Marketing Roadmaps

Content marketing

The silver lining in the GDPR: An opportunity for permission-based marketing

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The GDPR (Global Data Privacy Regulation) is a European law intended to restore control of personal data (what we usually refer to as PII, personally identifiable information) to the consumer. Under GDPR, businesses must comply with a set of strict stipulations regarding data collection and usage that require consumer authorization, both for collection and the intended uses. For more background on the law, AdWeek has a nice piece summarizing the regulation from the perspective of advertisers, agencies and tech companies. and the EU has an excellent interactive infographic.

GDPR changes the worldwide advertising playing field. Even though it is a European law, compliance will be expected from any company, anywhere, that might have access to an EU citizen’s private data. On the technical side, which I am not going to cover here, the data management platforms and ad tech companies that support advertisers, publishers and the programmatic media infrastructure will have to manage permissions to ensure that no one is using data in an unauthorized manner. All data – first, second and third party. It’s a huge effort. Complying with the provisions of GDPR is table stakes. You have to do it or risk pretty hefty fines.

Brands and publishers will need to be transparent about data collection and use. In order to obtain, and retain, permission to use customer data to target, retarget, market, they will need to demonstrate value for their use of this information. As perceived by the customer. This is the opportunity and the silver lining to GDPR. It is now far more likely that brands and publishers will invest in innovative permission-based marketing to differentiate themselves from the pack.

Beyond table stakes

We have permission, as marketers, to go beyond a transaction based commodity marketplace driven by programmatic advertising and ever more creepy targeting and retargeting. A marketplace, by the way, in which media companies risked marginalization if not extinction as brands began to realize they could create content and target it to their audiences with direct buys through Google and Facebook, without the intermediary and mark-up of a publisher. As I commented last fall:

… 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.

We now can go beyond the table stakes of privacy regulation, and build the permission-based proprietary audiences that will deliver true advertiser and consumer value.

What are we delivering to the reader/viewer/listener in exchange for the permission to use the data that we seek? Is it truly differentiated from the competition? If not, think some more. You must offer unique value to make it worth giving YOU the permission to store and use personal data. This is just as true with a subscription offering. Subscriber data is still used to market the audience to advertisers, and just as subject to GDPR. The paywall only increases the demand on content value.

This is why I advise:

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.

Other things to think about:

  • Community – Building a community around your content through exclusives, discounts on services, events (on and off line). Digiday is an example of a publisher creating a community of senior marketing execs around a paywall offering.
  • Infuse your content with your customer — whether sponsored content created by influencers, or crowdsourced reviews or live stream events in which they can participate.
  • New content streams. Go beyond digital and video, and look at podcasts and events as ways to lock in your unique value, your unique audience. Vox Media and Crooked Media are two examples of firms successfully exploring new content streams.
  • Newsletters are the ultimate permission-based marketing tool, so don’t use yours just as a billboard for content that is consumable on your site. Add additional value, shoppable links and images, even original content that is only available in your newsletter.

Your objective is to create an ecosystem of value in which your user (or prospect if you are a brand) regularly extends and renews permission to use her/his private data. You still have to abide by the GDPR rules, and be transparent about how you use data, whether you share it with others, and so on, but provided you don’t betray the trust of your reader/viewer/listener by breaking those promises, at the end you will have something far more valuable than retargeting data.

You’ll have a loyal audience. And that can’t bought. It can only be earned.

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Agree with my ideas, but not sure how to get started? I can help with everything from strategy development and content creation to influencer, digital and social marketing, performance audits and presentation decks. Even better, the first hour is free. Email sgetgood@getgood.com to book your free consultation. I’ll give you some thought starters during our conversation, and we can go from there.

11 ingredients for digital success in 2018

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The past 6 months have seen tremendous upheaval in digital media. Companies that were once high flyers — Mashable, Rolling Stone, Time — sold for a fraction of their former (perceived) value. Whether you think this is massive disruption or simply inevitable course correction, the ingredients for digital success have evolved.

It’s not enough to have a mobile-first site with strong traffic, SEO friendly content, a way to deliver video pre-roll and a good native offering. You DO have to have that, but digital success in 2018 requires a few more ingredients. Scale alone is not enough.

Here’s my recipe for digital success in 2018. Whether you are a digital publisher or a brand extending its content strategy, below is my take on how to turn readers and viewers into true audience that you can then further monetize — events, products, e-commerce etc.

