-
Another Blog Post about Content Marketing
Fact: Content marketing is the new darling of social business and has dominated the conversation over the last few years. The numbers speak for themselves. There were roughly 50,000 blog posts and over 100,000 tweets just on content strategy in the last year alone.
When we published our first ebook in 2011 on Content Supply Chain, the new content marketing model was very early in its maturation and understanding.
· Experts, thought leaders and agencies were busy redefining it and its relationship with social.
· Only a small percentage wrote about content as a holistic process and it was too early for measurable results of a successful program.
· The hottest topic was the notion of Brands as Publishers.
· The biggest pain points were related to traditional publishing demands and the ability to create amazing and disruptive content.
Fast forward to today.
· Though it is still nascent, content marketing has matured and the level of sophistication has risen as brands (particularly large enterprise) sort through the complexities.
· The conversation is less theoretical and more experience-based. And there are lessons learned thanks to early adopters such as SAP, Coca-Cola and Intel.
· Content on content has become more holistic and process-based as companies begin to operationalize internally.
· It is still a long road to ROI, but there are some common value metrics.
· We’ve gone from Brands AS Publishers to Brands ARE Publishers.
· In addition to content creation, the biggest pain points are related to organizational silos and governance issues and roles.
As my colleague Kathy Baughman explained in her latest blog post, this month we are releasing a companion piece to our ebook, The Alchemy of Content: A Formula for Overcoming 4 Major Content Pain Points, to help marketers sort through this brave new world. Hopefully it will serve as a useful tool for marketers and content strategists. Stay tuned!
-
Content Quality
Content, content everywhere, but not a thing to read? OK, so it’s a little dorky to quote the Rime of the Ancient Mariner but if you take a critical look at some of the major brands’ content programs you’ll see my point. Facebook Pages, Twitter feeds, websites, YouTube channels and even customer communities are overloaded with content. Yet, what value is it if a branded community has 1,263 pieces of content tagged to my keyword—and none of them meet my needs?
It seems that some brands have been so busy feeding the content beast that they have forgotten about the old adage: garbage in, garbage out. Consumers are pretty savvy when it comes to content. They know what they are looking for—and what they don’t need. Having searches or links yield results that are out-dated, off topic and just plain irrelevant only leads to frustration—and that’s not good for your brand.During the last few years ComBlu, has developed our own point of view on content. Like other leading voices in the field we think it should come in multiple formats, be easy to find and easy to read. But our meter of “good content” goes a bit deeper. We encourage our customers to get beyond “share what you have “to” share what is needed.” Sometimes, turning what you have into what is needed can be as simple as refreshing statistics, flipping the results of a great study into an infographic or even taking a fantastic article for the web and changing the voice and style to be more social.
When helping a client to analyze its content holdings, I look for five attributes: relevant, accurate, engaging, complete and accessible. In this blog, I’ll take a closer look at relevant and accurate. Relevant content should be the easiest to develop. It is timely and answers a question or information need that has been expressed by your content consumers. Relevant content should also tie into your business objective—if it does not, then why are you offering it? The tricky thing with relevant content is that it has a shelf life. It is as important to remove content when its use or timeliness has passed, as it is to offer it in the first place. Nothing can make you appear to be more out of touch with your customers or the industry than out-of-date content. And when looking at branded content being offered, this is often the biggest “crime” you will see.
The next attribute you can use to evaluate your content is accuracy. When looking for accuracy, ask yourself if the data or information you share is still the most recent and latest thinking. Also, the content should be error free and communicate complete thoughts—be certain your information is correct and that you know the source. I recently worked on a content project with a medical group where everyone on the marketing and communications team quoted the same incredible stat. But when we asked them to include the source before they shared the information with their brand advocate community, they discovered the information they thought was based on an international, long-term study was really drawn from an undergraduate paper in the ‘60s involving less than a dozen subjects. It’s a funny story unless it’s your brand making the error—and it’s the media or a large group of your consumers doing the asking.
In my next post, I will cover more of the content quality attributes I use when evaluating content. Until then, please reach out via this blog or email at cnolan@comblu.com and share your meter for evaluating content quality. Ideally, we can turn this into a dialog from which we can all learn and benefit.
-
A Thumbs Up is A Terrible Thing to Waste….
