Content marketing strategy photo by Kindel Media on Pexels.comWhat makes content marketing distinct from other forms of marketing is that its primary goal is to engage your target audience’s interest rather than lead immediately to a call-to-action to buy. The content can take many forms, ranging from single pictures with captions on social media posts to extended articles, eBooks, and videos.
Part of planning an effective strategy is selecting the medium that is most likely to capture your audience’s attention. For a B2B that means showing awareness of business pain points and insights into what's happening in the industry now. For B2C, you want to connect with the consumers in your target market repeatedly by offering them helpful tips or engaging stories.
For example, a kitchenware seller may send out recipes or blogs that offer advice on healthy substitutions to make guilt-free desserts. It can also use video content effectively to demonstrate techniques in cooking or offer a downloadable app that converts cooking measurements from ounces to grams or milliliters.
What all the approaches described above have in common is that they position the brand as a credible source of information within its own defined niche. Over time that leads to a deepened relationship with your audience.
Typically, you can expect 6-9 months of consistent content marketing posting to see an uplift in B2B sales. That's because B2B sales typically involve longer cycles, more approvals, and a lot more money than B2C.
(One exception was a B2B blog I ghostwrote that brought in sales qualified lead the very next day).
As businesses don't tend to very receptive to cold calls and emails from businesses they have not heard of, the support of content marketing and demand gen leads to greater success in outbound sales efforts.
The emails are about on par with what you'd get if your cat walked across your keyboard, but real emails are not the point. The stunt is an attention-getter for tourism for Iceland, and it does that quite effectively. See the Visit Iceland site with the suggestions of what you can see in that country when you "outhorse" your emailing to an Icelandic horse.
If you If you are not familiar with Ryan George, then check out his YouTube Channels. Screen Rants, which offers commentary on films in the guise of pitch meetings in which spoilers abound, has nearly 8.5 million subscribers (and millions of views on his take on Spider-Man: No Way Home in which he reveals, among other things, how long it takes to watch five movies to get all the connections in this one).
The Ryan George channel has 1.38 million subscribers. One of the recent videos on that channel contains fundamental points about the customer's experience. In What Shoppiong on Amazon Feels Like, he nails both best practices and worst practices for effective marketing.
Best practice: conveying the sponsor message
The brand paying George for the video is mentioned at the beginning but only very briefly. That means that even if you don't want to sit through an extended description of the features and benefits SayMine.com boasts of, you will at least have heard of it.
That's a win-win solution. By placing the more extended description at the end, he's removing the irritation people have from being forced to watch an ad before they get what they want, something that is not likely to make people develop more positive feelings for the brand.
The brand still gets its spotlight with a brief mention in the beginning and in Ryan George's description of the video. Plus when he delivers the spiel about it, he does so in a kind of tongue-in-cheek manner consistent with the Ryan George brand. He delivers it in the guise of the "adstronaut."
Worst practices: irrelevance, keyword-stuffing descriptions, and information overload
Within the video, the role of Amazon shows an obliviousness to what the shopper wants and needs that highlight the worst practices of pushing products and services on the shopper that are irrelevant to his current needs. He's shopping for a chair and is not interested in video recommendations.
When he finally does get to see chairs, all of them are identical despite showing different brand names with variations on descriptions. Those of us who have shopped on Amazon know this is accurate but just to prove it, I'll put a screenshot from Amazon below:
Compare that with one of the ones in the video:
Content writers, take note! These product descriptions exemplify an SEO strategy that forgets about how the text sounds to the human reader .
While all that may not overwhelm the shopper, attempting to make sense of the thousands of reviews may do so. That is also not an exaggeration. One of the chairs I checked on the site had over 23.5K ratings.
Talk about information overload! A few hundred would be more credible and manageable than the huge number of reviews that certain products show on eCommerce sites.
Audiences loved this video because they could so relate as customers. Marketers and online sellers should pay attention because the humor here works because it is true. Turning off shoppers and losing potential customers due to bad practices is no laughing matter.
"In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes," Andy Warhol predicted back in 1968. In the 21st century, though, it’s not about minutes but seconds.
TikTok videos are designed to be short and the original default length for uploading was just 15 seconds. Rivals hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the short video format with music also set their base standard at 15 seconds.
The boom and bust of 2020 for TikTok The first half of 2020 has been very good for the social video app from Internet company ByteDance, called TikTok. By the end of April, Sensor Tower Store Intelligence estimated that the app had been downloaded over 2 billion times on the App Store and Google Play.
