Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Predictions for 2018 – Podcasts, Newsletters and Targeted Content

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In my post earlier this week, I predicted three types of digital content would be central to advertiser efforts in 2018.

Newsletters

What’s old is new again. Newsletters are super valuable because they are permission-based; your customer has opted into the sales process by subscribing. Our top of funnel marketing activity logically should focus on getting the customer into our marketing ecosystem. Short of an immediate purchase, subscribing to a newsletter is the next best thing. But focus efforts on subscribers who open and engage with the content; scrub deadweight regularly. A large subscriber count is not the goal. What matters is converting the active subscribers into customers.

Targeted content

We have so much data about customer preferences and purchases in the DMP (data management platform). We should be using data to better target content as well as ads. This is the foundational premise of start-up LiftIgniter, an AI driven personalization engine. It promises to deliver more personalized content to site visitors, learning and improving over time to deliver an optimized visitor experience and increasing stickiness. And ad revenues.

I think publishers should take this idea one step farther, and use such technologies to deliver a better branded content experience to visitors. Users outside the target might see an aligned piece of editorial content that is simply sponsored by the advertiser, while readers/viewers who are known to be interested — “in market” — see a more branded, conversion-oriented piece. This would be a win-win. Advertisers would pay premium fees to reach the targeted, qualified audience with no waste, while the casual visitors see top of funnel awareness-oriented content and aren’t turned off by a harder, irrelevant sell.

Podcasts

Podcasting has been waiting a long time to find its critical mass, and the time, it seems, is now. According to the Pandora Definitive Guide To Audio, podcasts will earn $220million in ad revenues in 2017. Slowly but surely, innovators are solving the content discovery and usability issues that slowed growth of the format, and better listener metrics can’t be far behind. Video will always be important, both branded content and editorial video, but I see podcasts as the big growth opportunity for publishers in 2018. They have lower production costs than video, and offer a more even playing field, in which (so far) Facebook has no special advantages.

The branded content S-Q-U-E-E-Z-E

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“On average, unaided awareness was 69 percent and purchase intent was 51 percent after engaging with branded content,” reported the Polar Ipsos Branded Content Study in May 2017

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The struggle, it is real. Digital publishers finally have solid proof that branded content works, and boom, a whole raft of new competitors surface, all looking for that same advertiser dollar.

Digiday covers the problem quite nicely in this piece: As branded content pivots to video, publishers face new challenges. The article focuses on the competition offered by video production houses and entertainment studios, with a passing mention for influencers who approach a brand directly. Its central thesis is that the entertainment studios bring top-notch talent, expertise and a blank slate for the brand message, whereas the digital publisher pitch is about its audience and its editorial voice, which may no longer be enough in the new market realities.

I agree and suggest the following additional points that make it easier to go with the independent production versus the publisher.

  • Depending on the property, the editorial voice can make brand integration more or less challenging. If it is too hard, the advertiser looks elsewhere, and then can distribute its content through owned channels, content syndication, native advertising and programmatic.
  • The studios and video production houses are more distribution channel agnostic, whereas a publisher will always focus its distribution first on its owned properties. That can make it more costly to reach the total audience, unless the publisher is extraordinarily strong on the desired segment.
  • Nearly all video needs to be amplified on social to get the results we desire. The advertiser can buy her audiences from the social platform just as easily as the publisher can. The pitch for the editorial voice, and the implied endorsement of it, has to be stellar for brands to pay upcharges on something it can easily buy itself.

The competition isn’t just coming from entertainment studios and video shops. As Digiday noted, influencers are increasingly able to pitch directly to brands, at a level of production quality equal to the studio product. Brands themselves have more in-house capability, as do their media, strategy and PR agencies. Every publisher faces a certain amount of in-category competition and let’s not forget the social platforms. Facebook could do a little more vertical integration at any moment, and open its own branded content studio, which would be a formidable competitor. Note that I think this scenario is unlikely; Facebook has a vested interest in NOT being directly responsible for the content distributed on its service, thus not likely to broadly embrace strategies that put its Russian-hacking defense in jeopardy.

