In an article earlier this month, Contently VP of Content Sam Slaughter detailed how brands should use native advertising to build an audience that they own:

One could make (and many have made) the case that brands communicating directly with their own audience is bad news for publishers who depend on being the audience gatekeepers. I don’t buy that.

For one, building an audience is hard. And more importantly, even a brand with their own audience will want to reach other audiences with their message. Whether they use sponsored stories, paid distribution, or social advertising to get there is dependent on the circumstances—but the need to reach additional eyeballs efficiently and effectively is constant.

Case in point: Here at Contently, we have a huge audience for our industry pub, The Content Strategist. And yet we still pay through the nose to place sponsored content on publisher sites like Adweek. Why would we do that when we could put it in front of our own audience for free? Simple: Adweek readers are people we want to reach.

Shane also tackled this question in an article for Ad Age, noting that having direct access to an audience is every brand’s goal, but it takes time, patience, and editorial leadership to make that happen. In the meantime, sponsored content is a way to align a brand with an already recognized and trusted platform.

3. What is the value of a long-term content strategy vs. a campaign-by-campaign approach?

As we noted last month, the cliché is true: Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. You need time to develop an effective editorial strategy through trial and error and to build trust with readers. That’s why some agencies and custom-content studios run by publishers are requiring brands to commit to a content push of at least four months, if not a year or longer. In an ideal world, they’d be signing on for 5-plus-year commitments.

4. Who should we be targeting, i.e., who should our audience be?

Determining your target audience is content strategy 101. Who wants your service or product? Who shares similar values? What do they want but aren’t getting enough of? These are easy questions to ask, but difficult questions to answer—and those answers are different for each and every business. If you don’t have someone on your team who has built an audience before, you likely need to find the right help.

5. How do you go about developing a brand voice?

This is a crucial aspect of content marketing, and it was one of the main topics Shane covered in the first-ever Contently e-book, “The Beginner’s Guide to Blogging and Content Strategy.” Though three years old, the advice still holds strong.

Witty, smart, sarcastic, optimistic, skeptical— whatever the tone, be consistent. Early on, figure out what your brand’s message is and how you want to say it. Choose a tone or angle, and then consistently apply it to your content. If you want to be instructional and serious, stick with that. As Shane writes in “Beginner’s Guide,” it’s not so much what you say—it’s how you say it.

6. How much content should I be creating?

The short answer: a lot. A brand needs to pump out quality content in order to establish trust in their readership. The perfect mix is different for each brand, but when starting out, look at key engagement metrics (like engaged time, average finish time, shares, and return visits) to see which pieces of content are compelling your audience to come back. Then, double down on what works while constantly testing and iterating new approaches. That’s the approach the brand newsroom of the future will take.

7. How does a brand set up a newsroom?

Brand newsrooms are all the rage right now. When TCS sat down with content strategist Neil Chase, he had some key advice for setting up a brand newsroom internally:

The brand newsroom must embrace and follow the company’s culture, but it also needs the ability to change that culture. To make a closed company more open. To make a company that’s nervous about publicity more comfortable with it. To help a company that operates in a regulatory environment able to do more than it thought possible before. To try new things, use new technology and break bad old habits. More here.

Brands have the opportunity to reimagine the traditional newsroom structure to best serve their needs. This means establishing specific responsibilities for each department. And as Shane explains in the talk below, most every decision should be driven by data and the quest for an exponentially increasing return on investment:

And for a visual guide to brand newsrooms, check out our interactive e-book, “The CMO’s Guide to Building a Brand Newsroom.”

8. What’s a good strategy for getting more people to find your content in the first place?

One of the most important principles for building an audience is the “superconnector.” This is a person or platform that has an established audience you can borrow. If there are people in your brand’s network with whom you can connect, do it.

But how? You need to offer unique and valuable content. Produce content that their audience is interested in and then give it away. This way you make the superconnector happy, and you get exposed to a broader audience. Offering value leads to trust, and the audience will be more likely to follow you to your own platform.

It’s a similar idea to finding influencers. Connecting to 500 people through one person is much more efficient than trying to reach people individually. In addition, don’t be afraid to pay to jumpstart your traffic. Creating good content is only effective if people read it. Here’s the TCS breakdown of the top distribution platforms.

For more, check out Shane’s webinar, “Superconnecting Massive Audiences,” below:

9. What are the benefits of outsourcing content creation?

Don’t think outsourcing, think in-sourcing, as jargony as that sounds. (Forgive us.) Bringing in freelancers adds a fresh twist to a brand’s voice. For instance, General Mills brought in outside writers, photographers, and infographic experts to write and design their successful recipe site, Tablespoon. While the perspectives of freelance brand writers are often at odds with traditional marketers, that’s actually a good thing, breathing fresh life into a content campaign. Their ability to connect with audiences and tell a great story in unorthodox ways can be invaluable.

