Content Marketing Quickie

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: We’ll tell you how to win over Gen Z with influencer marketing, and why you should. Spotify is opening the doors of its podcast kingdom, a little, to 3rd party developers. And I’m going to tell you, but you aren’t going to believe, the percentage of website content that NEVER gets seen by consumers.

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: Does your brand have a sincere purpose? Do you know how to convey it without losing the sincerity? Cause that’s really important. Get the latest on how B2B is consuming and producing content. And yes, you need technology, but that won’t get you nearly as far with customers as dealing in emotions.

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: Forrester shows us that in #B2B, there is definitely a literal monetary cost for getting content wrong. For all the talk it gets, we’ll show you CX just ain’t that great for most companies, and why. And, you’ve GOT to hear how much time small businesses are putting toward making a video. You won’t believe it.  

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: TikTok is apparently the social video beast that can’t be stopped, so we’ll tell you trends in it to watch out for. What are the best WordPress plugins for content marketers? And audio content you really need to be thinking about, but that is not podcasting. 

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: Martech stacks can be confusing. We’ll clear it up by listing the main components of one. We’ll tell you how many pieces of content it takes to get a B2B buyer to buy, and what kind. And 5 big reasons you might be unimpressed your website traffic and conversion rates.

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: Tactical tips on how to get your podcast discovered. New B2B video marketing statistics including when and how business types tend to watch. And some of the biggest wastes of marketing dollars made by small and medium businesses.

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: A new social media network, but one unlike any that’s come before it. An update on the health of Twitter. And 5 tips to measure how well your LinkedIn Company Page is performing for you. 

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: 4 things you’ve GOT to know about writing headlines that get clicks. How to organically boost the number of Instagram followers you have. And why sit around guessing? We’ll reveal what sponsored content costs on YouTube and TikTok.

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: We’ll reveal what people say are the most important factors for them to trust your brand. What happens when the cookies are gone and you can’t track people anymore? And the advertising & marketing world is seemingly uniting behind an effort to determine what content will and won’t be permitted. Yikes.

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: We’re going to blow your mind with how much brands are spending on influencer marketing, and for no visible reason. You’ll get some myths about SEO that are probably sucking up your time. And dystopia is right around the corner, Instagram is judging photoshopped artistic images as fake news and hiding them.

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: What you need to know to get the most out of your YouTube channel this year. You’ll learn the things you’re putting in emails that tick people off the most. And hear the three essentials to organizing your internal content team in a way that makes sense.

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: You’ll learn the platforms and kinds of content social media marketers are favoring this year. Influencers aren’t everyone’s cup of tea…in fact different people view them very differently. And comprehensive results of what B2B content marketers think works and what they’re struggling with.

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: If digital advertising is a part of what you do, hear the things you should be paying attention to heading into 2020. Find out how much additional revenue could be yours IF you maintain a consistent brand personality. And find out the preferred content making tools of the top Instagram influencers.

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: Trends in email marketing B2B marketers should be especially interested in. That darn Google search algorithm is changing again and we’ll tell you how to adjust your content, or not. And what are most brands doing, trying to take creative all in house and ditch agencies or turn to gig economy creatives?

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: We’ll tell you some ways to get the click through rate on your videos up, and why you should really want to. Learn the red hot marketing trend that’s predicted to be abandoned within 5 years. And B2B buyers state clearly how they want to hear about and communicate with vendors, but marketers say eh, what do you know?

In this week’s Content Marketing Quickie: The case for why B2B should stop debating podcasting and accept that it’s another vital marketing channel. How to spy on what your competition is doing with their content strategy. And the threats facing the digital advertising dominance of Google and Facebook.

In this week’s #ContentMarketing Quickie: Some interesting stats on how B2B marketers are using content in Account Based Marketing and what their biggest problem is. Hint, it’s a really familiar one. With especially younger consumers losing trust in paid influencer marketing, we’ll tell you what it is they totally trust. And what are the main things that get people to shell out and subscribe to information websites?

In an episode of the Content Marketing Quickie you do NOT want to miss: Is digital advertising a load of BS and ad platforms & marketers just won’t admit the truth? What should the real goals for content marketing be? And Google might be about to publicly shame you if your website doesn’t pass this test. https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/13230718600-5d15791f

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: Okay Instagram influencers, what now that your Likes might be completely hidden? The things brands must be doing right now to get ready for the Voice revolution. And, we’ll tell you the one kind of content B2B marketers can put out that will be more effective than anything else you can do.

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: The many ways big ad agencies are being threatened like never before. Why podcasting seems to be one of the very few mediums where ads are downright welcome. And, how to get your target audience to do what you want them to do using brain science!

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: You know what you want them to do for you, but do you know what influencers want you to know? The Content Marketing Institute’s latest figures on what high performing B2B content marketers are doing. And we’ll count down the top 10 buzzwords marketers are absolutely sick of hearing.

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: Almost half of B2B marketers think their content is ineffective - why? Welcome to the world of multi-touch attribution and finding out what REALLY influenced your prospect to buy. And shocking proof that marketers just aren’t as smart as they think they are.

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: Is there really anything you can do content-wise to get ready for the one answer from one source through voice search world to come? Some outstanding research on what B2B marketers think on a variety of topics – wait til you hear what they say about podcasting. And one state is about to make it a law you have to help users stop you from selling their info.

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: Conversations are content, and many brands are super not very good at having conversations. Video trends that teach us how to get more interest and engagement from viewers. And we’ll not only tell you the factors that lead to trust in social media platforms, we’ll tell you which ones are the most and least trusted right now.

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: Proof from brain studies that podcasts have very real and unique benefits for brands. How much say should publisher editorial teams have over sponsored content? And if you think you know TikTok, you most assuredly do not know who and what’s behind TikTok that’s driving its success. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/how-tiktok-holds-our-attention

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: Learn from an influencer marketing campaign disaster we’ll tell you about. LinkedIn changed their algorithm and you have to make these changes to adapt. And what a new survey shows is and isn’t getting good engagement for brands on Instagram.

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: They act like they’ve got it all down, but Adobe reveals how brands really feel about how they’re coordinating to get content done internally. What are you going to do when one of the most basic of social media metrics goes away? And there’s a technology getting adopted like crazy that’s going to call for much, much more content.

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: We know emotions drive people to do things, but we’ll tell you exactly how to do that. Adobe tells us what matters to and what chases off content consumers. And we’ll help you make sure your YouTube situation is optimized for SEO.

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: LinkedIn has some cool new resources for you marketers that will help you know what your target audience wants to get from you. You might think you know email subject line strategy, but we have some things you have not thought of. And hear where we are in the delicate dance of users wanting personalized experiences, but not wanting to give up the data that makes that possible.

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: If you find yourself tasked with making content for Gen Z, there are some things about them you really should know. Why drilling down and getting honest about your root problems must happen before you can make content that actually helps you. And see which of these glaring email marketing mistakes you might be making. Thanks Feedspot for including us in this great list! https://blog.feedspot.com/content_marketing_podcasts/

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: Listen to what the people say – these are their favorite and most effective formats for getting brand info. Are agencies hurting themselves by trying to keep all work in an office full of full timers? And here’s why podcast discovery is about to get a whole lot easier.

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: Reasons your CMO might be curled up in a ball on the floor crying. A little YouTube secret about video length and frequency you might not have known. And a look at the one part of the funnel markete

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: Hey advertisers, women have something they want you to know. What would happen if you just stopped making and publishing content? One company did and we’ll tell you what happened. And you’ll lea

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: Is the Facebook bait and switch on brands now happening on Instagram? You’re not going to believe this, Google’s trying a new social media network again. And just wait until you hear how many co