But still, even if Facebook stays out of it, digital publishers are squeezed by competitors on all sides. Here are some thoughts for surviving this branded content squeeze.

  1. Build a branded content studio that has its own reputation for quality storytelling, that can compete for the brand dollar almost independent of your digital distribution. Great Big Story (Turner) and T Brand (New York Times) are two examples of this approach.It is also the most costly in the short-term. In these days of ever-decreasing media margins, if a publisher hasn’t already started down this road, this may not be a viable strategy.
  2. Niche. OWN your audience. Make your voice matter. If your publication/channel is the go-to source for the audience, your editorial voice becomes relevant again. Even though the brand can buy your audience elsewhere, it cannot buy your editorial endorsement anywhere but from you.
  3. Talent. Become the most efficient way to get the best talent. For some publishers. this means celebrities; for others, success is rooted in building the right community of influencers that you can tap into for branded content, both user generated and house branded.
  4. Think beyond video to other channels. I will have more thoughts on this in a future post, but newsletters and podcasts will be important for advertisers in 2018. I also think the ability to tailor content to individual preferences (using all that data we have) will breathe new life into sponsored content. If we know that only the target audience, the presumed interested audience for a message, will see the sponsored post or branded video, we can offer more brand integration and tailor the messaging to drive conversion. Without wasted audience or irritating casual readers.

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I attended AdTech in New York last week, and met two super-interesting video companies.

Shootsta, based in Australia, offers brands a way to create higher quality social video. Basically, they send you the camera set-up, you film your content, and they do post-production. Targeted at the social media and corp comms folks tasked with feeding the social channels. Not intended to replace corporate video production.

Showbox, based in Israel, attacks the problem from a slightly different angle. It’s a cloud based platform that lets websites/communities/publishers offer professional quality video creation tools to users. I haven’t dug in yet, but it would seem to solve the quality problem of user generated branded content at a more efficient cost than what we used to do, which was have our video producers do the post-production.

 

3 tips for more successful email newsletters

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In recent posts, I have been focusing on the role and value of an engaged community in marketing success. Email newsletters are a critical component in “feeding” the community as well as informing the larger audience. For a publisher, convincing a reader or viewer to subscribe to updates closes the content loop, and makes them a highly valued Joiner, to borrow a term from Jeffrey Rohrs, author of Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers (affiliate link.) For a brand, the subscriber has given permission to be contacted directly, which brings them is one step closer to becoming a customer.

Yet, we don’t leverage newsletters as well as we could. It is simply too hard to create and send newsletters for most marketing organizations, so we don’t create enough of the super-targeted or opportunistic missives that are more likely to lead to success. Our newsletters are broad and generic, and often deleted unopened. Even those that are offer-driven tend to hit too wide or too late to drive the consumer behavior we want.

Some of the challenges that contribute to this are:

  • lack of email systems connectivity to websites and sales/marketing databases, to more efficiently manage the lead flow process and target emails more specifically to consumer interests and behavior;
  • design requirements. A well-designed newsletter is more likely to succeed but most marketers aren’t designers, and the design backlog can be a roadblock to getting timely missives “in the mail;”
  • organizational silos that put the power of the email newsletter tools in one department, making is difficult for others to harness the tactic for their business objectives.

How can we do better with newsletters? Short of fixing the three challenges I noted above, which are longer term, organizational issues, there are three things you can do immediately.

  1. Review YOUR newsletter subscriptions, and think about the ones that actually engage you past the first, heady SUBSCRIBE moment. Which you likely did as the result of another transaction (download a white paper, enter a sweepstakes, purchase a product, etc.) I recently did this as part of a massive INBOX ZERO effort, and pruned a lot of newsletters that I never even opened. The ones that remain (including a few that I remember subscribing to FOR the content) passed one of two tests: I am a customer, want to get the special offers, and have acted on a newsletter at least once or I regularly share on social or use articles in my blog posts;
  2. Better target YOUR subscribers that exhibit these engagement behaviors and also target their lookalikes. What content works? What doesn’t? Even if you have lots of subscribers to your newsletters, most of them are passive. Keep sending those passive users your content, because opens do still matter, but spend more time on the engaged readers. Offer them exclusive access or content to increase their loyalty;
  3. Scrub your list regularly. Get rid of the subscribers who don’t ever open your content. They just inflate your subscriber numbers which makes your open rate look bad.