10. Is it really worth the investment to hire trained journalists for branded content over cheaper writers and copywriters?

Definitely. With the saturation of Internet content, brands are not only competing with one another for attention, but also with established media powerhouses. Brands need the talent to compete, and that makes writers who are talented, experienced, and passionate about a brand’s mission invaluable. There is truth to the warning “You get what you pay for,” and when it comes to content, quality is king. Click here for more.

11. What is a good strategy for getting people to notice your content when they mainly go to your site to buy stuff?

Depends on what you’re selling, but a smart strategy is to integrate editorial with the products themselves. You want a balance of boosting the appeal of your product with providing value through your content. The story cannot only be about the product. Contently uses the “Content Funnel” as a framework for creating content for varying levels of engagement.

The first step is to attract your audience by offering them stories that speak to their values and are either timely, seasonal, or evergreen—meaning always relevant. The second level of the funnel is for stories about the company and the customer. This gets a bit more personal and moves the audience closer to the product. The third tier is the stories concerning your product. The people who make it to this level of the funnel are the ones who will become patrons of your brand.

A few brands doing an awesome job of weaving amazing content into their commerce platforms are Mr. Porter, Birchbox, and Apple.

Groupon is one more great example of combining content and commerce. It made stories an integral part of each deal, and rode unprecedented conversion rates all the way to an IPO. People could connect with the company on multiple levels and kept coming back for more.

12. What’s the best way to define your content?

The best content is mission-driven: For us, that mission is building a better media world. That’s why we cover the media and marketing world here on The Content Strategist, give freelancers the tools and knowledge they need to succeed on The Freelancer, and fund independent investigative journalism over at Contently.org. If you want a definition, start with a question: What’s my mission?

13. What metrics can help you improve your writing and performance?

14. How does a brand calculate their ROI? Not just a formula but the process and tools?

Most metrics focus on developing the brand, not the creator. The natural progression in smart content strategy is Stories > Engagement > Relationships > ROI. Each level of the brand newsroom should focus on one or more of those pieces. For creative people, the story metrics are the most important. For editors, engagement and relationships should take priority.

Story metrics that matter most: engaged time, finish percentage, and return engagement. These three metrics lead to relationships, which then directly translate to ROI when the conversion pathway is tracked correctly. For more, check out our “4 Keys to Calculating ROI for Content Marketers” (process) and our e-book, “The New World of Content Measurement” (tools).

15. Which social platform should I use to build a following of wealthy investors using longform content?

As we detailed in our “Banking on Content” e-book, LinkedIn is a finance content marketer’s best friend. LinkedIn has the audience you want, and their targeting capabilities are unmatched. If you’re publishing directly on LinkedIn, they have great engagement metrics built into the platform, and they also recently rolled out a redesign of their longform pages. If you can build an audience on LinkedIn, you can attract a following that will transfer over to your owned media platform.

For more finance content marketing tips, check out our “State of Finance Content Marketing” e-book.

16. As far as formatting and placement are concerned, what is the sweet spot for linking to external resources in articles?

If you’re giving a load of resources, do so at the end of the story, not as a distraction midway through. If links to external resources are important for context, definitely include them in-text (like in this piece). If you’re not concerned about content engagement, then split test it the same way you’d split test a landing page.

Also, whenever you reference a brand name in your article—yours or otherwise —always link it within the text. This can amp up your SEO ranking.

17. What is “thought leadership” and is there value to being considered a thought leader?

A brand that is a thought leader assumes expertise in a field. People rely on them as a resource. Thought leadership is the number one goal Contently clients list. Really, thought leadership is about branding. If your brand is intelligent, that’s exactly how you want to self-style. If your brand sells Doritos-shell tacos, who cares about thought leadership? You might care about entertaining teens and twenty-somethings.

And yes, thought leadership has become a buzz phrase, but it’s here to stay. Here are some tips to make it work for you.

18. What trends will be impacting content creation in the near future?

What if Coca-Cola took you inside of a can or Corona could actually find you your beach? Immersive virtual reality is going to hit marketers by surprise. Strapping on goggles and transporting instantly to a virtual hangout will be a huge opportunity for bigger and better storytelling.

The main answer is that we’ll see more players: media companies, media agencies, creative agencies, PR firms, small shops—everyone’s selling content right now. We’ll also see an explosion in multimedia and branded web series, leveraging YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and other emerging platforms and talent to reach millennials.

