As content marketers, it’s our job to engage our audience, build brand awareness, and drive interest in our company’s products and services. But to truly maximize content value, you need to have a way to measure your content’s impact.

The analytics are crucial for providing insight into the value of your production. With the right tool, you can track metrics like organic traffic, reader engagement, and content conversions to understand how your assets are performing.

This data can help you make data-driven decisions to optimize your content strategy. So, why is organic traffic so important? What does it mean when your audience spends more time on your articles engaging with the piece? How does this translate to business results?

Let’s dive in and explore how tools like Contently’s Content Value Tracker can help you optimize your content for maximum impact.

Content Value in Organic Traffic vs. Paid Traffic

Organic traffic and paid traffic are two primary ways to drive traffic to your website or blog. Organic traffic refers to traffic that comes from search engines or other sources without direct payment.

In contrast, paid traffic refers to traffic that comes from paid advertising, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads. While both types of traffic have their place in a content marketing strategy, there are some key differences between them.

One of the primary benefits of organic traffic is that it can be more cost-effective in the long run compared to paid traffic. With organic traffic, you can rank for high-value keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business without paying for each click. This can result in a higher return on investment (ROI) over time.

Organic traffic can also help build brand credibility, as users trust organic search results more than paid ads.

On the other hand, paid traffic can provide more immediate results compared to organic traffic, as it allows you to target specific audiences with precision and generate traffic quickly.

Paid traffic can also be a useful tool for promoting time-sensitive or seasonal content, such as holiday sales or limited-time offers. However, paid traffic can also be expensive, and the results are often short-term, meaning that you need to continue paying for ads to maintain traffic levels.

Overall, the decision to focus on organic traffic or paid traffic in your content marketing strategy depends on your goals and budget. While paid traffic can provide quick results, organic traffic has long-term benefits and can result in higher ROI over time.

By understanding the differences between organic traffic and paid traffic, you can make an informed decision about how to allocate your content marketing resources.

Contently’s Content Value Tracker

https://player.vimeo.com/video/486097536?api=1&h=4f775112d0

Contently Analytics and Content Value Tracker Overview from Contently.

Contently’s analytics dashboard provides a comprehensive solution for measuring your content’s organic traffic, audience engagement, and freelancer productivity. One of the key features of the dashboard is the Content Value Tracker, which allows you to measure the impact of your content on your business goals.

The Content Value Tracker uses a proprietary algorithm to assign a dollar value to each piece of content based on its performance. This allows you to track the ROI of your content marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy.

Our analytics suite shows content’s full impact down to the dollar — and it all starts with our Content Value Tracker.

Our proprietary algorithm calculates what your organic search traffic is worth to your business every month based on how much it would cost a competitor to replicate your success through paid ads.

With dollar values for SEO Traffic, Average PPC, and Net Value compared to other publications in the Contently platform, this approach captures how well you’re reaching your audience at the crucial research stage in the buying cycle, building the expertise, authority, and trust that Google’s algorithm values most.

But that’s not all: Contently’s analytics features help you optimize content performance across the entire marketing funnel. You can drill down to story-level data for topics, formats, traffic sources, and more.

Overall, the Content Value Tracker enables marketers to optimize their content strategy based on organic traffic data. By identifying top-performing content and improving SEO, marketers can increase organic traffic to their sites and achieve their business goals more effectively.

For example, if you find that a particular blog post is driving a significant amount of organic traffic, you can use that information to create more content on similar topics to attract even more traffic. Additionally, by monitoring search ranking data, you can optimize your content to rank higher for specific keywords and drive even more organic traffic to your site.

Analytics, Content Value, and You

Content marketing analytics is a crucial aspect of any successful content marketing strategy, and the Content Value Tracker is an excellent tool for measuring the value of organic traffic.

Using the insights provided by the Content Value Tracker, marketers can make data-driven decisions that can help them achieve their business goals more effectively.

Whether it’s creating more content on popular topics or optimizing existing content to rank higher in search engine results, the Content Value Tracker enables marketers to make informed decisions that can have a significant impact on their bottom line.

Overall, if you’re looking to maximize the value of your content marketing efforts, it’s essential to have a robust analytics tool like the Content Value Tracker in your arsenal.

By leveraging the insights provided by this tool, you can create a more effective content marketing strategy that drives organic traffic, builds brand awareness, and generates leads and revenue for your business.

To learn more about Contently’s analytics, reach out to schedule a demo. We’d be happy to show you how your organization can showcase content value.

The post Realize the Value of Your Organic Traffic With a Content Value Tracker appeared first on Contently.

Though marketers may have a general sense that content contributes to their company’s bottom line, a staggering 49% don’t understand how their content is performing, according to a recent Parse.ly report.

But when budgets tighten across B2B and B2C organizations, there’s greater pressure to prove content marketing value relative to revenue contribution.

To maximize the effectiveness of their content marketing strategy and ensure a healthy ROI, organizations can benefit from analyzing the latest content marketing ROI statistics and applying best practices for leveraging them.

Eye-Opening Content Marketing ROI Statistics

If you don’t yet have the data behind your own organization’s ROI calculations, these stats can help you make a compelling argument to stakeholders that content marketing is worth the investment:

• Content marketing can generate 3x the leads as traditional marketing yet cost 62 percent less.
• Email marketing sees an average return of $36 for every dollar spent.
• Between 2021 and 2025, the content marketing market is expected to grow by $417.85 billion.
• Seventy-one percent of B2B buyers read blog content prior to making a purchase decision.
• Thought leadership content led to purchase decisions for 48 percent of decision-makers in a global study.

How to Determine Content Value

Based on those statistics, you could argue that most content marketing delivers value to someone in some way. But if you’re trying to put a dollar value on content, there are two formulas you can use to calculate ROI.

The key is first having a content attribution model and lead scoring program in place, plus ways to capture accurate data for several important content metrics.

For a quick refresher: Content attribution is the practice of assigning a sales revenue percentage to content that influenced the sale during the buying process. Lead scoring can help sales and marketing teams determine which leads are most likely to become customers. They do this by assigning a weighted value to actions prospects take, like viewing a sales page or downloading a white paper.

To calculate content ROI as it relates to sales and opportunities, use this formula:

• Average Cost per Opportunity x Average Opportunities Tied to Content = Content ROI

To express ROI as a percentage, use this calculation:

• ROI (%) = ( Return – Investment / Investment) x 100

When determining the total investment cost for a content piece or campaign, don’t forget to include the following:

• Promotional fees like paid placements
• Freelance writing and design fees
• General cost of internal resources tied to the content project

Including these costs ensures your ROI calculations are accurate while also providing insights into areas you may want to streamline in the future.

Common KPIs That B2B and B2C Brands Track

Clicks, visits, and downloads… oh my! With so many potential key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate, marketers sometimes struggle with where to start.

Consider the Content Measurement Maturity Model to evaluate where your organization stands and the steps you can take to tie content marketing efforts to revenue. The model is an easy-to-follow framework content marketers can use to improve their organization’s content measurement.

B2B and B2C brands may have different KPIs, but some common ones include traffic, conversion rate, engagement, and revenue. Tracking these KPIs will help you understand the effectiveness of your content strategy and identify areas for improvement.

How to Identify the Ideal Channels for Monetizing Your Content Strategy

Once you have identified your organization’s maturity model stage and the KPIs you plan to track, the next step is to determine the ideal channels for monetizing your content strategy.

These four points can help you focus on the right channels:

• Identify your target audience: If you don’t already have buyer personas developed, you should conduct research to understand who your target audience is and where they are most active online. Are they more likely to spend time on social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn? Do they prefer to read blogs or watch videos? Understanding your audience’s preferences will help you identify which channels are most likely to resonate with them.
• Analyze your existing channels: Take a look at the marketing channels you’re currently using and analyze their performance. Which channels are generating the most engagement and conversions? Which channels have the highest ROI? This information will help you determine which channels to double down on and which to cut back on.

When it comes to owned channels, blog posts, social media posts, and email newsletters represent the largest volume of content activities.

• Experiment with new channels: Don’t be afraid to experiment with new marketing channels to see what works best for your business. Try out new social media platforms or content formats to see if they resonate with your audience. Keep track of each channel’s performance and adjust your strategy accordingly.
• Monitor industry trends: Stay up-to-date with industry trends and emerging marketing channels. For example, user-generated content and live streaming have exploded in popularity in recent years. Keeping an eye on these trends can help you identify new opportunities to monetize your content marketing strategy.

B2B Content Marketing Strategies

The process for B2B buyers is usually longer than B2C and can include more touchpoints. That presents an excellent opportunity to deliver engaging experiences that lead to higher conversions.

Channels that B2B organizations have seen a healthy return according to content marketing ROI statistics include:

• White papers and case studies: Providing in-depth industry insights, survey reports, and case studies can position your brand as a thought leader and generate leads.
• Thought leadership webinars: Hosting webinars allows you to engage with your audience in real time and showcase your expertise. Try not to focus on self-promotion but on valuable and actionable insights that can benefit your potential buyers.
• Email newsletters: Email marketing is an effective, low-cost way to nurture leads and drive sales through list segmentation and targeted campaigns.

It’s important not to place all of your ROI expectations on a single tactic. One deal Contently analyzed included seven content pieces that influenced the sale and resulted in a 15.5x content ROI.

B2C Content Marketing Strategies

B2C companies can use content marketing to boost sales and drive conversions through a variety of mediums. Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are excellent for engaging with customers on a direct level and providing them with shareable content:

• Social media marketing: Social media platforms offer a range of monetization options, such as sponsored posts, reels, and influencer marketing.
• Visual content: B2C audiences are often more visually driven, so investing in high-quality visual content, such as videos and graphics, can help drive engagement and sales.
• User-generated content (UGC): Allowing customers to create and share their own content related to your product or service can help build brand loyalty, drive conversions, and increase revenue. Leveraging the power of influencers is another way to get high-quality UGC that larger audiences will see.

For consumers, user-generated content falls in the same category as word-of-mouth, which makes it a valuable option that brands haven’t fully tapped. One survey found that 79% of customers said that UGC influences their purchase decision.

One of the most successful UGC campaigns was the Ice Bucket Challenge, which helped raise $115 million for the ALS Association. Not only did it take off among social media users, but top celebrities like Taylor Swift and Steven Spielberg  joined in on the viral challenge.

Measuring and Optimizing Your Content Strategy ROI

To ensure that your content monetization strategy is effective, you need to measure results to optimize your ROI. To do this, you should regularly analyze your KPIs and adjust your strategy accordingly.

• Test different monetization channels: Experiment with different monetization channels to determine which ones generate the most revenue. For example, you can test social media advertising versus email marketing to see which channel is more effective in driving sales.
• A/B test: A/B testing can help you determine which content types and formats are most effective in driving conversions. In other words, you can test long-form blog posts versus short-form blog posts to see which one generates more leads.
• Personalize: Personalizing your content and marketing campaigns can help increase engagement and drive conversions. For instance, you can use customer data to personalize your email campaigns and tailor your content to meet the specific needs of your target audience.

Monetizing your content marketing strategy is essential to generating a positive ROI. By tracking common KPIs, identifying the ideal channels for monetization, and measuring and optimizing your content marketing ROI statistics, you can ensure that your content marketing efforts drive tangible results for your business.

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C brand, understanding content marketing monetization and implementing the best practices will help you stay ahead of the competition and succeed in today’s digital landscape.

Stay on top of your content marketing game. Subscribe to The Content Strategist to get the latest news in content marketing strategy, digital transformation, and emerging tech trends.

The post Monetizing Your Content Strategy: Insights for B2B and B2C Brands appeared first on Contently.

I wasn’t entirely surprised by this finding; I’d recognized this as a pattern when examining the analytics of individual accounts. But now I wondered: were our customers secret SEO wizards?

When I started digging deeper through interviews with the content marketing teams that use our platform, I came to a surprising realization. They were not. And most were nowhere near reaching their full potential.

Our customers’ SEO performance was primarily attributable to the high-quality, well-reported, original stories they were producing through Contently, which Google loves and naturally garners backlinks. But from a strategic perspective, there was so much room for improvement.

The main culprit? A flawed process that might look familiar to you:

1. The content team would create a story without an SEO strategy in mind.

2. The SEO team would come in at the end, cram in keywords, and make the writing worse.

3. The story wouldn’t rank for the keywords that got crammed in anyway.

Keyword stuffing may have worked a decade ago, but modern search engines are so sophisticated in interpreting language that pieces edited after-the-fact for SEO don’t often drive results.

In 2021, SEO is most powerful when used to give insight into your audience. The questions they’re asking. The topics they’re researching. SEO insights should spark your ideation—providing the creative constraints to inspire your team and spark story ideas that answer your audience’s biggest questions. When we examined our most successful and sophisticated customers, this was the approach they took.

And so, we decided to build the latest and greatest feature on the Contently platform: SEO Story Ideas.

SEO Story Ideas is the newest addition to the Ideation section of our platform. It uses a purpose-built algorithm to instantly recommend story concepts likely to rank well in search, based on your content strategy and existing target keyword list.

Our algorithm searches through billions of keyword options in order to deliver the target phrases that make sense for individual brands, and have the strongest implications for content pieces. Each idea comes complete with critical organic search data, so it’s easy to determine which have the most potential to drive organic search traffic.

With this feature, we’re excited to continue to boost our customers’ content performance, while taking another big step in our mission to fuse the art and science of storytelling together.

By automating the keywords research process, SEO Story Ideas frees up time for SEO strategists by allowing their content partners to find data-driven story ideas easily and independently, while giving editors and writers inspiration for high-impact content.