Your email newsletters can be one of your most effective community engagement tools. Or they can be digital “bin fodder.”

Your choice.

Updated 18 September to add link to an article from eMarketer reporting on a July 2017 survey by Adobe that puts some quantitative measures to some of the points I discuss in this post.  Not surprisingly, 50% of respondents said the most annoying thing about email marketing was frequency – too much. None of the other reasons even got close to similar significance, BUT among the top complaints were two data-related issues: an offer than makes it clear that the data about me is wrong (24% ) and urging me to buy something I have already purchased (20%).

The future of digital media: Creating a new content ecosystem

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Second of (probably) three posts about the future of digital media

Quality Content + Audience at Scale + Community =
Sustainable Engagement, Loyalty and Conversion

In my previous post, I presented this marketing equation. It means that for publishers of content, whether a media company or a brand, creating quality content and building a large audience is not sufficient to drive sustainable consumer engagement, loyalty and conversion.

We need a community.

There is a certain “duh” about that statement. Of course community is important. Fandom is the bedrock of social media. But I don’t think we’ve quite hit on how to effectively use community to reach our marketing goals. To truly partner with our community, not just create content for it (the typical publishing model), or build spaces where it can can create its own content or connect with likeminded folks (the social platforms, including blogs).

In this post, I am going to cover a concept for how digital publishers/channels can collaborate with the community to create higher value content. It is by no means the only way to partner with or build community.

The idea:
A content ecosystem created around media sites or brands that seamlessly combines “owned and operated” editorial content with content created by consumers (the community) but on their OWN sites or platforms, not hosted within the media property or brand site. Accompanied by robust revenue shares between the publisher/brand and the community partners.

How we get there:
People don’t visit destination sites the way we did when the web was young and we bookmarked all the sites we loved and checked them frequently for new content. Search and social drive discovery, and loyalty is fleeting, especially in B2C lifestyle content. It is a distributed model, and we may not even be aware of where we are consuming the information  (a problem for another day.)

Tightly focused verticals and B2B, which is sort of a vertical, are slightly different and may still see some success as “destinations,” but the cachet of writing for a mainstream vehicle is far less than it was “back in the day.” Content creators can find their audience and create a community without the endorsement of mainstream brands.

As a result, the model of getting people to create content on a destination site for free just won’t work very well and it doesn’t scale easily (if at all.) That’s not how we consume content, and the value exchange is unbalanced. The content creator gets far less than the site owner; the cachet of writing for a site — even HuffPo — only goes so far. The site owner may not be getting exactly the content it expected either. If you aren’t paying someone, it is much harder to dictate what they produce or maintain your desired content quality.

Syndication is a better choice for the content creator, as it offers the possibility of click-over to the original content site, where the content creator can monetize through advertising and potentially bring the viewer deeper into HER content. The mainstream site owner can control quality by only syndicating content that meets its quality standards and editorial needs.

But syndicated content is rarely integrated with the editorial content alongside which it lives. It disrupts the flow of content experience, just like advertising does. And more so when it is sponsored content syndicated into a native unit within a site.

If we really want to increase the long-term value of content — to publishers, brands, consumers, content creators, everyone — we need a better model.

My ideal content network is a community-centered editorial ecosystem. With an integrated editorial strategy that leverages the contributions of the publisher/brand and the distributed sites on the community network, somewhat like a hub and its spokes.