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of July 16, 2019.   -If the apocalypse was coming, you’d want us to tell you about it right? Well probably the best article I’ve read in a long time just came from Michael Stelzner at Social Media Examiner, who’s seen the future not for what he wishes it was, but for what it is. And if you’re a content marketer, and you probably are because I don’t get a lot of farmers listening to my show, you’ve got some serious thinking about the future to do. We’ve talk about this a little before and I’ve put out the warning before, but Michael says look, Google used to provide millions of answers to a search. But we’re moving toward a one answer world, which Wired has written will kill off the internet as we know it. Do I have your attention yet? With voice assistants, we’re moving to the conversational web, not pages and pages of links. You know who that benefits? Google. Not you. Michael points out Google already does everything it can to answer your question before any search results come up. They ran some tests and learned while people searched “social media” 1.43M times over 90 days and Social Media Examiner was always near the top, less than 1% of searchers clicked their link. So while you’re killing yourself to rank, it’s starting to not matter anyway. All your keyword obsession and authority building and SEO…you’re working your ass off in a system that won’t even exist soon. Google will be the provider of the one best answer. Without links to you to click, what do you think is going to happen to your traffic? Or worse, your new email subscribers? Basically, we’re facing an incredible shrinking audience for brands. And do you know the only way to make up for that and stay visible? Give money to Google for ads! Michael very honestly says all this has them thinking about what to do. And what they’ve come up with is not really even an answer, but it’s a few ways to maybe adapt. One is really focus on conversion rate optimization, because converting the fewer opportunities you get will be more critical. Start thinking beyond written word and shift hard to media; video and audio. And, think about the one thing Google can’t deliver…your own opinion. It probably won’t get searched unless you’re famous, but it is the content that’s truly unique to you. You may have noticed I get a little opinionated here myself sometimes. https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/death-google-search-traffic-what-it-means-for-marketers/   -How about I tell you what Vidyard & Ascend2 learned when they went poking around to find out what B2B marketers are doing? This is always fun because it makes you go phew, we’re doing that too or hey, that’s the opposite of what we’re doing! Which of us is right? Over half say their main reason for doing content marketing is to improve brand awareness. Getting more customer conversions actually came in second. 93% think what they’re doing is working, it’s lifting that brand awareness or whatever their goal is. Now overall, they’re most worried about increasing sales revenue, but if we’re just talking about content marketing, they regard the top challenges as brand awareness and getting better sales leads. Didja hear me? Not more, better. 91% say content marketing budgets will be going up, but before you go to some club and make it rain, ¾ of them said that increase will be moderate. What do they think is the most trusted kind of content? Most of them said case studies. 66% say the best way to get all this content marketing done is a collaboration of in-house resources and outsourced specialists, aw they’re talking about me, they are such sweet survey takers. Now we know how marketers love metrics and there are all kind of metrics you could get so, which ones are B2B marketers focusing on most?  Leads generated, but they like a good conversion rate too – preferably paired with a lovely red Merlot. But once they’ve had a lot of that Merlot and get real honest, they’ll tell you if content marketing is actually doing anything for them. And it is! 43% said sales revenue went up as a direct result, 35% for more lead gen and 18% felt more people were aware of their brand. Actually only 4% said they didn’t get jack squat for their foray into content marketing, and who knows what they spent or what they did. It’s not always our industry’s fault y’know. https://awesome.vidyard.com/rs/273-EQL-130/images/B2B%20Perspectives%20on%20Content%20Marketing%20Engagement.pdf?   -If you want to figure out how your content can play nicey nice with the algorithm on LinkedIn and get seen by more people, their Senior Director of Product Management Pete Davies has spilled the beans. Look at them all over the place. See what they want is more engagement from users because, let’s face it, a lot of busy businesspeople, when they go on LinkedIn, are lurkers and consumers and takers. They’d rather get audited than like or participate in a discussion. So, LinkedIn is focusing more on niche-specific professional conversations and not so much pumping up things that are already trending. So apparently when you open the app, bam, it’ll with greased lightning like speed look for newer posts from your connections and the different things you follow. You know what identifies those occupation specific conversations? AI! Because AI is the magic word that fixes everything! Davies says, “Members are more interested in going deep on topics they’re interested in. We see better conversation around niche ideas than broad.” Wait a minute, I’m going to write that down. People are more interested in the things they’re interested in. This statistic will come as no surprise. Engagement on LinkedIn newsfeed posts is usually just generated by the top 1% of power users. Which I think I am. Interestingly, the LinkedIn algorithm doesn’t favor any one format over another. So LinkedIn videos, while nice and probably smart, won’t automatically get more love. What the algorithm is turned on by are posts that out and out encourage engagement. It can pretty much predict not only how likely it is a user will engage, but whether others in that user’s network will engage too. Writer Amy Gesenhues suggests given all this, using hashtags, more niche ones vs broad, might be the smart play. But keep it to three or less or you’ll look like you’re having some kind of hashtag seizure. https://marketingland.com/linkedin-lifts-the-hood-on-its-news-feed-algorithm-to-show-how-it-ranks-posts-263180   -Lastly, and quickly, don’t forget about Pinterest if you want to inspire your customers. They say there’s been a 31% increase in searches for “inspirational videos” since last year, and active users are 54% more likely to say those inspire them more than videos they see on other platforms. So to help all that they’ve got an improved uploading tool, a refreshed gallery tab so you can feature your clips in one nice place, and a lifetime analytics metric – which is cool because remember videos don’t get buried in a feed on Pinterest, they keep popping up…like R Kelly legal charges. Recommendation algorithms are starting to help people find related videos too. Venturebeat’s Kyle Wiggers reminds you 59% of millennials have discovered products on Pinterest, which puts it right up there with Instagram. Pinterest users spend 29% more than non-users. And 90% of weekly users turn to Pinterest to make buying decisions, with 78% saying brand content there is “useful.” Don’t you want to be useful someday? https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/10/pinterest-introduces-new-video-tools-for-brands-and-creators/   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. If you are starting to conclude it’s not that bad, go ahead and subscribe to it. Ask your friends if they heard or been victimized by it yet. And we’ll have more next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of July 9, 2019.   -Your email list, love it, cherish it, nurture it and grow it. According to a McKinsey & Co study, it’s your best friend, and it’s 40x more effective at getting to your target audience than Twitter or Facebook. Yeah yeah, everybody, including all of us, complain about how much email we get, but it works doggone it. And Jason Aten gives us a few reasons why it works. First, gee only 3.8B use it, so it’s got reach to beat the band. And at least for now, email platforms don’t render you helpless against some algorithm that stops your message from going where you send it based on…I don’t know, some constantly changing who knows what? It can be customized, and those whiz bang marketing automation tools let you send things based on interactions far more than social media. And that’s good because email is also personal – it’s the home of direct one to one digital communication, especially where business is concerned. People might skip looking at their social channels for a few days, lord knows businesspeople don’t check LinkedIn or even get their LinkedIn messages, but people do check their email. Some studies say we check it up to 80 times a day. It’s permission based. Turns out liking a Facebook page means very, very little. It’s the lightest level of commitment someone can make to you other than completely ignoring you. But if someone gives you their email address, they’re serious about wanting to hear what you have to say. And finally, you get a level of analytics that’s far more useful to you than the assumptions and guesswork you have to engage in on other channels. You know who opened your emails, if they clicked on the links, what they did when they went to your site. That’s the kind of data that can really help you tweak things and get to closing faster. It’s also pretty easy to A/B test with email so the aforementioned tweaking can be accomplished. Now obviously there’s a right and wrong way to do email, and most of that revolves around the quality of the content you put on it and how you present it, but that content quality thing is kinda true of every channel now anyway. https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/this-mckinsey-co-study-shows-why-you-should-still-use-email-marketing.html   -I’m a writer, I love writing, but from what I hear the robots and AI are going to replace me. I’m doomed and it’s right around the corner. But aside from putting super nice people like me out of work, this notion of AI creating blog posts and other text assets comes with a sort of dystopian risk. A risk that actually might render the whole endeavor pointless. Here’s the problem. Everyone’s worried about the manipulation of people politically with misinformation, but what about manipulating the entire search engine ecosystem with garbage content? These systems are actually getting pretty good at auto-creating something that looks relatively authentic. Now apply that capability to a system that relies on a high volume of content with grabby headlines and keyword manipulation. The machines can crank out vast amounts of that at scale and clutter up the Interwebs beyond anything you’ve ever imagined. Limitless sites and blogs and ads. They’ll look legit because AI can make posts look like what we’re used to, complete with quote outs and the author’s photo – which may or may not be a real person. But if you actually read these things, they’re of no real value to anyone actually seeking answers to something. In fact, they count on people like you and me to NOT read all the way through the articles we turn up through search. But Mike, you say, can’t Google tell the difference? Well they’ve always tried to stop people from gaming search, and you can bet they’re working on this issue, but as of today, AI’s limitless deluge might just be unstoppable. Fractl’s Kristin Tynski says there are “massive implications” for SEO and they’ve actually been using an AI tool called Grover, not for evil, but just to test how good AI is at inhuman content generation. Rowan Zellers is the one who made Grover, and he says for now, you can still tell an AI generated post from a real one. They themselves can spot them with 92% accuracy. But the abilities will get better and when that happens, SEO consultant Mike Blumenthal says it will attract spammers en masse, and as a sad side note, it could drive the cost of grinding oceans of worthless content way down. That’s when people who actually make worthwhile content will be expected to do it for 47 cents a month. https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/2/19063562/ai-text-generation-spam-marketing-seo-fractl-grover-google   -Remember the classic scene from Seinfeld where he’s arguing with the lady at the rental car counter? He says, “You know how to take a reservation, you just don’t know how to hold the reservation. And really, that’s the most important part is the holding.” Well many businesses are that rental car company. They know how to get a customer; they just don’t know how to keep a customer. And considering how much it costs to get a new customer, the failure to keep happy customers is a truly epic and expensive fail. A Brightback study found 97% of large business leaders, from B2B, B2C and hybrid companies, say they’ve made customer retention a top priority. But some of those sectors are more serious than others. 68% of B2Bs are certain they prioritize retention appropriately, though 29% think they could be doing better. But only 44% of B2Cs feel like they’re doing a good enough job. But wow, check out small businesses. The Manifest found that 6%, only 6% are prioritizing keeping customers. Okay swell, well how do you keep a customer? Brightback found offering at-risk customers special deals is one of the top 3 most effective tactics in B2C. For B2B and hybrids, they like to test different discount offers when customers contact to cancel. They also like letting customers pause their subscription. But here’s where the real difference shows up. When it comes to customer retention objectives, most B2Cs said they want to improve satisfaction with better customer experiences and support. But only 14% of B2Bs are thinking that way. Instead they want to teach customers how to use the service and do better onboarding. Their baby’s not ugly, those stupid customers just have to learn to love it y’see. https://www.marketingcharts.com/brand-related/brand-loyalty-109085   -Lastly, and quickly, Gavin O'Malley tells us that Forrester learned B2B marketers think their website is the most effective tool for early-stage demand-gen effectiveness. More than digital advertising, SEO, sales enablement, partner enablement or events. Okay, just one problem. After Forrester looked at 60 websites across 12 B2B industries, they found nearly every single one lacking. Laura Ramos said, “Most B2B marketers continue to fail miserably when it comes to creating content buyers find interesting, interactive, or compelling.” The number one offense, making prospects dig through a crowded maze of offerings and info to maybe find what they were looking for. B2B sites love big fat websites that are complicated and full of jargon. It’s makes them feel like bigshots and make site visitors, um, leave. But those same businesses will tell you they have no need for content strategists or creators. Forrester recommends “internalizing the customer mind-set” and adjusting content based on that. Crazy idea. https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/337647/forrester-b2bs-think-their-sites-build-awareness.html   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. Big bump in downloads last week so thanks. You may have noticed by now I’m not really selling anything. It’s just news and some fun comments so maybe you’ll be cool with sharing it and telling people about it. Back next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of July 2, 2019. Happy birthday ‘Merica!   -Here’s you. “I’m a startup, brand spanking new, but I’m going to go after keywords that have been around forever and build up enough authority to start showing up in the top 5 organic results.” Here’s people who hear you say that, “Um, we’ll be happy to take all your money but…riiiight.” Jeremy Moser on Search Engine Journal is here to give you a big ol’ reality check, but also some helpful advice. Keyword driven content, probably the keyword you want to go after, that’s owned. Mega companies have been working them for decades and you might get there one day, but many, many, many days in the future. Long tail won’t work either, the big brands have that locked up. So unless you have unlimited money and forever, you might want to reconsider seeing keywords as your path to greatness. But you do need traffic, like now. Hey how about sharing links? How? You have little traffic to offer, so the only people who’ll take that deal are sites with as little authority as you have. Don’t despair, Jeremy tells us what to do instead…if you can. You need to generate fundamentally different, truly original and exclusive content. Like what Mike? Simmer down I’ll tell you. Like proprietary research results, preferably that hasn’t been done to death. Web surfers love these articles and you stand a slight, slight chance of a major player quoting it or linking to it. Another thing to try is having a super unique tone and use it to make your pieces provocative. Don’t just copy Gary V, do your own thing, but like that. Stand out. You’ll notice people gravitate to the same old names, mine is not one of those names dammit. Turn heads by being something other than what’s already out there. Lastly you can try interviewing big shots for round up articles. Sure it’s the same old people but if you can get them to talk to you, leveraging them should work. Of course, the reason they might not talk to you is, they know you’re just trying to leverage them. Pique their interest by asking something topic related, not who their favorite Care Bear is, that they’ve never been asked. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/keyword-driven-content-wont-rank-startup/312969/   -Many of you who are interested in content marketing are interested in it because you’re in charge of the social media channels for your brand. Your dreams came true, didn’t they? So just for you, here are the latest learnings from research done by Sprout Social Nathan Mendenhall shared. They talked to social marketers and consumers to get this stuff just so you’ll be better at your job. So listen carefully. Now I ran the social channels for the Oracle Social Cloud – talk about having to put on a good show – and I was shocked to learn 47% of social marketers think their #1 challenge is putting together strategies that speak to the company’s business goals. Huh? Then what are you posting? Your social strategy is derived from the overall content strategy isn’t it? Ohh, your company didn’t think an overall content strategy was needed. Quit! Quit right away and go somewhere else! 71% of marketers can give other departments info on the customers from the social channels. Hey, it’s called data. Why leave it on the table? 77% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand they follow on social, so while it’s getting harder, they’re still worth getting. And 67% are more likely to spend more with a brand they follow, so don’t just grow the audience, nurture the one you’ve got. Half follow brands to learn about new products or services. Stop! I know what you’re thinking. That doesn’t mean they want you to sell them on what you’ve got, that just means they want to be able to get info on their own. 45% of consumers are more likely to research something when a brand’s employees post about it. Man, employee advocacy is powerful but it is ever so tricky to do. The only time employees want to post about the brand where they work is when they’re super proud of where they work and of the products you make. So do that. 40% of social media marketers think private community groups will be more important, which duh, that’s where the social platforms are shifting anyway. And 63% of marketers think listening will get more important. Well how much more important could it be? This shows the focus has sadly been stuck just on what brands want to say. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/8-social-media-marketing-stats-you-shouldnt-ignore/557405/   -Well there’s always some Instagram news isn’t there? They announced they’re bringing ads to the 'Explore' tab. Now you brands can get your sponsored posts in that part of Instagram town. Anyone see a trend here? Anyone getting déjà vu? Facebook is turning Instagram more and more into an image of itself, itself being a dominantly pay to play ad platform. So you know what Explore does, uses those granny’s secret recipe algorithms to suggest things to you based on your activity. In the next few months, you’ll start seeing sponsored posts in the Explore feed, like it as a user or not. Instagram says they’ll be introduced slowly and thoughtfully…you know, the old “turn up the heat on the frog slowly so they won’t realize they’re cooking and jump out of the pot” technique. Rebecca Stewart reports on The Drum-pa-pum-pum, it’ll be easy for advertisers. They can do auto placements with a simple opt-in to start showing up in Explore, and they’ll get to be part of what’s hip and happening, and maybe get explored. Aliens, doctors, I’ve always resisted getting explored. Instagram claims 80% of users follow a business on the platform. https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/06/26/ads-are-coming-instagrams-explore-tab   -Let’s see, what else can we learn real quick? I know, how about how to get your blog to generate more leads? Christopher Jan Benitez says the hottest bloggers will tell you their biggest bonehead mistake wasn’t building an email list from day one. Did you know over 75% of people going to your site from search will never go there again? So you’ve got to capture that lead on visit 1. Christopher says do these steps. Get a self-hosted WordPress.org site. Register with an email marketing service provider. Make sure you’ve got software that makes really nice sign-up forms and lets you test multiple forms to see which converts best – if opt-ins can be personalized based on user behavior, even better. And use the right Wordpress plugins – a lot of them are hard to use and some don’t integrate with the MailChimps of the world. Basically, just put some serious thought and effort into this, because little email subscription boxes in the sidebar don’t get noticed. How about turning people who comment into leads by using a comment redirect? When they post their comment, they get sent to a page on your site that encourages signup. Or you can buy people off with incentives to sign up…like some exclusive content you’ve made that won’t cost you much, if anything. Or a content upgrade. Oooo you’re “premiere” level, aren’t you a stud now! https://bloggingtips.com/2019/06/25/how-to-generate-more-leads/   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. Please become a regular listener, make being aware and smart about your own industry a habit, it’s not that bad an idea you know, and we’ll see what happens next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of June 25, 2019.   -Who runs content at your company? Somebody? Nobody? Half of a person? Well if you’re thinking about how to staff up so you’ll have at least a reasonable internal content capability, there are some essential roles you should be looking at. And these suggestions come from none other than Robert Rose at CMI, who’s certainly been around and seen what shortcuts shouldn’t be made when you’re trying to get content done. He says why should content get any less thought put into roles and responsibilities than other departments in the org? How you resource content pretty much reveals whether or not you get it, and how serious you are about it. Robert says this content team should be built around the purpose, creation, management, and flow of content that creates value for customers. And these pieces should certainly be there in some form or another. Chief content officer or Content Marketing Director. Doesn’t have to be c-suite but they’re the leader and champion for content and the audience. And they make sure everything in all the silos connects consistently to the brand story and makes sense. Of equal importance, a Content Strategy Director who lead the persona work and experience design. They can also make clear what technology needs to accomplish. But then another kind of Content Strategy Director might do backend stuff like content processes, taxonomies, governance, audits, and SEO strategy. Next you might have a Managing Editor running day to day editorial and production flow. Then there’s a Production Director or essentially a Creative Director that makes sure things look great/are great. Although Creative Directors always seem to come from design world, today they need to lead cross-functional specialists, so personally, I think the days of Creative Directors coming from design and rarely from video and editorial or over. Robert’s dream team is rounded off with an Audience development manager, an Influencer wrangler, and a technical content manager to run the CMS, the DAM, marketing automation platforms and what not. You can now look at your current approach to content staffing and get a stomachache. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/06/core-roles-content-team/   -B2B, that’s where one bee tells another bee where the honey is. It’s also business to business selling and Marketing Insider Group rounded up some info you B2B marketers are probably going to want to know. The current figure is 57%. That’s how much of the buying has been done by prospects before you even get contacted. Kinda makes you think the content you have out there representing you needs to be on point. 57% is also the number of B2B marketers who said their biggest challenge is getting target audiences to engage, that where you content geniuses can come into play. And you might find an open door, because 30% of B2B marketers think content syndication is their most successful lead gen tactic. 56% have upped their spending on content creation and 60% make at least one piece of content a day. It’s not always video of course, even though by the end of this year 80% of all web traffic will be video. Of course, every time we look at snapshots like this, we also find some things that makes us go yikes. Only 42% of marketers are talking to their customers to understand what kind of content they need. Stupid customers, what do they know? We’ll make what we think they should want! Only 25% of marketers are highly confident they can quantify ROI, even though they will regularly ask for it without even knowing what they’re asking for. 38% of B2B sales people are so disenfranchised with marketing, they source leads by themselves and don’t even bother with leads that come in from marketing. And here’s my favorite, this comes from HubSpot, 18% of B2B sales professionals don’t even know what a CRM is. I’m a little lightheaded, I’m not sure I can go on with the next story. https://marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/30-sales-and-marketing-stats-you-need-to-know-for-2019/   -Nope, turns out I’m fine. I know you were worried about me. So let’s talk about video since it will be 80% of all web traffic. Those smarty pantses at Vidyard, very cool people when it comes to using video for business, put out their Business Benchmark Report on B2B orgs. And this info is pretty verifiable because they get it from first-party data from 324,000+ videos that were published over the course of a year. Here’s what we now know. Videos are getting shorter. The average went from 6.07 mins in 2017 to 4.07 mins in 2018. And maybe as a reward for that, audiences are watching longer. 52% watched all the way to the end, and that number goes up to 68% if your video’s under a minute. B2B video viewers are mostly watching in the middle of the week, Thursday seems to be the sweet spot. And they like mornings, between 9 and 11a. Now for all the talk about how mobile everyone and everything is, business videos are still overwhelmingly watched on desktop, 87%. Mobile is creeping up but dang, maybe those B2B videos shouldn’t be shot vertically. As for who’s making the most video, you’d think it’s the giant companies with over 5,000 employees and you’d be right. But coming in second are the little guys with 31-200 employees. What you mid-size companies are thinking, I have no idea. More small and medium-sized companies are using a mix of internal and external production resources, because they know they need a lot of content, but they want to keep the quality high. More businesses are getting serious about video analytics too, they at least want intermediate info. Well swell, but what kind of videos should you be making? If you’re like most, you’re making webinars, demos, and social media videos. B2B companies are also doing explainer videos, product videos, and customer videos. And, increasingly, businesses are waking up to the fact that sales needs video content to power each part of the buyer journey.  https://www.martechadvisor.com/news/interactive-marketing/vidyard-reports-increase-in-video-analytics-by-19-since-2018/   -Lastly, and quickly, there’s a whole new world of content marketing opening up and it’s apps for smart speakers. Jay Baer roles out some stats on just how big these Alexa’s of the world are being adopted. Edison says over 53M Americans now own a smart speaker. That’s an increase of 14M in one year, one of the fastest-adopted consumer technologies ever. Half of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. Look on your calendar app, that’s next freaking year! Beyond smart speakers, voice tech is getting embedded into…well, everything. Car, fridge, everything. Adobe found 91% of business decision makers are prepping big investments in voice, 44% will release a voice app this year. We will be talking more about this. https://www.convinceandconvert.com/voice-activated-content/why-the-time-is-now-for-voice-activated-content/   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. Okay, maybe you won’t share it without getting paid, but you can at least subscribe and mention it in passing as you’re talking to other marketing people. We’ll be back next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of June 18, 2019.   -You lucky Instagram advertiser you. You not only got something new, you got something that allegedly is going to make everything better and everyone happier. And it all has to do with how you and influencers mercilessly use each other. In the next few weeks you’ll be able to do Paid Partnership ads. That’s what it will say right there on the ad, Paid Partnership, and your brand name will be there too. It’s all about ad transparency, right? You see after all this time creating content marketing so that the public won’t be able to tell the difference between content and an ad, the platforms are having to make it clearer which is which. But what’s good about this is it lets you incorporate your brand content into their Instagram ad strategy. According to Instagram’s numbers people, 68% of people go there to interact with creators, so now brands can use those digital artists in an advertising environment that includes all those Facebookie targeting options. Now your Paid Partnership post can go beyond your followers and you’re your influencer’s followers, allowing more discovery of both. See how that works? Agencies like Scott Harkey’s OH Partners dig it. Brands like Liat Weingarten’s Old Navy dig it. You know Instagram has some pretty unhappy influencers, and they’re hoping this makes them a little happier. And isn’t that what we all want? Just to be a smidge happier? What made them unhappy was Instagram taking away the like counts from posts. So this could be a way to appease them with additional reach. I don’t know. Influencers are a vain lot and they get off on big like numbers. Anyhoo, this Paid Partnership ad option will also be available in Stories in a few months. https://www.adweek.com/digital/instagram-advertisers-can-now-promote-creators-organic-branded-content-posts-as-ads/   -How important is mobile? Well put your phone in the driveway, run over it with your car, and see how you feel. That’s how important mobile is. Vince Nero reports that Siege Media just put out some stats to back that on up. 1. Browsers and apps have to be really fast on mobile. After all, the expectation is “I’m on mobile, I’m on the go, I’m so busy and important I need this site to load instantly.” Think with Google says 53% of mobile users are gone if things don’t happen in 3 seconds, probably sooner. 2. Despite more power and big beautiful monitors, nobody wants to sit down to a desktop anymore. ISSUU, I’m not stuttering, all those letters are in their name, shows mobile traffic has a 125% growth rate. Desktop has a 12% growth rate. Wah wahhh. 3. The most value is in video content, especially videos that make you feel something. It’s not just me, Animoto did a study showing 29% of men and 23% of women are likely to comment on emotional videos. 4. Think with Google also found people interact twice as much with brands on mobile than anywhere else. And 5, you should use social to listen and see what people want on mobile from you. That’s why I keep the Content Marketing Quickie quick…cause you’re on the go! Go, go, go! Very busy, very important. http://exclusive.multibriefs.com/content/5-mobile-content-tips-backed-by-statistics/marketing   -Aw, what’s the matter Skipper? You’ve submitted 498 guest posts to influential sites and got turned down by every single one of them? You know why? Because you know and they know that you’re just trying to use them to get authoritative links back to your site, a site which is probably much less authoritative than theirs because otherwise you wouldn’t be trying to get on it. Adam Torkildson says don’t feel too bad. There’s nothing wrong with trying to guest post, just be cool about it and understand how things work. These sites got to be the coveted authoritative sites that they are by making sure the content that goes on it stays high value. Now I know you think every word you write is pure Shakespearean gold cuddling the knowledge of the great minds of our time like Newton, Hawking and Carrot Top, but…maybe not. Probably not. When you send in your 498 articles, they’re thinking is this real difference-making content? Will it actually hurt our influence? Is it something new or just the same old rehash and bringing up the rear thought leadership? Literally, you won’t be able to pay them to harm the influence they’ve worked so hard and spent so much time building up. Adam’s tips to give yourself at least a shot. Don’t sell yourself in the article, don’t put 12 links to yourself in it. And as mentioned earlier, add real value with something fresh. If you aren’t providing that, you aren’t needed. And lastly, make sure you are writing for the site’s niche audience. You’re not submitting the same article unedited to 20 different places, are you? Well stop it. https://socialmediaexplorer.com/content-marketing-2/having-a-hard-time-guest-posting-youre-not-alone/   -And lastly, what kind of Quickie would I be if I didn’t include some of the more pertinent info for digital marketers that came out of the Mary Meeker annual Internet Trends Report? They call her the queen of the Internet y’know. Well this thing is 333 slides long so here we go…slide #1. Wait, don’t hit stop and go find an NPR podcast, I’m not going through all 333. Just the fun ones. Internet ad spending was up 22% in 2018; most of it’s on Google and Facebook, but Amazon and Twitter are growing their share a bit. 62% of digital display ad buying is for programmatic, and that number is really headed up…up and to the right. It’s costing more, a lot more, to acquire customers. Now we all know that sucks because if it gets too high, it’s really not worth the long-term revenue that each new customer provides. Mary says things like free trials and unpaid tiers are going to play a much bigger role in customer acquisition going forward. For instance this podcast is free, and it’s my devilish plan that it will make you listen to more episodes which will also be free so…I don’t seem to have much of a business plan here. Dangerous waters ahead for targeted advertising thanks to regulation and privacy issues. Nobody knows where all that is going to land just yet. Plus, although more people are seriously starting to worry about it, Americans are spending more time with digital media than ever: 6.3 hours a day in 2018, up 7%. Mostly on mobile. So, if you make some half decent content, the people are definitely glued to their smartscreens. Time spent on YouTube and Instagram is going up most. Digital is now 28% of all video usage time, so TV’s share is down to 72% cause I math. Monthly active podcast users went from 22 to 70m since 2008, with the sharp rising trend hitting right before 2014. Images rule when it comes to content and how we communicate, we are basically regressing to grunts and cave drawings. And lastly, I just have to say my heart goes out again to all my friends in my former industry of radio, which continues to get screwed over royally by advertisers. When you look at TV, desktop and mobile, the ad spend share pretty much matches up with its usage by the public. But look at print, and even though only 3% of media time is spent there, advertisers love it anyway – giving it 7% of ad spend. Now look at radio, it represents 12% of media usage, but advertisers couldn’t care less. It only gets 8% of ad spend. Maybe ad buyers are still just pissed they didn’t win concert tickets as a kid. https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/11/18651010/mary-meeker-internet-trends-report-slides-2019   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. Subscribing will make it easier for you to get. Course if you use the Apple podcast app, they’ll stop counting downloads if you don’t listen for a while so…use Spotify. Back next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of June 11, 2019.   -You’re probably getting ripped off. That’s right, if you buy digital ads for your company you are definitely getting ripped off, it’s just a matter of how badly. Cybersecurity company Cheq just released a study that shows advertisers will blow more than $23B globally to ad fraud this year alone. For every ad dollar spent, 10-15% of it winds up in the pockets of companies who are actually supposed to protect you from digital ad fraud. Now if you’re Polyanna and think it couldn’t possibly be that bad, you’ll embrace another study that was done using the exact same methodology by the Association of National Advertisers. They say yeah, you’re getting robbed, but it’s only costing advertisers $5.8B, and that’s down from 2017. You’re supposed to feel good about that. But the fact that two studies who approached it the same way came to two wildly different conclusions only underlines the truth…digital advertising is such an in-the-shadows, slight-of-hand shell game ecosystem that you can’t get to the truth. And when you’re stealing money from people, the last thing you want is for things to be clear and trackable. That’s just a little tip for all you amoral kids from Uncle Mike. Guy Tytunovich is Cheq’s CEO, and he used to be with Israeli intelligence by the way, he said, “We wouldn’t have run this research if it wasn’t for other research pieces we strongly disagreed with and, in some cases, felt were inadvertently misleading.” Cheq found up to 30% of digital ads are affected by fraud, so that’d be around 21T per year. It’s actually campaigns with cheaper CPMs that get hit the hardest. And did you know for every impression served, at least 20 different companies have their hands in the digital ad ecosystem pot, all taking a cut? If nothing is done about ad fraud, and don’t hold your breath, it’s going to reach $26B next year, then $32B by 2021. Roberto Cavazos, a University of Baltimore economics professor isn’t holding his breath, He says, “There’s little regulation or disincentive against fraud.” And the final nail in the coffin is, marketers don’t seem to care! They paid a boatload of the company’s budget to buy digital ads, they checked the box, and nobody seems interested in whether they got what they paid for. So I guess everybody wins? https://adage.com/article/digital/report-ad-fraud-hit-23-billion-isnt-going-down/2174721   -Well I hope I didn’t leave you too disillusioned about digital ads in that last story but if you’re a publisher, hang onto your headgear because it gets worse. You know about tracking the users of publisher websites, right? Advertisers will pay the publisher to get personal info on the site’s users, then they’ll combine that with data they buy somewhere else to form these pretty intense profiles they use to follow people around the web and target them with relevant ads. The idea is that this makes the publishers a lot of money so they can continue offering their content free to readers, who of course are paying, they’re just paying with their privacy. It’s a nice idea but it’s not that true. New research found selling out their readers with this kind of tracking actually only gets publishers a whopping 4% more revenue than good old-fashioned ads based on context. That works out to $.00008 per ad. Wow, somebody’s getting a new coffee maker for the break room! This isn’t exactly breaking news, it’s long been doubted the user data selling and reader tracking helped much. So it boils down to the ad tech industry getting a huge favor from publishers while all publishers get is a slimier reputation with their users. How big of a favor? Some earlier studies found advertisers pay up to 500% more for targeted ads than contextual ads. Doing a little math here, if content publishers only benefit 4% of that, carry the one, calculate out pi to 7 decimals…hey where’d that other 496% go? Some people point out that tracking even demonetizes publisher audiences because their readers are simply followed to lower value sites where they can be targeted with ads for less. And as if all that weren’t a big enough kick in the pants, guess who’s accountable for privacy and data protection laws. That’s right, the publishers. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/research-shows-publishers-benefit-little-tracking-ads   -Alright enough about all that, let’s talk influencer marketing. What if you wanted to do influencer marketing, but there were no influencers out there that are just right for what you do? Craig Coffey had that problem. He’s director of marketing communications at Lincoln Electric. This may shock you, but there just aren’t that many influencers with large established audiences around welding. By the way, if you want a solid income and job security, let me be the first to propose a prosperous career in welding to you. Only .01% of the world’s population knows how to do it. I’m not kidding. Because of that, Craig knew it didn’t really make a lot of sense to try to become the biggest influencer in and amass a huge welding audience. But that didn’t mean the company couldn’t become the kind of influencer they needed but couldn’t find. They thought broader than welding and established Spring Make, an event that brought together not just welders, but makers of all kinds, like woodworkers and blacksmiths. Score. People came out of the woodwork – ha, see what I did there – to not just talk about what they do, but to broaden their maker skills into these other areas. There were classes in making things, but also classes about how to make something else…content. And if they’re out there making content, who are they going to see as the leader in the space? That’s right, Lincoln Electric, who put on the event. In fact, Spring Make quickly became a content brand itself, separate from Lincoln Electric. And why not? The event generates enough content to carry them through an entire year. If you do big events but you have no content strategy for it and aren’t getting any content assets out of it by the way, we need to talk. Needless to say, Craig’s happy because they made themselves the influencer in all things maker. Craig throws these fun stats at us. 40% of customers are using ad blockers. 