SEO Story Ideas is the newest addition to the Ideation section of our platform. It uses a purpose-built algorithm to instantly recommend story concepts likely to rank well in search, based on your content strategy and existing target keyword list.

In just a couple clicks, our customers can turn a story concept into a pre-filled pitch request and ask their freelance team to come up with unique angles on the story. Or they can assign the story and put it into production. This ensures our customers are creating content that’s not only high-quality and well-reported, but also likely to perform well in search.

Optimizing ideas and proving ROI

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Contently post if we didn’t also talk about content measurement and optimization. We’ve also built on our industry-leading Content Value analytics which now show how much the organic search traffic to each story you create is worth, based on how much it would cost a competitor to replicate that success. (Some of our best-in-class customers are able to demonstrate over $50 million in content ROI using this method.)

When combined with our in-depth story-level engagement insights, these new analytics provide a comprehensive view of the performance and ROI of every story you tell, so you can make smarter decisions through each round of publishing.

Some of our customers have already been using this feature in beta for months, to tell incredible, high-performing customers, and we’re so excited to see everyone combine the art and science of storytelling—with a little dash of improved process to make everything hit just right.

Watch a demo to explore these new features now!

The post Introducing SEO Story Ideas: Your New Favorite Content Strategy Tool appeared first on Contently.

Because of the pandemic, we’re living within the rectangular screens that sit on our desk and in our pockets. But this reality has a silver-lining for creatives—marketing leaders are shifting their budgets into content.

The one thing that keeps me up at night, though, is how marketers measure content success.

In a recent Contently survey, 95 percent of marketers told us they expected their budget to increase or stay the same this year. But just 36 percent said they were satisfied with their company’s ability to measure the success of content.

This is because measuring content marketing is more complicated than performance marketing. Content has a huge impact across all stages of the customer journey, but you can’t capture ROI with a simple attribution model on Day 1. While everyone wants to attribute content directly to revenue, it’s silly to attempt that before you gauge how effectively you built an audience or generated leads.

Since content marketing is at such an inflection point right now, we wanted to share what we learned about tracking success over the years. So, with the help of our team, I published the industry’s first ever Content Measurement Maturity Model. You can read the whole thing here, but I also wanted to briefly walk through how it works.

Our 10-Step Content Measurement Maturity Model

Our Content Measurement Maturity Model consists of 10 steps spread across four stages—crawl, walk, run, and fly. When companies master measurement and optimization in one stage, they’ll be prepared to graduate to the next.

• The crawl stage is strategic to audience building.
• The walk stage is strategic to lead generation.
• The run stage is strategic to revenue generation.
• The fly stage is strategic to revenue attribution.

In the graphic, you’ll notice there’s only one measurement step in the fly stage—multi-touch content attribution—because it’s incredibly hard to do right, and if anyone else tells you different … well, frankly, they’re lying.

Let’s take a closer look at each stage.

Crawl: Strategic to Audience Building

The crawl stage is all about measuring audience building. You need to attract an audience before you can measure the down-funnel actions people take.

1. Audience Reach. Here, we’re looking at tried-and-true reach metrics, as you’ll see in the table below. According to our survey, this is the step most commonly adopted by marketers, with 80 percent tracking audience reach key performance indicators (KPIs).
2. Audience Engagement. AKA how deeply are you engaging folks with your content? It’s not enough to get people to come. You also need them to stay.
3. SEO Effectiveness. SEO is foundational to building an audience. According to Contently Analytics, 67 percent of all traffic to brand sites comes from organic search. Surprisingly, though, only 57 percent of marketers track these metrics.

Walk: Strategic to Lead Generation

Once you’ve started successfully building an audience, you want to inspire people to take actions that’ll create a deeper relationship with your brand—like signing up for a newsletter or virtual event, using an interactive tool, or requesting a demo.

Here we measure:

4. Leads Generated. The number of people taking a conversion action that’s important to your brand.

5. Lead Engagement. Using a marketing automation system like Pardot, you’re able to track how a lead engages with your brand’s content—the emails they open and click through, the pages they visit, the articles they read—and assign an appropriate “score” for that behavior. Similarly, tools like Contently Docalytics and Adobe allow you to see how a lead engages with “big rock” downloadable content like research papers.

6. Share of Voice. This measures not only how effectively you’re inspiring folks to take an action that pushes them into your pipeline, but also how well your content is controlling the conversation and boosting your brand in the market relative to your competitors.

Run: Strategic to Revenue Generation

In the run stage, we cover the areas that’ll get your CMO and CFO excited—content attribution to revenue.

Our model recommends three complementary approaches that will help capture the full picture of content’s impact on your bottom line.

7. SEO Value. SEO Value calculates how much your organic search traffic is worth to your brand. It’s a leading indicator of revenue returns—we launched Content Value in our platform this past fall, and it’s been a revelation for our customers, allowing them to measure the monetary impact of their content proactively, instead of just retroactively.

8. Lead Value. A straightforward approach in which you multiply the number of leads your content generates by the traditional cost-per-lead (CPL) for your marketing team.

For instance, a leading B2B software company that Contently partners with recently launched a large-scale content campaign that drove 22,000 leads. Since the company’s average cost-per-lead was $71, the marketing team was able to attribute over $1.5 million in revenue impact to their content efforts, a 7x return on their investment.

Ex: 22,000 x $71 = $1.56M

9. Single-Touch Content Attribution. A single-touch attribution model gives 100 percent of the credit for a sale to one marketing effort. The downside of a single-touch model is that it’s limiting, particularly in a B2B cotext, when there are many touchpoints across the buyer’s journey. The upside is that it’s relatively simple to implement, as most marketing automation systems and customer relationship management systems (CRMs) make single-touch attribution easy to track.

Everyone wants to jump to this step off the bat, but remember: It only makes sense to focus on attribution once you’ve built an audience and started measuring your ability to drive and engage leads.

On their own, each of these approaches has gaps, but when factored in together, they provide a holistic picture of content’s impact on revenue.

Fly: Strategic to Revenue Attribution

In the “Fly” section of our maturity model is the final step: Multi-Touch Content Attribution.

A multi-touch attribution model factors in all actions a customer takes over the course of the sales cycle, often divvying up the credit on a weighted scale. For instance, it may give double credit to the first and last touch in the cycle, but equal weight to all other touches in between.

We made this the final stage in our model because it’s so difficult to implement—especially inside enterprise organizations with poor data hygiene. It’s the white whale of content measurement—much discussed and desired, but rarely captured, even after a long odyssey.

If you’re still at the crawl or walk stage—you’re not alone. And you can still produce really impactful work there. Less than a third of marketers we surveyed measured are currently looking beyond lead generation.

The good news is that our maturity model is designed to help you reach the next stage and get comfortable with these content marketing ROI metrics. After all, the whole point of content measurement is to make smarter decisions.

Check out the full model here. And to evaluate where you stand right now, take the interactive assessment below.

The post Measure Your Content Marketing ROI With These 10 Steps appeared first on Contently.

It’s nearly impossible to prove content marketing ROI if you don’t outline clear goals at the beginning of the year. Sure, you may be able to cherry-pick some numbers in December, throw them into a Powerpoint, and make a tenuous case to your boss. But you’ll be playing a dangerous game for two reasons:

1. The most impactful KPIs aren’t just magically measured by Google Analytics. You need to properly setup your marketing stack (GA, Pardot, Salesforce, SEMRush, Facebook Business Manager, etc.) to track the behaviors that matter most.

2. If you’re not creating and distributing content with a clear purpose, you’re basically banking on a happy accident to keep your job.

So where do you start? To prove ROI, your content goals should ladder up to the things your CEO cares about: new business (revenue generated by new clients), customer retention, and loyalty (getting your existing clients to keep spending more money with you).

This doesn’t mean your content should be full of product plugs. Far from it. It’s much more effective to build trust with your audience through helpful content than to inundate them with sales messages. They’ll be more likely to buy something from you in the long run.

But you do need to tie content to revenue. There are a couple of easy places to start.

If you’re B2B, most of your inbound business comes from demo requests or people looking to talk to sales. Track how many people first visit your site by reading or watching a piece of content before subsequently filling out a demo/sales request. Then see if those leads convert to deals at a higher rate.

If you’re B2C, track whether people who consume your content convert into customers at a higher rate, and if they spend more money. Walmart, for instance, found that people who read their content had 7% larger orders—a big overall KPI for the retailer.

Then, measure the key drivers that attract the right audience to your content. After all, you need to build an audience and inspire people to engage with your content if you want it to have an impact on revenue.

SEO: Measure gains in search traffic and ranking improvements for target keywords. (For instance, we really want to attract people searching for terms like “content strategy” and “content marketing platforms.”)

Newsletter sign-ups and Engagement: Since newsletters are the most consistent way to build an owned audience, growing that list is key. But also track your open rate, click rate, and overall percentage of engaged subscribers.

Social Engagement: How are followers engaging with content across channels? Look to metrics like video views, engagement rate, reach, social referral traffic, and comments.

Backlinks and earned media: The most effective SEO strategy today is to create content with such great original research and reporting that it earns backlinks and press. It’s super valuable to organically introduce your brand to new audiences.

The science here comes from setting achievable goals in each of these categories. The art comes in interpreting the data, figuring out which metrics are most impactful for your business, and teaching your team how to create and distribute content with these goals in mind.

This is far from an exhaustive list—I’m working on a content marketing ROI mega-post that goes into much greater detail. But we’re almost a month into the year. If you haven’t set goals already, you need to get started. Your content marketing program depends on it.

The post The Art and Science of Content Marketing ROI appeared first on Contently.

Some marketers expect content revenue to have a linear path. You make content, people click on it, and then—BOOM—they immediately buy something or fill out a demo request form. After all, if our search ads work that way, shouldn’t content work that way too?

It doesn’t, but that’s not a bad thing. Content is all about building trust and loyalty with people so that when they’re ready to buy something, you’re their first choice—driving continuous demand and making the sales process much easier.

This is why we invest so much of our marketing budget in content at Contently. The vast majority of people don’t just read an article like this and request a demo. But they do come back and read something a few days later, then sign up for our newsletter or attend a webinar. When the time is right, they request a demo to learn how we can help.

While content conversion doesn’t follow a linear pathway, you can chart these stages to tie your content to revenue.

The 3 stages of content ROI

I’ve found it’s easiest to tackle content marketing ROI when you chunk it into three stages. The best place to start is at the upper half of the funnel, where you can map how your audience turns into sales-ready leads.

1. Audience growth

At this stage, you’re trying to make a damn good impression on your target audience in hopes of converting them to the next stage. You want to build awareness, trust, and an overall positive brand sentiment through helpful, entertaining content.

Most marketers are comfortable with the key metrics at this stage—they’re the ones Google Analytics shows you default: unique visitors, return visitors, time on site, pages/sessions, and scroll depth. Social metrics—shares, comments, likes—come into play here too.

We’ll talk about how to maximize audience growth in a bit, but some content marketers tend to stop here. That’s a mistake because if you want to drive revenue from your content, you need to inspire people to take an action.

To drive more action, you want a strong SEO strategy that’ll bring in the right type of readers. For instance, we focus on ranking for keywords like “best content marketing platforms,” “how to write a white paper,” “enterprise content marketing,” “content marketing for banks,” and “b2b content marketing funnel.” These keywords are likely to attract people who are good customer fits for Contently.

You also shouldn’t be afraid to use paid distribution to reach more folks who fit your ideal customer profile. It’s a great way to grow the top of your content marketing funnel. It’s getting more effective, too, since paid content distribution costs are down 34 percent since March.

2. Content leads

A lot of marketers call anyone who downloads their e-book or attends a webinar a “lead,” but I find that misleading—particularly to your sales team. Just because someone downloads an e-book doesn’t mean they’re ready for a sales call. It’d be like if you downloaded Tinder and immediately got a passive aggressive voicemail from a wedding planner. These things take time.

I prefer to call these folks a “content conversion” or “content lead.” They’ve taken an action that’ll allow us to build a deeper relationship with them. Trust doesn’t magically build after one article. But if someone starts reading your newsletter every week, or attending hour-long webinars, or takes an educational course you made, that person is much more likely to become your customer in the future.

Your job is to make it as easy as possible for people to convert into content leads. Give them a few different options. For instance, we’ll offer free content resources each week on a blue bar across the top of our blog. Right below it, there’s a sticky button to subscribe to our newsletter.

Once a month, we’ll also target each visitor with a prompt to sign up for our newsletter using Sumo, which converts at almost a 3 percent rate.

We also include a content offer unit on the right rail. We’re a tech company, so we don’t need to sell ads, but we can still put that white space to good use.

If you want a B2C example, Marriott does a great job of using smart UX on its popular travel mag, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler, to maximize conversions.

(Disclosure: Marriott is a Contently customer.)

Here, you want to track both the number of content conversions as well as the rate your visitors convert to one of your content offers. Google Analytics conversion goals are a great tool to do this. (Check out Andy Crestodina’s guide for more.) And you need to properly nurturing content leads through a marketing automation platform until they become sales-ready leads.

3. Sales-ready leads

Next, you want to nurture your content leads until they become sales-ready. What is a sales-ready lead? Someone who’s raised their hand and asked to learn more about your product, usually by filling out a form on your website.

At this stage, you want to nurture your content leads with a drip campaign of relevant content. If someone signed up for a webinar on content marketing ROI, follow up with additional articles, case studies, and product videos that cover the topic. Feel free to include a call-to-action to talk to sales. You want to make it easy to convert—but only after you’ve delivered valuable content.