 

11 ingredients for digital success

The Basics
1. Great content. With a point of view
Content with a point of view will be more successful than content that tries to be all things to all people. Vanilla is a lovely flavor, but if everyone offers that same vanilla, content becomes a commodity. Point of view isn’t necessarily an opinion or a “stand;” you don’t have to be news or hard-hitting to have one. It can be everything from a niche target, an overt POV, to a more subtle theme or vision underlying and holding together the content you create. It is NOT a mission statement or manifesto, although those can part of a point of view.

2. A deep understanding of and commitment to your customers — both the one you have and the one you want.
Point of view is likely something you share with your target audience or customers. The more you know about them the easier (but never easy) it will be to build a product they will love. This is equally true if your project is 100% digital, or digital is simply the gateway to purchasing a tangible good. You also have to be committed to looking at your business with a customer-centric lens. Everything truly does depend on making the customer happy. Shortcuts may get you through in the short-term but long-term success for any brand is about delivering to customer needs. Consider expanding the C- suite to include a Chief Customer Officer to be the steward of this effort in partnership with client service, marketing, sales, finance and operations.

3. Data, data, data
Data drives decisions. What gets measured, gets managed. You’ve probably heard these phrases more than once in your career. Simply put, the things we measure are the things we can effectively act upon. If you don’t have data, you can’t adjust, optimize, improve. Of course, for measurement to be effective, you have to define a baseline for success up front so you measure the right things, not every thing. All data is not equally important.

Analytics (website, social platforms, campaign performance) are just the first part of a comprehensive research plan. Third party research data is the second. And proprietary research – into your audience, your content performance, market opinion — is the connective tissue that brings analytics and third party data together into meaningful, actionable information that you can use to make your content better and differentiate from the competition.

Traffic Drivers
Our first set of ingredients are the traffic drivers. How do you find the audience and bring them to your content?

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is your first, and best, friend for building traffic. Nothing — not even paid search — replaces strong organic search results. You can build an internal SEO team or contract an SEO firm to develop your SEO plan and process. However you choose to operationalize SEO, it should be a continuous loop between the content creation team and the SEO management team. But search alone is not enough to ensure success, and you shouldn’t expect it to deliver all your traffic. Against one measure, it scales amazingly well. One well written, search-optimized article can deliver many readers against multiple queries. On another, not so much. You acquire every reader one search at a time. To achieve any scale, you have to keep feeding the beast fresh new content all the time. Even though you can update older content, you still need staff to write and edit. Search is the foundation of your traffic strategy, but it isn’t the whole structure.

5. Social traffic
Social traffic isn’t the panacea either, but you need a robust social strategy to distribute your content on the popular social platforms. Specifically Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter (in descending order of importance). Earned, or “organic,” mentions of your brand are important and you should by all means start with a social communications strategy that leverages your owned social accounts to spread the word about your content and initiatives. But don’t expect earned social to get the volume you need. For most brands, organic social reach is a delightful myth. While your audience may follow your accounts for the news, they aren’t going to re-share it at the volume you need to reach new audiences. And then there’s the fact that the algorithms of social (Facebook in particular) are DESIGNED to push you toward paid social. Ads, boosted posts etc. Don’t fight it. Embrace it. Make it work.

My advice is to post your news and stories and get the organic reach that your audience will naturally deliver. Then boost the best performing posts to reach new readers. This will increase the potential pool that might share the content, thus increasing your earned media. Branded content in the form of influencer-generated posts is an important ingredient; consider MarketingLand’s report this week on research done by social analytics firm Shareablee showing that viral reach from branded content ads on Facebook eclipses standard ads.

6. Native advertising
The power of native content is why you should use your web and social analytics, and even your SEO analyses, to identify the best content to put in native advertising units. Publishers may prefer to promote the branded content they create in their native units, but increasingly they are opening their inventory up to native programmatic as well as premium native advertising using content sourced elsewhere. Plus of course services like Taboola and Outbrain, although I recommend that you regularly evaluate whether the traffic you get from less-premium sources is the same quality that you get from more premium sources of traffic.

But like SEO, social posts and native ads deliver one reader, one viewer, one click at a time. Scale requires volume. Every increase has a real cost to produce and distribute the content. It’s effective, but not terribly efficient.