70% of millennials prefer products endorsed by non-celebrity bloggers. And influencer marketing delivers 11x higher ROI than traditional marketing. Write it in lipstick on your mirror, “You can be the star you’re looking for.”   -And lastly and quickly, you know I’m always blabbing on about how content should make people feel something. Anything. If it doesn’t, all you’ve done is add to the meaningless noise out there that makes life harder for everyone. Well new research out of Finland says not only can you make people feel emotions, those emotions physically show up in different ways in the body. In other words, they’re so powerful they are literally felt. Ever have your heart broken? That happened in your mind but it’s felt in the chest. Same with stress, which is felt in the neck, and anxiety which shows up in the stomach. Of course, different people process emotion differently depending on their tolerance and history, but still, this is something to keep in mind for those of you who still think the content you make doesn’t have to play to human emotion. https://in.mashable.com/science/3966/decoded-why-people-feel-emotions-in-their-bodies   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. If you think it was any good, and if you think good content should get a little help, a review or a subscribe would be great. Let other content marketers know about this mess. Be back next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of June 4, 2019.   -Wanna learn some stuff about social media? Gee that’s swell, because Social Media Examiner just put out their 2019 Industry Report and these are always nuggets of information that are either reaffirming, or downright hard to believe. Despite warning signs and storm clouds, social marketers don’t care. They’re very bullish on it, even moreso than last year. They think it’s doing everything they want it to do: exposure, sales, thought leadership, you name it. The big 5 will likely stay the big 5, in order they’re using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Twitter? Really? Yes Twitter! It’s the 6th most-popular social platform for American users but #3 in the hearts of marketers. In fact, over a third plan to increase activity on Twitter even though usage has fallen 4 percentage points in 2 years. Anecdotally, I was following the Twitter hashtag during Digital Summit Atlanta and was stunned at the lack of participants and activity on it compared to just 5 years ago. On the other side of the coin, Americans are way more likely to use Pinterest and Snapchat than social marketers are. Facebook is de-prioritizing the News Feed and de-prioritizing publisher content, but social marketers do not care. 51% plan to increase their posting throughout this year. What Facebook is switching to is something consumers love, messaging. But you can count on social marketers to zig when the world is zagging. Only 39% of them plan on increase their Facebook Messenger activity, which is actually DOWN from 2018. But here’s something they’re getting right. They know they have to pay Facebook to get any reach. While 51% are increasing organic efforts, 59% are upping their Facebook ads game. So, in summary, it’s like social marketers feel like they just figured these channels out so they’re operating as if the platforms and user behavior don’t change. https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-statistics-2019/   -Gonna take a shot in the dark here…you do lead generation campaigns don’t you? What do you hope to get out of that? Yeah, I know, leads, I’m not that stupid. But even SmartBrief wanted to know more about what the expectations are so they asked marketers and advertisers things like what do they see as "typical" success for lead gen campaigns. Over 30% want an average conversion rate of 10% or less but over half want 20% or less. Some wanted 50%+, they’re like the girl who turned into a blueberry on Willy Wonka. If you don’t test your landing pages, you are not alone. Only 24.5% do that "Always" or "Often". 16% "Never" do. How many fields do you make users grind through on your forms? 93% use 6 or less. The experts say you should shoot for 5 tops. Now to talk about my thing, content. Marketers are using all kinds of it. Tops on that list are white papers, ugh, videos and infographics. Most think promoting a video will deliver the strongest conversion rate. But at the same time, they put a lot of stock in the design, layout and copy of the landing page, feeling like that’s got the greatest impact on conversion. https://www.smartbrief.com/original/2019/05/survey-report-landing-page-habits-marketers   -Wow Andreesen Horowitz analyzed the living hell out of podcasting. I mean it’s a really in depth and thorough look at where things stand today. Who didn’t come out looking so good? Apple. 60% of podcast listening happens there and that app comes pre-installed on phone but has Apple been good for podcasting? Could be better. Like tons better. Even though the podcast app is in 900M iPhones worldwide, it only has 27M monthly active users in the US. That’s um, quite a gap. The other way Apple’s botched it is they don’t monetize podcasting on their platform at all – that’s made it hard for advertisers to jump in harder and heavier than they have. Yet another way Apple’s blown it is the metrics are non-existent. And of course, a lot of people think the app sucks. Overall, it paints a picture of Apple as a lead weight around podcasting’s ankles. In terms of the app, the study says “Users seldom feel passionately about the podcast app they’re using. The content is the core element users are engaging with.” That might be why Spotify already has 9% of podcast listening and iHeartRadio and Pandora are scoring from promoting podcasts to the large existing user bases they already have. Then there are what Andreessen Horowitz describes as “long-tail” listening apps, like Stitcher or Breaker, who are competing based on features users just like better. Advertisers are in and are largely very happy with the results they’re getting, but podcasting’s monetization is still lacking. Again, ad buying is manual and tedious, not like it is on Google and Facebook. And it needs those metrics and targeting tools. The report says, “The current state of monetization in podcasting mirrors the early internet: revenue lags behind attention.” But make no mistake, companies, probably not Apple, will figure these things out and podcasting’s monetization future looks very, very bright. http://www.insideradio.com/podcastnewsdaily/new-report-blames-apple-for-difficulties-in-making-money-from/article_dd49b3e8-8233-11e9-919e-5778e1456954.html   -Well earlier I told you how doe-eyed in love social media marketers are with Facebook, no matter what. So this story I assure you will not matter to them. But an eMarketer report tells us users are spending less time on it. And they say time spent on Facebook will go down even more or at best, stay flat for the foreseeable future. Do you spend 38 minutes a day on it? Because that’s the average and that’s down 3 minutes from last year. That may not sound like much unless it’s your 3-minute video that didn’t get seen. What’s going on? Why is interest going down? Several reasons. One, the scandals, the privacy issues, it all just keeps giving the brand impression that this is a company that’s learning to fly while it’s already 30,000 feet in the air and we’re all sitting there in coach hoping they get it right. Analyst Debra Aho Williamson also says the News Feed changes haven’t helped, because there’s less publisher content and apparently, your friends and family just aren’t that fascinating. Teens especially seem more than willing to not go on Facebook, and our lives depend on what teens think. So, the numbers aren’t great, and you know what you do when you have bad numbers? You hide them of course; this is the generation of transparency and authenticity. Facebook recently stopped disclosing metrics for its main app. The good news for them, Instagram’s fine. Usage should rise through 2021. https://mashable.com/article/facebook-use-declining-emarketer/   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. Subscribe, review it, let me know how to make this better for you…sounds like my honeymoon. And as Johann Sebastian said, I’ll be Bach next week. I’ll be…because that was his last name.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of May 28, 2019.   -Some people are mad at Mailchimp. People get mad sometimes when change happens. Then some people get mad when they need change at a toll booth and can’t find any. It’s a real no win situation. But Mailchimp wants to be more than just an email marketing platform now. They want to serve small businesses in just about every way small businesses need to be served. They teamed up with Square to offer shoppable web pages. They broke up with Shopify amidst rumors they’re going to develop and roll out their own ecommerce platform. They’ve introduced a CRM, a tool to build websites including buying your domain, and, here’s the part that has some people angry, a new price structure in which you’ll get charged for all your contacts, not just your subscribed ones. I mean there’s some grandfathering for people already on plans but nothing last forever grandpa. Darcy Kurtz at the chimp says, “We have the permission and credibility to play in this space.” The CRM gives you what you’d expect, you can store data there, see your customers and prospects, segment those peeps for messaging, even see a customer’s lifetime value based on engagement data. Gee, I wonder what my lifetime value is. Other tools “smart recommendations,” which makes recommendations based on user data using…the magic phrase everyone’s required by law to use now, AI. You can now even retarget with Facebook and Instagram ads like you already could for Google. But wait there’s more, it’s also a social media manager, you can do your organic posting on Mailchimp. As for the bacon, the green, the scratch, even the free version comes with the CRM, smart recommendations, starter templates and automations. Then if you want custom branding and a/b testing it’s $9.99/month. Other plans go up to $299.99/month, wow, that’s less than $300, which gets you phone support and advanced segmentations. https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/mailchimp-debuts-a-crm-platform-to-help-small-businesses-act-like-enterprise-businesses/   -How are Millennials going to feel when we stop talking about them? Well they’ll probably feel like Boomers – getting shoved closer to the “they don’t matter” column. But they better get their existential selves ready because now the talk has started to shift to Gen Z. Gartner studied them like little lab rats raised on the Wiggles and found out cool things like they’re 1.5x more likely to follow a brand if that brand puts out content that boosts their image. That’s right, you’ve got to pay attention to their image, because while other generations worried about fitting in, Z’s are savvy self-branders and self-marketers. Plus, they are true digital natives, so they aren’t awed by technology just for the hell of it being newish, they expect the Internet and social media to serve their perceived needs. 81% of them follow friends online but guess how many follow brands. About 30%. When they do look at social content from brands, they want it to inform and inspire them. Again, they take social media seriously, but mostly as a way to project the image of themselves they want to. Lots of likes on their posts makes them feel better. So let’s get back to that informative and inspirational content. It’s got to be that if they’re going to share it. The study says it has to interest or excite them; make their friends laugh; or express how they’re feeling. You can get them as loyal customers, but they’re going to drive that relationship, not you. But to do that you have to find them, which isn’t easy because they change social media apps like Disney changes their classic movies. Some other things that will help you make content for them, root it in their top personal values, which are identity, creativity and passion. And you can capture attention by taking a stand, as long as they agree with that stand. Finally, there’s not that much difference to them between their digital and real worlds, so you need to meld the two as much as you can. https://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=241255   -If Google’s SEO Myth Busters podcast was willing to tell you the top 3 SEO factors to focus on, would you want to know what they are? Fine, I’m going to tell you thanks to Webmaster Trends Analyst Martin Splitt. Factor #1 – Your content serves a purpose for the user. It’s about something they need or want. Use phrases people would use when searching for that thing, which means you B2B people should calm down with the jargon that impresses only you and talk like a non-tech management level person would talk. Factor #2 – Meta Data. Ooo now you’re getting excited aren’t you? This is what creates the little snippet that shows up under your entry in the search results. By itself, it’s not a ranking factor, but what you put here will convince people to click your entry, or not. Make sure the titles and meta descriptions are unique and specific about that page, copy and pasting or default content is not such a good idea. Factor #3 – Hopefully, you feel the need, the need for speed. How fast your pages load isn’t more important than other things, you can be slow and still rank well – that’s how I got out of high school, but it matters. Best way to approach it is it’s an SEO factor, but it’s got nothing to do with the ranking algorithm itself. There you go, tips right from the Google’s mouth. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-3-google-factors/#close   -And quickly squeezing another one in, a survey by Yum Yum Videos says 87% of small business owners are quite happy with their ROI from video marketing. Use of video marketing is still going up. 21% are going to do it for the first time this year and those who’ve done it are likely to invest in it again. In 2019, unless these owners are lying, 67% will make more than 3 videos, 34% will make 3-6, 19% will make between 6-10, and 14% of Quentin Tarantino wannabes will make more than 10. Great. What are those videos likely to be? Well since 95% of online consumers have watched at least one explainer video, that’s the top choice for 80% of businesses who believe it also brings in the best ROI. They’re going to put these videos mostly on social media, specifically, in order, YouTube, Facebook then Instagram. The most small business owners, 66%, said it’s video that will have the biggest impact on their strategy this year. But just in case you hate videos, some other formats made the list, including eBooks, infographics, blog posts, and yes, podcasts. https://smallbiztrends.com/2019/05/video-marketing-roi-statistics.html   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. This has been going on long enough that I can ask you to take a minute and review me on whatever platform you listen on. I won’t even tell you what to say. You’re a content marketer, you’ll think of something. Back next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of May 21, 2019.   -If you’re using a creative ad agency or you are a creative ad agency, you might have some kind of emotional reaction to the thoughts of ad veteran Paul Arnold. Be careful when you invite someone to speak at a conference because they just might speak their mind. Paul says advertising, as it is right now, is on a “suicide” mission to wipe itself out. Hey I bet that’s not what you wanted to hear. You wanted to hear you’re all doing a great job. But the way he sees it, some things are happening that are creating an existential threat. No, it won’t happen as fast as Thanos snapping his fingers or the dinosaurs looking up and saying, “Hey, what’s that falling out of the sky,” but more of a slow decay kinda thing. First of all, he’s seeing clients not trusting their agencies as much as they used to, and creativity getting progressively devalued. A lot of clients are out there feeling “let-down,” and right alongside that, believing that creativity isn’t that hard, that anybody can do it, and that they know how to do it better than any collection of entertainers and journalists. That’s why the lesson Intel learned about taking everything in house is being fully ignored and in-house operations continue to be built. And that content will mostly be inward-focused, company leadership pleasing, customer ignorant and likely – epic masterpieces of utter boredom, sameness, and safety. Paul goes on to say clients raising demands on agencies and agencies bending over to take it up the…to please clients is a wicked combo in which nobody is asking, “Why are we making this?” It is strategy free. I’ve seen it myself. When I ask about content strategy, prospects look at me like I’m speaking to them in fluent Klingon. Can’t we just get on with making stuff that won’t work? Paul said, “If agencies carry on the way they are, they’re destining themselves to becoming a low-value, commoditized category.” https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2019/05/06/advertising-is-on-a-suicide-mission/   -When the execs at Spotify heard NSYNC sing “Bye Bye Bye,” they thought it was spelled B-U-Y and was a secret message that they should spend tens of millions on podcasting. And that’s exactly what they did. One company they already owned before this recent buying spree was Soundtrap. They started up to make it easier for morons like me to make music, thinking most music programs looked like the dashboard of the space shuttle. Well Spotify is using them to make podcasting easier. Soundtrap for Storytellers is a cloud based, subscription platform that does a lot of cool things some wannabe podcasters see as hard, or something they’d really just rather not mess with. Obviously you can record your show there, but there’s a built in Skype type thingy that makes it easy to have guests in other locations. You could have interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger in South Africa right before he got kicked in the back. You get a big library of sound effects and jingle making tools, tapping into Soundtrap’s original strength. Then multiple people can edit and work on the podcast together in real time, from different locations since it’s in the cloud. And here’s the really interesting one, interactive transcripts are created that sync with your audio, and you can edit the audio file as easy as editing text document. Now with all that, I thought Spotify would only let you put your podcast on Spotify but wow, no. You can download the finished product and publish it wherever you want and even publish the transcript. Now how much would you pay? This really isn’t an ad. None of you have contacted me to sponsor this show yet so there aren’t any ads, but then again I’ve never asked. Anyway, it’s $15/month or $18 a month if you also want all of Soundtrap's music tools. Drawbacks, you’re limited to 8 hours of interactive transcripts a month, and it’s only available in English. Other languages are coming though, like profanity. https://www.cnet.com/news/spotify-launches-the-google-docs-of-podcasting-soundtrap-storytellers/   -If you’ve dedicated your whole life to being a keyword master, or if you’re a brand that only creates content so you’ll have a place to stuff your keywords, you might be interested to know keywords are becoming less of a thing. Aw, some of you are mad, I can feel it. Jonathan Kagan at Results Digital isn’t saying keywords have gone away, but there’s been a shift in priority away from keywords and toward audience target and segment. He says think about it, Google, Bing, Yelp, Facebook, it’s the category and audience for those ads that get traffic to you, not keywords. Marketers have started to focus on who should see an ad, not whether they searched for a certain term. Jonathan sets the target audience before even putting keywords in, then lets Dynamic Search ads do the keyword targeting. The audience gets narrowed down, the competition goes down, and they aren’t overpaying for the target they want. What this does require though is ad copy that works beautifully for that customer and that landing page. Jonathan suggests merging your paid social and search teams since the needed skills are the same, get data on your site visitors and use that to build awesome segments, and quit stressing about every variance of a keyword imaginable - the search engines have gotten smart enough you’re just being redundant. https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/335697/the-keyword-is-dead-accept-and-adjust.html   -Gonna squeeze a little more learning in here. The 2019 Adobe Brand Content Survey revealed some things you should probably keep in mind as you do your big time hoity toity content marketing job. Half of people use more than one device at a time constantly or frequently, and they use devices over 8 hours a day. So your audience is definitely out there. Brand sites are important and all that crap, but frankly, young people go to social and video channels to research you and interact with you after buying. More than anything else, consumers want content to be accurate and informative, followed by simple and entertaining. The things that piss people off most are spam emails and slow loading content. In fact, over half, especially Boomers, will give up on you if they have problems getting your content. As for the content itself, what pisses them off is stuff that’s too wordy or badly written. They also don’t like bad designs or creepy personalization. Older consumers are less likely to share stuff, give up their personal info, or trust social media. That said, content from family and friends is the most shared and most trusted. Then again, Bernie Madoff was somebody’s friend and family member. https://www.slideshare.net/adobe/2019-adobe-brand-content-survey   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. I want more downloads but you’re probably too busy to do my marketing for me. Just make sure you’re subscribed, and I’ll go buy a Google ad or something. And we’ll be here next week.