Once those leads hit sales, you can drive a massive amount of additional ROI through a strong sales enablement strategy. That’s the topic of a whole other blog post, which you can read here.

Making your own map

To tie content to revenue, track your conversion rates at each of these three stages and map how content flows downstream until someone becomes a sales-ready lead.

Say we drive 100,000 unique visitors at the audience growth stage. Based on our conversion goals, we know that 1 percent will sign up for a webinar or another content offer, while another 2-3 percent will sign up for our newsletter. This translates to 1,000 webinar sign-ups and 2,000 newsletter sign-ups.

Next, via our marketing automation platform, we look at the rate at which our webinar attendees and newsletter subscribers convert to demo requests. Our model shows that for every 100,000 visitors to our blog, we’ll generate 80 demo requests.

Then, to get all the way to revenue, you just need to understand how much each sales-ready lead is worth to your business. Say that your average deal size is $100,000, and each lead converts to a sale at a 5 percent rate. In that scenario, each demo request adds $5,000 in weighted pipeline, and those 80 demo requests are worth $400,000 to your business.

The compounding returns of the content marketing funnel

The great news about content marketing is that when it’s done well, you’ll see compounding returns over time.

Most marketing is fleeting. Spend $500 on ads today, and you’ll have to spend again tomorrow to see the same results. But spend $500 on a piece of great content today and it will drive continuous traffic and leads for free—by ranking well for search, getting shared on social, engaging website visitors, and increasing newsletter engagement.

As I wrote last month, this phenomenon is called the compounding returns of content. Even as your monthly investment in content remains flat, the results will compound over time. And if your content marketing funnel is set up correctly, that audience growth will translate into sales.

There’s never been a better time to build your audience. Engagement with branded content is up 16 percent right now, and people are eager for insights and thought leadership that will help them overcome new challenges and do their jobs better.

Help them overcome those challenges while following the guidelines here, and you’ll build a content marketing machine that’ll deliver compounding revenue for years to come.

This article is based off my webinar, How to Make the Case for Content Marketing: Compounding Returns and ROI. Watch it on demand here.

The post How to Map Content Marketing to Revenue, in 3 Steps appeared first on Contently.

In the face of that uncertainty, companies are tightening their belts. A number of people have reached out to me asking for advice on how to protect their budget and make the case for content.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Like many other marketing leaders, I’ve mapped out potential budget cuts in case the economic fallout from COVID-19 is worse than expected. But we’re not cutting content; we’re doubling down on it. Given how the coronavirus has changed our jobs as marketers, there’s a good chance you should too.

The compounding returns of content

The biggest mistake people make with content marketing ROI is taking a short-term view. The vast majority of advertising and marketing is fleeting. Say you spend $500 on paid search ads today. You’ll get 25 clicks, but tomorrow, you’ll have to spend that money all over again to see any additional value.

Spend $500 on a helpful blog post optimized for search, and it’ll drive continuous traffic and leads while building trust with your audience. You’ll spend that $500 up front, but afterwards, high-quality content will continue to deliver results for free.

This is what Tomasz Tunguz calls the compounding returns of content marketing. When you create a high-quality piece of content, it delivers results not only on the first day it’s distributed via an email newsletter or social media, but also gradually over time as the results build on each other.

Take, for instance, this piece on how to write a white paper. We published it back in 2012, when Contently was five people hiding out in the corner of Google’s Chelsea Market office. It’s consistently generated 3,000 pageviews per month for the past 8 years and driven thousands of newsletter subscribers and leads. To get the equivalent results from a search ad for that topic, we’d have to spend millions of dollars.

This dynamic holds true for temporal/timely content as well. While the long-term returns fizzle out faster than with evergreen content, the initial traffic spike is often larger, and you still see compounding returns over time. We’ve seen this with a lot of our coverage of Facebook’s algorithm over the years—a big initial spike, and then a smaller long-term tail as it’s still shared over social and ranks for longer-tail search terms.

Why content marketing is the smartest investment you can make right now

There are a few reasons for this:

1. The demand for high-quality, helpful content has never been greater

I’ve never felt more urgency to create helpful content for our audience. Our customers and readers are facing new challenges—working remotely, adapting their content strategy, spinning up virtual events, communicating thoughtfully and sensitively with their audience.

Your audience is almost certainly looking for new answers too. As a marketer, think of yourself as in the business of public service. In financial services, your audience is urgently looking to you for financial advice. In telemedicine, there are critical questions you can answer for healthcare providers across the country. In B2B tech and services, you can help your audience figure out how to work in a whole new way.

We’re not cutting content; we’re doubling down on it.

There’s also a good chance they’re looking for content that has nothing to do with COVID-19. They’re simply spending a lot of time online right now and want to use it productively. Your content can simply entertain them, teach them a new skill, or help them stay mentally and physically fit.

Nudge, an analytics platform that tracks branded content performance around the web, found that attention time on content is up a whopping 39 percent over the past four weeks, compared with the same time period a year ago. Traffic to business, finance, and education sub-reddits is surging. Comscore has also seen a huge increase in usage across devices.

This is an incredibly important time for marketers to step up to the challenge. As you do, remember this mantra: Always be helpful, always be honest, never be opportunistic.

2. Content is the most logical place to reallocate event marketing and paid media budgets

The top two line items in most marketing budgets—events and paid media—are on hold for the foreseeable future. And since people are taking a wait-and-see approach on purchases across many sectors, advertisers are pulling back on media spend.

The logical move? Play the long game and reallocate those funds towards content, which is designed to build relationships and nurture leads. Once the economic landscape shifts in a couple of months, you’ll be set to hit the ground running and accelerate your business thanks to the connections and trust you’ve built.

The compounding returns of content means the investment you make now will keep delivering for you over time.

3. Content fuels virtual events

With in-person events suddenly canceled, brands are quickly shifting to virtual events. When the focus turns to the screen, strong content becomes more important than ever. Mediocre presentations can’t be propped up by great food, booze, and networking opportunities.

High-performing content published on your blog and social channels can easily be translated into virtual events. It’s a tactic that’s been extremely successful for us. We turned my LinkedIn series on the four elements of great storytelling into a webinar that got over 1,000 sign-ups almost immediately.

If you plan on pulling off successful virtual events in the coming months, it’ll be a lot easier if you can pull from a reservoir of timely content. Having a strong foundation of written, research, and video content allows us to create virtual events much faster. Heck, if this post does well, there’s a good chance we’ll turn it into a webinar too.

Content and connection

One of the best pieces I read recently was from Henk Campher of Hootsuite, who wrote that the best thing brands can do right now is “do good or make people feel good.”

As many of us sit in isolation, our need for connection has never been greater. And nothing makes humans feel more connected than a great story.

Those stories can be about the good you’re doing. GE Report’s breaking news coverage of how it’s helping the fight against COVID-19 has been astounding. Or they simply can make people feel good, and nothing makes people feel good like a heartwarming story. (Which is why I’m currently binge-watching Homeward Bound.)

We all need a sense of duty and purpose right now. And the best thing we can do for ourselves, our companies, and each other is to tell great stories.

The post How to Make the Case for Content Marketing in Uncertain Times appeared first on Contently.

A race against the clock supplies stakes and consequences. It compels us to complete important tasks with urgency. That’s also true for more than just movies. Our jobs may not consist of saving the world, but work deadlines can still have a powerful impact on our effectiveness and content marketing ROI.

To find out the impact due dates have on marketers, Contently’s data science team studied the workflows of more than 13,000 pieces of content. Of course, merely setting a deadline doesn’t guarantee you’ll finish a task. Procrastination is the ultimate foil, and conquering it requires a specific type of deadline.

How external deadlines affect content marketing ROI

My to-do list is hellish. Cross off one project, and there are three more ready to take its place. You can probably relate to this stress. I’m not interested in sympathy, but what I am interested in is prioritizing deadlines. In college, I could’ve majored in procrastination if English didn’t work out. I’ve gotten much better, but it can be hard to juggle the articles, e-books, video scripts, and webinars with all the Slacks, emails, and meetings.

Some of these tasks have deadlines, and some of them don’t. Even the ones that do can be tricky if the deadline isn’t documented. One common piece of advice asks people to set personal deadlines before an established deadline. But no matter how good our intentions, those private plans usually don’t work. We push back dates, promise ourselves that we’ll get to it later, and never finish it when life gets in the way.

Consider a 2002 study conducted by behavioral economist Dan Ariely and marketing professor Klaus Wertenbroch. Ariely and Waternbroch gave their subjects a proofreading project. People were split into groups and instructed to follow three different deadline schedules. Subjects received 10 cents for every error they corrected but were penalized $1 for every day they were late completing the project.

Simply setting deadlines improves content marketing efficiency by 2.5x.

As the researchers discovered, “What is clear from our empirical evidence is that procrastination is a real behavioral problem, that people strategically try to curb it by using costly self-imposed deadlines, and that self-imposed deadlines are not always as effective as some external deadlines in boosting task performance.”

Recently, Contently’s data science team ran its own study to see the effect public deadlines were having on the work our clients created. The team analyzed 13,598 stories produced in the Contently platform. The data set included written assets ranging from 250 to 750 words.

The results showed a strong correlation between setting deadlines for your content and completing projects quicker. Stories without any due dates took an average of 48 days to complete. Stories with deadlines for half of the workflow steps took an average of 28 days to complete. Lastly, stories with deadlines for every step averaged 19 days to completion.

In other words, simply setting deadlines improves your content marketing ROI by 2.5x in terms of production. Most people think of content marketing ROI in terms of audience engagement, but your efficiency could affect the bottom line just as much.

If you’re struggling to get things done, this is a basic principle worth repeating. Set an external deadline your team can see. You’ll hold yourself more accountable, and as our data highlighted, repeating these good habits should lead to a more efficient output and better content marketing ROI.

As marketers attempt to slow down, they’re going to focus on perfecting a few bigger projects instead of constantly creating shiny new things. These initiatives will have complicated workflows and plenty of moving parts. So if there’s ever been a time to improve your ability to hit deadlines, it’s now.

The post Our Data Shows Deadlines Will Improve Your Content Marketing ROI By Nearly 2.5x appeared first on Contently.

To make sure everyone can reference and benefit from the day’s insights, we’re publishing the presentations in full here. Scroll down for links to each deck presented at Summit.

Marketing vs. Sales: Getting Buy-In for Your Content Marketing Program

If an article goes up on your site and nobody is around to read it, does it make an impact? That’s what’s at risk when marketing and sales teams fail to work together. Even though they share common goals, they don’t always communicate, which leads to content chaos, wasted resources, and lackluster results.

This session covers how marketing can join forces with other teams to get the most out of content and build buy-in across the enterprise.

Speakers:

• Whitney Jones, Director, Enterprise Digital Marketing & Ecommerce, Cardinal Health (Slides)
• Stacy Simpson, SVP & CMO, Genpact (Slides)
• Brad Young, VP, Digital Content Strategy, Prudential (Slides)

Data-Driven Marketing: A Contently Customer Story

Marketers have more access to data than ever, but understanding how to actually use it isn’t always easy. In this keynote, see how you can make sense of the numbers to escape content chaos and master the content lifecycle. (Click here to see the full presentation slides.)

Speakers:

• Jason Lewin, Director, Digital Marketing & Optimization, RBC Wealth Management, RBC
• Ashleigh Patterson, Senior Director, Global Content Marketing & Social Media, RBC

How ContentlyOne Is Solving Content Chaos

Learn how Contently’s latest features will help companies improve the way they share assets across teams, integrate with other tools in their marketing stacks, and use data through automated strategic recommendations. (Click here to see the full presentation slides.)

Speakers:

• Sanjay Ginde, VP of Engineering, Contently
• Sunil Chaudhary, Product Director, Contently
• Katie Dreier, Senior Product Manager, Contently

Proving ROI: Different Models Marketers Use to Show Success

ROI is a simple concept, but proving it can be intimidating. Why? Because there’s more than one way to show success, and people aren’t sure which approach is best for their situation. In this session, marketers from B2B and B2C brands show their ROI models and explain how they connect their content to results.

Speakers:

• Robin Bennefield, Editorial Director, Marriott Creative & Content Marketing, Marriott (Slides)
• Shawna Dennis, VP of Marketing & Communications, MD Financial (Slides)
• Lily Wong, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing & Sales, RBC (Slides)

Ask a Content Strategist

With over 20+ years of enterprise content marketing experience, Contently’s head strategists have seen it at all. Join them for a live Q&A session where they tackle the most pressing questions facing content marketers. (Click here to see the full presentation slides.)

Speakers:

• Giuseppe Caltabiano, Head of Content Strategy, EMEA, Contently
• Joe Lazauskas, Head of Marketing, Contently

Content Strategy 101: Who is Your Audience and What Are They Searching?

Marketers love to talk about being customer-centric, but it’s rare that we look at content strategy from our customer’s eyes. In this session, see why your content strategy needs to be guided by audience intent. (Click here to see the full presentation slides.)

Speakers:

• Alli Manning, VP of Content Services, Contently
• Kristen Poli, Manager of Content Strategy Services, Contently
• Felicity Blance, Content Strategist, Contently

The New Newsroom: How Brands Are Creating Breakthrough Content by Thinking Like Media Companies

In this roundtable, hear from marketing leaders who are using journalistic best practices to produce timely and worthwhile content at scale.

Speakers:

• Julie Hochheiser Ilkovich, Managing Partner & President, Editorial Operations, Masthead Media (Slides)
• Candice Jones, Principal Brand Content Strategist, Amtrak (Slides)
• Anna-Lee Muck, Editor-in-Chief, Dell Technologies (Slides)

The post The 2019 Contently Summit: Keynote Presentations appeared first on Contently.