Considering that South by Southwest® (SXSW®) is the “premier destination for discovery,” why wouldn’t ComBlu be first in line to participate in this cultivating event? That’s why we have sprung into action and developed three intriguing proposals for this year’s event. From content supply chain methodology to ROI and decision journey considerations, ComBlu (we hope) is focusing on the right topics that will interest today’s content marketers. But, we can’t do it alone. This year the competition for speakers is fierce with more than 3,200 proposals submitted. Here’s where you come in: whether you are heading to Austin or not this March, we need you to vote for the session that would be most of interest.
Act fast – the voting process ends on August 31! Simply visit the highlighted link below and give your thumbs up for the session of your choice (don’t forget to register – it only takes a moment).
Sourcing a Screw Informs Content Supply Chain
Today content is a critical component of enterprise value. It’s a key differentiator for brands that know how to source, create and distribute it effectively. Yet, few organizations apply the rigor of the supply chain discipline to the sourcing, creation, logistics, management, distribution and measurement of its content value. Companies that source raw materials for the manufacturing process apply granular discipline at every point in the supply chain and constantly seek ways to improve logistics and workflow, cut costs, find new competitive advantage, and get to market more effectively. This same approach applies to the content supply chain, which McKinsey estimates has a sunk cost of tens of millions of dollars in CPC, OEMs and technology companies. Panelists will discuss real world issues in putting a content supply chain methodology in place and give practical tips for each of the five basic steps of content supply chain:
1. Input
2. Creation
3. Management
4. Distribution
5. Measurement
Find your Princess Cake: A slice of content ROI
For years, the major baking brands all optimized their content to rank high for the most frequently searched term: “Chocolate cake.” But the real opportunity lay in optimizing for a term that was “own-able”…like princess cake. Building the right content measurement system can help brands find their “princess cake.” This is what happens when brands move beyond “activity metrics” and develop “value metrics” that show how to calibrate and optimize their content marketing strategy.
Panelists, Kathy Baughman (ComBlu), George Palatine (Allstate), Ekaterina Walter (Intel) and Rishi Dave (Dell) will share the innovative ways they are approaching content ROI. They will share tips for:
• Developing content KPIs
• Determining which content contributes to sales and which is a drag on performance
• Building a meaningful content dashboard
Right content at the right place and right time
Customers and prospects want different kinds of information at different points of the decision journey. The right mix of created, curated and social content differs at each point along the way. And, where consumers look for information and conversation differs at each point in the decision process. It all needs to be calibrated for different segments of decision makers and influencers.
Moderator Chris Silva (Altimeter Group) and panelists Ekaterina Walter (Intel), Joe Chernov (Eloqua) and Kathy Baughman (ComBlu), will help the audience understand how to deliver the right content at the right place at the right time. They will:
• Show how to map content along the decision journey
• Demonstrate the authority of different types of content along the decision journey
• Share how to gauge quality content for different points in the decision process
• Show how the content of three brands align along the decision journey
Thanks in advance for your support. Fingers crossed!!!
-
Social Marketing’s innovation curve: What lies ahead.
By now, everyone has seen this Infographic. Yes, it is complex and confusing and it should give you a headache.
The tools to manage and measure activity on a socially enabled web today are growing at substantial rate. Today, you can track and measure virtually any activity you would want to or deploy a tool to help you manage social campaigns of virtually any type. A tool or an app has been built to address almost anything you might want to do.
This explosion of social tool development, while innovative and necessary, does little to solve the bigger problems of social engagement, which essentially boil down to understanding why people act the way they act in a social brand encounter and then helping to facilitate the right engagement and then understanding in simple clear terms the value and outcome of that encounter. That’s the bad news. The good news is this will change.
If you follow any innovation curve in virtually any industry, things tend to get harder and more complex before they get simpler and easier. Why? Because, during the early phases of innovation, the processes and rules and infrastructure that will later support new inventions are getting built right along with what’s being invented. Solving any one problem on its own is the goal. Later, problems get grouped together and a new smarter solution addresses them all.
Take the Model T automobile for example. Building the car on a mass scale was one thing. Tough enough to be sure, but what about manufacturing and distributing replacement parts as those cars began to break down? Sourcing, distributing and stocking virtually every part on the car separately was likely a daunting, painful and expensive exercise at the outset, for the supplier and the consumer.