In addition to growing your unique users, you need to convert those one-time readers and viewers into a loyal audience. You want them to keep coming back for more, and consuming more than one piece of content at each visit. In analytics terms, you want your uniques to keep growing, but your page and video views to eclipse uniques. In my opinion, 4x is a baseline for good, and you really want it to be much more than that. Our next set of critical ingredients are the engagement and loyalty drivers.

Engagement and Loyalty Drivers
These ingredients deepen your readers’/viewers’ relationship with your content.

7. Newsletters
What’s old is new again! Newsletters are the best mechanism to get casual readers/visitors into into your content ecosystem and regularly coming back for new content. Because they are permission-based, with the user having control over what data is shared with the publisher, they are more compatible with privacy regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will become increasingly important for any firm doing business with EU nationals when GDPR takes effect in May 2018.

That said, getting permission from the user is only part of the privacy mandate; you also have to protect it, so your newsletter tech needs to be super smart. Bottom line though, the more you can get the reader/viewer to share with you (first party data), the less you will be restricted by potential regulations/restrictions on the use of third party data from the big databases. That means delivering real value in exchange for personal information, and the more you ask, the more value you must add.

Don’t use your newsletter simply as an index to articles on your site. Folks may subscribe but they won’t necessarily become loyal readers (and repeat visitors) if the newsletter is nothing more than a promotional tool for your articles. Take the time to create some original content around the articles you recommend. Follow the example of Digiday; its daily newsletter highlights articles from the Digiday site, but it places them in context, giving the reader value even before she clicks over.

8. Recommendations
Website design matters. It is all well and good to say that no one comes to your home page, so giving it undue importance is wasted effort. For many, site visits are driven by search and social directly to the content. But the structure of content on the site once someone gets there and their ability to discover new, relevant content matters. A lot.

Publishers and brands need to invest in recommendation engines and native units that bring readers/viewers deeper into content based on their interests. Baseline is a smart keyword/topic match to the article/video they are reading or viewing, but we need to push the envelope on this. As we build stable databases of loyal readers’ preferences and past viewing habits, we should make inferences about the type of additional content they would like to consume, both editorial but also branded content. The better we match our recommendations to their interests, the more likely they are to consume multiple pages of content by choice, and not just because you split the content up into 7 pages.

9. Video (but smarter)
Digital publishers by and large have struggled with video. There is huge advertiser demand, nowhere near enough quality inventory, and strategy after strategy to manufacture it has met with lukewarm success at best. Facebook seems to be the hands-down winner for delivering targeted video eyeballs, followed by the video aggregators like Jun Group who have fed the digital demand of both publishers and brand-direct.

What seems clear to me, whether you are looking at digital, linear or OTT, is that successful video strategy is grounded in more than just delivering consumer eyeballs through targeting and audience acquisition strategies. If you BUY every view for slightly less than you re-sell it to your advertiser client, your business cannot scale efficiently. It works for a while, but eventually the advertiser figures out that she can buy that same eyeball direct.

To be successful with video, it comes back to figuring out what resonates with your audience, what fits with your editorial or brand mission, and most importantly, what you can do better, smarter than the other guy. I wrote about this in September. Success is rooted in smart content strategy, incorporating video where it makes sense for the story, not simply to deliver advertising. We shouldn’t pivot to video; we should integrate video into a multi-format digital strategy that includes all sorts of content. For a successful publisher’s take on this issue, check out Digiday’s report on Bustle’s strategy.

Even if your content is primarily text, and doesn’t seem to “need” video to tell the story, for example B2B content, you need to start at least thinking about video. Pew Research reported this spring that millenials are now the largest living generation : “In 2016, there were an estimated 79.8 million Millennials (ages 18 to 35 in that year) compared with 74.1 million Baby Boomers (ages 52 to 70).”

This generation looks at and engages with content — both digital and IRL — differently than the older generations. For many in the cohort, video is the preferred communication medium. Business sites that want to reach this new worker need to think about how to incorporate video into their content strategy.

For what its worth, I think it helps to think about video as 5 basic types.