Over 700 people signed up, and we got a ton of questions. We tried to answer them all, but I spent a little too long breathlessly explaining how to work with compliance teams. So for this month’s Ask a Content Strategist column, I thought I’d dive into some of the best questions that went unanswered.

As a content team of one, I struggle holding onto the roles of creating the strategy, campaigns, assessment, graphics, etc. to avoid the chaos that always ensues. What should my primary focus be? And what are absolutely necessary technologies to invest in?

-Paul, Colorado

It’s never fun being a one-person team. No one realizes you’re responsible for 1,000 percent more than just creating content. And there’s usually that one guy who thinks he could do your job way better than you. (You may think you can write, Chad. But you can’t.)

When you’re a one-person content team, you’ll always be tempted to focus on just creating more. More content. More campaigns. When you’re overwhelmed, it’s much easier to just focus on the rote tasks in front of you.

But to be successful, you need to take a step back and focus on your content strategy. You’re one person. You can’t do everything. So it’s all about honing in on the few channels and tactics that are getting you the best results.

This is essentially the 80/20 rule. If you’re getting 80 percent of your leads through email and SEO campaigns, but spend the vast majority of your time trying to maintain an always-on social and blog cadence, you’re wasting time and effort.

Focus on the channels that work best for you, and then put all of your energy into creating a few pieces of high-quality content specially crafted for those channels.

As for the technologies you’ll need: It depends. A B2C startup focused on paid social video has a much different stack than a B2B company focused on email campaigns and partner webinars. But there are a few must-have buckets.

Analytics: The biggest key to growing your program is showing results. If you’re B2B, you need to show that your content drives leads. If you’re B2C, you need to show that people who engage with your content come back and buy something within a 90-day window.

Google Analytics is free, awesome, and can track both engagement metrics as well as basic conversion pathways. But to provide a full picture, you’ll need a good CRM as well. For most smaller companies, HubSpot is the easiest to plug in and get working.

Calendar and workflow: These tools are important for your own sanity and organization, but they also provide transparency to other teams you work with (sales, demand gen, accounts, etc.) so that they can know what content is coming. A lot of Fortune 2000 and fast-growth companies invest in a content marketing platform like Contently, but if your program isn’t ready for that yet, you can use a more general workflow/calendar tool like Asana.

Social media management: The free version of Buffer is awesome for smaller companies. For enterprise companies, Sprinklr and Spredfast are client favorites.

CMS: For owned content, you need a strong CMS that you won’t spend half your time troubleshooting. WordPress remains the easiest platform to design, maintain, and use. Plus, there are tons of great plug-ins to create different content formats (interactive, quizzes, parallax scroll, etc.) and templates that boost conversions and sharing.

What’s an example of a “big rock” asset in the consumer content world?

-Woo, San Diego

Usually we refer to “big rock content” in a B2B context—white papers or e-books that then get repurposed in a bunch of different ways: blog posts, infographics, videos, social posts, and interactive content that relies on the foundational research in the original asset.

But B2C companies create big rock content too—just look at Spotify’s “Year in Music” research, which it remixes as everything from personalized playlists to 100-foot-high billboard ads. There’s also Red Bull’s epic music and extreme sports documentaries, which the brand slices into “social cuts” specially designed for their audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

One of our customers, Silversea, creates big rock “Collections” that serve as travel guides for specific destinations around the world. Each component within them—like these awesome Planet Earth-esque travel videos—serves as a divisible piece of content.

Just look at that freaking walrus!

What are the most effective ways to track ROI for each individual piece of content you produce?

-Sam, San Diego

Here’s the truth: I really do not recommend trying to quantify the hard ROI of every individual piece of content that you create, as opposed to your content program as a whole.

It will lead you down a terrifying rabbit hole in which you have to match up a ton of web analytics and CRM data, and you’ll spend 90 percent of your time making those calculations instead of, you know, actually making cool stuff.

That being said, here’s an in-depth guide on one way to measure the full ROI of individual content pieces. And here are some key metrics you can look to in order to identify top performers.

Conversions: Track which pieces of gated content generate the most leads. For instance, in 2015, I wrote a series of five content marketing playbooks for Contently. They were extremely popular, generating tens of thousands of leads.

Each playbook was classified as an individual campaign, which we then tracked as the lead source in Salesforce. If a deal closed as a result of a playbook, it got credit. As a result, we were able to attribute millions of dollars of revenue from that campaign. (I’m still waiting for my cut…) And guess what? We’re rolling out an updated series of playbooks in the coming months to try to recapture the magic.

SEO: Three things I love about SEMRush—it’s cheap, easy to use, and tells you the monetary value of your primary organic keywords. If a piece of content is ranking for a high value keyword and driving a ton of traffic, this is an easy way to show hard ROI for an individual piece.

Here are some other ROI guides that should help:

The content metrics that really matter.

How to show the ROI content has on your brand.

One last piece of advice: Find the friendliest marketing or business analyst in your company, bribe them with booze and cupcakes, and get them to set up an automated dashboard that pulls in your most important KPIs each month. (In all likelihood, they already use Looker, Domo, Tableau, or Google Data Studio.)

It’ll mean the difference between looking like this at the end of every month…

Versus looking like this instead…

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s head of content strategy and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: What Should You Focus On When You’re a Team of One? appeared first on Contently.

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

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

Centralized content teams are the norm

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

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

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

More content needs to map to the buyer’s journey

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

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

B2B marketers aren’t using tech to manage email

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

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

An ROI reckoning is coming

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

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

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

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

This insane supergraphic (via Scott Brinker) classifies nearly 4,000 marketing technology solutions available today. When Contently launched in 2011, there were only 150. That means there are about 25 times more companies creating content about marketing and competing for my target audience’s attention.

Which leaves me with the question: In this terrifying sea of logos, how the hell do we stand out?

I’m not the only one asking this question. It was also one of the dozens of inquiries I got during our content strategy webinar last week. Let’s dive in.

How do I differentiate my content from competitors who are also writing with ‘an audience-first’ focus?

— Daniel, Orange Finder

Ultimately, three keys will help you stand out from your content competitors, and none of them involve paying an agency $250,000 to conduct a content audit.

1. Articulate your brand’s unique vision and mission in detail—and use that as content inspiration.

Contently is a content marketing technology solution. Naturally, we want to educate people about the importance of content marketing and the incredible ROI it can deliver when done right. But so do thousands of other companies. For us, “content marketing is great” would be a terrible guiding light because it’s so damn generic. Instead, we need a perspective that’ll allow us to deliver true value to our readers. We need to provide a unique perspective that they can’t get anywhere else.

To accomplish that, we do things like:

• Intelligently communicating that the key to great content strategy is using data and technology to boost human creativity.
• Publishing comprehensive reports, like our Content Methodology e-book, which provide actionable content marketing strategies that people can actually put into place.

• Investing heavily in original research, whether it’s via our platform data or through large-scale consumer studies.

• Publishing as many case studies as possible so folks can understand what success actually looks like.

2. Use that unique vision to craft your brand voice—and make sure it stays consistent.

“Brand voice” is one of the most vague and overused buzzwords in content marketing. Yet, it’s still crucial for you to develop a great one.

Luckily, communicating a clear mission and unique perspective is half the work. Once you have that, it’s pretty easy to conceptualize your brand’s identity. As I wrote in our content strategy playbook:

A clear sense of identity is what categorizes the best brand publishers. GE is the smart, inquisitive, clever science nerd who blows your mind. Red Bull is the death-defying rock star you want to hang out with. HubSpot is the inbound marketing genius who wants to help you get that promotion. Moz is the wizard of SEO with secrets that will fundamentally change your business. In different ways, they’re all a kind of person who will accumulate a posse of interested admirers at that dinner party.

We’re obsessed with crafting and maintaining a great brand voice, which is why we built a tone analyzer into our platform to quantify it, based on the five-factor model.

This tool allows us to not only track the consistency of our voice over time, but also see the tonal traits of our best-performing pieces. Then, we can optimize our content over time so that we get our voice exactly right.

3. Perform a white-space analysis to understand what topics we should cover.

In our weekly editorial meetings, story pitches have to pass a basic litmus test: Has this story been done before? If so, has it been done well?

If the answer to both of those questions is yes, that pitch gets rejected. There’s just no value in doing something that’s already been done. We’re not offering any true value to our audience.

We also use content strategy tools to analyze which publishers have the highest share of voice across topics relevant to our audience and pinpoint where we can stand out. (See our content strategy playbook for more on how that works.) For instance, we’ve started covering marketing technology a lot more after spotting a gap in the market.

This process has become so crucial that we’re currently building a white-space analyzer into our platform to help our clients glean these insights. (That’s all I can say for now, but be on the lookout for some exciting news soon.)

Some of these tactics are pretty advanced, but they’re worth it. At the very minimum, just ask yourself those key questions: Has this story been done already? Am I offering my audience something new?

Are you seeing any learnings that suggest what makes the strongest use of video?

-Paul, Tilt 300

Here are some excellent data points from this roundup by Dillon Baker and this roundup by Tubular Insights:

• Time spent with digital video exploded from 21 minutes per day in 2011 to 76 minutes per day in 2015.

• Young millennials watch more digital video than TV.

• 46 percent of all video plays in Q4 2015 were on mobile devices.

• 69 percent of videos watched on smartphones are shorter than 10 minutes.

What can we conclude from this? For starters, there’s no doubt that video is only going to become a bigger part of content marketing. The secret sauce seems to be short videos distributed through social media platforms and watched on smartphones.

Native video on Facebook, in particular, has changed the game. Most major publishers invested heavily in Facebook video in 2016 and saw a big jump in engagement, per NewsWhip.

These numbers come with a caveat, though. If you watch for just three seconds, Facebook counts that as a view. Some users even accidentally “watch” a video by scrolling slowly through the feed. But Facebook is still the dominant media platform of our time. American users spend 50 minutes per day on the social network, and by one Facebook exec’s account, Facebook feeds will be all video by 2020. This trend isn’t going away.

As with most content trends, media companies are in the lead, with brands soon to follow. That’s why marketers should start studying the most successful video tactics of these publishers in detail. A few key elements pop out:

• They’re short—usually less than two minutes.

• They serve one of three purposes: make you laugh, show you how to do something, or explain something in an easy-to-understand way.

• They’re visually engaging from the first second, with title screens that immediately communicate the value proposition of the video.

• The visuals move fast, meaning things like motion graphics, overhead shots, and quick cuts.

• They don’t involve your middle-aged VP of finance speaking to a camera for 20 minutes.

“I see video as a megatrend,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings call Wednesday. “That’s why I’m going to keep putting video first across our family of apps.”

Facebook Live is poised to explode, especially since Facebook does everything it can to promote live videos, including sending push notifications anytime someone goes live.

Live video can be overwhelming, but it’s worth exploring. We’ve been dipping our toes in the water by broadcasting various content marketing talks and company culture talks at Contently. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to The New York Times’ strategy for future content. After a rough start, the Times really hit its stride, producing a ton of inexpensive live video on the fly about smart issues .

Can you recommend any tools that can analyze our content and provide insights for actions? For example we want to display relevant related articles to users who are reading a certain topic, how do we go about doing this?

-Ashleigh, DHi

Yes! In B2B content marketing, it’s absolutely necessary to track the industries of your readers and serve them personalized content. This strategy more than doubled our conversion rate on e-book offers on article pages. The two technologies I recommend are Optimizely and Funnel Envy. Check them out.

Chocolate, please.

-Stephanie

After the last two weeks, I think we could all use a little chocolate. Unfortunately, I still haven’t figured out how to transfer chocolate via an article about content marketing. So how about a GIF of this dancing bear instead? It’s a heck of a lot more fun than staring at a supergraphic of martech companies, I’ll tell you that.

If you have a question for next month’s column, please submit it here. You can also tweet it @JoeLazauskas, and I will promise to respond with more bear GIFs.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do I Stand Out From My Competitors? appeared first on Contently.

The answers seem obvious, assuming you want to live to tell the story. Yet if we relate this analogy to the content marketing world, we see a different process and outcome (you end up at the bottom of the ditch).

In our content marketing 2016 study, 73 percent of respondents said they produced more content in 2015 than in 2014. However, two-thirds devoted less than a quarter of their marketing budgets to the production, management, and distribution of this content. And 63 percent of marketers spent less than one-tenth of their budgets on content marketing technology.

What do these stats tell us? While most companies are interested in growing their content operations, the majority of them are not making the necessary investments to make that leap.

So how do you go about getting those necessary resources? We’ve created a checklist for how to ask for more money, followed by a breakdown of how you should spend that money once you get it.

Step 1: How to get buy-in

We hear you—it’s tough to get someone to invest in an activity that still involves risk. But as a marketer, it’s your job to demonstrate the positive return on a new investment. Here are some proven methods to get you there:

Tie content strategy to specific sales goals.

Since sales goals directly correspond to the bottom line, they’re much easier to link to company objectives than other departmental goals. When sales does well, the whole company celebrates with reply-all email GIFs because the bottom-line gain is clear. Marketing’s biggest challenge is to prove ROI, which is why tying content to specific sales goals is critical when trying to get a bigger budget. When content is seen as a tool to empower different portions of the sales cycle—and enterprise as a whole—important ears perk up and wallets open.

“We have to be thinking about business and sales and how we can bring something to those objectives,” said Trisha Winter, CMO of Amplifinity, in a recent BrightTalk virtual presentation. “If you don’t know what business objectives are, ask. If you’re a CMO, print them out and put them on everyone’s wall.”