There will also be a greater merging between digital and social media, and traditional media. HP’s recent commercial featuring a montage of Vines is a great example. Finally, a select few brands will finally figure out how to structure their organizations like a media company.

There you have it.

Thank you to everyone who submitted your questions. As always, when others pop up, feel free to reach out @Contently.

The post The Answers to Your 18 Biggest Content Marketing Questions appeared first on Contently.

Those 11 inspiring videos are all original feel-good New York Times productions, and as Digiday’s Lucia Moses noted this morning, the ad is intended to drive subscription signups for The Times, with a prominent call to action at the top of the piece imploring readers to “Get with The Times.”

While this may seem bizarre and a little too meta for this early in the morning, it’s actually a shrewd move by The Times to grow their audience. Clearly, they’ve identified Mashable readers as potential Times readers and subscribers, and as a result, they’ve come to them with a month-long campaign of branded posts.

The Times also punched up the titles of the individual videos for a Mashable audience. “Tattoo Artist Gives Breast Cancer Survivors Nipples and Hope” was originally titled “The Nipple Artist,” and “Can Your Grandma Pump Iron Like This?” was called “Shirley and the Bodybuilder.”

This is something publishers of all kinds—and particularly brand publishers—can learn from. As Contently’s Sam Slaughter wrote in a post last week, sponsored content should be used to introduce yourself to new readers and bring them to your owned media property:

For one, building an audience is hard. And more importantly, even a brand with their own audience will want to reach other audiences with their message. Whether they use sponsored stories, paid distribution, or social advertising to get there is dependent on the circumstances—but the need to reach additional eyeballs efficiently and effectively is constant.

Case in point: Here at Contently, we have a huge audience for our industry pub, The Content Strategist. And yet we still pay through the nose to place sponsored content on publisher sites like Adweek. Why would we do that when we could put it in front of our own audience for free? Simple: Adweek readers are people we want to reach.

Everyone is pursuing the same thing—lasting relationships with readers—and as a result, we may soon see sponsored posts become common currency in the media industry—between both publishers and brands, and publishers and publishers.

The only question is: What’s next? Upworthy sending correspondents into Syria and running sponsored posts on The Times? The Wall Street Journal punking The Times with sponsored posts on The Onion? Jeff Jarvis’ head exploding from all of this?

In the immortal words of Terrell Owens, getcha popcorn ready.

The post Native Adpocalypse! The NYT Sponsors an Upworthy-Style Listicle on Mashable appeared first on Contently.

The Best Branded Content of July

With the media and marketing worlds easing into their annual late-summer hibernation, there were fewer case studies in awesome content marketing this past month than usual. But eight brands fought through the summer slump to create something awesome. Read it.

Could Red Bull Become the New ESPN?

Natalie Burg plunges into the big existential questions surrounding Red Bull—an energy drink company that’s looking more and more like a media powerhouse every day:

Who is Red Bull, really?

Among the existential questions that plague humanity, maybe this one is not as high on philosophers’ radar. But for those interested in the state and future of branded content, it’s one worth asking.

First, they were a company known for making hyper-caffeinated drinks; then, they were an energy drink company that was surprisingly content-savvy. Now, they’re beginning to firmly look like media company that happens to sell an energy drink, as The Content Strategist’s James O’Brien foretold 18 months ago.

Perhaps nothing helps shape the answer to the question of who Red Bull is right now more than the release of a new app, RedBull.com, and the update of another, Red Bull TV, which seem to showcase the company’s identity—as it stands today, anyhow. Read it.

If You Ignore Owned Media, You Might End Up Serving Burgers

What do barbecues and owned media have in common? Find out. Read it.

‘Summer With Cimorelli’: Inside Subway’s Hit Web Series

This summer, Subway scored a content marketing hit by pairing six YouTube-star sisters with an innovative distribution strategy, Susan Kuchinskas reports:

Great content marketing is like an excellent sandwich: a mix of ingredients that pleases the palate while also delivering substance. Subway’s “Summer with Cimorelli” web series does just that by layering owned and earned media over a solid content marketing and distribution strategy that’s pleasing fans and keeping them coming back for more. Read it.

How Planned Parenthood Controls the Hobby Lobby Conversation With Incredible Content

Can a brand succeed in hijacking the news through viral content? Planned Parenthood’s recent success indicates that the answer is yes.

On June 30, the Supreme Court voted on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, deciding that closely held corporations aren’t required to cover their employees’ birth control costs under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Women in favor of birth control (a lot of us, it turns out) were outraged that some employers could deny birth control coverage due to religious beliefs.