The popularity of TikTok is a worldwide phenomenon. However, its presence in India is now curtailed because the government banned the app, as well as 58 others, on June 29, due to their links to China. That is quite a blow to the app in light of the huge user base in India.
Live Mint reports that there were over 200 million active users of the app in India, which represents a major chunk of its global hold. It was such a profitable market for ByteDance that last year the company said it planned to invest a billion dollars there.
The rise of the Reels rival
The Indian market may now turn to one of the rival video platforms that have been trying to compete with TikTok. They include offerings from Instagram and YouTube.
As TikTok’s growth has been impossible to ignore, Facebook attempted to launch its own version through Instagram under the name Reels. It first rolled out on a limited basis in Brazil in November 2019.
We all have our own stories to tell, and some of us choose to share them with the world on social media in video format. That’s why a person’s “story” on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook refers to a video post. Now LinkedIn is going to try to be a platform of stories, too, rolling it out first for American college students.
As TechCrunch recently reported, LinkedIn will allow student to post short videos on their Campus Playlist. They can then be viewed there for one week, though they will remain accessible for as long as the student wishes under the the individual profile’s “Recent Activity.”
If you’re a regular LinkedIn user you might have noticed that it now encourages people who post to add in hashtags, generating several suggestions you can just click. It also does this for Student Stories, according to the TechCrunch report, which is why there will likely be more instances of the hashtag #OnCampus appearing on the videos linked to the school’s Campus Playlist.
To get deeper into this story, I reached out to students on LinkedIn. Cammy Okmin, a student at California Polytechnic who holds the title of LinkedIn Campus Video Editor, graciously answered my questions via email.
Click-through rate (CTR) has long dominated as a core marketing metrics because it is so easily tracked. With video, new metrics, like engagement rates and completion rates (VCR), are also taken into account.
However, these metrics don’t necessarily prove the campaign is working toward the marketing goal if it isn’t defined properly.
Anthony Coleman, senior director, search and social, Digital Remedy, believes that easily-accessible metrics are not as useful as some people think. CTR only tells you how someone interacts with an ad, and can reflect some level of awareness, but not what actions the person takes in response, Coleman said. Another drawback of CTR is that it is easily manipulated to inflate numbers for more impressive results.
“When you’re trying to run an active campaign and get new users in the door...a metric that is so easily shifted is not a good metric,” Coleman said.
Privacy concerns, and the need for GDPR compliance for any company that is globally connected has made it necessary for brands to find ad targeting alternatives.
The question is: are marketers going to step back, or take a step forward, with a new paradigm of lookalike data?
The trend in programmatic advertising has been to tap into more -- and more -- data about individuals, to deliver more personalized approaches. But with the rise of GDPR, not all data is fair play in the EU, and that changes the rules of the game.
Some companies are rolling back personalization and reverting to more traditional forms of contextual advertising. Others are looking forward by leveraging data in new ways.
Earlier this week, Cedato officially released its Contextual Lookalike Targeting technology for programmatic video.
Takeaway:Media consumption is evolving alongside technological advances like artificial intelligence (AI). While we generally embrace progress, we have to also be aware of the downsides of some forms of technology. There is a dark side to AI’s capability when it is used in promoting fake news.
The dark side of technology was among the topics explored at NYC Media Lab’s second Machines + Media conference, which was sponsored and hosted by Bloomberg at its global headquarters in the city on May 15. Though some of the sessions were more about looking at what tech is currently available to media, even those brought up the shadow of manipulation and misinformation.
With nearly two billion active users and over five million advertisers on its platform, Facebook is major marketing medium. Many marketers appreciated its extended access, but what they didn't not care for was the lack of control over ad placement. Now Facebook is doing something to address that concern. John Donahue, Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Sonobi spoke with me about the latest development.
On September 13,Facebook announced new “monetization eligibility standards“ to assure its millions of advertisers that they can “feel confident and in control over where their ads appear.” The new guidelines offer greater “detail on the types of content that advertisers may find sensitive” so that they can decide if they want to prevent their ads from appearing on the pages that feature sensitive content.
The calendar still says 2017, but for car brands, it's already 2018. To market this year's Camry, Toyota is veering away from making its car look like the sensible, though boring choice. Its “Sensations” campaign is meant to tap into what its audience is feeling.
Among the commercials designed for the campaign are some that explicitly encourage making the purchase of the care for “the wrong reasons.” Those present the Camry as an attractive choice that makes driving a sensuous experience – as if the car were a sexy sports car.