Pitch brand experience.

No one is going to buy your product or enlist your services if they don’t trust who you are and what you do. While the ultimate goal of budget talks is to convince your boss (or board) that content marketing will lead to a surge in profit, your first job as a marketer is to communicate the steps it takes for the buyer to get there.

It’s virtually impossible—you will say—to establish a brand as an industry leader without producing compelling content to support that claim.

“It’s not as easy as dollar spent, dollar earned. As a CEO, what I’m interested in are broader principles. How will this impact brand? Relationship? How do I get the biggest gain?”

The proof is in audience engagement rates. Eighty-two percent of customers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content, while 60 percent are inspired to research a product after reading about it. Eighty percent of millennials—who, at over one-fourth of the U.S. population, make up the largest portion of the workforce—not only want to engage directly with brands but now expect this material.

In Winter’s BrightTalk budget discussion, Jeff Day, CEO of Bluewater, summarized it best: “It’s not as easy as dollar spent, dollar earned. As a CEO, what I’m interested in are broader principles. How will this impact brand? Relationship? How do I get the biggest gain?”

Your answer: A budget that places content at the forefront gives brands the leverage to convey leadership and serve as a valued community resource. It allows companies to differentiate themselves from competitors in a way that forms a meaningful connection to the public. As we like to say at Contently, those who tell stories rule the world.

Present tech as a way to compete in disruptive markets and empower your creative team.

Brian Solis, principal analyst for the Altimeter Group, studies the way developments in technology impact human behavior and how this, in turn, impacts our relationship to society, markets, and the companies that supply us. For Solis, “New technologies provide us with greater insights into customer behaviors and aspirations.” The tech available today, as Solis sees it, presents businesses with the opportunity to become “more human and relevant than ever.”

Yet, as Solis acknowledges on his blog, investment in technology is not just about purchasing the newest product. Choosing the right technological investment for your brand to assess audience engagement is just as important as the will to improve. The conversation about software must focus on the idea that tech platforms serve as a tool to understand audience behavior, and thus empower the creative potential of a brand’s publication team who speaks to these masses.

As Day reiterated in Winter’s BrightTalk, “Everybody has access to the same technology. It’s the creative application of technology that matters. There’s only so long you’ll be the first one doing it.”

Reinforce the compounding impact of content.

According to Curata, over half of marketers who curate content indicate doing so has enhanced brand visibility, thought leadership, SEO, website traffic, and buyer engagement. Forty-one percent say it is has increased the number and quality of sales leads. Best of all, the Aberdeen Group reported that website conversion is 6x higher for content marketing adopters.

Evidence also suggests that content marketing dollars stretch further than traditional advertising because of their impact on so many different operational layers. For example, while banner ads attract top-funnel intrigue, that traffic is rarely qualified and engagement stops after the first click. Content, on the other hand, has the ability to pull customers through the entire customer journey.

When developed as part of a larger publication strategy, content fulfills awareness (top funnel), educational (mid funnel), and conversion (bottom funnel) goals. And, when used as part of a customer retention strategy, it can increase ROI up to 15x.

Step 2: How to find money

Let’s say your content marketing pitch didn’t work. Or it did to an extent, but you didn’t get as much money as you hoped for. What should you do next?

If you’re anything like Adam Tanguay, the organic growth lead at Weebly, a web-hosting service, you prove content ROI through a traditional marketing lens. When I asked Tanguay how he was able to get Weebly to eventually invest in Contently, he showed his true hustler colors.

“The internal buy-in really stemmed from about a year of scrappy work on my own—with zero investment—to show that content pushed real, tangible value,” he said.

With no funds reserved for a content budget, Adam decided to prove the value of content by measuring it the same way he would with display or paid search. To do that, he used internal performance data that examined “last clicks” to connect signups and dollars directly to content.

Tanguay then used tracking pixels and fractional attribution to show how content value fit into the entire marketing funnel. From there, he compared the revenue he could generate with content to the cost of content marketing software. “It showed a clear positive ROI for all the content efforts,” he said.

Tanguay’s lesson is an important one since it combines the buy-in strategies mentioned above. He collected data that connected content to larger marketing and organizational goals, then showed the compounding value of content—including improved brand awareness.

“Content as a program didn’t originally start as its own revenue generating strategy,” he said. “First, it was a retention and branding tool to communicate with customers, as well as a tool for SEO.”

It was only later on that it started to become its own source of marketing ROI, while still doing the SEO and retention work. “That’s another reason why,” Tanguay said, “[Content marketing] is so incredibly valuable for our business.”

Step 3: Where to spend it

Congratulations, hustler, you finally secured a content marketing budget. Now comes the hardest part: How do you divvy up the goods?

As a content marketing technology company, it’s our job to tell you about the benefits of investing in a tech solution to empower your content strategy. But tech alone won’t do the trick. Below is a rundown of how we recommend slicing up your budget.

Staff: 25 percent

An editorial lead should guide your content strategy. This person will direct the editorial process—managing writers and editors, administrating strategic research, and ensuring efficient collaboration between editorial, strategy, and design.

In-house writers, editors, data strategists, and designers should focus on developing more sophisticated longform pieces, e-books, whitepapers, and any other creative materials that connect your brand with the buyer throughout the customer journey. As such, the editorial department should also work intimately with the sales and marketing teams to nurture leads.

The creative staff is what fuels the content wheel. Without them, the machine stops.

Production: 30 percent

Production costs will vary depending on what content makes sense for your brand. Do you benefit most from longform stories, blog posts, or whitepapers? Are infographics or video an important storytelling tool for your industry?

By enlisting freelancers, Aimia, an international marketing firm, was able to access local writers who could capture the nuances of regional markets. Aaron Dauphinee, Aimia’s general manager, explained in a Contently interview that utilizing freelancers allowed Aimia to “move from a relatively tight individual network to forty thousand people worldwide.”

For Coca Cola, freelance writers have been the source of some of the company’s most popular blog content, such as Laura Randall’s story on Coke-themed weddings. When speaking about the success of the story, Coca Cola Journey editor Jay Moye said, “That was not an idea we can take credit for. That was Laura.”

Distribution: 20 percent

Distribution dollars instead give life and longevity to content. Paid social targeting on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—and, to a lesser extent, distribution tools like Outbrain—are necessary today for growing an engaged audience and conducting smart business. As Contently editor-in-chief Joe Lazauskas writes, “If you’re going to spend $400 on an article, spending an extra $50 to ensure that twice as many people see that article just makes sense.”

In his research comparing organic and paid traffic, Contently co-founder Shane Snow found that it would take the average company with less than 100,000 social media followers about six years for organic clicks to pay off agency costs.

When done right, paid distribution maximizes exposure to the highest-performing individual pieces, driving brand awareness, generating leads, and key relationships with readers. In Contently’s case, optimizing our most popular articles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Outbrain led to an additional 8,000+ hours of engagement last year. Because engagement is our key metric for conversion, readers who click on these pieces are more likely to engage with other articles, subscribe to our newsletters, and become Contently customers and advocates.

Technology: 25 percent

A content marketing tech platform is the vehicle that enables the entire publishing process. As an organizational machine, it weaves together editorial calendar management, data measurement, and distribution.

Your company’s marketing will always hinge on the abilities of creative and strategic teams, but without a strong tech platform to manage workflows, collaboration, and engagement analytics, those teams will always be limited. For Genpact, global business operations service, enlisting Contently’s tech platform has allowed the company to expand its user base and make its workflows more efficient. According to Amrit Thapar, Genpact’s content leader, content marketing technology has “reduced the cycle time for a piece of content by 40 percent.”

There is no magic content budget that will definitely make ROI skyrocket 15x or to give upper management a 100 percent guarantee that your content strategy will take off without hurdles. But stacking your strategy with a solid creative and strategic staff, investing in varied production materials, budgeting for distribution, and prioritizing a content-focused tech platform will put you in a good position to make the jump and become a well-oiled content marketing machine.

The post How to Maximize Your 2016 Content Budget appeared first on Contently.

That last startup-ism was lampooned last year in an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley when dozens of startups paraded on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to explain how they were making the world a better place: through software-defining data centers for cloud computing; through canonical data models that communicate between n-plugs; by revolutionizing the way you report bugs on your mobile platform. It’s a damn perfect parody, as evidenced by the fact that we have our own rah-rah maxim here at Contently: to build a better media world.

The primary reason I came to Contently as editor-in-chief was my belief in this mission—that by giving brands the access to world-class creative talent and powerful software, we could help them become publishers in their own right and tell great stories instead of flooding the web with intrusive advertising. Ultimately, that would mean: a) less shitty ads; b) more great stories; and c) all of my journalist/designer/filmmaker friends getting paid to do what they love.

Two years in, is this a realistic vision? I think so. I’ve seen our own editorial efforts deliver incredible business results for Contently, from cold, hard revenue to brand lift. And I’ve seen Contently clients like Amex, Coca-Cola, GE, and Marriott build internal media companies. I’ve watched the industry become more ambitious, and I’ve seen forward-thinking companies embrace content as the atomic particle that powers and permeates through all of their marketing efforts. I’ve seen journalists and filmmakers get paid well to do great branded work.

But while content marketing has positive momentum, it remains an experimental line item for most brands. It’s hard to do well, which is part of the reason most CMOs think their content is failing. Despite the good vibes, it’s easy to see the industry continuing to fall back on uglier alternatives—like the nearly $15 billion that’ll be spent on programmatic display advertising this year.

A world where intrusive advertising rules is one where no one wins—especially not consumers and content creators. And there are five main issues that keep me up at night, worrying that we’ll slink back into a dark age:

1. The undervaluing of editorial skills

All comics by Martin Kozlowski

The rise of content marketing has led to a lot more editorial positions that have popped up inside brands, which makes sense—you need people to write and edit and come up with ideas for all this content! What’s troubling is how some brands have tried to fill these roles: by trying to turn marketing managers into editors, copywriters into reporters, SEO specialists into content strategists. There seems to be a blind belief that great editorial skills are something you can develop overnight, especially with the help of a few content-ideation and headline-optimization tools.

That belief is insane. Great publications with loyal audiences require remarkable editorial talent. And remarkable editorial talent is still quite cheap. If brands don’t start hiring talented writers, editors, and content strategists, it’s hard to see them competing with the rest of the media world.

(See our guides to hiring here and here.)

2. Prohibitive bureaucracy

When it comes to content, most brands are running a race where their pit crew forces them off the track every lap.

Sure, when you’re creating a 30-second TV spot, you can afford to go through a 12-person approval chain and lengthy legal review. But not when you’re creating content every day. Editors need the freedom to experiment with new formats, different story types, and subjects that push boundaries. It isn’t just the lawyer getting cold feet, but also the brand manager mistakenly trying to force in product plugs, the comms manager killing every interesting quote with corporate banalities, and the VP of marketing who bottlenecks the entire edit calendar because he wants to sign off on everything.

So what does a successful content marketing operation look like? I’ve always been a fan of the model that Seth Godin suggested to me in an interview earlier this year:

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

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

That kind of setup might be a little optimistic, but content creators do need some degree of autonomy within a brand if they’re going to succeed. (For another take, see John Hazard’s guide to brand approvals here.)

3. The campaign mindset

While doing research for my monthly “Best of Branded Content” column, I’ve come across tons of impressive one-off brand videos and microsites. The latter can be especially infuriating; these sites are loaded with dozens of articles and then left to die, a taxidermied ornament growing dusty in the corner of the branded content lodge.

All of this content is wasted because many brands are stuck in a campaign mindset. They’ll spend tons of money to create something shiny and awesome with an agency or publisher partner, but once that short-term opportunity ends, they don’t build on that momentum that can lead to a loyal audience over time. All of a brand’s content needs to be part of a cohesive whole, working toward clear goals.

4. Marketers who believe, “If you build it, they will come.”

There’s nothing more depressing than when a content team inside a brand overcomes tons of hurdles, creates some amazing stories, and then gets labeled as a failure because no one saw them.

When launching a branded content campaign, you absolutely need paid distribution for your content. Even if you have a million Facebook followers and a million Twitter followers, only a few thousand people, at most, will see your work.

I’ve seen brands budget hundreds of thousands of dollars on the actual content and then stop spending when it comes time to make sure people see that content. That gameplan is nuts. It’s never been easier to target the right audience for your content—from CMOs to Drake-loving yuccies—as Jordan Teicher detailed in his excellent guide on distribution platforms last week. Outbrain will drive readers from top pubs for $0.30 a click. When we promote a popular post on Facebook, we commonly see a CPC less than $0.10, a figure that drops even further if you’re promoting native videos. After all the trouble you’ve gone through, why the hell wouldn’t you spend $1,000 to put your content in front of 10,000 new people?

The math in favor of paid content distribution is stupidly simple, especially as we move toward a platform-centric universe that’ll serve up hungry audiences to anyone skilled enough to catch their attention. And to take advantage of the system, brands need to start devoting significant chunks of their media budgets to content marketing.

Bonus: Marketers’ ability to show ROI

Ultimately, content marketing will never become more than a side project for most brands if CMOs can’t demonstrate impressive ROI figures to the rest of the c-suite.

Unfortunately, there’s still a myth in the industry that you can’t really tie content to business results. (And if I hear that one more time, I’m going to lose it and run screaming through Content Marketing World in an orange speedo.) As I wrote in my content measurement playbook, it’s very possible to tie content to every stage of pipeline revenue by carefully tracking the impact your content has on the bottom line with marketing and sales automation programs like Salesforce and Marketo. And you can prove brand lift with a shoestring budget. None of this is easy, but if a bunch of English majors like us can figure it out, trust me, you can too.

