What are you most excited about in the digital marketing space at the moment?
I’m both excited about and scared of the realisation that our lives are going to revolve (more) around our mobile phones and smart peripherals like wearables. Phones are our social connector, informer, gaming device, entertainer, dating companion, payment gateway, and they’re moving into healthcare fast.
We’ve all talked about the mobile revolution for the past 15 years, but the mobile mind shift is changing now. The good news for technologists, content creators, and marketers is that the big ideas are still ripe for the picking. It’s more of a battle of will and justification.
What’s your favourite example of innovative digital marketing?
I really like AirBnB’s platform for travel. They have a great user experience for exploring places to visit — they show places with visual stories and bring out locals’ knowledge really well. Then, when you’re ready to book, they take users through what is essentially a stranger’s house. The way they’ve designed the content, experience, community and all the small finishes that builds up trust is a phenomenal job.
Where do you go for great content?
As an ex-journalist, I find it very important to keep up with the very little I know about a lot of topics. To keep up with the pulse of what is going on, I check in on Twitter — but I don’t have a lot of time to engage to be frank. I also have a stable feed of news from writers I respect and I’ll actively seek those out. In terms of discovery, I do like platforms like Flipboard where you can really dig into topics that have been aggregated by smart folks. For work, I’d like to think LinkedIn could be a place to actively find and engage likeminded professionals and their content, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve quite got the product right in terms of ‘hanging out’ on LinkedIn vs needing to close the browser down if your boss is looking over — it still feels a bit like a jobs site. Of late, I’m finding a lot more interesting content via Medium.
What’s next for digital content?
I’d like to think it’s integrity. I think we’re pretty much reaching the bottom in terms of sensationalist headlines and “You won’t believe what happens next” story introductions. For brands wanting to really stand out when creating content, they’ll need to find their content mission and be really true to that promise.
And while I love digital metrics, I think we’ll need to measure the performance of content better. We need to gauge how people felt about the content brands are creating, how it helped their lives, and how likely they were to trust the brand after reading or engaging with that content. If we focus on clicks and bounce-rates it becomes a clickbait beauty contest.
Hopefully we’ll see the end of brands with frivolous social media pages spewing out worthless content. If you look at all the successful content marketing brands and media outlets, they really believe in what they are writing and have a passion for it. Great content comes from brands who live and breathe what they do.
What defines good content?
Knowing your audience and adding value to their lives. There is a bazillion web pages out there and only a finite amount of people with time to read your content. The world is diverse, so knowing what drives your target audience will determine how to approach them with content they’ll remember, use, and keep coming back for.
What is the biggest myth about content marketing?
For brands there are two: it’s expensive and hard to manage. Unfortunately, brands don’t think like publishers enough when approaching content marketing — they still think in advertising cycles or periodic website updates. It’s frustrating to have marketing teams draw out the content creation process.
Some of the biggest stories I’ve written as a journalist were short, to-the-point, and written in half an hour or less. Brands & their agencies need to be more nimble to support this model.
How are you amplifying and maximising your content?
That’s a broad question, but how we approach it at MRM//McCann is that we start with people and their journey. At every moment of truth there is an expectation and we look for those moments to tell our content story. To do this we’ll map out a customer journey map and look at it from both offline and online and see how we can create content that users will gravitate to.
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Brendon Chase, Director of User Experience at MRM//McCANN. You can follow him on Twitter @cankles.
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