How many spokes? 20-25 contributing sites that really match the editorial mission. If you cover multiple vertical markets, 15 or so per vertical, depending on how many verticals you have. You really don’t want more than 100 or so content partners in the editorial community. Because you have to deliver a high degree of service to maximize the value – yours to them as a content and probably advertising partner, and theirs to you as content producers in your ecosystem that will help you deliver a great content experience and scale more easily. Remember: they continue to invest in building their audience just as you do yours. The collective effort increases scale beyond the capacity of any individual.

When a viewer finds a piece of content — however and wherever she enters your ecosystem, she is offered additional content that matches her interests through contextual matching, behavioral targeting and as she comes back, knowledge of her content consumption. What does she love? What content is she more likely to engage with? Offer her the best matches, both on the site and across all the content partners.

What’s the tech that does this? I have some ideas, based on things I have been working on recently, but this doesn’t have to be complicated to start. It is a simple commitment to build an integrated content strategy with the community, where content lives equally in both places.

Why does this matter so much? Consumers are already banner blind unless they are actively seeking. Without some innovation, they will become equally blind to native advertising, which is the most relied upon method for scaling sponsored content. I also expect that midroll ads on Facebook video are going to impact video completion rates far more than preroll did. It’s disruptive, and consumers hate being disrupted. (Side bar: I am already sick of the insurance company souffle.)

These common ad formats won’t go away. They have their place in the ecosystem, but it is largely top of funnel, driving awareness and interest. If we want to drive down the purchasing funnel, we need to engage consumers with our message, and convert them to customers.

Branded content, and most specifically influencer content, is the key. Consumers are more likely to trust influencer recommendations than any other source when it comes to purchasing a product (Source: In the Company of Friends, SheKnows/Research Narrative Influencer Marketing Study, October 1, 2015, PDF.)

By creating a more hospitable ecosystem for influencer content, in which we seamlessly move within the content network, the experience of reading or viewing sponsored content is less disruptive. We’ve already accustomed our reader to following her interests across our network with our “regular” content. The branded content experience looks much the same. Anchoring branded content or video, usually on the brand or mainstream media site (but not necessarily,) seamlessly integrated with influencer content on other blogs or social platforms. With the right intelligent tools, we could even target sponsored content to the most likely consumers, eliminating the circulation “waste” of readers that are not in the target demo.

As I noted above, you wouldn’t need hundreds of influencers as content creation partners in such a community ecosystem. 20, 25 per content area or niche. But you could complement the vertical networks with microinfluencer activations and social marketing promotions on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you didn’t want to build out your own group of social influencers, there are PLENTY of agencies and software platforms that you can contract on a campaign or annual license basis.

This model is far from complete as I’ve described it here, and there are a number of considerations not even mentioned, but we’ve been circling around this idea of community-centered publishing for years. HuffPo built the first relatively successful model where folks would write for free, and Medium came along to scale it, but neither quite got there in the end. HuffPo is at its core a contributor-fueled website that sells ads. Medium had no center to serve as the hub for the spokes of distributed content, making it too hard for advertisers to buy. From Medium. Without the hub that adds value, brands can create influencer marketing programs on their own. No need to come to a publisher.

YouTube has a revenue share model with its content creators, but it too is center-less, relying on brands and content creators to create broadcast channels for some semblance of structure. It’s still very much the wild wild west. Other media businesses, from BlogHer and SheKnows to CafeMom/Media and the now-shuttered Mode developed variations on this theme, and got very close, but each time, one side of the ecosystem dominated, either the O&O channel/site or the partner network.

Largely because the media industry wasn’t ready for such a distributed model.

For this ecosystem to work, the two sides need to be equally  important, content partners. Decisions about where content runs are driven by creating the highest long term value for the content and consumer relationships, which creates the value for the partner sites.  Ownership — of content, even of exclusive relationships, is less important than results and creation of value. This is not the usual way we do things. When valuing a company, one of the first questions is what do you own – content, technology, exclusive contracts. In our distributed model, we don’t own all the assets, but we are using them in proprietary ways to create value.

And everybody wins.