In the end, things improved. They had to for the fledgling automotive industry to remain viable. All the confusion, competing systems and supply chain gaps needed to be streamlined and refined and new smarter and more innovative solutions and options were layered on based on understanding and meeting customer needs.
Innovators moved from activity metrics (which parts are needed) to value metrics (when to make and distribute them so that inventories matched demand) as the industry evolved.
Making sure that the customer could get the parts they needed when they needed it AFTER they purchased the vehicle helped to ensure that that customer would buy another auto from that manufacturer rather than a competitor’s product.
Social Marketing today is going through the same innovation phase as the early auto industry (and every other one for that matter). It will get better. For the industry to survive and remain relevant to users, it has to! The focus will begin to move away from the tools and the activity to the experience and the value of the relationship we deliver.
As this innovation occurs over the next few years, look for consolidation to speed up and for tools become more expansive, robust…and simpler. Tomorrow’s Infographic will look drastically different than the one at the beginning of this post. It will be less about the tools available and more about content, relationship triggers and the decision journey. That’s what tomorrow’s tools will help to manage-relationships and decision journeys, not just data.
Remember, keep your eye on the prize of understanding what is driving your value metrics; what is moving your constituents through the decision process and what compels them to remain involved with your brand. The tools which help you manage your social marketing initiatives will get better, be more intuitive and easier to use, I guarantee it.
Knowing this, social marketing practitioners and their business peers need to start focusing hard on what makes good relationships work. You must now begin the process of blurring the lines between all of your brand experience channels and optimizing those channels for relevance and value.
Get ready, as the next few years will bring marketing innovation and opportunities you have never imagined were possible.
Filed under: Advocacy,Brand,Brand Advocate Identification,Brand Advocates,COE,Content Amplification Program,Content Marketing,Content Supply Chain,Identification,Influencer Identification,Influencer Marketing,Influencer Relations,Listening strategy,Measurement,Social Campaigns,Social Ecosystems,Social Engagement Strategy,Strategy,Technology,Thought Leadership
no comments -
Three New Tools to Help Brands Share their Stories
Logging in. Linking In. Checking in. Pinning. Posting. For a social media marketer, it can be oh-so-exhausting. But, like a good social media doobie, you do it every day: Leverage your social media toolbox to bring to life compelling brand stories and perspective.
At times, the experience can seem daunting and disjointed for both the content marketer and the brand ambassador. Sure, we all have stories to tell, but how do we find the most relevant content and ensure that you are telling a cohesive story?
Fortunately, we’ve found a few nifty new tools that aggregate your content from multiple networks, creating portals in the cloud that help you curate the best content and potentially cut through the never-ending stream of status updates. While these platforms will certainly evolve as they mature, picking a favorite requires a bit of trial and error to determine the interface and approach that’s most appropriate for your brand. Our three favorites (in order of preference) are:
1. Storify puts the social web into context by curating the best story elements and content to create an embeddable, dynamic and shareable story highlighting the best tweets, photos, RSS feeds and videos about a particular subject. Say bye-bye to the time-consuming chore of cutting and pasting text and links and downloading and re-uploading photos. Instead, simply drag and drop the content that best brings your story to life. Storify initially took off with journalists who used the tool to quickly identify social media activity related to their news and then “storify” the most relevant findings. For marketers, storify enables you to engage authentically and in real time with industry news and real-world discussions relating to your product, brand or industry. Case in point: Avis’ customer appreciation campaign.
2. Glossi promises to create beautiful, living magazines about you. Think of it as a web-based version of Flipboard, only instead of creating magazines of your favorite content, it brings together in one place your activity on five social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and Tumblr). Each profile features a profile image, a Facebook-like cover background and immediately below, your shared music, videos, tweets, posts, check-ins and links. It’s easy to reorganize (or even delete) your featured content. Right now, it’s in its infancy (you can request an invite to the beta), but given its ease-of-use, it will likely be embraced by social influencers and brands in the months to come. You heard about it here first! Case in point: Yoko Ono’s Glossi.
