Content Marketing Quickie

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.