As you can see from the video above, “Striking” presents a young woman in the role of the Bond girl, who zooms by in a car that flutters her hair as if she were in a convertible with the top down. It meant to be exciting, and once y're excited you can find a corresponding video identified by emoji.
n June 22, the New York Times reported that, with the exception of the gaming industry, VR has proven a disappointment. It cites weak sales for VR headsets and the fact that all the “dabbling” in VR ventures has not amounted to serious strides.
But that may change with a boost from YouTube. The Google-owned video site is promoting the development of VR videos with new resources and tools that help developers and may make VR videos more attractive for marketing.
Which VR elements in a video get the most attention? That's something that creators are able to track with Heatmaps, a feature that YouTube rolled “for 360-degree and VR videos with over 1,000 views” on June 16.
You can see an example of a heatmap applied to a music video here:
“What's in a name?” Possibly quite a lot when it comes to personalized marketing.
Several months back I received a marketing email from Sprinklr that was rather ironic given its message about effective use of data. It opened like this: “ Hi {lead.First Name:default=}.” Obviously, something went wrong, and I saw the code rather than my name.
Of course, personalized emails are not all that unusual any more, so some marketers have upped their game with personalized video. After receiving the “A Dog's Purpose” video (above) — in a correctly personalized email — I contacted Adgreetz's co-founder and CEO Eric Frankel about what data is used for this kind of personalized video marketing, and how the video was delivered to people who are 1) dog owners, and 2) have a dog of that particular name?
How offensive or annoying is that? That's a real question for those in the business of assessing what types of ads viewers might consider beyond the pale: Especially now, when ads that don't make the cut may be blocked before any human sees them.
Ad blocking software is what many people rely on to stop annoying popups and noisy videos that play online when they want to watch or read something. However, those extensions required downloads and sometimes fail. They could prove far more effective if they are integral to the browser. Google has plans to do just that in Chrome, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
The standards Google would apply would be based on the research of the Coalition for Better Ads. Its Initial Better Ads Standards drew on over 25,000 consumer ratings of digital ad experiences in North America and Europe, this past March.
Marketers who ignore the standards, thinking that it will only affect some of their ads, may suffer unanticipated consequences. According to the Journal, Chrome may keep out “all advertising that appears on sites with offending ads, instead of the individual offending ads themselves." Like the one bad apple, one bad ad can spoil the entire marketing barrel, which is a very high price to pay for poor judgement.
“Sure, I love waiting to be seen by a doctor who doesn't even bother to learn my name” said no one ever. Long waits in boring waiting rooms is one reason for patient discontent, but so is feeling like their time isn't valued and that no one cares about the lack of customer service for patients.
Any one of us who has had the experience of being in a hospital, or even of caring for a family member who was, can identify with the experiences depicted in these videos.
It doesn't have to be that way. That's the message that North Memorial Health, a healthcare system that operates two hospitals and 25 clinics in the Minneapolis area, is adopting for its new branding campaign created by BrandFire. The approach is to acknowledge that, while healthcare may be broken, it is working to fix it, and to humanize the healthcare experience.
Given the dramatic increase of video content on social channels, marketers are working out strategies to capitalize on the medium. To stand out in such a sea of video content, they key is to not just attract viewers but to keep them engaged. The key ingredient for engagement is interaction, according to Wyzowl, a video explainer company that boast of having created videos for over a thousand companies.
The National Retail Federation estimates that consumers in the U.S. will spend $18.2 billion this Valentine's Day. Large though the figure may appear, it's actually down from last year's record high of $19.7 billion. It works out to an average of $136.57 per person. The bulk of it, $85.21, is earmarked for one's romantic partner, and the rest is divided among parents and children, teachers or classmates, friends, pets, and coworkers.
Though gifts of jewelry, flowers, chocolates, and dinners out, still make up the bulk of anticipated spending, there are also other options considered, particularly in light of the expanded categories for recipients of gifts on this holiday. And that means expanded opportunities for marketing around the holiday. The medium of choice for many marketers is video, because of its reach, its engagement, and the metrics on both.
photo from https://www.goodfreephotos.com/albums/vector-images/arrow-with-heart-vector-clipart.png
Want to get a smoker's attention? Try a smart billboard that coughs. That's what a responsive billboard designed to promote smoking-cessation products from a Swedish pharmacy did. As thevideoof the billboard in actions shows, it looks like a static picture of a man until a smoker gets close enough to trigger the digital screen to shift to showing the same man coughing. That's followed by a picture of the promoted products.Picture a billboard, and likely you think of a static picture with a slogan or some other words on it, or maybe a sort of revolving picture in a more dynamic version. That's old school billboards. Today's technology allows billboards to pick up on essential cues that enable them to tailor responses to the people in front of them. These are smart billboards equipped with responsive abilities. And there are more developments ahead.