3. RebelMouse, like Glossi, is also new to the scene and, for now, by invitation only. Started by Huffington Post’s former CTO, Paul Berry, the RebelMouse platform consists of a personal bulletin board à la Pinterest that is organized by headlines with stories underneath. Right now, you can only aggregate your Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest feeds. Tumblr and Instagram are coming soon. Case in point: FastCompany’s RebelMouse page.
While all of these tools certainly help you aggregate your content across multiple networks, their true power lies in presenting it in creative, compelling new ways that are engaging to your advocates. In a single package, these services bring together the simplicity of Twitter, the visual engagement of Pinterest and the blogging capabilities of Tumblr. The rest is up to you: you’ll want to promote creatively and consistently as you would any of your brand’s social properties. As Martha Stewart would say, “It’s a good thing.” What say you? Will you be test driving any of these new content management tools?
-
Return on Content
Delivering content at the right place and the right time along the decision journey is the goal of most content marketing programs. Content is a consumable and shareable asset that has a different and distinct role at each point of the journey. Marketers need to understand each role before they can measure the impact and effectiveness of content assets.
The decision or shopping journey differs for B2B and big-ticket purchases than for consumer products or smaller priced items. For cost per clicks (CPCs), the shopping journey is shorter and often consumers have an entrenched consideration set that they brink to the point of purchase. Disruptive content is essential for breaking through and stimulating new ideas about purchase selection. The decision cycle for B2B and big-ticket items is typically longer and buyers often interact with the brand more directly and frequently.
Despite these differences, the steps on the journey are very similar. In our content supply chain practice, ComBlu uses a simple five-point decision journey, including:
· Awareness: Becoming aware of the brand, product or service with or without any intention to buy through brand communications, word-of-mouth (WOM) or independent discovery.
· Consideration: Researching and becoming familiar with a set of options that could fill a need or want. This is usually through a combination of online research, conversations, or face-to-face encounters either with a salesperson or at a retail store.
· Preference: Honing the considered choices into a short list of likely options.
· Purchase: Making the final decision and taking the plunge.
· Post-Purchase: Driving repurchase intent, as well as brand advocacy or WOM.
We use the following chart to help clients understand how to plan content type, channel selection and measurement along the decision journey. This particular version is for a B2B enterprise.
Once we understand the type and role of content along the decision journey, we can begin defining the right metrics suite for each point in the journey to track content performance and engagement trends. The following chart is a sample of a measurement-planning matrix that we use.
After we have identified the right metrics suite for the content mission at each point of the journey, we use the content module of our Social Performance Index™ (SPI™) measurement service to create a performance index for specific content key performance indicators (KPIs). This allows us to understand which topics, formats and venues perform and serve as a data point for refining the content road map and insights process of the supply chain. It allows the content creation team to be more efficient and effective when they create content and for the distribution team to calibrate their channel strategy. This approach also gives great insights into advocate participation and behavior, and can feed directly into a gamification engine that recognizes and rewards people who share, add context and create appropriate content along the decision journey.
Content marketing is a core function for today’s social business. A lot of smart people are working on new ways to socialize many of the core functions of the content supply chain. This approach to measuring return on content will evolve as the social discipline matures. How are you approaching content ROI? It’s an important discussion and one we’re glad to jump into.
ComBlu is sponsoring a free Content Masters Series beginning June 6, 2012. It’s four webinars that breakdown the content supply chain. For more information or to register, click here .Hope you’ll join us.
-
Everything Changes in an Instant
It certainly was a wake-up call for me last month when Facebook announced that it was acquiring the photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion. The jaw-dropping payout was buzzed about everywhere and made me wonder: is there more to the app than a way to share photos with family and friends? What’s more, is this a social tool we as marketers need to be paying attention to?
Turns out, the answers are “yes” and “maybe.”
Instagram is now the hottest thing since, well, Pinterest. In fact, it already boosts more than 30 million users and 400 million photos. Why is this thing suddenly so insanely popular? I decided to take it for a two-week test drive. Based on my experience, I believe Instagram’s success can be attributed to the following:
· It taps into the power of community. Instagram is more than a photo app; it’s a social network in and of itself. Sure, there are other photo-sharing sites (and Facebook does this too), but Instagram elegantly creates a community solely dedicated to sharing photos. Built into the interface are community features that keep you coming back for more. “Home” takes you to the latest photos from friends and those you follow. “Popular” serves us a fresh batch of the latest and most-liked pictures. “News” reveals what’s happening with whom you’re following and who’s following you. “Profile” enables you to find friends, review your filtered photos, edit your profile and configure sharing on social networks.