In this week's episode of the Content Marketing Quickie: the most trusted source of information by consumers, trends to watch out for in B2B email marketing, how to get more social media shares, and how Facebook is commoditizing video production.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of May 7, 2019. Let’s see what you guys did to the industry this week.   -Want a job in content marketing? Well you should be in good shape. There were 23,846 job openings in it last year. But what content marketing skills are in the most demand? You need to know this so you can go on Coursera and at least learn enough terminology to bluff your way through the interview. Fractl studied ads on Indeed to figure out what hirers are looking for. And while that’s a fun parlor game, what makes this less than informative is that the people writing job ads for content marketing positions mostly have no clue what they want, need, or should ask for. They also don’t know the proper terms. And they usually print out a glossary of responsibilities they expect one person to handle alone. But anyway, here’s what the Indeed ads are showing. They’re mostly looking for junior level positions. Then comes senior level positions, then interns, who’ll make $37,000 to $43,000. For senior roles they want to pay $60,000 to $90,000. Um, I can tell you I’m more expensive than that. They want 2-3 years’ professional experience including from the interns who are just coming out of school. Nobody said you had to use logic in your want ads. The skills they want to see are social media, content creation and SEO. The senior positions are going to want you to also be a strategy and management rock star. But overall, content creation is the big ask, across all formats and channels. They want you to be brilliant for their $37,000 investment. But don’t forget the soft skills. Especially interns should be good at going to get soft serv ice cream for the office. No that’s not what I mean by soft skills. We’re talking about those interpersonal skills, a willingness to work hard, and being really good at details. Unfocused lazy jerks will probably have a harder time landing one of those multiple content marketing gigs. https://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/study-reveals-the-skills-you-need-to-get-hired-in-content-marketing-02192325   -Congrats to my pal Steve Pratt and Pacific Content for getting acquired by Rogers Media as this little burst of podcast acquisitions continues. Hey, everyone’s finally realizing that audio is a legitimate format that people like…imagine that. If only we had 99 years of evidence from radio that that was the case! Need more proof? Edison Research is always good about rounding up the numbers in terms of how podcasting is used, how it’s growing, and what kind of people are listening to it…and here are the latest figures from their survey of American listeners. 70% are now aware of podcasts, so that about 197M people. 51% have listened to one, hopefully this one. Nearly a fourth of us listen on a weekly basis. One article pointed out almost 4x more people listen to podcasts weekly than watched the Game of Thrones season premiere. And you may have noticed podcasting didn’t get nearly the media coverage the dragon show did. It’s mostly still guys that listen to podcasts, 36-29%, but I’m not supposed to assign genders so forget that statistic. But it is okay to call people rich and people who listen to podcasts are far more likely to make over $75,000 a year, so you’ve got a nice affluent audience with air pods in just waiting for you. Here’s a big one, podcasting is now the most listened to form of audio at 28%, overtaking AM/FM radio’s 24%. Those DJ’s don’t really play your song requests anyway…the robot says what’s going to be played. This next stat surprised even me, and I try to never allow my eyebrows to go up. 93% listen to most of an episode. Hey I love video, but video can only dream of that level of consumption. People don’t skim, they really listen. Most people listen on mobile, which wasn’t always the case, it used to be desktop. But listening on smart speakers is up to 10% now. Alexa, play me one of NPR’s 12,000 podcasts. So you get it, people like podcasts…but why exactly? They say the number one reason is you can listen while you’re doing something else, it’s the only content format that lets you multitask, which people love to do. I’m changing my oil right now. https://www.convinceandconvert.com/podcast-research/2019-podcast-statistics/   -Facebook continues to confound and confuse. They had their big F8 party where Zuck told us what they’re going to do next and what they’re going to do is redesign the app and website in a big way to be more about groups. Groups will be promoted and integrated in as many places as possible throughout this year, so get ready to adapt to a new look and a new experience. In the app, no more blue bar at the top. The logo and nav icons are there now. The icons for Stories are bigger cause they’re pushing that, but the status update box isn’t as prominent because Facebook doesn’t want to be about that as much now. Zuck wants it to be more about private communication. Private meaning, I guess, groups. They’ll encourage you to join them all over the app. Facebook says groups are among the most "meaningful" ways people use Facebook. I disagree, but I do like to get warned on my neighborhood group if there’s a coyote roaming around. All this also smells like a tactic to get you to connect with more people. Maybe every friend you’ve ever had in your life is already a connection and Facebook isn’t happy you’ve maxed out. So they’ll have a "Meet New Friends" feature so you can connect with people you don’t really know who are in your groups. Which is…LinkedIn! What does this mean if you’re a brand? I’d start figuring out which groups directly relate to what you sell and focus on making educational content that adds to the discussion there. https://mashable.com/article/facebook-app-website-redesign-groups/   -In the true spirit of the Content Marketing Quickie here’s a really quick story that’s impactful and doesn’t really need to be expounded on. How confident do you think marketers are that their content marketing is working? Well I’ll tell you. A mere 10% are confident they’re making an impact. Heinz Marketing shows 63% say their content marketing strategy is either ineffective or only partially effective. The trend ain’t good either, that’s way up from 35% who said that in 2017. There’s a lot broken folks, and it needs fixing, it doesn’t need more baseless hype. https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/03/15/marketers-lose-faith-the-efficacy-content-marketing   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. Talk about these things with your friends and coworkers, and God forbid you tell them about this podcast so they become listeners too. That would just be crazy. We’ll get caught up again next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of April 30, 2019. I took a vacation last week, sue me. Let’s see what’s going on.   -Step right up my friends and behold a marketing technology elixir that’s so powerful it’s guaranteed to put a song in your heart and a spring in your step. Yes this amazing marvel of modern technology has what’s good for what ails you, no matter what that might be. Sure it’s a little expensive but can you really put a price on dreams coming true and complete peace of mind? In the old days what you just heard was called a snake oil sales pitch. Today, some think a lot of the marketing technology that’s rolling through town is also, a lot of snake oil. It’s a $100B-plus business. And if you’ve ever seen one of those infographics that shows every platform and player in it, your eyes are now probably glazed over like a Krispy Kreme. Mike Doyle at retailer City Beach is calling it out. He says these tools are complex, you get bit with implementation costs, and these platforms require staff expertise and the learning curve that comes with it. He thinks there’s a shakeout coming…or there should be. Gartner says Martech is now the biggest budget allocation in marketing budgets at 29%. The tech tools are being bought, but are they really helping anybody? Andy Lark’s the former CMO of Commonwealth Bank and Foxtel and he says marketers in big companies are “really struggling”. Is it because they’re stupid? Nope. It’s the tech products. He analyzed 50 martech systems over two years and found very few could actually deliver on their claims. They automate spam and call it marketing automation. Even if these tech platforms did work as promised, the buyers can’t get the maximum value out of them because they aren’t set up to do so. They don’t have a data flow system up and running, and, here’s the hammer I keep banging, the ability to create good content to run through these systems is nowhere to be found. There’s a lot of content stuff, it’s just lousy and doesn’t inspire anyone to do anything. So why are all these marketing tech platforms still out there and still selling? Because nobody who bought into one wants to admit they made a mistake, and the platforms know it. Lark says, “Marketers are being asked to do more with less, so they buy into digital hallucinations.” https://www.afr.com/business/media-and-marketing/cmo-brief/shakeout-in-100bn-martech-sector-as-marketers-struggle-20190321-p5160w   So to follow up on that first story, let’s take a look at CMI’s 2019 Content Management and Strategy Survey on how marketers are using tech tools. The verdict of that survey agrees…marketers are awash in tech tool options, too awash. Well here’s the good news, businesses are getting a little more serious about taking a strategic approach to content as opposed to just putting on the lame show and hoping for the best. 76% take a strategic approach and 59% have a documented content management strategy. Well, I say that’s good news but 59% is still a crazy low number for people that actually have a plan. Most say their content strategy includes business goals, roles and responsibilities, measurements, desired outcomes, workflows, timeframes, and governance. The bad news is most businesses are struggling, there’s that word struggle again, to use tech tools that actually help them activate content at scale. The CMI survey shows 42% have “not yet acquired” the right tech to manage content. Another 42% got the tech but aren’t using it to its potential. The numbers show a lot of marketing technology was bought in 2018, kind of a boom year for that sort of thing, but marketers don’t seem to be getting better at using what they have. 78% said “we have some systems in place, but there’s a lot of manual work.” Meaning scalability ain’t happenin’. Now what’s the underlying gremlin that’s driving this latent dissatisfaction? It’s the digital hallucination we mentioned earlier. There was, and is, a belief out there that if you spend enough, you can flip a switch and the robots will do all your marketing and qualified leads will rain down on you forever. Need proof? In 2019, marketers are spending 29% of their budget on tech and 28% on humans. Half even said their business had “too much technology.” The reality that’s settling in is, if you don’t have humans that know how to make other humans care enough to take desired calls to action…all your shiny, top dollar marketing technology is a ghost town. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/04/content-management-technology-research/   LinkedIn took a step toward looking less serious and getting more like Facebook, rolling out its own versions of Reaction Buttons so people can express themselves beyond a simple Like. They said it’s because LinkedIn users were asking for more ways to express themselves and make themselves understood. Were they really? Apparently, just saying you like something is wholesale unclear and confusing. Does a like mean you like like it or love like it or like that you posted it or like it cause it changed my like life? Who knows? So here they are, the new expression list is the obviously inadequate Like, then there’s Celebrate to praise a promotion or achievement – you can’t like that, you need to celebrate it. There’s Love, which is way more than like but don’t love too much because that’s inappropriate in a business setting. There’s Insightful which means you think there were some really deep thoughts. Lastly there’s Curious, which signals you’d like to learn more about the topic and start getting spammed on it. So how did LinkedIn arrive at these particular expressions? They analyzed the top words people used in comments, and apparently you used the word “curious” a lot. LinkedIn has not responded to my suggestions for additional reaction buttons including “Hire Me Dammit”, “Inflated Resume Available on Request,” and “Yeah I Get it, You Want to Be a Speaker/Author for a Living.”   https://www.business2community.com/linkedin/linkedin-rolling-out-reaction-buttons-02194635   Want to know the future? Your usual palm reader is on vacation? Well don’t worry because some members of the Ad Age Collective have predicted what’s going to impact content marketing most in the next couple of years. Maggie O’Neill at Peppercomm says brands will increasingly have to take a stand on divisive social matters. Sounds like a reckless unnecessary risk to me but that’s what Maggie sees coming. Hootsuite’s Greg Perotto says social media will go beyond marketing and become an integral part of how businesses deliver customer experiences. Troy Osinoff at JUICE says look out, data’s going to get scarcer and that’ll make it harder to target and retarget. Why? Because the tech giants will have to adapt to growing oversight about how they get and use data and because we’re all getting queasier about where and how our data is used. Kurt Kaufer at Ad Results Media predicts podcasting will rapidly expand, an easy prediction since that’s already happening. But he adds better measurement and attribution will have advertisers jumping in at an unprecedented rate. Fuze’s Brian Kardon thinks AI will play a greater role in campaign decisions. Again, not really a prediction but somebody had to stick the AI buzzword in there somewhere. It’s a law now. And my new hero Michael Lisovetsky at JUICE says all this tech will only make human creativity more important. The platforms and tech will grow commoditized but brilliant people with great ideas will always be rare and have tremendous value. The prediction is our industry will finally wake up to that. https://adage.com/article/executive-collective/future-media-and-marketing-eight-predictions-industry-pros/2165846   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. It’s always like this, it’s short, you’ll get something to talk about at networking events, and it’ll get at least half a grin out of you. So hopefully it’s worthy of you subscribing. And we’ll see what happens next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of April 16, 2019. Let’s see what changed while you weren’t looking.   -Podcasts are hunky dory and everything, but one of the lingering issues with them is discoverability. Or to be more precise, searchability. We learned in last week’s Content Marketing Quickie – see, I told you you’d learn something in a short period of time if you just subscribe and listen – that YouTube is actually the largest platform for podcast consumption by far. Which makes me feel stupid cause I have yet to put this one back on YouTube. And, you’ve heard that behind Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. But to make all that work to the maximum degree, all those spoken words in podcasts need to be written words. That’s where transcription comes in. And here’s the news. Google’s Podcasts app is automatically transcribing shows. That means not just searchability of the content, people can look for certain episodes about certain topics on your podcast without having to memorize the name of your show or the episode title. Are you telling me Content Marketing Quickie for April 16, 2019 isn’t a memorable title? The head of product for Google Podcasts says, “Google’s really good at giving you text and video related to your search query. There’s no good reason why audio isn’t a first-class citizen in the same way.” Well, here’s the problem. Sorry, there’s always got to be a problem. Android Police checked these new auto transcripts and as you probably already guessed, there were loads of errors. We’re all so different and we all talk funny and for all the hype around Echos and Alexas and Siris, the machines just don’t seem to be able to make out what we’re saying. Next week I’m doing the podcast completely in pig latin. https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-search-to-podcasts-through-automatic-transcription-314798   -Who doesn’t love data? He was the most popular character on Star Trek: The Next Generation. But we love that other data too, the kind that tells you whether or not your content is working for you or if it’s just a money sucking pure crap waste of time and effort. And what should you be looking for anyway? Michael Brenner’s group had a post recently that gives you the basics and here they are. 1. Traffic, that includes total unique visitors, pageviews and unique pageviews. It’d also be nice to know where your traffic is coming from. 2. Sales or conversions. What counts as a conversion? Well that’s up to you Skippy. It’s whatever gratifies you or whatever you count as a win, but for the most part, if the content consumer takes a desired action afterward, that’s a convert. 3. Engagement How long do they stay? How many pages do they go to during their visit? 