But the ROI of content will be a mediocre proposition at best if talented people don’t have the freedom to tell great stories and have the resources to get those stories out there. You can’t solve one problem without solving all of them, and I hope we do. After all, when it comes to startup catchphrases, Make the world a banner-ad-infested slum just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

What content marketing issues worry you? Let me know @joelazauskas on Twitter.

The post 5 Content Marketing Problems That Keep Me Up at Night appeared first on Contently.

Sarah Lawrence focuses on writing the same way the Trix Rabbit fixates on brightly colored breakfast cereal: It’s an obsession. There are no finals; instead, you write a 25-page mini-thesis for each class, the result of biweekly meetings with your professors in which you’re given a dozen books to read and ordered to dive into the academic tidal pool of LexisNexis. The idea is that after 12 weeks of hard, methodical work, you produce a brilliant paper that establishes you as the preeminent scholar of your generation.

Most of my friends, however, used a different approach. The biweekly meetings with professors were often trials of masterful bullshitting, prepped for with frantic skimming of SparkNotes. This strategy usually worked—even if the professor could smell the bullshit, they wouldn’t always have the energy to call the student out on it—but it was a harrowing ritual nonetheless. On any given day, at least one of my friends would be in the midst of a mild panic attack, certain that their professors would discover their deception. In desperate times, they’d fake being sick or cry, but you could really only play those cards once. After feigning progress the whole semester, everyone would blindly pray to the Adderall gods that they’d somehow pull through.

Though a screwup in many ways, I avoided this hellish routine thanks to my natural Jewish neurosis. The stress of not doing the work would tear a hole in my stomach, so I tended to get my papers in early. I also couldn’t endure the inferno that was “Conference Week”—the seven days leading up to the end of the semester. It was a grizzly, confusing scene: 40 acres of idyllic grounds in high spring, dotted with ivied manors pulled straight out of The Great Gatsby, were suddenly infested with 800 sleep-deprived, hollow-eyed students manically guzzling every stimulant in sight, all in hopes of cranking out 75 pages in a single week.

Usually, after a little bit of research, they’d discover that the thesis they’d been bullshitting about for three months was, in fact, total bullshit. It didn’t make sense, and you couldn’t write a paper on it. So they’d either have to start from scratch or make a bunch of things up so that they could jam their square thesis into a round hole. By the end, they’d look more zombie than human, even if they’d miraculously made it through.

It was a real-life fable, the collegiate version of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” the famous cautionary tale about preparing for winter. They were grasshoppers, dancing the semester away while the few ants among us toiled steadily at their papers.

The panic in the grasshopper’s eyes when the end of the semester arrived was vivid and real, and I’ve only seen it one other place since: in the pupils of content marketers who have to show their bosses how their work generates ROI at the end of the quarter.

A content marketing fable

I’m going to generalize a lot here, but I think there are two different kinds of content marketers: those who plan like the ant and those who ignore hard work like the grasshopper. (I’ll refrain from making a bad Antman joke here.)

The latter group reminds me of my procrastinating friends from college; they start with a vague idea of what they’d like to accomplish, get it approved, and then do relatively minimal work, generally content to just cover their asses and get by. They fake it, throw up one or two vanity blog posts a week, and pray that no one asks any tough questions about ROI.

The content marketers who prepare, however, have a clear plan and goals in mind, and relentlessly work to reevaluate that plan and make sure it’s on track. They know if their aim is audience growth, SQLs/MQLs, brand building, customer education, or, more likely, a blend of a myriad of metrics. They can see the finish line, and they’re constantly tinkering with their content to get there.

Recently, someone at Contently asked me what’s different about the way our content team works this year versus a year ago, since our monthly audience is twice as big, our content is driving tons of leads, and, to be honest, the stories we publish are a lot better.

There are a lot of factors at play, but the biggest one is that we’ve become much better at thinking like the ant.

At the start of every quarter, we have a big planning meeting where we lay out all the big projects we want to accomplish over the next quarter. We audit our overall content strategy and think about badass new storytelling formats and topics that we think will expand our overall audience. We also map out a series of big reports that we feel will reach the marketing executives who are important to the business side of Contently. During the first half of this year, for example, that meant “The Ultimate Content Strategist Playbooks” series; a half dozen other e-books; a few original studies; two custom spring editions of our print magazine, Contently Quarterly; and consistent improvement and innovation in our daily content.

Since we have clear goals laid out, we’ve been able to benchmark our progress on a weekly and monthly basis—something my former Sarah Lawrence classmates couldn’t do while they were procrastinating and getting lost in the hallways after eating too many mushrooms. When my team at Contently was off the mark and not accomplishing what we needed to, we knew it immediately and could correct our course. This ensured that we didn’t find ourselves scrambling at the end of the quarter to justify to our VP of finance just what the hell we’ve been doing all this time.

When you’re a content marketer with a diligent plan, it’s pretty hard to fail. After all, the great thing about content is that creating it is in your control. If you pay attention to what works and then bust your ass to double down on those strategies, chances are you’ll have enough successes to hit your benchmarks (and, most likely, exceed them).

But if you’re a content marketer who, like the grasshopper, is ignoring the coming winter, not even a week-long Adderall binge will help you when it inevitably arrives. But hey, at least you’ll be too busy obsessively cleaning your kitchen to remember that you no longer have a job.

The post The Ant and the Grasshopper, or Why Ignoring ROI Is a Death Wish appeared first on Contently.

Without further ado, I present 21 content marketing predictions for the second half of 2015 from around the Contently office:

On brand ambitions

1. More and more brands will hire full-time editors. They’ll call them something absurd though, like “global audience strategists.” —Sam Slaughter, VP of Content (Tweet this!)

2. A few overly ambitious brands will try to publish hard news. They’ll probably fail, and it’ll be fun to watch, but it’ll be interesting to see if anyone can figure out how to do it even half well, since that particular space is wide open. —Jordan Teicher, Associate Editor (Tweet this!)

3. Brands will start seriously turning their attention to Gen Z, roughly a quarter of the U.S. population. They’ll need to come correct—these kids are notorious for having different habits than millennials, consistently using as many as five different devices (laptop, TV, iPad, smartphone, desktop). —Ann Fabens-Lassen, Communications Manager (Tweet this!)

4. More brands will invest in video (obviously), but few will do it well. They’ll spend a lot, get nothing in return, then turn bearish on video. By 2016, we’ll be seeing articles like “Why Video Is a Bad Gamble for Content Marketers.” —Ryan Galloway, Head of Editorial Services (Tweet this!)

5. Brands will realize that content marketing is not just about telling a compelling story with words. It requires strong visuals and multimedia to push a narrative forward. —Kathryn Han, Director of Design (Tweet this!)

6. Brands will cultivate their Instagram accounts to tell powerful, honest stories about their company behind the scenes. Their visuals will feature a lot of dreamy landscapes that remind us that the world is grand. —Julia Schur, Editorial Intern (Tweet this!)

7. We’ll continue to see an explosion of media companies launching within brands. By Christmas, it’ll be the hot new accessory for content marketers, the puka necklace of the digital age. Following the lead of Casper’s Van Winkle’s and Starbucks’ venture with Rajiv Chandrasekaran, some brands will take a crack at editorial independence. Only one or two will do it well. —Joe Lazauskas, Editor-in-Chief (Tweet this!)

And ROI

8. Companies will get more focused and accurate about defining just how much quality content is worth beyond strictly financial metrics. Content marketers will start looking at many of the same brand metrics their colleagues in advertising use to measure impact. —Richard Sharp, Head of Product Marketing (Tweet this!)

9. Brands will scramble to spend their remaining 2015 content budget on premium content such as infographics and videos. As they prepare their 2016 budget proposals, they’ll feel pressured to define and measure the business value of this content. —Kunal Patel, Product Manager (Tweet this!)

10. I’ve said this before, but I need to say it again: Vanity metrics will die. No more empty-calorie metrics like shares and tweets and pageviews. —Paul Fredrich,VP of Product (Tweet this!)

The future of martech

11. Everyone who’s selling content marketing technology of some sort will attempt to get a new acronym to stick. CMOs will be up to their eyeballs in pitches for CMPs, CMMs, CCPs, and other synonyms for POS. —Shane Snow, co-founder & CCO (Tweet this!)

12. The Content Marketing Lumascape will be turned upside down, and we will view it in terms of the consumer funnel—not by publishers, platforms, and networks. Content leaders will be those who specialize in driving awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, loyalty, and advocacy. —Brett Lofgren, Chief Revenue Officer (Tweet this!)

13. We will see a shift as content marketing initiatives include more technology integrations and integrations across multiple teams. —Ari Kepnes, Content Strategist (Tweet this!)

14. Brands will demand formalized, customized content marketing programs straight out of the gate. Tailored content hacks will replace the current laborious model of looking for a technology partner, strategy, creatives, distribution opportunities, and other elements piecemeal. The norm will be a proven, pre-made content marketing program, wrapped up nice and pretty. —Ali Kriegsman, Sales Executive (Tweet this!)

15. Marketers will finally realize that software alone doesn’t create great content, regardless of its bells and whistles. You need great talent and a succinct strategy. A fool with a tool is still just a fool. —Paul Fredrich, VP of Product (Tweet this!)

And the future of media

16. More news curation apps and app features will emerge, especially with the upcoming 2016 election. Every media company will want to be your go-to source for up-to-date content. They’re going to need to be on mobile to do it, and they’re going to challenge brands to find new ways to get seen. So far Snapchat, Facebook, Flipboard, and Apple are duking it out. Who’s next? —Amanda Walgrove, Writer (Tweet this!)

17. A media company will buy a content marketing firm to help scale their native ad business and establish their own content marketing division. —Dillon Baker, Associate Editor (Tweet this!)

18. Media companies will embrace two alternative revenue sources: as content marketing agencies (which are way better equipped to help brands build audiences than most digital agencies) and as SaaS companies (as innovative media operations like BuzzFeed and Vox start to license their proprietary software products). We’ll hear “All media companies are becoming SaaS companies, and all SaaS companies are becoming media companies” a lot. —Joe Lazauskas, Editor-in-Chief (Tweet this!)

19. A major deal will make it abundantly clear that “destination content” is quickly becoming the new advertising. —Alex Combs, Data Scientist (Tweet this!)

And finally, silly names

20. Ambitious types looking to oversee all of marcomms, internal comms, media, content, etc. will rebrand themselves as Lord of the Comms. —Elisa Cool, VP of Brand Development (Tweet this!)

21. That moment when awesome content almost makes it out the door but is killed by committee, compliance, or other internal processes will come to be known as being “John Snow’d.” —Elisa Cool, VP of Brand Development (Tweet this!)

The post 21 Content Marketing Predictions for the 2nd Half of 2015 appeared first on Contently.

Content performance metrics are still being measured in the form of opens, clicks, pageviews, and shares. Thus, content marketers are getting better at leveraging a common formula: clickable headlines + paid distribution = numbers that look like success. Unfortunately, that success is often an illusion.

The real value generated from such metrics for a given content program could actually be zero, because audience engagement and loyalty may be limited to just that one campaign. The harder it is for content marketers to prove that their content results directly tie into a company’s overall financial success, the harder it is for them to ask for more money to produce better content and truly engage audiences over time. This is a huge mistake and a disservice to the marketing profession.

At companies that are attempting to link content more directly to shareholder KPIs, content marketers are quickly evolving into hybrid creatures: half editors, half data scientists. To succeed, these chimeras need a formula that goes one step further than attention time. The formula needs to consider the lifetime value of each audience member, and, more importantly, how to maximize that value from the best audience segments.

I’ve spent a lot of time in my career thinking about better ways to prove marketing attribution. That effort has evolved with the help of the latest marketing automation technologies. At Contently, we have the pleasure of looking at a treasure trove of content performance data in our own technology platform, which has allowed me to develop a pretty exciting formula for the content marketing world. We have lovingly named it ROCI [rock-ee], short for Return on Content Investment:

ROCI = (Revenue Attributed to All Content Marketing Assets – Total Content Marketing Spend) + (Share of Audience Attention * Fair Market $ Value of Target Audience)

In layman’s terms, this formula addresses the primary ROI measurement needs of direct marketers and brand marketers: revenue attribution and brand lift.

The first part of the equation focuses on revenue attribution. Revenue attribution consists of the hard dollar returns that companies gain from short-term campaigns (i.e., successful conversions from offers, discounts, downloadable assets, form fills). With the help of marketing technology, these returns are much easier to measure. However, there is a content production cost involved: the cost of the people required to make the assets and the cost of distributing those assets to their respective target audiences. When you subtract the production costs from the revenue earned, you get the first part of the formula, which is the net revenue earned in dollar terms.

The second part of the equation focuses on brand lift. Brand lift consist of the soft dollar returns, which are harder to measure but arguably just as important as hard dollar returns. These returns may never yield direct revenue, but positive brand perception earned can yield network effects that correlate to a dollar value as well. There are many documented ways to calculate brand lift, but the most important currency, in my opinion, is how much attention a brand can earn from an audience member—measured by the engaged time they spend with your brand’s content on their own accord.

Next, we can place a value on that time by calculating how much it would cost to “rent” that audience’s time through traditional and digital marketing channels. When you multiply the attention time your target audience is spending with your content by the fair market value of renting that audience (often with paid distribution metrics such as impressions and CPCs), then you have a soft dollar value for the brand lift you’re generating.

