What are you most excited about in the digital marketing space at the moment?
I get excited about the new capabilities around content sequencing and personalisation. The technology, data and platforms in this space are getting much more sophisticated and integrated. I think this advancement will ultimately lead to much better ways to target, nurture and convert your audiences through relevant content. The proliferation of content marketing has caused a lot of brands and publishers to create a massive amount of content.
Volume is no longer the issue for most — it is typically more about strategically distributing content not just to new audiences, but more importantly your existing audiences that can be nurtured with the right content at the right time. More volume doesn’t translate to more relationships and conversations unless the content is highly personalised and hyper-targeted over time.
Content sequencing across multiple devices and networks will be even more critical in the future as our consumption of content and our attention becomes even more fragmented.
What’s your favourite example of innovative digital marketing?
One of the best examples of social media marketing I’ve seen is from Purina. Unlike most brands, they’re using social the way it should be used — socially. Using the “Moment Studio,” they’re generating over 1,000 personalised responses a week to pet lovers on Twitter and Facebook and getting over a 95% response rate.
By directly engaging social users with highly personalised content, Purina is able to connect to their audience in a very meaningful way one tweet at a time. This non-broadcast, high touch approach embodies why and how a brand can use social to truly connect with their followers and fans.
Another great example in digital is what Chipotle is doing around the world of food processing. They’re nailing how to tell a compelling story across digital with films, games, social and other extensions.
The fact that Hulu is running their original TV series is a sign that brands can be bonafide storytellers. It’s not just a space for TV channels and studios anymore. I think you’ll see a lot more brands adopt this model, but Chipotle has certainly paved the way and showed brands that you don’t have to default to generic product content — your story can be more bold and meaningful.
What’s next for digital content?
One area that I’m really intrigued by is the future of measurement. Vanity metrics like clicks and impressions have ruled the digital media kingdom for years. These metrics don’t tell you much about the engagement of the content itself or map to common conversation goals. While we’re seeing a shift to attention metrics as a part of the measurement formula from early adopters such as Upworthy and the Financial Times, I think there is still a long way to go to improve the way we analyse content marketing.
The use of attention metrics is certainly a step in the right direction, but in my opinion there’s no silver bullet that I think will replace CPM or CPC. I think we’ll start using new tools and capabilities that will be able to customise metrics based on the tailored goals and attributes of your content rather using a standardised, one metric fits all approach.
What defines good content?
I think it should ultimately pay off whatever your goals, but my broad definition would include a couple of requirements. Good content has to be premium — in other words content that is not easily found elsewhere. Take a stance, provide a unique point of view and shed light on a new angle of the story.
If your content is vanilla and doesn’t stick out, it will never stand a chance in this highly competitive marketplace. Secondly, good content is not self-proclaimed. It has to be validated by an audience’s attention and willingness to share.
We look at share rate (ratio of shares to views) and engaged time or completion rate (videos). I think we have to be careful about just looking at clicks or views. A lot of clicks doesn’t necessarily mean the audience is engaged with the content. It may just signal a big media spend or clickibait. As my friend, Ken Blom at BuzzFeed says, “you can trick someone to click, but it is very difficult to trick them into sharing.”
What is the biggest myth about content marketing?
We can get caught up in this “content is king” mindset in which we believe that if content is good enough it will automatically find an audience. This “field of dreams” approach to content marketing will fill up your website with archives, but no audience to show for it. The reality is that you’re not done when you click publish. I strongly believe that you should spend just as much or more time on the promotion of your content as the production of it.
This focus on distribution should be reflected in your time, budget and measurement across your content marketing initiatives. A focus on distribution should be fully baked into your content marketing recipe from conception to production, all way through to promotion and analysis.
How are you amplifying and maximising your content?
The way we distribute and amplify our content reflects an active day trader looking for growth opportunities, much more than a mutual fund manager who will simply buy and hold. We’re constantly making adjustments to what content we promote, where it’s promoted and how much budget is allocated to it — all based on our KPIs and core goals of the individual piece of content. Testing multiple iterations of creative on multiple networks is key to this flexible approach.
We’ve learned when optimising against performance that only 10% of our overall volume of content will generate 90% of the traffic and engagement. Using what we’ve dubbed as the “10 > 90” rule as a guide to our strategy, our core objective is to quickly identify and optimise the outliers (10% of top performing content) with additional investment while moving budget away from the laggards (90% of content that doesn’t take off). We’ve seen as much as an eight to 10 times increase in CPC or CPE efficiency when using this rule.
Where do you go for great content?
While I still have some go-to destinations like Medium, Digiday and FastCompany, I’m probably getting 80-85% of my content from a range of personalised content discovery apps. Flipboard, Zite, LinkedIn Pulse and Prismatic are among my favourites depending on the topic and device I’m using. These platforms do an amazing job of delivering highly relevant content based on my interests, consumption history and personal connections. The destination and source of content is becoming less important to me as these curation platforms are getting so good at helping me discover new content and publishers that I would have never sought out directly myself.
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