So was Planned Parenthood, and they went on the attack. But they weren’t just armed with a press release. Instead, they released an armory of powerful content across social media, their owned media sites, and publisher sites. Read it.

The post Content Marketing Catchup: Red Bull’s Big Future, the Danger of Ignoring Owned Media, and More Must-Read Stories appeared first on Contently.

But it also matters where they read it.

I liken the day-to-day production of content to throwing a barbecue. If you like to grill and have lots of friends, barbecues are easy to host on a daily basis. I threw at least 15 during my final month of college. People will mosey over since you’re known for throwing good barbecues and the headline on the Facebook invite is enticing—something like: “Burgers, Beer, and Bocce: This BBQ Is Probably Better Than Whatever the Hell You’re Doing Right Now!”

And they’ll stay if the burgers are done right, the tunes aren’t annoying, and the beer isn’t Keystone Light. It’s about understanding what your audience wants and putting in the effort to deliver. If you do a good job, they’ll probably come back. Producing high-quality content on a day-to-day basis works the same way—people will keep coming back. If you’re a publisher—and particularly a brand publisher—building a reserve of reliability over time is the ultimate goal of the content game.

Yet, instead of consistently throwing content barbecues that keep people coming back, a lot of brands seem eager to just pay for the right to hand out burgers to random people in the mall. You may delight someone by handing them free meat, but you’re only going to see them again if they bother to seek you out, and they don’t even know where you live.

Your chances of building relationships with them would’ve been much greater if they came to your barbecue.

This is the difference between owned and earned/paid media. Fueled by the misconception that every interaction with branded content counts the same, brands are willing to ditch the arduous work of building an owned audience for just buying as many content impressions as possible. A few brands—American Express, Coca-Cola, Red Bull, BarkBox—have succeeded by getting millions of people each month to come read content on their sites. But most are just willing to pay six figures to sponsor content on publisher sites, popping up in the mall of BuzzFeed, content burger in hand. (“17 Burger Toppings You Never Expected From a Brand!”—I’m committed to pushing this metaphor to its limit.)

(Full disclosure: American Express and Coca-Cola are Contently clients.)

This isn’t to say there’s no value in people reading your content outside your owned site. Such a strategy can work, especially if you use that content to drive people back to your publication. By all means, pay for the ability to give someone a free burger, but only as long as you remember to tell them to check out the bacon, mushrooms, and Swiss bad boys being grilled up at your owned spot.

BBQ metaphors aside—because, quite honestly, I’m getting hungry—there are many reasons a reader on your owned media site is more valuable than a reader on an external site. Just consider these three:

1. The branding

If I read a HubSpot article on the HubSpot blog, I’m very aware I’m reading an awesome piece of content from HubSpot. If I read it on Relevance.com and there’s just a line of text at the bottom of the article that says, This article originally appeared on HubSpot.com, that’s much less likely to register.

2. Relationship building

If you’re a brand, the goal isn’t to drive pageviews so you can sell ads; it’s to build relationships with readers. If a reader is consuming a piece of content on your site, there’s a much better chance of building that relationship. They may simply come back to the owned site for more content. Or they may choose to sign up for an email, or click the button that allows them to follow you on Twitter and LinkedIn. Or they may just consume more content and spend more time on your site, which will strengthen that relationship. And you can track and measure any actions they take—now and in the future.

3. The possibility of conversion

If readers are consuming content on an owned site, there’s always a chance they’ll check out what else you offer as a company, and, heck, maybe even buy something. Content marketers dream about conversions the way grillers dream about hearing their burgers are the best burgers people have ever eaten.

So the next time someone tells you owned media doesn’t really matter, hand them a Grimace costume and a tray of burgers. It may be that person’s job in a few years anyway.

Contently arms brands with the tools and talent to become great content creators. Learn more.

The post If You Ignore Owned Media, You Might End Up Serving Burgers appeared first on Contently.

The classic advertising saying “We know half our advertising works. We just don’t know which half,” is out the door. “The brand lives in the connections, the juxtapositions, the inferences, the feeling of reciprocity,” O’Connell explains. Now it should be a goal — or even an expectation — for companies to build these tangible relationships.

“The relationship of content and distribution is not the setting of traps in every hallway,” O’Connell warns. Instead, a company should provide real value to their customers. “Content should work like “a system of helpful Post-It Notes and handrails that help consumers get where they want to go.”

Image courtesy of Change Conversations and header image courtesy of Flickr, kdonovan_gaddy

The post Why Brands Can’t Ignore Owned Media appeared first on Contently.