· It’s nostalgic. Digital may have killed the sharing of physical photographs, but Instagram taps into what we loved so much about them in the first place, with 18 filters that can make new photos look old or as if it was from a Polaroid. Cool artistic effects are a snap too, including the ability to add borders and blur backgrounds.
· It’s free. Doesn’t cost anything (not even 99 cents) and (for now) has no advertising. No wonder, the recently released Android app garnered more than 5 million downloads in just a few days.
· It’s simple. One click is all it takes for you to Photoshop your cute little puppy and share it with the world. And, for social media connoisseurs, there’s nothing new to learn—incorporating hash tags and @ signs to simplify connecting of themes and users. Facebook can’t do that (yet).
· It’s the right time. Smart phones have become the center of our universe, plain and simple. In fact, Pew Internet Project just reported that more than half of all mobile users have smart phones. Instagram taps into our desire to share our stories—anytime, anywhere.
Instagram is perfect for brands that want to reach the young, artistic and hip—its core demographic, and can authentically tell their stories visually. This explains, perhaps, why fashion brands are currently leading the way. Some brands that have embraced the platform and built quite the following during the past year include Threadless, Playboy, Red Bull and Starbucks.
Ford Fiesta in Europe, for example, launched a contest last fall inviting fans to post photos about the car using the #Fiestagram hashtag. Every week, prizes were awarded for the best photos and were featured on the brand’s Facebook Page and on digital billboards.
From what I’ve seen, the brands that are currently using Instagram truly get it. They understand that it’s not about digitizing your product shots, but rather telling and collecting stories and making personal and emotional connections with your customers. As is a best practice with any social channel, meaningful engagement requires interesting content—content that is updated consistently and frequently—and encourages participation from your fans.
Do you have any Instagram stories to share? We would love to hear how you use it or plan to use it in your marketing efforts.
Filed under: Content Marketing,Content Supply Chain,Engagement,Traditional and Social Media Relations
no comments -
Introduction to Building a Content Analytics Dashboard
Content Marketing is a hot topic. Everyone wants to know how they can deliver and amplify great content that their customers will engage with. Here at ComBlu, we’ve analyzed why marketers need to act like publishers, develop systemized approach to content ideation, creation, management and measurement. In short, brands need content a supply chain. Recently, we’ve flipped the problem on its head and begun to parse it in a new way. How would you measure the quality and engagement level of your content? This will be part one of a two part series that explains how to approach a content dashboard.
Know your assets
All content is not created equally. Before we can really begin to accurately measure content, it’s key to understand what content is being delivered to your customers at each step of the decision journey. Content that is created by the brand or its customers for the awareness, consideration, preference, purchase and post purchase audiences will each have different metrics associated with them. Make sure to get organized before you begin to build your dashboard.
Align your tools
A common mistake that we’ve seen over the past eight months is that brands jump to an analytics or dashboard planning phase before inventorying the tools that are available to them. Be sure that you review what data points are available to you. I know this sounds obvious but it is a very, very important step. Frequently, the awareness and consideration content is created and maintained by a marketing team, purchase content by IT or e-commerce and the post purchase content by the customer satisfaction teams. Just because the content is on a branded website doesn’t mean that all of the content owners are using a like toolset to measure or track the content. As the old saying goes … Measure twice and cut once!
Select your metrics
Once you have verified the tools and data points that are available to you, you can begin selecting which metrics align with content depending on where it applies to the decision journey. Your dashboard needs to provide insights further than the number of impressions that you’re generating.
Here’s a preview of what’s to come on May 8th, when Kathy Baughman will reveal part two of the series which will dive into detail on aligning your metrics.
Awareness Consideration Preference Purchase Post Purchase · Volume of social content· … · E-newsletter subscription· …. · Reviews or stories created· ….. · Average order size· …. · Participation in forums and discussion boards· …… How far along are you in creating a content analytics dashboard? What are some of the struggles that you have faced?