  1.  News / Documentary — current events, educational, fact-based. Your purpose is to convey specific information to viewers, and you may or may not have a specific point of view and desire to convince / persuade.
  2. Comedy — Make ‘em laugh.
  3. Caught on Tape — There is a reason “America’s Funniest Home Videos” has been on television for more than 20 years. People LOVE to watch real people and animals in funny, silly situations. The quality of the videos may be dodgy, but the quality of the engagement is not. See also babies, puppies and kittens.
  4. How-To – do just about anything. Cook, apply make-up, style a wardrobe, decorate, garden, change a tire, take pictures, make videos, even business topics can come to life in video. You name it, there is a how-to video to show you the way. This is the easiest type of content for publishers and brands to add to their sites, and our appetite for it is insatiable.
  5. Scripted entertainment with HIGH production values — the market has been cornered by linear and OTT properties created by the big entertainment studios, especially at long-form, but I think there is room for scripted short-form where talented amateurs can be competitive with the big guys.

In my opinion, there are two successful video strategies. You can specialize in one type of video, and go deep and long to meet the needs of your audience for that type of content on your channel. In an increasingly crowded marketplace, you must have an unserved or underserved niche to be successful. The other strategy, which is the one most publishers and brands would be well-served by, is that you integrate the appropriate type into your story telling as needed, but your focus is the stories. You don’t need to specialize in one form as much as you need to make sure that the video you are creating is additive to the stories your audience comes to you for.

Note that some of these formats lend themselves naturally to the development of community, ie the fans that are loyal viewers. For example, comedy shows, reality TV, and character driven drama or comedy. Others are more likely to be driven by search engine results such as tutorials. Current events are a bit of a blend. We may be fans of a particular franchise such as The Rachel Maddow Show, but much of the time, we are driven by search about a specific news item.

Make small, smart investments in your original video programming, and then look at the numbers – what drives traffic and engagement? Do more of that. Drop anything that doesn’t work, no matter how much you love it.

10. Community
Influencers must become part of your content ecosystem. For branded content but also more broadly to extend the footprint of a publication or brand authentically into the community. This takes a different shape if you are a brand using your content strategy to directly promote your company and its products or a publisher, aggregating content and monetizing through advertising, but the fundamental principle is the same.

Go beyond seeing your customers as content or product consumers, and engage your audience in the content creation process. Last fall, I outlined how this might look for a digital publisher. The most important thing to remember is that you want to create multiple touch points for your customers into your brand or publication, and leverage their contributions as much as you can. Everything from deep relationships and extended partnerships with brand ambassadors or top-tier contributors to simple content creation programs with mid-tier influencers and earned media with micro influencers.

11. E-commerce
Many publishers are leaving money on the table by not integrating shopping into their sites. For branded content for sure, but also to earn against the products used in the normal course of business. Where can I get the clear mixer bowl in that video? I love what the host was wearing. Show me similar outfits. One needs no further proof that this is a smart strategy than that Amazon has launched an influencer program to develop branded content as an extension of its affiliate marketing program.

Online retailers like ShopStyle have a robust affiliate program as well as content programs using influencers. Publishers like Diply, Mashable and Bustle have incorporated e-commerce on their sites, to varying degrees:

  •  CRO and President of Diply Dan Lagani sat down with Cheddar to talk about the potential of e-commerce for digital publishers.
  • Bustle in the Wall Street Journal:  “The company has also signed additional video deals with Facebook Inc. and YouTube, and boosted its affiliate commerce, where it takes a cut of product sales generated by links included in its posts.”

But for long-term success, publishers need to develop e-commerce strategies that do not depend on Amazon affiliate income; Amazon will likely start cutting its affiliate commission rates as it further develops its own content strategy. Whether they choose to go direct to brand, partner with the affiliate networks like CJ Affiliate and Rakuten or partner with retailers, the key will be to integrate the shopping cart in such a way that it is non-intrusive to, but integrated with the content experience. The smarter, the better. Bonus for integrating influencers into the mix, as ShopStyle does.

The other e-commerce play is to have your own product line. Not every publisher has the wherewithal, the brand or the stomach for this, but if you have your own products, you are the original channel 😃 Subscription boxes were all the rage this year; no matter what your interests, you can probably sign up for a box of merchandise to be delivered to your door every month.

The garnish — a podcast

A podcast, my last ingredient for you, is more of a garnish than a requirement, so I am not counting it among the 11required ingredients for 2018, but I suspect it will be one by 2019.

Podcasting is the most social of social media. The format is so simple — a conversation between/among two or more people that makes us feel, with the intimacy of sound, like we are seated at the table too.

According to Edison Research, podcast reach has grown by 50% over the last four years, and nearly a quarter of Americans age 12 or older listen to a podcast monthly. Podcasts are most popular among 18-34s, but teens and the 35-54s are also listeners. 41% of Americans listen to some form of “speech” audio on any given day.