By combining the hard dollar return with a soft dollar return on content over time, you can optimize your marketing budget much more effectively. We believe that earning an audience and generating revenue organically is much better than relying primarily on paid media efforts to boost your marketing ROI.

It’s by no means a finished theorem, as solving the problem of true content value over time is incredibly hard and unique to each business model. But over the next few months, we will be working with the best minds in the marketing and data worlds to test and adapt this formula. If you have any thoughts, opinions, or insights, I hope you’ll let us know.

Ray Cheng (@Ray_Jing) is the VP of Marketing at Contently.

The post ROCI: An Exciting New ROI Formula for Content Marketers appeared first on Contently.

Finance marketers aren’t known for their sense of humor, but there he was—this rabidly energetic man on stage—working the crowd for laughs like a stand-up comedian, introducing upcoming speakers like the hype man at a concert, and damn-near pleading for a chortle of laughter that would loosen the Windsor knots around the necks of the very serious men in the front row.

This, I realized, must be Jason Miller. LinkedIn’s head of global content for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has a well-earned reputation as a different kind of B2B marketer. His path to success has been downright bonkers. At Marketo, he generated a ridiculous amount of revenue with a coloring book. (Yes, really.) His B2B marketing book, Welcome to the Funnel, is as much about rock ‘n’ roll as it is about lead gen. Most guys in our office have man crushes on Ryan Gosling or Channing Tatum. Our VP of Marketing Ray Cheng has a man crush on Jason Miller.

I pretty much had no choice but to interview him about all things content marketing. And in honor of Ray, I started the interview with a pickup line.

So how did a journalist and a rock ‘n’ roll photographer like you end up in a content marketing interview like this?

Funny story, actually: When I was in college I played in a hard rock band. We had a showcase with Mercury Records and we needed to find somebody to open up for us. We invited our friends, this band called the Love Hogs, to open up our show.

The guy from Mercury Records came out and he signed a development deal for the opening band and left before we came on. I was really depressed, and that’s when I quit the band and decided I should probably go to college. Because of my love for playing in the band, I lived vicariously through music and the music industry. I thought the music industry was where I was going to be the rest of my life. I wanted to be a record exec in New York. That was my dream.

Around 2009, the industry was just still trying to figure out digital. It was bringing in new ideas around social media marketing, blogging, big data, and my efforts to try new things fell on deaf ears—so I quit. Went back to school, got a couple of digital degrees, learned about SEO marketing, pulled my way to a startup, and now I’m here.

It seems like you’re the guy bringing the creative juices at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. How does that mesh with the analytical side of this company?

That’s interesting because I learned pretty much everything I know about social and content and demand gen and email and analytics and whatnot when I was at Marketo. I reported directly to Jon Miller. Jon Miller has a degree in physics, but he’s a marketer. He is a brilliant marketer. You can imagine the hellish time I had creating a dashboard that would really mean something to him.

“I thought B2B marketing was pretty boring when I first started. All the content was written like a bunch of instruction manuals. Every cover was the same dark ominous cover with some 12-point Times New Roman font.

Everything that B2B marketers were doing, I just did the exact opposite.

I switched my love of rock ‘n’ roll and my love of Jerry Seinfeld and I pulled a George Costanza and did the exact opposite. Everything that B2B marketers were doing, I just did the exact opposite—I did [content] I thought would be funny and entertaining.

Jon pretty much told me to do whatever I want. He gave me the creative outlet. But he told me: you have to tie everything you do back to metrics because you have Marketo and you have the ability to do so. So keep your cost per lead under this amount and have some fun.

He did say: There is one metric I want you to focus on that can’t be measured. I just want you to get people to like the company.

When I was in the music industry, I had to take the bands out and entertain them. I’m an entertainer. I figured I could apply that to the top of the funnel, add a little personality, add a little fun to content, pull people in.

I like to think they knew what they were getting when they called me up—a little Axl Rose, a little Jerry Seinfeld, a little edge with my content. I like to turn things upside down—look at things different.

What were those metrics and that attribution model that allowed you to have your fun and be creative?

People over-complicate this model all the time. Why do you create content? You create content because the buying process has fundamentally changed and you need new ways to start conversations and engage with prospects.

We measured, number one, referral traffic. That’s a huge goal. Not only referral traffic but non-branded referral traffic, meaning if somebody is coming to your site without typing your keywords into the search engine, then they must be coming from your content.

Here’s another thing: The content purists will tell you never to gate top-of-funnel content. I don’t care about that. I do the exact opposite. I gate everything that’s worth an email address. If the value was worth more to that person than an email address, then we we’re winning.

The content purists will tell you never to gate top-of-funnel content. I don’t care about that. I gate everything that’s worth an email address.

We looked at referral traffic, non-branded referral traffic, and quality of leads, of course. Were the sales cycles shortened based on top-of-funnel content and middle-funnel content? Was it accelerating and awakening leads that were already nurture tracks but weren’t responsive? And, of course, we looked at engagement.

I think it’s a matter of time before research is going to tell us that social signals play a role in [search] rankings, but in the meantime, I think they play a pretty good early indicator of whether your content is relevant, if people like it. Then we use multi-touch attribution. So can see which channels they came in on and the pieces of content they consumed all the way to revenue. So we track that as a touch point, using multi-touch attribution, and then we divvy up those little touch points and attribute them to pipeline. Then we’d use Marketo or Eloqua—whatever the hell marketing automation [software] you use—to see which content, which campaigns, which outlets drove the most pipeline.

How have things changed in your role at LinkedIn? Obviously it’s a fairly different company than Marketo—have your goals and approach changed significantly since you made the move?

You know, I market to marketers, so what I really do is I find problems and I try to come up with innovative solutions to them and I write about them. That’s all I ever do. That’s all I ever did at Marketo. It got me where I’m at today so nothing has really changed—we use Eloqua now, which is interesting. [Laughs]

It’s not about creating more content, but creating more relevant content. We can’t all be the HubSpots of the world. They do a great job pushing out a ton of extremely relevant content. They’re a volume player, and it works for them. But most of us, we can’t really do that volume play. So I focus on the number one burning question on our prospects’ minds, and then I go in with one “big rock” piece of content.

It’s not about creating more content, but creating more relevant content.

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions operates almost like its own little startup. [When I came in], There were two people on the content team. There was an opportunity to educate around content marketing best practices, and a blog that needed some love and optimization.

A couple of years later, the LMS blog is in a really good place helping us drive MQLs, pipeline, and ultimately revenue.

This whole world of creating content for marketers is an interesting one. I’m in it, you’re in it. Recently, Rand Fishkin over at Moz said something really interesting in his “Whiteboard Friday” video. He said it’s not good enough to create good unique content anymore—you really need to create something that’s ten times better. When I look around the marketing content landscape there is a lot of generic 101 stuff out there. What do you think that people creating marketing content really need to do to stand out?

I love Rand. “Whiteboard Friday” is one of the pieces of content I watch every week. The Moz blog is something I read every morning—it’s a great mix of everything I think a hybrid marketer needs to know about.

It’s interesting to see a lot of SEO experts shifting their focus to how SEO supports a holistic content marketing strategy, and content marketers shifting to better understand how SEO plays into their strategy. Rand and the folks at Moz are a perfect example of why you need to be an expert in more than one marketing discipline.

Let’s be honest: How many content marketers create content answering their prospects’ pain points versus content marketers create content they think they know needs to be created? I don’t create anything that doesn’t address a problem or offer an innovative update to an old solution.

In order to stand out, you need budget to do native advertising and pay to promote your own good content, some keyword research to understand the conversation about what content you should be putting out, and then on top of that you probably need somebody with a really big, bold, outgoing personality—and maybe a comedian.

I’m curious about your content ideation process. What’s the mix between just wanting to continue to double down on the tried-and-true stuff versus experimenting with new formats, ideas, and approaches?

I’m always trying to find out the next new thing, but I am just tired of the shiny-object syndrome, like Pinterest and Snapchat and stuff I’ll probably never ever use and I don’t really care to. The search engine’s job is to provide the most relevant answer to a search query’s type in. A content marketer’s job is to be that answer. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you need to own that conversation.

I’m constantly taking cues from being in the city or at a show and I’ll take little pictures or take little notes. On my OneNote, I probably have around 400 to 500 half-written blog posts, ideas that might have something to them. I take it back to my team and we get into a big whiteboard discussion on a Friday we call spitballing. We drink some wine and see what comes out of it.

In order to be a successful content marketer, you have to do a tremendous amount of trial and error, but you have to have a foundation to support your trial and error.

In order to be a successful content marketer, you have to do a tremendous amount of trial and error, but you have to have a foundation to support your trial and error. You certainly shouldn’t be trying to do anything unless you have some sort of foundation driving the results while you are trying to figure out what to do next.

We’re not going to start seeing the LinkedIn Marketing Solution Snapchat Discovery Channel anytime soon?

[Laughs] Not unless I read a blog post about someone using Snapchat to drive revenue for a B2B audience. If Snapchat wants to get me to use Snapchat, write that article and target me on LinkedIn.

I think if I wrote that blog post, it would have a 75 percent email open rate. Just so many subject line buzzwords right there.

The other thing and I think about a lot too is that I have never done this by myself. If you go about this alone, you’re probably going to fail and probably get fired. Again, bring an agency on board to help out with concepts and creatives, bring some additional writers on board to help out with writing and fleshing out your ideas.

A team of two with the right agencies and partners can market like a team of 10,000 with today’s technology. I don’t see a lot of people taking advantage of that. I see a lot of egos hijacking content strategies. I see a lot of people doing Meerkat sessions that have no business value. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

When you look at the social media landscape right now, it seems like every single social platform—Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat—is really doubling down on original content to keep people on the platform. Do you see the potential for LinkedIn to become even more of a publisher in its own right? Could the Marketing Solutions blog be blown out to a full-fledged business publication?

I’m not really in a position to answer a question that big around LinkedIn specifically. But as far as LinkedIn Marketing Solutions goes, I do see us building what I call an owned media empire.

As far as LinkedIn Marketing Solutions goes, I do see us building what I call an owned media empire.

We’ve built this brand around the “sophisticated marketer.” In order for something to get stamped with the sophisticated marketer’s brand that we built, it has to reach a certain bar, and not every piece of content gets there.

We found that once we purchase a piece of content with the “sophisticated brand” on it that it usually does really, really well no matter what it is because we built this certain level of trust around that brand. Shane said something that really resonated with me last year at Finance Connect. I quote him in this all the time. It was about branded content and how we’re not really that good at it yet and we are still learning. Somebody asked him the question, like, “Are you afraid of companies creating content on their own turning off readers because they added their own logo or whatever?” He said something to the effect of “Your content should be so damn good that you want your brand logo to be on it.” I think that’s where it’s headed. The whole branding content thing, I know it goes back to 1906 or whatever, but we are really not that good at it yet in many cases. I think we’re getting better.

Do you think the way forward for brands is really building their owned media empires like you said, as opposed to just relying on advertising for your BuzzFeed but building magazines and publications of their own?

I completely agree. The one piece of content I took home from Finance Connect was your guys’ magazine. I read it on the plane and I still have it. I brought it home. It’s sitting on my coffee table, for Christ’s sake! Because it was so well done.

I was doing some research for though leadership for a presentation in London a few weeks ago. I was trying to write the case for B2C thought leadership. And I came across the story of Betty Crocker in the 1930s. They were selling flour. How do you differentiate yourself from the other guys selling flour? Well, they were trying to sell flour to people who were baking things. So they started the world’s first cooking show—a radio show.

It cost them a tremendous amount of money back then, but now you can do that with a podcast for 50 bucks or even free. Then they took a step further and created the world’s first cookbook.

That’s how they differentiated themselves, and now they’re a huge empire, but it all started with them building their own little media company. Shit, look at HGTV or Food Network or MasterChef. Those wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Betty Crocker. I think a brand today can take a page out of Betty Crocker’s history and say, “How do I create my own little owned media empire?”

The post LinkedIn’s Jason Miller on Egos, SEO, and His Plans to Build an ‘Owned Media Empire’ appeared first on Contently.

Last fall, I found myself in an editorial meeting at the office of a large brand. The company was relatively new to publishing, and its family-focused finance content had performed respectably so far, but the employees were still a long way from reaching the goals they’d set months before.

With the holidays approaching, we saw the opportunity for a timely piece of content: an infographic about the exorbitant costs of holiday travel for families. We suggested a slick production design with an accompanying article offering tips for saving money when visiting grandma. It was, we said, the type of content that could easily go viral. I showed the employees this list of the 10 most viral infographics and pointed out that they all racked up hundreds of thousands of likes and shares. If we approached this project the right way, other personal finance blogs would pick it up, as would mommy bloggers and travel sites.

An awkward pause ensued. Across the table, noses crinkled. Shoulders rolled into noncommittal shrugs. “I don’t know,” their marketing director said. “Aren’t those expensive?”

Yes, we explained, but the ROI can be huge.

Another stakeholder piped up: “OurFictionalCompetitor.com doesn’t do infographics.”

With that, the idea of doing an infographic died. In its place, they opted to do a listicle. It was called “10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With a Pumpkin.” And even if you wanted to find it, you’d have to struggle through page after page of similar-sounding Google results to do so.

No risk, no reward

For traditional media outlets, one of the most critical channels for building a readership is the old-fashioned “exclusive”. They get the coveted interview. They publish the big scandal before the other guys. In short, they have something no one else has. Brand publishers aren’t breaking news (yet), but they have a similar opportunity to earn seismic readership gains by giving the audience something they can’t get anywhere else.