4. Social media engagement. Yeah likes are ego boosters but what you really want is shares, that means whatever the content was really struck a chord. It’s also nice to know how much traffic your site is getting from social platforms so you’ll know if it’s worth the trouble. More on that in a second – cause a big can of worms has just been opened up about that. 5. SEO performance. Where are you in search rankings for your keyword phrase and are you trending up or down? Google Analytics is frankly meh when it comes to that, but Google Search Console is worth checking out if you haven’t. You’ll see which terms you do rank for and how you’re trending. Now take all of this with a measure of salt or a spoonful of sugar or a tranquilizer dart to the neck, because success is what YOU say it is. Everyone has their own goal for their content, or they should, and who cares what other people say it should be doing? https://marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/metrics-to-measure-content-performance/   -I watch a lot of YouTube, mostly things getting blown up in slow motion – which you think I wouldn’t have the time for what with the slowness of that. And maybe you’ve noticed like I have that it’s getting harder and harder to find videos that aren’t front loaded with ads, multiple ads, longer ads, many unskippable. I wonder how long people have to say that ads that interrupt, pop up, or generally prevent you from getting the content you want will meet with irritability and ill will before marketers and platforms start listening. My personal guess is 67 years. YouTube introduced 6-second video ads in 2016 and everyone seemed cool with it. I mean, they were ads but it is what it is – they didn’t generate a lot of actual complaining and what’s more, they worked! After a year, Google reported “70% drove a significant lift in brand awareness, with an average lift of 9%. Over 90% drove ad recall with an average lift of over 30%.” So when you find something that works, you go with it right? Of course not! We’ve got to fix what isn’t broken, nothing can just be fine. MediaRadar looked at all online video ads in January and February of 2018 then 2019 and found, you guessed it, a rise in longer video ads. The number of 6-second ads was down 20%, and the number of 30-second ads went up 19%. Well here’s the problem, longer ads work too! You can’t skip them so the view through rate is a forced 100%, and since there’s more information in it, the resonance is higher. Our only hope, the 15 second ad, which is now the most common at 40%. The hope is that maybe that’s the sweet spot of volume of information conveyed before viewers hate you. https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2019/04/09/are-youtube-video-ads-getting-longer/   -And now the thing I mentioned earlier about social media that’s kicked off quite the ant bed, pitting brother against brother, Hall against Oates, ant against ant. Lush set everyone’s heads on fire when they announced, they’re ditching their social media channels in the UK. That’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They’ve had it. They’re done f’ing around with algorithms, going through middlemen, paying for access to their own audience and not being in control of the conversation. Instead they’ll drive people to the site, email, and phone for more one-on-one conversations. But they aren’t acting like social doesn’t exist, it’s still a thing. But they’re switching their social strategy to all influencer marketing. And another but, they’re just trying this is the UK. Their channels in North America, which is just upwards from South America, will remain. Needless to say, many people who make their living as social media gurus and practitioners and Facebook defenders went into full Lush Derangement Syndrome…slamming the company saying the only reason they’re giving up on social is their content sucked and they were doing it wrong and they’re failures because they didn’t buy the expert’s latest book. But actually, Lush was doing fine. Their Facebook and Instagram channels got over 10m video views and were growing 42% month on month. They’re just done. They said, "We don’t want to pay to be in your newsfeed.” Now the question looms, is this gonna start something? Will other brands start re-examining the value proposition of social media? Will ongoing PR problems with the social media platforms make brands think twice? Will this lead to a boon for other distribution channels? And how am I supposed to get all the way through Avengers Endgame without a bathroom break? We’ll just have to see https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/04/09/lush-abandons-social-media-its-getting-harder-talk-customers   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week, your call to action this week is to do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around then subscribe to the show so you don’t forget it. And we’ll see what happens next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of April 8, 2019. Let’s see what changed while you weren’t looking.   -Are you one of those people that talks to the commercials when they come on TV? “Hey cartoon of lower back pain illustrated by little lightning bolts around it, that’s exactly what I feel like! Can your solution really help me?” If so, sure your family is very worried about you but you’ll love this news. When you’re listening to music or a podcast on Pandora, you might soon be able to talk to the ads you hear, and they’ll listen. Maybe you’ll say, “Hey ad, please email me more information about what you’re talking about.” Or maybe you’ll say, “Not interested. I don’t believe that non-stick frying pan is really coated in diamonds.” Later this year, in the year of our Lord 2019, Pandora will do a beta test with Instreamatic, which is a company called Instreamatic. The ad unit will listen and respond to voice commands. Will it work? Probably as well as Siri, Alexa and all those things who I’m sure always completely understand what you’re saying so you don’t have to repeat it three times. But Instreamatic says it uses those magic letters AI to anticipate your intent — sometimes even before you say anything to the ad. It will assume it knows what you want better than you do. But check it out, this ability to dialogue with ads has the potential to solve what’s been a really huge, even a large problem for audio ads. You can’t click them. It’s called the “Click Challenge,” which sounds like a game show that would be hosted by Howie Mandel. But by being able to tell the audio ads I love you or I never want to hear from you again, it helps marketers know they need to change their creative or improve their targeting. And of course it means streaming audio like podcasts can get full credit as an advertising medium that works. Instreamatic colluded with a Russian broadcast, and that experiment showed this can even increase ad revenue. They ran voice-activated ads in December that represented just 1% of the impressions, but…those few voice-activated impressions brought in 10% of total audio revenue for the show for that month. I don’t have any ads in this podcast, but you’re welcome to yell at it if you want. http://www.insideradio.com/free/pandora-listeners-may-soon-be-talking-back-to-the-ads/article_712b6420-5567-11e9-bdc4-6fce638705c4.html   -Hey CMO, what’s the trouble kiddo? Did you have a bad dream? Is something bothering you? The answer is yes it is. CMOs do worry, in secret. So Kapost did a survey at the CMO Summit in Denver, Denver – Home of the people who live there, asking CMOs what keeps them up at night. The answers were honest and not entirely surprising, so if you’re a CMO, see if you agree and when you wake up in a panic, you’ll know you’re not alone. They worry Is My Messaging On-Brand? Most CMOs said no, it’s not. We can’t be sure we’re on brand or on message, and that’s IF we even have a clear brand personality or key messaging someone is watching out for. Yet they find the prospect of a content audit big and scary. C’mon it’s a good thing, it’s not like a tax audit. SiriusDecisions says 65% of all content is completely wasted because the company doesn’t know it exists, doesn’t know where to find it, or it’s old, or it’s now wrong. Another thing they worry about is Are My Teams Aligned? Accenture says 4 in 5 marketers don’t even know for sure what their content objectives are. Teams in silos are winging it and doing their own thing and shoving stuff out ad hoc, they’re checking the box. And they worry Is Everyone on My Team Working toward Strategic Goals? The answer is most likely not. Marketing teams think only about the channel or team they’re supporting in the moment. Strategy, if there even is one, get sacrificed quickly just to get stuff out the door. The result is very confused customers getting weird and disjointed experiences from the brand. https://marketeer.kapost.com/marketing-leaders-questions/   -Ah, the ability to fast forward and rewind to wherever you want to be while watching a video. Pretty basic thing right? Instagram didn’t think so, cause you can’t do that when you’re watching a video there. Oh sure they let you do it for videos on IGTV, but on the ones that show up in your feed, not so much. And it’s not like they don’t know it’s wanted. Users have been asking about it and for it a long time, scratching their heads, asking, “Why is this not regarded as important by you guys?” Well if you ask long enough, good things might happen. The scuttlebutt skinny word on the street is they’re testing putting a seek bar on videos in the feed. But just in the feed, not as part of an Instagram story. So if you’re an Instagram fan you can go on just about every other video platform there is and start practicing; forward, backward, forward, back. What control! What raw power! https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/29/18286805/instagram-video-seek-bar-scroll-playback-feature   -Email is a pretty darn solid distribution channel for content. And if you don’t believe that let us help you with 13 email marketing stats put out recently by Convince & Convert. Actually I’m only going to give you 7 because this is the Content Marketing Quickie and I don’t want to change it to the Longie. 1. The average subject line is a little over 43 characters. Short & powerful people. Long subject lines are a real issue on mobile and with many email service providers who won’t even show long ones. 2. Over 347B emails will be sent and received by 2022, that’ 78B more than 2018. So it’s competitive out there and your only hope is great email content. 3. 68% of Millennials say promo emails influenced a purchase. In fact it was the most effective of all the methods studied. 4. 56% of emails are read on iPhones or Gmail. So avoid large image files and long paragraphs. And Gmail users can Snooze you now, so you need to convey some sense of urgency. 5. The average email open rate across all industries is 20.81%. It ain’t a great number, but at least now you know if you’re average. 6. 73% of email marketers send emails at least weekly. Frequency’s a gamble. You win if people like them and you’re staying top of mind, you lose if your emails are bad because people will eventually be annoyed enough to unsubscribe. 7. 55% of consumers like emails with relevant products and offers. That’s kind of a no brainer but it does show personalization and showing items that match preferences is the game, and it’s a data game. Isn’t that right Dave? See, I tried to personalize. Surely one of my listeners is named Dave. https://www.convinceandconvert.com/digital-marketing/email-marketing-statistics/   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. Be that person that turns your followers on to something half decent, share the link to this podcast and then you can discuss whether or not I’m annoying. And we’ll see what happens next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of April 1, 2019   -A new study of B2B buyers shows they want random, one-off content pushed out to them by vendors, and they want that content to be all text and focus only on the sales proposition vendors want to say. They say if they get this, they’re likely to buy immediately based just on what they’re told. Okay so now we’ve got the obligatory April Fools story out of the way. And it would be funny except for that’s actually how a lot of companies are still approaching content. They’re living the dream but make no mistake, they are dreaming.   -I know what you want from the Content Marketing Quickie, I’m not stupid. You want to hear all about European law! Well straighten up your beret and pull up a hot plate of bangers and mash because here it comes. This actually made a lot of news and does potentially affect you because, it kind of changes how you’re allowed to put content on the internet. That’s right I’m talking about the EU Copyright Directive. Governments love directives. At issue, how do you balance the ability to share and spread content, and most of us want that more than anything, for our content to get shared and spread so more people will see it, how do you balance that with the content creator’s right to totally control everywhere their content is seen and get paid for every instance they want to get paid for it? I think this should have been called the EU Have My Cake and Eat it Too Directive. Make no mistake, not unlike my choice to not color my hair, this issue is extremely controversial. Over 5M signatures and rising on a change.org petition opposing it. For the good that does. Some experts like the head of Mozilla’s EU public policy, Reagan McDonald, say the EU sets standards and you can count on those policies finding their way to the US. Why? Because the discussions around the responsibilities of internet platforms have pretty much run parallel. So here are the hot parts of the Directive. Article 11 says web platforms and news aggregators will have pay publishers if they use even small parts of their content in search results. So think Google, Flipboard, Feedly, all those guys. It’s being called a “link tax.” Do YOU want search engines and aggregators to be incentivized NOT to show your content? Yeah I didn’t think so. Then there’s Article 17, which says for-profit platforms have to make sure copyright-infringing content isn’t on their sites. So expect a lot of scanning and tracking tools to be on content and be used to vet content before it goes anywhere. If you’re a smaller startup platform that can’t afford all that, well, I guess you just don’t get to compete. Now if you want to figure out how all this jibes with fair use law in the US for editorial or satirical use…be my guest.   -You know it appears this video marketing thing just might work? But everyone likes proof and they like stats to show the bosses so they can be convinced the sky is blue, so here are some video marketing numbers we got from Oberlo for 2019. 85% of all internet users in the US watched online video monthly on any device. It’s like a habit or something. 54% of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business they support. And let’s just underline that part… “that they support.” I will watch your home movies if you’re a really good friend, but I’m much less likely to do so if I don’t even want you in my house. 87% of marketing professionals use video as a marketing tool, so now you know if you’re the lone holdout. Videos are a consumer’s favorite kind of content to see from a brand on social media. But if you want to keep giving them things they don’t like, you are free to do that. 88% of video marketers are happy with the ROI of their video marketing efforts. It gets them 66% more qualified leads per year. A typical person will spend 88% more time on your website if there’s video on it, and if they get a choice of reading text or watching a video, they pick the video 72% of the time to learn about a product or service. When it comes to search engines, there’s Google, but then coming in second is YouTube, on which over 1B hours a day of video gets played. Because once you start watching those ASMR videos, you just can’t stop, you’ll break the cozy. And lastly, 10% will remember a call to action after reading it in text. 95% will remember it if it’s in a video. I don’t know how many will remember a call to action if it’s in a podcast. So stick your finger in your belly button then let me know if you did it. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/10-video-marketing-statistics-for-2019-infographic/550274/   -Pretty cool how you can target very specific audiences with Facebook ads right? But what about the untargeted? How do they feel? Did you hurt their feelings or worse, are you ostracizing them and cheating them and trying to cut them out of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? I guess it’s no surprise in these times of ours that that’s become an issue. Does your ability to target the audience you want discriminate against everybody else? Are you evil or aren’t you? Tell me! Here’s what happened. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development has charged Facebook with discrimination. That’s because Facebook doesn’t have enough problems. The filing says the way they do ad sales violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968 because some users are excluded from targeted audiences because of gender, ethnicity, religion, nation of origin, geographic location, familial status and/or physical disability. ProPublica started looking at this in 2016 with a story in which their reporters were able to use Facebook’s targeting to buy an ad for housing that excluded all users “with an ‘affinity’ for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people.” So you can target but, no you can’t. https://www.adweek.com/digital/u-s-government-charges-facebook-with-discrimination-based-on-ad-targeting-practices/   -We talked a bit last week about the best B2B content to build trust. Now we get some more info about what consumers do and don’t trust. Mantis Research found 58% say whether or not they read an email depends on the trust they have in that publisher. They have to trust that you send them something worthwhile, and they have to trust you’ll let them easily unsubscribe if you just can’t seem to make any good content. But the study showed trust is low…and falling. Same old story, brands have a love affair with their own content and think they’re crushin’ it, but their audiences mostly see it as clutter. https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/333805/who-do-you-trust-email-newsletters-beat-social-me.html   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. Be that person that turns your followers on to something half decent, share the link to this podcast and then you can discuss whether or not I’m annoying. And we’ll see what happens next week.