Right now, the playing field, and opportunity, is wide open to all. The duopoly of Facebook and Google are no better situated than any other player to establish a podcast audience and generate revenue from (and with) that audience. Even though many big advertisers are still waiting for listener metrics to get better, Edison projected podcasts to earn $220 million in ad revenues in 2017. Publishers searching for new sources of revenue would be well served by considering a podcast. It ticks a lot of boxes — content, community, native advertising, low barrier to entry and easy to experiment with formats.

The fast and simple way in is to sponsor an existing podcast that aligns with your brand values/proposition and reaches your target audience. The longer way around, and the more lucrative for a publisher, is to create a new podcast that delivers unique value for your brand and to your advertisers. I highly recommend looking to your community of readers/viewers/influencers for both hosts and guests.

And there you have it — 11 ingredients for digital success plus a bonus garnish. Thanks for sticking with me to the end.

The Myth of Organic Scale

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Massive organic scale for branded content, whether sponsored video, editorial or influencer posts, is a myth. A pretty, shiny, elusive myth.

It was always something of a pipe dream. Those of us in the business learned quickly that we need to use amplification media to reach large numbers of consumers with our messages. No matter how large the organic audience of a website or influencer blog, we could not target content the same way we could ads. Drop that excellent post into a banner or native amplification ad, and I could be sure that moms of elementary school children were exposed to the sponsored juicebox posts.

This doesn’t minimize the value of the authentic voices who create sponsored posts on their blogs. Their endorsement of the brands they love drives consumer engagement with the brand in ways that traditional advertising never could. But we are lucky if 5% of a blog’s readers read any given sponsored post during the typical 6-8 week timeframe of most digital campaigns. If we want to drive that number up, we need to drive traffic to the posts.

Paid media is one way to do it. The other common way to drive traffic to our content is through social posts, both paid and earned. When a reader magically clicks the SHARE button, that earned share is GOLD, providing both engagement and amplification. Paid promotion is everything from asking the author to promote her post on social to engaging microinfluencers to share out links to branded content to standalone social posts that act as the endorsement and deliver the brand message directly to the audience.

And no matter how you look at it, for the most part, organic scale is a thing of the past on social. The most popular platform in the world is Facebook, and its branded content policy and content algorithms are designed to support its business model, to sell access to the most targeted audiences in a variety of ways. Ads are but one way to reach the Facebook user. If you want sponsored posts and branded content to reach as much of the target audience as possible, you have to boost the posts. The other platforms may be less obvious or less advanced (and certainly smaller), but the fact remains that paid social is the best solution for scaled amplification.

I’ve stopped worrying about whether that is a good or bad thing for influencer marketing. It just is, and your branded content programs, whether publisher- or influencer- driven, need to include paid social as an amplification tactic. We need to worry less about whether something was paid or earned, and more about whether it is shared.

Influencer – ie consumer – endorsement is the most powerful testimonial for a brand. A good influencer marketing program focuses on activating the right influencers to share about a brand, and then amplifying that content so it reaches the largest possible number of other consumers. I’d rather see brands regularly work with a smaller number of influencers, but in deeper relationships (brand ambassador, content partner, etc.) and supplement that core group with scale microinfluencer activations when they have product launches, major initiatives etc. This delivers the largest possible impact for the brand.

In a blog-based campaign, the initial posts carry the authentic endorsement of the influencers, and reach their organic audiences, some of whom will engage with the brand by commenting or sharing the content. This content is the irreplaceable foundation of the social strategy. For scale, we then have to amplify.

The amplification strategy has two parts. The first phase broadens the reach of the initial posts with social shares and paid media designed to scale the targeted audience for all the content. The second phase evaluates the best performing content and boosts it on social to extract maximum value from the best content.

Social-first programs generally skip the paid media phase, and jump right to boosting the best performing posts, although I have always wanted to develop a really well-done native ad treatment to amplify Instagram content back to digital with an e-commerce component.

Bottom line, matter how much organic reach your chosen influencers have, it’s never enough. Adding paid amplification delivers the targeted scale needed to maximize message awareness and optimize engagement with the audience.

Organic scale is a myth, but that’s okay. Like most myths, the truth is less sexy but it works just the same.We still can get the results we need.

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.

 

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.