But like the pumpkin publisher above, many brands shy away from going for the home run, preferring instead to play small ball, grinding away with slap singles and hoping to win by pure volume. This strategy is destined to fail, and no one explains it more effectively than Moz’s Rand Fishkin:

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.

In short, if you’re publishing unambitious content, you’re throwing your money away. There’s no ROI for being just another voice in a crowd.

Excuses, excuses

Even though brands have a financial incentive for producing creative, original content, too many still insist on churning out mediocre work. They tend to justify that mindset with three typical reasons.

-It’s hard. When I show publishers great examples of branded content, like Land Rover’s outstanding “The Vanishing Game” or NVIDIA’s delightful debunking of lunar landing conspiracies, they often assume that marquee content is outside of their grasp. But with the right creative talent, this sort of thing is very doable. Look at what Contently accomplished with the team at Marriott Traveler. Sure, standing out can be challenging, but it’s far from impossible.

-It’s expensive. In fairness, content like “The Vanishing Game” is indeed a little spendy. But taking a chance and creating something exclusive doesn’t have to break your budget. As Amanda Walgrove recently pointed out on The Content Strategist, the old fashioned article remains the most effective type of branded content. It’s also one of the easiest to produce. Video is a close second in effectiveness but remains substantially more difficult to create. The lesson here? Put some effort into creating outstanding articles that give your readers something they can’t get elsewhere, and watch the wins roll in.

-It isn’t being done by competitors. This facepalm-worthy comment crops up more often than you’d believe. As I’ve noted previously, when brands enter the content game, they’re not just competing with the other brands in their industry—they’re competing with every other established media brand out there. This realization alone should spur brands to create truly ambitious content. It’s a crowded field, and you’ve got to stand out to win.

The pumpkin publisher offered up each one of these flimsy excuses, some more than once. But even though its content was unambitious, its goals were anything but.

No substitute for a good story

A few weeks later, the company published the pumpkin piece, along with a few others, all of which were similarly worthless. A month rolled by, accompanied by more unfocused, uninteresting content. The executives expected slow, organic growth and gradual development of an owned audience. It wasn’t happening. In fact, almost no one was reading their content. Few viewers arrived, and almost none stayed.

“Give it time,” the marketing director said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

At this point, we know what was coming. We also knew that letting it happen would be the only way we’d convince them to be smarter about their content. When the quarter came to a close two months later, they’d missed their content goals—every metric, from pageviews to engagement—by nearly 75 percent. This, we thought, would be our opportunity. But before we could even suggest doing better content, the stakeholders decided that pouring money into distribution would be their magic bullet.

We sighed. And then we waited.

At the end of the next quarter, little had changed. Despite tens of thousands of dollars spent on distribution, their content was still underperforming—and not by a little. At this point, they were ready to throw in the towel. “Maybe content marketing isn’t right for our industry,” they said.

Our response? “Give it another quarter. And give us a chance to do something great this time.”

Three months later, their content had surpassed all of their goals. Their audience was growing, sharing, and engaging. But we didn’t give them a magic bullet. There is no secret to why their new content succeeded where their old stuff failed.

All it took was great stories.

We gave their audience thoughtful, useful content they couldn’t get anywhere else. We made it interesting, and we made it unique to their brand. We started with the stories themselves, and everything else fell into place.

Ryan Galloway is the Senior Managing Editor at Contently.

The post Why Ambitious Content Is the Only Content That Matters appeared first on Contently.

The Ultimate Content Strategist Playbook No. 5: Measuring and Optimizing Your Content Marketing

My fifth and final Ultimate Content Strategist playbook has dropped. A few reasons you should read it:

1. It breaks down not only how to measure the effectiveness of your content, but also how to put that content into action on a weekly basis to ensure that you get better over time. It’s based off the framework we use ourselves, and it freaking works.

2. If you want to know how to measure a specific brand goal, this playbook will tell you how.

3. I spent so much time on this that I haven’t finished Mad Men yet. So if you don’t, I’ll be kind of sad. Also, that flying book. Look at that freaking flying book.

WTF Is a Vertically Integrated Media Co., and Why Would I Want One?

Do you like complex media issues described through Miami Vice metaphors? Of course you do. And that’s why Contently VP of Content Sam Slaughter was put on this earth.

When I first started looking into this topic, an anonymous source led me to a well-known classic film called Miami Vice. To be clear, we’re talking about the Jamie Foxx/Colin Farrell/Michael Mann version—Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas were all about horizontal integration (hehehe). Anyway, Foxx and Farrell are talking to an informant about a Colombian criminal syndicate, and he tells them “they’re vertically integrated,” to which Foxx replies, “You mean they walk around with constant erections?”

Which actually is not what vertical integration within digital media is about—but it might as well be, given how much people seem to actually understand anything about the topic. Truth be told, the drug trafficking metaphor is actually pretty relevant to media companies. Read it.

The Financial Times Just Introduced a New Digital Ad Currency, and It Could Change the Web for Good

The end of slideshows may be near, writes Dillon Baker:

The bitcoin of digital ad currencies is here, and it’s being brought to you by your favorite 127-year-old salmon-colored newspaper.

Yesterday, the Financial Times formally announced that it will begin to sell ads based on a new currency: CPH, or “cost per hour.” Instead of selling ads per thousand impressions (CPM) or per click (CPC), as most in the industry still do, FT is betting that selling display based on time-spent with the ad in view will ultimately produce better results for both publisher and advertiser. Read it.

‘The Times Should Own Warby Parker’: Thrillist’s Ben Lerer on the Future of Commerce and Content

When I met Thrillist’s Ben Lerer on a grassy knoll, we talked about everything: girls, the Entourage movie, barbecue. Actually, we talked about none of those things. Instead, we discussed how the media and retail industries are converging rapidly, and what brands and publishers alike need to do to win. Read it.

Quiz: Are You a True Grammar Expert?

Take this quiz and feel good about yourself before you drink a 30 rack of Bud Light Lime and eat 17 hot dogs. We believe in you.

The post Content Catchup: The Ultimate ROI Guide, the Bitcoin of Ad Currencies, and More Must-Reads appeared first on Contently.

Financial firms are willing to spend a lot to reach people where they are. That’s because over time, those people can be worth a lot.

But if there’s one thing finance managers don’t want to do, it’s waste money.

Making sure marketing efforts pay off can be a challenge, given the competing metrics, an array of screens to consider, shifting consumption patterns, generational gaps, and new digital channels constantly arising.

At LinkedIn’s FinanceConnect conference in New York this month, executives from the likes of Oppenheimer, JP Morgan Chase, and AXA—as well as marketing and media companies—gave a hard look into ways they drive ROI by tying their content to specific results.

(Full Disclosure: JP Morgan Chase is a Contently client.)

Define goals and map to them

Marketers unabashedly love generating pageviews, social shares, likes, and other indicators of attention. It takes some work, though, to figure out whether being popular also contributes to the bottom line.

“It’s a long game … building that relationship with your consumers,” financial services media strategist Rod Kurtz said.

Before getting overly excited about the simple metrics such as inbound traffic, session times, or newsletter signups, institutions are taking steps to understand how those metrics can indicate that more revenue is on the way.

A financial firm may have to study, for example, whether a higher proportion of people who sign up for newsletters become customers than other folks, or whether those who sign up use more of the firms’ financial products.

If the answer is “yes,” then it makes sense to try to cost-effectively generate as many newsletter signups as possible in target communities.

A sophisticated marketer will also test different designs, language, and layouts, and run them against a control group. They can dig deeper to see if clickthroughs and newsletter-generated phone calls lead not only to inquiries, but also additional sales.

Done well, and iterated over time, the effort will pay off. The expense—the cost of creating and managing social and digital media efforts—will remain relatively stable, but as effectiveness increases, so will revenue.

David Edelman, a partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., said that by evaluating “the steps somebody takes to give a crappy evaluation,” a client was able to “create a map” of touch points—website, emails, branch visits—and improve customer satisfaction.

Track, dammit

A surprising number of efforts in social media, blogs, and elsewhere are measured crudely—or not at all.

Yes, web analytics can say how many referrals came from Twitter or Facebook, but how much more can be learned? Experts at the conference advocated adding tracking codes on social posts to measure what works for specific customer segments. Looking more deeply at session times, pages or videos viewed per visit, repeat visits, and other loyalty measures also help, especially if they can be mapped to goals, as noted above.

It’s also crucial to create taxonomies and tag content so that it can not only be accessed and elevated quickly for people trying to find it, but also parsed and categorized in measurement tools to create more full pictures of who is consuming content, and how.

One executive told me how his bank provides content to other financial institutions in geographies where they don’t operate. His bank then gets a percentage of the presumed value of new customers, if their signup can be traced back in some way to that content.

The executive’s team puts pixels (images or code that are invisible to the human eye) in their articles so the bank can then track people who access them. That way, when readers do take an action, his bank is more likely to know.

Facebook recently introduced tracking pixels to help companies understand whether a clickthrough they’re getting from a post on the platform leads to a conversation event like filling out a form, signing up for a newsletter, or clicking to receive a call.

While this kind of categorization helps any content manager, it’s especially crucial for financial firms, which often offer a multiplicity of complex financial products addressing very different needs—and whose content requires careful vetting and organization before being presented to customers.

And sometimes, the data individuals share can provide great clues for financial institutions.

“Train advisors to focus on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter,” said Frédéric Tardy, chief marketing and distribution officer at AXA. When someone updates their profile and shows that they’ve “moved from company A to company B” that alone can indicate they’re ready for some financial help, he said.

Not just numbers

Not every media effort of course leads to a direct sale, or has to. Sometimes the goal is simply to create brand awareness or impart a sense that a bank shares values, or is “cool” or fun.

Transamerica hired an artists’ collective named Mr. GIF to travel throughout the U.S. and tell visual stories on the bank’s Tumblr about positive community efforts in promoting diversity.

The bank was happy to see increased traffic and positive comments and show that it stood by values it promotes, executive Allan Gungormez told me. Sometimes that’s the simple return on investment you’re looking for. You just have to know your goals.

The post How Finance Execs Measure the ROI of Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content marketing success is on the rise, but that isn’t necessarily translating to bigger budgets.

According to Ascend2’s newest Content Marketing Trends Survey, 89 percent of respondents say they’ve had success with content marketing. Despite the good news, less than half of marketers reported that they plan to increase their content budgets—even though they cite lack of resources (53 percent) and budget constraints (40 percent) as two of the most challenging obstacles preventing marketers from reaching their most important objectives.

So, with these limited budgets in mind, what strategies and tactics can marketers employ to engage their audiences? The solution is to identify the strategies that are most effective while also being relatively easy to create.

The below chart from Ascend2’s report visualizes which content formats provide that sweet spot, proving effective while not very difficult to create. The bigger the gap between blue and orange, the better. As you can see, the most viable way to give your content marketing a boost seem to be focusing on articles, case studies, visual aids, and eNewsletters. These forms are the Goldilocks of content: not too difficult, and just the right amount of effectiveness.

Videos, white papers, and webinars, on the other hand, fall on the other side of the spectrum. They’re a lot of work, take time and resources to do well, and if they’re not promoted correctly, can fall flat and deliver a disastrous ROI. Bottom line: They’re only worth doing if you’re prepared to invest in them.

Take a look at Ascend2’s chart for more insight on doing your content right.

The post The Most Effective and Difficult Types of Content Marketing, in One Chart appeared first on Contently.

The post Content Marketing’s Future Is in the Hands of Two Groups, and They’re Not Talking appeared first on Contently.

In meeting after meeting, I run across content marketers who worry that their work isn’t being taken seriously by the rest of the company. I like to give them an analogy to explain why:

Imagine that you’ve just been named the CRO of your company, and you’re trying a lot of new tactics to grow the business—hiring new people, opening new offices, or changing the price of your product. After a month or two, it would be reasonable for others to ask how each move affected the company’s bottom line. If you can’t answer with quantitative results, you’re left to conjecture—which, in our data-driven world, is a fast track to getting fired.

Unfortunately, this is how a lot of marketers are treating their content strategies; do a lot of things, but then only look at the total end result. In a way, this is understandable; content marketing is still new, and there’s a lot of debate about the best way to measure its effectiveness. Marketers are rightfully wary of investing time in the wrong content measurement strategy, but I’ve found that many are shooting themselves in the foot before they even get started.

Time and again, we see that there’s a simple, overlooked fix that produces huge results: tagging content is the foundation for successful content marketing operations.

You may be thinking that you can put this off—perhaps content isn’t a company priority, your operation is small-scale, no staff to backfill—but having a robust taxonomy can solve all three of those problems. It helps you demonstrate that content is supporting key business goals, compare content’s value in cross-channel campaigns, and optimize what your staff works on. The simple act of using tags and tracking their performance is often enough to get content marketers a seat at the big table.

Creating an effective taxonomy isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either. It’s important to know that at the start, you’re going to be wrong, and that’s okay! To cover the basics, considering the following categories: topic, type of content (by length, media type, etc.), audience (potential buyers, info-seekers, advocates), marketing campaigns (if you have multiple messages in digital), and business themes/goals (leads, signups, awareness).

It’s that simple. At the end of the quarter or month or week, check the results. For those that have been riding their intuition, the results can be shocking: what you thought was a great recurring topic or format may turn out to be a dud, while another may be surprisingly effective. But the important thing isn’t what’s performing—it’s that you’re accountable.

That’s the only way content marketers are going to get the budgets to play with the big boys.

The post Tagging Content: The Simple Thing Most Brands Get Wrong appeared first on Contently.