![\"11](\"https:\/\/\/i0.wp.com\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/11ingredients-graphic.png?ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe Basics<\/strong><\/em> 2. A deep understanding of and commitment to your customers \u2014 both the one you have and the one you want.<\/strong> 3. Data, data, data<\/strong> 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Traffic Drivers<\/strong><\/em> 4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)<\/strong> 5. Social traffic<\/strong> 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\u2019s report<\/a> this week on research done by social analytics firm Shareablee showing that viral reach from branded content ads on Facebook eclipses standard ads.<\/p>\n 6. Native advertising<\/strong> But like SEO, social posts and native ads deliver one reader, one viewer, one click at a time.<\/em> Scale requires volume. Every increase has a real cost to produce and distribute the content. It\u2019s effective, but not terribly efficient.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Engagement and Loyalty Drivers<\/em><\/strong> 7. Newsletters<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t use your newsletter simply as an index to articles on your site. Folks may subscribe but they won\u2019t 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<\/strong>; its daily newsletter highlights articles from the Digiday<\/strong> site, but it places them in context, giving the reader value even before she clicks over.<\/p>\n 8. Recommendations<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n 9. Video (but smarter)<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. Success is rooted in smart content strategy, incorporating video where it makes sense for the story, not simply to deliver advertising. We shouldn\u2019t pivot to<\/strong> video; we should integrate video into<\/strong> a multi-format digital strategy that includes all sorts of content. For a successful publisher\u2019s take on this issue, check out Digiday’s report on Bustle’s strategy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Even if your content is primarily text, and doesn\u2019t seem to \u201cneed\u201d video to tell the story, for example B2B content, you need to start at least thinking about video. Pew Research reported this spring <\/a>that millenials are now the largest living generation :\u00a0“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).”<\/em><\/p>\n This generation looks at and engages with content \u2014 both digital and IRL \u2014 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.<\/p>\n For what its worth, I think it helps to think about video as 5 basic types.<\/p>\n
\n1. Great content. With a point of view<\/strong>
\nContent 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\u2019t necessarily an opinion or a \u201cstand;\u201d you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\nPoint 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 <\/a>to be the steward of this effort in partnership with client service, marketing, sales, finance and operations.<\/p>\n
\nData drives decisions. What gets measured, gets managed.<\/em> You\u2019ve 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\u2019t have data, you can\u2019t 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<\/strong> thing. All data is not equally important.<\/p>\n
\nOur first set of ingredients are the traffic drivers. How do you find the audience and bring them to your content?<\/em><\/p>\n
\nSEO is your first, and best, friend for building traffic. Nothing \u2014 not even paid search \u2014 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\u2019t 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\u2019t the whole structure.<\/p>\n
\nSocial traffic isn\u2019t 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 \u201corganic,\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019t going to re-share it at the volume you need to reach new audiences. And then there\u2019s the fact that the algorithms of social (Facebook in particular) are DESIGNED to push you toward paid social. Ads, boosted posts etc. Don\u2019t fight it. Embrace it. Make it work.<\/p>\n
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n
\n These ingredients deepen your readers’\/viewers’ relationship with your content.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nWhat\u2019s 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)<\/a>, which will become increasingly important for any firm doing business with EU nationals when GDPR takes effect in May 2018.<\/p>\n
\nWebsite 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.<\/p>\n
\nDigital 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.<\/p>\n\n