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of March 25, 2019   -Don’t worry everyone, the stability of the world and the validity of news and information is safe in the hands of Generation Z. Naw, I’m just kidding with you. We are completely doomed. Now you’d think with all the garbage Facebook and Twitter have gone through, all the scandals, all the suspicion, all the shady stuff, all the content censoring and manipulation, all the dropping stocks…you’d think that social media would be about the last place you would go to get trustworthy information. Nope. Not Gen Z. Comscore says they lead the way at 55% in turning to social media for their primary source of news. That might be because social media has totally consumed their lives and they see it as the only way one would get information, or maybe they just like what they’re seeing on it and are loving the echo chamber. Colby Atwood at Borrell Associates said, “They believe if it’s important enough, the news will come to them.” And social is what makes that happen. So that’s terrifying. If they rely on the news “finding” them, they’re relegating themselves to being like undiscerning hogs that gobble up whatever slop someone pays to dump in front of their snouts. As you go up the line to Millennials, Gen X’ers and Boomers, the trust in social media seems to go away with age and maybe wisdom. But here’s where none of them seem to be going to get their news, portal sites like MSNBC and Yahoo! Gordon Borrell also talked a bit about what they call the overpopulation of media, saying there’s got to be a shakeout, a thinning of the herd coming soon. They point out there are still 2 newspapers or weeklies for every county in the US, over 10,000 radio stations, 4 class A TV stations for every TV market, over 1,000 cable channels, 660,000 actively produced podcasts – now I feel guilty for making this one, 495 new TV shows that debuted last year. But you think your prospects are going to spend their time with your kick ass white paper instead. Bless your heart. Our world today is an overwhelming glut of content of questionable value and quality getting feverishly pushed out in a growing and chaotic number of ways. Wow, what is a brand to do as audiences keep dispersing and diffusing like our ever-expanding universe? Borrell says they’re using fewer companies to buy more kinds of media, that’s what. 90% of advertisers are hedging their bets by bundling traditional and digital advertising. I’m going to assume you’re starting to see just how powerful the ability to build and hold an audience is, right? http://www.insideradio.com/free/borrell-consumer-news-habits-radically-evolve/article_2f6a74a6-4c73-11e9-96e0-ab49befea4fc.html   -Well if social media is our destiny for how future generations get their information, better buy some video ads on social media right? eMarketer says social video ad spending in the US, hey that’s where I live, should reach almost $14.9B in 2021, up 44% from 2019. That’ll mean social will account for almost one third of all video ad spending. And what a spending spree we have going on where video ads are concerned. That’s expected to go up 62.1% between now and 2023. Who stands to gain the most from that spending? Facebook and YouTube. Makes sense, because those are the platforms video viewers prefer according to AudienceProject. YouTube gets 90% of viewing, Facebook 60%. But eMarketer also found Twitter and Snapchat won’t do bad in that video space either. Twitter’s US video ad revenues will pass $1B two years from now. Why is all this happening? Because video works. Don’t tell anybody, that’ll just be our little secret. Brightcove says 76% of adults in the US, UK and Australia bought a product after seeing a video and 66% of Millennials engaged with a brand after watching a video on social. http://www.insideradio.com/free/forecast-social-video-ad-spending-to-shoot-up-by/article_e377f9ca-4a14-11e9-a477-774716b244b2.html   -Want to be a trustworthy B2B brand? Then how about listening to what B2B marketers say are the main things they do or don’t do with their content that helps them build trust? Vennli went around asking them that question and here’s what they learned. First of all, if you’re posting a lot of data from Gartner and Forrester and all those guys, you might think that’s helping you because these are all well known, well respected names. Turns out you’re right, they are well known and well respected, but the trust people have in them doesn’t necessarily translate into your readers having trust in you. For instance, I’m telling you about this survey by Vennli, but that doesn’t mean you trust me. Good move, because I’m a very suspicious character. Vennli’s CEO Marty Muse says B2B brands should worry less about 3rd party articles and make their own content that doesn’t deal in industry vagueries but speaks right to their prospects’ pains and needs. As for the best tool to do that, 57% said brand content is the best way to build trust. Then comes a strong social media presence at 44%; TV/print/digital advertising at 40%, and customer references or testimonials at 40%. What ranked closer to the bottom? Well we already mentioned analyst reports, but that was followed by word-of-mouth and press coverage. They went even further to find out what kind of brand content drives the most trust in a B2B brand. The winners were sales support documents, followed by case studies, customer support documents and videos. https://www.chiefmarketer.com/original-content-builds-b2b-brand-trust-report/   -Yeah, you might be making content. Might. But are you making content that’s worth anything or is it just adding more low value noise to the ocean of low value noise? Media Update’s Jenna Cook has 5 things you can think about and grade yourself on that I thought was…well kind of elementary, but it makes a lot of sense and an absurd number of companies don’t do any of this so off we go. 1. Is it original? If others have the same kind of thing you’re putting out there and there’s nothing entertaining or distinctive about your host or brand voice…congratulations, you’re not special! 2. Is it relevant. You hear that word a lot but it boils down to, do the people you’re sending this to really care? I mean, really care. Is it concise? I don’t call this the Content Marketing Quickie for nothin’. Is it consistent? Content comes at such a high pace and volume now that your one and done piece of content will be forgotten like, 5 minutes ago. You build an audience by getting them addicted to what you’re putting out. And finally is it actionable? Did you seriously not think to tell your audience what you wanted them to do with what you just gave them? https://www.mediaupdate.co.za/marketing/146325/five-ways-to-tell-if-your-brands-content-is-valuable   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie, you should know by now if you hate it or want to get it every week, so subscribe or give it some word of mouth…which we just learned doesn’t lead to a lot of trust. And we’ll find out what happens next week!

Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of March 18, 2019   -Do you know when the first email was sent? 1971! 1971! The top song was Three Dog Night’s Joy to the World, you know, the Jeremiah was a bullfrog song? The highest grossing film was Fiddler on the Roof. On TV we were watching the then highly controversial political fights between Archie and Meathead on All in the Family. They think that in 2018, 124.5B emails went out. And yep, emails are content. Or at least what you put in them is content. So it’s worth knowing how to do it right and things like the Email Marketing Survey Summary Report help because their research gives us some insights, or at least some things to debate. The first thing they found out is engagement and improving brand awareness is the main thing companies want out of their email campaigns. Nobody likes to see low opens and click rates. And you’re never going to up your engagement unless you learn what your target audience likes and wants. It’s actually amazing how little companies know about who they’re selling to or care what kind of content they like to get. Next, most marketers think a mix of personal messages and one topic emails are most effective. By the way, only 17% think plain-text emails work. 64% of marketers say the effectiveness of their emails is improving moderately. It’s almost like you shouldn’t believe those “Is email dead” thought leadership pieces. Lastly, companies appreciate that when it comes to email, they can mostly handle that in-house, 39% use in-house people only. Now when they get all fancy schmancy and pursue the personalization and machine learning automation whiz bang, that’s when they reach out for some specialists. As always, our take is you can build the machine and the data can be right and your targeting can be on point…but if your content isn’t worthwhile, all that’s for nothing. Stop making what kind of show you’re going to put on the last thing you think about.   -Well it’s been about a month since Spotify said surprise! We’re spending over $300M to buy Gimlet Media and Anchor, cause we’re getting big into podcasting. And then we all went, “Okay but why?” And then they didn’t say anything, and we kept saying, “No really, why did you spend $300M on podcasting?” But answers are starting to trickle out, apparently there’s a plan. And the plan is essentially to cover bases and hedge bets. Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek and Gimlet’s founders Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber have been making at least some public comments about the plan. First, what’s Spotify going to do with a high-quality podcast producer like Gimlet and an app that makes it super easy for any Joe to make low quality podcasts like Anchor? First of all those brands apparently aren’t going away, they won’t get swallowed up by the Spotify brand. Courtney Holt, Spotify’s head of studio and video, says it’s like Pixar and Marvel being owned by Disney. They’re still their own powerful brands. Is it? Is Gimlet and Anchor really like Pixar and Marvel? Here’s what Spotify knows, there IS money in podcasting, an expected $659M in ad revenue by 2020. So here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to be the primary place people go for podcasts, and we’re going to have podcasts you can only get on Spotify. Like Netflix does with movies and TV. We’re also going to be the main way people discover new podcasts cause our algorithm we did for music is that awesome. Maybe you, like I, have listened to a song on Spotify’s Discover Weekly and thought to yourself, “Why in God’s name do they think I’d like this song?” Well they’re gonna do that for podcasts. Like Netflix does with movies and TV. Holt says their algorithm is “pretty darn good.” Hey, watch the language, I checked clean content on my show description settings! Spotify’s CFO says they’ll invest in podcast content and that will increasingly be exclusive. But Gimlet’s Blumberg says well, our existing shows will stay available everywhere. Now, about Anchor. They don’t know. What do you want? They don’t know. Spotify says maybe exclusive originals will work best, but maybe user-generated shows will work best. So they’re exploring both. https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/5/18243729/spotify-podcast-strategy-gimlet-media-anchor-purchase   -The expectations are pretty high for those who use tech, including content technology, to sell tech tools. I mean they should know how to kill it right? The Technology Content Marketing 2019 report tells us how they’re doing. First, 75% say their content marketing’s working better than a year ago. So there’s that. But what, if anything, are they struggling with?  Here’s the thing about the answer, which I will give you here in a sec, stay in the car. There’s not a lot of difference between the struggle named by those who are top performers and those who aren’t. Which means it’s a real and sticky problem. And that problem is creating content that appeals to the different multiple roles that are involved in buying decisions. Everybody cares about something different. There was actually only one other thing where there wasn’t that much difference between top performers and the others. They both pretty much say they care a lot about making content designed to build customer loyalty. Still, only 53% of tech marketers and 73% of top performers said they did that more successfully than the previous year. Success for early funnel goals – brand awareness, lead gen, and education, that’s what’s growing. For those that did better, what exactly did they do better? They covered more stages of the buyer journey. Only 62% of tech marketers overall said they cover all those bases well. How do they research what the audience wants? 80% actually listens to what their sales team tells them. 71% look at their website analytics. And get this, 55% actually, and I know this is weird, ask their customers. Email’s huge, 92% use it to nurture prospects. 64% reported using video more often compared to last year. But check this out, just as many say they did more written content like blog posts too. 37% even increased their use of audio. Getting back to the expectation tech companies should be better at marketing tech than the average bears, it’s true, they are. 36% say their proficiency with content marketing tech is at expert level while only 24% of regular enterprise marketers would say that. Get your shopping cart ready, there’s a sale on smarty pants! https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/03/tech-content-marketers-research/   That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. If you thought it was worth the time you gave it and it made you think about stuff after you listened, it’d be great if you subscribed. I promise, you will not make me rich. We’ll see what happens next week.