Let’s get right down to business, shall we?
After all, the ten minutes of your coffee break should be worthwhile. So instead of reading some meandering preamble, we present our pick of top 10 stories from the world of digital and content marketing that can do you a load of good.
Show me the ROI of your content marketing
If you’ve heard that from your boss and are looking to put your thoughts to paper, this article is for you. Katie Dufficy, Communications Director for Salesforce, Asia Pacific, shares how her company measures the effectiveness of content marketing. From having an effective elevator pitch like “Content marketing drove 20% leads for our business last year” or keeping relevant statistics handy like “72% of marketers think that branded content is more effective than magazine advertisements” are points that’ll not only convince your boss but your team to join the content marketing team.
Visual Content Marketing: 10 Brilliant Examples
Images play a big role in content marketing. People are not only attracted to a good visual instantly but are able to comprehend and respond to them better too. You’ll see these days that the visuals are getting bigger and better on social too. If you are looking to make your campaign more memorable and powerful, take inspiration from these 10 campaigns that have done it right. We especially like the “Liking isn’t helping” campaign by Crisis Relief Singapore where the image says it all. It makes people stop in their tracks and reflect their activity on social media and urges them to be more proactively involved offline rather than giving an easy thumbs up.
What Will Google Stamp Mean for Content Marketing?
Have you heard of Google Stamp yet? If not, now is a good time to take notice. After Google’s failed bid to buy Snapchat, the search giant is said to have worked double time to replicate the Discover feature from Snapchat and named the product Google Stamp. ‘Stamp’ stands for Story and AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages. From views rife on the internet, most people say that Stamp will allow mobile users to easily swipe between different types of content and a possible differentiator will be the addition of search intent to these actions. Though there is a lot of speculation, a product like Stamp can blur the lines between search, advertising, and content creation.
2018 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
Source: 2018 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: A First Look at Brand-New Research
The new benchmark report for Content Marketing is out! Put together by MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and sponsored by Brightcove, it’s time you get your hands on the 8th annual content marketing survey. There are some trend figures in there that can be useful during your next content strategy presentation to your boss or client. A strange metric that caught our attention – the spend on content marketing has definitely increased buy lesser number of marketers are able to align metrics to content marketing goals. This seems like a common struggle in the industry and if you have trouble doing this too, we suggest you go back to the first story in this blog.
Do you do the right mix of gated and ungated content? Find out here
Content marketers seem to be a bit divided on the topic of gated v/s ungated content. Some believe that content should never be gated. Others think premium content shouldn’t be given out for free and should always be gated. While there is no absolute answer, the trick lies in mixing both gated and ungated content as a part of your strategy.
Would you prospect every girl you date for marriage? Not likely. The fact that you want all their background info during the first date will scare them away. Similarly, if you ask all your first-time visitors to fill out a scary form, they are likely to bounce off sooner than you can say hello. Putting out the gating form at the right time for a piece of content that is unique makes sense. All marketers should use gated content to move people down the lead funnel.
Is your brand romancing a scandal with a wrong content placement?
Remember the YouTube ad and content scandal that broke out earlier this year?
The incident showed that even a company can like Google can land in a soup if it doesn’t give enough importance to handling content right. Several top-tier advertisers in UK including Toyota, Marks and Spencer and Tesco and French media group Havas pulled out of advertising on YouTube after it was unearthed that their ads were appearing next to extremist content. 62% marketers believe that adjacency could undermine a brand’s qualities and values. As a content marketer, you may be responsible for where your client’s content may appear. So better pay heed to what the industry is saying.
80% of Instagram Users Voluntarily Connect With a Brand on the Platform
And that’s happy news coming our way! Instagram’s COO Marne Levine recently revealed that 80 percent of the 800 million monthly users on Instagram connect with brands voluntarily. This makes it your best friend for visual content marketing. It seems to be one of the most successful among social platforms that are allowing people to view brands in a visual flourish and engage with them happily. Even though it is a seven-year-old brand, Instagram has been trying out innovations to connect the dots between customers, brands, and actual ROI. Looks like a solution may soon be around the corner.
Leila Fataar became global director of social media and public relations for Adidas Originals in 2012. The company hoped that her ‘Green and White Takeover’ campaign would sell 30,000 pairs of shoes. It ended up selling over a million. Fataar has gone on to craft many more success stories. When asked about what it takes to really build a brand, the answer is easier than you expect – the product. You have to put the product before the brand. You’ve got to contribute to the culture that you want to be a part of,” said Fataar. That’s an interesting question for us as content marketers. How do we put products before the brand and how do we merge the two effectively to create a great story?
Do share your thoughts in the comment section.
From $4.5B last year to $22.2B in 2025, email marketing is all set for growth
If you pitch email marketing actively as a part of your content strategy, you may be interested in this report by Transparency Market Research. The overall increase of internet users along with the penetration of smartphones is spearheading this number change for the email marketing industry. An interesting comment on the article though asks a question – Will email continue to exist the way it does today even in 2025?
Artificial Intelligence helps write fake reviews that pass on as the real thing
There is a grey market in the content marketing industry too. One where writers are bought dime a dozen to simply churn out content mechanically to suit the brand’s needs. Many times, this content includes reviews that help boost the brand’s presence on review sites. This industry, though, has taken a scary turn. Researchers at the University of Chicago used Deep Learning to create machine-generated reviews on Yelp. Incidentally, not only did these reviews pass off as genuine, they were even marked as useful by consumers. This meant that not only can such a system churn out content with lightning speed but also con users in believing a particular opinion about a brand. That’s a lot to think about!
That’s that. We would like to end on a reassuring note that we have all-human writers working very hard here at Just Words to create absolutely delightful content. We take pride in our work and love what we do. So if you need anything at all, do drop us a line here sales@justwords.in