With September here, students and
teachers are back in school. Instead of
just repeating the same lesson plans they used in previous years, teachers have
a new way to convey the material to their students through a free service
called Gooru.
Drawing on the power of big data to enhance learning,
Gooru offers teacher and student a curated and sharable playlist of
educational materials.
In the past, the device held by someone watching television was usually a remote control. In the future, it is just as likely to be a mobile device. Starting next fall, television ratings will be measured in tweets as well as Nielsen numbers as social conversations are analyzed to calculate the reach of a program. Nielsen and Twitter announced the new form rating last month, but their partnership has been in the works for over a year.
Snoopy was prophetic. 3-D movies have made a comeback. Consequently, movies today pack a lot more data per frame. But big data is also involved in the trend toward data streaming that is displacing discs and in the data on what people want to watch.
Big data drives today’s movie industry, both in terms of the amount of data packed into each frame you see at theaters and in terms of video streaming online. It’s what delivers 3-D effects in the theater and personalized recommendations to Netflix viewers. And very big numbers ride on both.
In the past few years, 3-D movies have staged a comeback on a scale much greater than their brief heyday in the 1950s. Adding in the 3-D effect adds "anywhere from 100% to 200% more data per frame," according to Jeff Denworth, vice president of marketing for DataDirect Networks (DDN). Denworth attributes the proliferation of present-day 3-D films to the huge success James Cameron had with the 3-D film "Avatar" in 2009, which packed a petabyte of data.
"Avatar" cost about $237 million to produce, but it brought in more than ten times that amount. It earned the distinction of IMDB identifies it as "the highest-grossing film of all time." By the beginning of 2010, it had taken in $2,779,404,183. A rash of 3-D films followed this success, and many did very well. According to iSuppli Market Intelligence (owned by IHS) in 2011 3-D films brought in $7 billion at the box-office, 16 percent more than the previous year.
The full figures for 2012 are not yet in, though they will likely be higher as the number of 3-D screens have gone up from about 9,000 in "2009 to 43,000 in by the third quarter" of 2012. One of the biggest draws of the year, Marvel’s 3D superhero flick, "The Avengers," grossed $1,511,757,910 in 2012. As 3-D has grown so common at the theater, movie-makers have to point to something else to distinguish their offering.
"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" had to do 3-D one better with its "brand new format High Frame Rate 3D (HFR 3D)." Instead of the 24 frames per second, which is the movie standard, it packs in 48. The advantage to the viewer, it claims, is that the greater number offers an experience "closer to what the human eye actually sees." Perhaps so, but quite a number of viewers were less than thrilled by the effect. Nevertheless, by December 29, 2012, "The Hobbit" had already taken in $600,508,000, according toIMDB figures.
Big data is also the key to watching movies on the small screen. Instead of picking up a disc when they buy or rent a movie, people now can just have it come right to them. As Dan Cryan, senior principal analyst at HIS observed, in 2012 Americans made "a historic switch to Internet-based consumption, setting the stage for a worldwide migration from physical to online."
Netflix was the subject of a WSJ blog on using big data to improve streaming video. Though Netflix still offers to mail out the DVDs people select for rental, more customers now opt for streaming. In the interest of improving efficiency on that end, Netflix transferred its holdings to Amazon’s cloud. It also started using Hadoop, which enables it "to run massive data analyses, such as graphing traffic patterns for every type of device across multiple markets." That helps plan for improved data transmission and better understanding of the customer.
In addition to using big data solutions for delivery of content, Netflix applies algorithms to predict what their customers would likely want to watch next. This type of data mining technology makes Netflix confident that it can handle hosting original content. In fact, it bet more than $100 million on it; that’s the reported sum paid for the rights to two seasons of House of Cards, one of several original content series it plans on streaming.
As Netflix’s Chief Communications Officer, Jonathan Friedland, says, "We know what people watch on Netflix and we’re able with a high degree of confidence to understand how big a likely audience is for a given show based on people’s viewing habits."
So what do you think? Is it possible to guarantee a hit with big data?