-
Crossing the social chasm
Why don’t fad diets work? Experts say that when dieting, people become fixated on what they eat, how often and the corresponding loss of weight. Once that weight goal has been achieved and the pants fit again, time to celebrate. No more hard-boiled eggs and plain boiled chicken breast. Whoo-hoo! Success! Let’s grab a burger and a beer, baby!
Five weeks later, the weight is back with a vengeance. Why is this? Simple. People place a short term focus on the tactics of the diet but totally ignore what is more important. That being a long term change in behavior. You see, it’s not just what you eat but how you approach the whole concept of health. It’s all tied together. You are tired. Don’t work out, you get stressed and you eat. That quick bag of Doritos as a lunch ain’t helpin’ things, neither is the diet soda for breakfast. Meals are things you get on the go. It is learned behavior that becomes engrained behavior.
Why is social marketing hard? Same reason as why dieting doesn’t work long term. It’s because, corporate teams have engrained behaviors which are focused on the short term. Campaigns and product launches. Beginning, middle and end; then onto whatever else is next.
Couple that mentality with a constant shuffle of teams and people through the endless re-orgs, attrition, upward and lateral movement of team members and focusing on anything long term becomes almost impossible…especially when we are measured and judged on the now.
Doesn’t losing five pounds by starving yourself this week sound better than losing 1 pound by taking the stairs instead of the elevator? More immediate gratification! Five pounds baby! One third of the way to my goal!
So how important is getting social marketing right? What impact will it have on the fundamental way we do business?
Social marketing is a disruptive model that will have far reaching ripple effects on corporate strategy that we cannot yet quantify. When Henry Ford refined and adopted the assembly line, when interstate highways were laid, when the light bulb became commercially available, the advent of the cellular telephone, the Internet, the growth in adoption of Twitter. These are all disruptive forces that no one fully understood or really appreciated at their outset. However, when taking the long view, you can begin to see how these things, well…changed everything.
Social marketing and ultimately, social business, which I define for purposes of this post as ‘collaborative engagement and dialogue which facilitate either common goals or common interests, done in ways that are transparent and communicated in languages, words and pictures we each understand and identify with’ are already beginning to change everything.
Remember the book Crossing the Chasm? The whole premise was around innovation and adoption of new ideas and process that allowed organizations, even big ones to become nimbler and allow their product and service evolutions to effectively go from early adopters to mainstream; which ultimately is the goal of every corporate entity, right? Organizations needed to adopt a process of change or fall into the chasm. IBM is a great example of one who made the crossing successfully. Zenith & Tower Records? Not so much. Ahhhhhhhhh, thud.
If your organization is still in command and control mode, if teams can’t or won’t be collaborative, if the silo walls of your organization are thick and without holes which allow for information, ideas and effort to pass through, you will never cross the chasm until a behavior change occurs-organizationally.
However, if you are attempting to evolve your business, over time, through new learned behaviors (which may be simply stringing a multitude of social initiatives or campaigns together to create the look and feel of what social marketing is really like) you are likely in either Step 2 or Step 3. See above chart.
Where ever you are, the important thing is getting through Step 2. Why is this? Well, social initiatives are based on relationships. Relationships are chaotic and ever changing. They are hard to plan around. They are not necessarily linear or fact driven. They are emotional and conversation driven. Try planning a traditional critical path around that. When you do, welcome to Step 2.
Everything you used to do doesn’t fit neatly into the new social model and that’s frustrating. The danger is giving up and going back to the old way of doing things (checking out).
However, when you learn to be truly collaborative with your peers, subject matter experts, customers and prospects that they aid in the planning and activities; outcomes and expectations magically align. The chaotic becomes more predictable. Welcome to Step 3, which is where you start thinking differently and acting differently and a new normal begins to grow.
Think about it. In any relationship, if you don’t approach the situation with mutual trust and respect, if you don’t listen and ask questions; if you don’t have a dialogue. Communication stops. Statements start. Trust evaporates. Usually, when that happens in any relationship, it ends badly. You are not being social. You are being obstinate.
Since social marketing is as new an idea as it is disruptive, we haven’t seen the full impact that these social ripple effects are having on organizations or industries. Therefore, few organizations, if any really, have moved into Step 4, but many are on their way! As more companies move across the chasm, this will force their competitors to follow suit. For everyone that makes the move, either by choice or by force, the new learned ‘social’ behaviors will eventually become engrained behaviors and that’s when social marketing becomes the norm and the power of social will be felt, understood and acknowledged.