Especially the customers, who get quality content about the topics and brands they love, from a variety of trusted voices, editors and consumer advocates alike.

I think and hope we are ready now. I’d love to build this.

15 September: Updated to add link to an excellent column by Jack Myers: How Wall St. Priorities are Damaging the Media Ecosystem

Final post in the series (for now) will be some thoughts about video specifically.

The future of digital media: The value of community

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first in a series of at least 3 posts about the future of digital media

Community

Of late, I have been thinking a lot about how we make content more successful. Especially branded content, but really any content.

Whether a publisher, who monetizes content through advertising, or a brand, which monetizes content through product sales, fundamentally all content is created with two objectives:

  • to inform, educate or entertain the audience;
  • to serve as a vehicle for advertising messages, including display, native, branded content, catalogs, shopping carts.

As marketers, our goal is to create the most successful content we can: well written or produced content (quality) consumed by the largest possible volume of interested consumers (scale), with the best outcome possible for advertised products— increased awareness, preference, trial or sale, depending on the KPI (conversion.) The standardized measures of success are pageviews, ad impressions, clicks, conversions and for extra credit, time on site and repeat visitors.

Search engines changed the way we find content, and social has amplified the mercurial nature of the consumer. We no longer habitually bookmark our favorite sites and rarely browse through a publication in the “I feel lucky mode.” With the possible exception of publications that we actually pay for, such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post, we don’t “read the paper.” We search, we follow friend’s social recommendations, and maybe, just maybe,if we enjoy our experience on a site, we remember and are more likely to visit the next time it turns up in search or social. Nirvana for the publisher: we have such a good experience with a site, we subscribe to its newsletter and enter its content ecosystem.

But with organic search and social, we aren’t really targeting the information seeker. She is pulling content based on her interests.

Advertising is different. When we are paying, we can and do target.

Ad targeting has transformed the ad side of the digital media industry, from the data management platform (DMP) to the increasing dominance of programmatic in the advertising mix. We are really good at finding the audience.

Certainly we should use caution, and sometimes skepticism, when considering audience demographics — think of the recent New York Times report that Facebook estimates its young American audience to be 25 million more than the actual number of 18-34 year olds in last year’s US census — but third-party tools from Nielsen and comScore help validate audience claims. At a minimum, they put everyone on the same, comparable playing field, which gives advertisers directional guidance.

Dodgy marketing claims aside, we are better at finding and reporting on audiences than ever before.

The question is, how do we get them to come back, to consume more content. To become loyal readers or viewers who consume a lot of content on each visit. Who engage with our branded content at the same level as our organic content. Who convert into customers.

Because, for publishers, re-selling each viewer at a slight mark-up for what it cost to acquire that page or video view is not sustainable. Unless you add measurable value to that view, such as increased conversions, the pyramid will eventually collapse. Brands will figure out that they can buy those views, that awareness, cheaper if they go direct.

Even then, even if they go direct, brands will not continue to pour cash into the funnel —whether YouTube or Facebook or programmatic media or influencer posts — to acquire views that do not convert into engaged viewers and customers.

The key is community. Tapping successfully into ones that form naturally “in the wild,” creating new ones, temporary at first, ideally permanent, around the content we create, and feeding the community with the additional sustaining value – informational, transactional, exclusive, financial – that encourages deeper engagement beyond the simple view or click to buy.

Your community is in your audience, but they are not synonymous. You will (hopefully) always have a much larger potential audience than you will an engaged community. But it is in your community that you find your evangelists, your influencers, your advocates. The audience members that will become your partners in promoting, in creating new customers.

Now, I am not so foolish as to think that this is a new idea. The essential value of community in marketing has long been known. Community is the underlying fuel of social media marketing, the entire gaming ecosystem, successful loyalty programs and multilevel marketing. Among others.

But I think we have only dabbled at the edges of how community can drive success for those of us publishing, and monetizing, content on the web.

It looks something like this:

Quality Content + Audience at Scale + Community =

Sustainable Engagement, Loyalty and Conversion