Your Website Isn’t A Content Destination
Website content and dark social content don’t work the same way, so why do marketers assume they can create for the website and then just drop links on social media? According to Chris Walker, it’s because website activity is easier to track.
Check out this Refine Labs TikTok and consider if you’re strategizing for on-platform engagement or just blog baiting (new term I just made up for a social media strategy where brands just post links to their latests blog posts).
Content Marketing Should Be Anchored On The Reason Your Product / Service Exists: A New Way
In this LinkedIn post, Cassidy Shield outlines a rut he sees many marketing teams stuck in: broad content with vague descriptions of the way their products solve problems for an equally broad audience.
His solution?
Get way more specific about who you’re targeting, educating them about the problem they have, and showing them how you solve it. It’s very Andy Raskin.
Measuring Content’s Impact On Brand Value
Is it really such a bad thing that we can’t accurately measure brand value? Robert Rose pushes back on “vanity metrics” and encourages marketers to simply “be satisfied with good things” in this CMI article.
“The likelihood of converting a sale from an existing loyal customer is 60-70% — but only 5-20% from a prospective customer.” — Altfeld
In this 45-minute YouTube video, the Zembula team breaks down how to drive loyalty revenue with emails.
Discovered via Really Good Emails.
Should You Try Amplified Marketing?
Lindsay Tjepkema of Casted (a podcast and video marketing platform) wrote a Marketing Profs article about how content marketers should try Amplified Marketing as a way to escape the current pressure to produce more and more content.
In short, it’s a push to lean into interviewing experts your audience can learn from via podcasting and video creation (which is what Casted helps marketers do).
While I’m a fan of the premise of starting from expert conversations then repurposing and distributing content to your audience (I think of it as squeezing the content for all it can be worth), I’ve recently been challenged to consider that this approach has a weakness: positioning the experts you interview as experts with strong points of view instead of your brand.
While I support Amplification Marketing, I think the more evolved version is figuring out how your company can go beyond facilitating connections between your audience and experts to actually being the source of expert advice, or at least one of the voices in the mix.
Discovered via Social Media Today.
Is Paid Social Worth Your Marketing Budget?
Mary Keough just lit LinkedIn on fire with instructions on how to test to see if your audience is on social media (specifically LinkedIn and Facebook/Instagram) and can be targeted, specifically...
“If I had $1,000 to conduct a marketing experiment to prove the efficacy of paid social here’s what I’d do:”
Find 7 very detailed steps here.
Turns out Gen Z doesn’t just want personalized ads… they expect them. In this Smart Brief article, Jo Hamilton explains the findings of a new study by Unsupervised. It turns out 81% of Gen Zers said they like personalized ads. His take on the study includes a few pointers on what makes an ad “bad”.
Discovered via Smart Brief on Social Business.
If you’re in marketing, it could be one of these 7 things, according to Ashley Segura (Ward). Don’t worry, she offers ways to deal with each marketing-induced issue.
Discovered via theCLIKK.
John Bonini’s Content Marketing Advice Is 🔥🔥🔥 This Week
If you don’t already follow John Bonini on LinkedIn, now’s the time. The Director of Marketing at Databox and Founder of Some Good Content had 2 posts that made me like / comment / share / collect (gee, that Curated Chrome extension sure is handy) this week.
First, check out this one about getting out of the content-creation-for-the-sake-of-ranking mill and actually creating something meaningful for your target audience.
Then, chase it with this one about how content isn’t some overnight growth hack but, instead, a long game that takes commitment to continue publishing, even when it feels like no one’s reading / watching / listening.
Act Like A Media Company—But Not As A Substitute For Traditional Content Marketing?
Ryan Law at Animalz addressed a topic you marketers who use your newsletter and other “‘media content’ like publications, books, podcasts, and shows content” might find interesting in his recent article The Value Arms Delivery Race.
Using brands like HubSpot, ProfitWell, and Wistia as examples, he explains how each justifies the expense of a media approach and the scenarios that make these investments make sense. But he also notes that they didn‘t start with media content, they layered it on top of their more traditional content.
Law’s current conclusion:
“And this is perhaps the best way to understand media strategies: it’s a way to build upon the success of traditional content marketing and not — yet — a substitute for it. Media is the next phase of the value-delivery arms race — but not every company needs to fight at the front line.”
My take:
I agree in theory, but I’m also watching some companies drive success by starting with a media approach—or introducing it earlier, including Refine Labs and Branch’s MobileGrowth.org, as well as creators who begin with podcasts and newsletters as they build an audience to sell to. I think it’s likely worth investing in sooner than later so that you can become a known authority earlier in the movement.