Social is here to stay folks. That’s a fact. What the impact is, no one yet knows; only that it will be substantial. So where are you on crossing the social chasm? Is the cliff ahead of you or behind you?
Filed under: Advocacy,Advocate Identification,Brand,Brand Advocate Identification,Brand Advocates,COE,Content Marketing,Content Supply Chain,Deck,Engagement,Engagement Road Maps,Identification,Influencer Identification,Influencer Marketing,Measurement,Social Campaigns,Social Engagement Strategy,Strategy
no comments -
Content Marketing is the New Social.
I’ve seen the above headline a few places now and at first I sort of scoffed; after all, content marketing has been an accepted marketing practice for decades. In fact, some believe it’s been around since the cave dwellers.“Modern day” content marketing began in 1895 when the John Deere Company began publication of the first known custom magazine, Furrow. Today, the magazine has over 1.5 million circulation and is distributed in 40 countries.
Still, content today is a very hot topic. The popular content conference ConFab is sold out for the second year in a row and this year WOMMA’s WOMM U conference will feature many sessions about content including three keynotes. Last year, every time I looked at my email inbox, I had at least 20 appeals to look at a new social measurement tool. This year, content is the top topic of unsolicited emails. Recent ones include:The History of Content Marketing, Ad Age’s Content Marketing Best Hope or More Hype, Content: The New Marketing Equation, and B2B Content Marketing. In fact, ComBlu published an e-Book about content supply chain last summer.
Content marketing is not only a much written about topic, but it is one that is on the minds of many brands. As we chat with major brands about content, many seem to understand a few key things:
- Content marketing is not actually the new social, but social has fundamentally changed how content is consumed and shared. This means that organizations need to understand that people—not digital assets or campaigns—are the most important and compelling amplification channel at specific points of the buying decision journey.
- Equally important is getting the content mix right. Brand created, socially created and curated content all have a role. In fact, part of the log jam in my email box is info about new tools, new curation services, and content creation services. Yet, few lay out which type of content aligns best with different points along the decision journey. That topic resonates with most brands that I talk with.
- Content is a key asset of brand advocacy. According to Steve Knox, brand advocacy has two distinct levers: people and disruptive events. If done right, content can disrupt and break through the clutter. The challenge? What constitutes disruptive content? How do you grab the attention first of the people you want to amplify your content and secondly the people who receive and consume it…and hopefully keep the message pass along cycle active? Many brands claim that they have the “magical content” part figured out. My skepticism creeps in when they can’t back up this bravado with replicable processes and systems. They blindly create content without understanding the psychology of influence. Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence, gives valuable insights into the art of persuasion and the fundamental principles that drive human behavior. What’s missing from many content marketing strategies is the rewards structure that helps keep the content sharing cycle alive.
- Predictive modeling will become a more integral part of content marketing’s DNA. If the Content Marketing Institute is right and brands spend 25% of the marketing budget on content, then that content better perform. The wonderful thing about content marketing today is we can measure it more granularly than ever before. I can easily track which pieces of content lands the most people back at my site and what they do after they arrive. Today’s tools also allow me to follow the hops my content takes after it’s shared and compare the network effect of each individual. Better yet, I can also use content patterns and trends to predict buying behaviors. This allows me to better target new content and promotions at very specific points along the decision journey. I can also use a recommendation engine to suggest other content that I know has proven in the past to stimulate deeper consideration or preference, and even purchase. Once this system is firing on all cylinders, cost and inefficiencies can be pared from the content supply chain.
·
- Content lives outside of the walls of the WCMS and the digital properties it feeds. In order to take advantage of all the places a brand’s content lands, we need ways to connect disparate systems and view content dynamics across a vast social ecosystem. Connecting the dots requires the ability to automate the confluence of CMS, CRM and campaign automation. Understanding how people engage with and change content is just as important as creating content in the first place.
Content may not really be the new social, but certainly is part of the lexicon of a social business. Deconstructing old content models and operationalizing them to take full advantage of today’s social channels and tools drives customer affinity and impacts business outcomes. It takes storytelling to a whole new level.
