Where to Find Reusable Content

First things first. What types of content are reusable for social media? Just about anything. Here are some places to look where your existing content can do double (or triple) duty:

Blogs – Repurposing blog content for social media is a no-brainer. But by this, we don’t mean just announcing your post, but rather pulling out the most useful bits – quotes, tips, conclusions, and images – to use as the basis for social media posts, which can be interesting in their own right and link back to your blog source content.

Images – High-quality images and interesting photography and graphics are essential to increase engagement across social media. Fortunately, you should already have a trove of these scattered throughout your blog, web and email content.

Press – News articles featuring your organization or interviewing your thought leaders are great to mine for social content. And don’t overlook the news you are generating yourself with press releases. Those can go a lot further than just PRWeb.

Email – Snappy subject lines, eye-catching images, persuasive and interesting text that moves your reader to take action – I hope this is what your email marketing looks like. And if it does, cribbing from that for social media will take next to no energy at all.

Research Reports and White Papers – Basically any thought leadership content that you create, such as market research, to generate leads and promote your business is a rich source content for social media.

Events/Webinars – whether relying on a summary of the content or a video or audio recording, events, presentations, and webinars are full of material to share across social channels.

Customer Stories – Social is all about conversing with your customers and fans, so why not make sure and share what your customers and fans are saying about you. Testimonials and success stories are an essential place to look for reusable content.

Analytics – Data is content. So what are you measuring? Is there a particular piece of your content that is a big hit? Take note of that and be sure to target that content for reuse. Are you noticing interesting trends how customers are using your product? Don’t keep it all to yourself. Share the analysis across social channels and start a conversation about it.

FAQ’s – Do you have an FAQ page? Let your customers know it’s there by posting questions (and links to the answers) on your social sites.  Even better, pay attention to the questions you get through Customer Service or Support. If one person has that question or challenge, you can bet there are many more who do. Use social to be proactive in solving it and boost engagement in the process.

Website – Finally, don’t forget the most obvious place of all – your website. You’ve built it to make a compelling case for your organization, to explain who you are, what you do, and why you do it  well. While social channels are for starting a conversation with your customers, not just blatant self-promotion, there is sure to be ample source material already on your website that you can massage and convert to social use.

5 Tips for Marketing Campaign Content Reuse

By now you get the idea. Social content does not need to be created from scratch. In fact, all content is social content. You’ve already got a ton of source material.

But reuse should not be confused with double posting. We don’t recommend just cutting and pasting your content to every social channel. That’s bad form. What you can do, however, is take the content that already exists and turn it into appropriate posts for each of the social media sites you are targeting.

Tip#1: Narrow your focus

Focus on something compelling! Choose a nugget from your existing content – a statistic, quote, tip, or conclusion that stands on its own as a useful piece of information. On its own, it’s a tweet. With a little bit of explanation, it’s a Facebook post. Add a graphic or image that is related and you’re golden. Of course, always include a link back to the source material.

If the source material is full of nuggets, you can spread those out over time as a steady feed for your social sharing.

Tip#2: Do a roundup post

A round-up post a great way to draw attention to the content you’ve been publishing. For example, you can collect all the posts you’ve done on a particular topic and start a conversation around that issue. It also serves as a way to resurface older content and make it fresh again.

If you’re really ambitious, you can compile those posts into longer form content like a white paper and then promote and share about that separately.

Tip#3: Don’t neglect your images

Make them do double-duty as both enhancements to posts on Facebook and Twitter, but also as stand alone posts on Instagram or Pinterest.

You can also use existing text content to inspire the creation of images and graphics. Use your data to create an infographic, or take a striking quote from one of your executives and add it to an image using a tool like Instaquote.

Tip#4: Explore different mediums

Text to text is one kind of repurposing, but to reach diverse audiences who have different consumption habits, consider crossing mediums. Turn your blog post into a podcast, your white paper into a presentation, or your presentation into a video. Each of these new mediums provide more opportunities for social sharing – not only on their respective channels (e.g. YouTube or Vimeo for your videos), but as more nuggets. The white paper that became a Slideshare presentation now has slides and graphics that can be pinned, tweeted and posted.

A great way to do this is to maintain an integrated marketing calendar, where you can plot out how you will repurpose themes and content across channels.

This process also works in reverse. If your content begins as video, audio, or a slide show, it can be summarized or transcribed into a white paper or blog for those who prefer to read instead of watch or listen.

Tip#5: Repeat yourself, at least on Twitter

This is different than the double-posting poo-pooed above. Given the rapidly updated feeds occurring in most social media channels, your content can be published one moment and buried under an avalanche of new posts the next.

So once you’ve mined your content and repurposed it into a social media nugget – make sure that effort isn’t wasted.

Guy Kawaski recommends tweeting a post at least 4 times (every 8 hours) so that it at least covers all time zones.

Create, optimize, publish, reuse, repeat!

The ultimate takeaway is that you don’t have to work overtime to keep your social media content fresh. You need only look with new eyes at the content you already have. Have fun. Make it useful. And your audience will thank you.

The post Reuse Marketing Campaign Content on Social Media appeared first on Rival IQ.

A few years ago, I conducted an in-depth content audit of how technology firms were using case studies for marketing. It was inspired by a question, interesting to me at the time, about how content marketing efforts might differ from technology companies in different geographic locations based on the maturity of the tech sector in their city or region.

My null hypothesis was that marketing is marketing, and best practices are best practices, such that regardless of how nascent or mature a city’s tech industry, companies’ marketing efforts would be on par with one another.

That turned out not to be true at all. Cities were chosen based on their rankings in The Business Journals’ “America’s Top 100 High-Tech Centers”.

Total number of published case studies by 30 firms in each city – ranked from lowest to highest.

When holding constant the number of the firms (n=30 per city) and the measure of case study use (all 150 firms had published case studies), firms in more mature tech centers had many more case studies than firms headquartered in “up and coming” centers.

While raw count differences might be chalked up to firms in Silicon Valley (and other established tech centers) simply having been around longer – such that they had more time to accumulate customers and customer case studies – other measures mirrored the trend seen above. For example, across 275 firms (55 in each city; 30 with case studies and 25 without), the trend held when measuring video testimonial usage.

Percentage of firms in each city using video testimonials on their website.

The trend continued even in terms of shareability – measured as the number of firms that added social share buttons to their case studies. Except for Seattle, which broke the trend <insert facepalm>.

Percentage of firms in each city that added share buttons to their case studies

Industry Content Audits Lead to Better Marketing

Here’s the upshot. You may not care how the marketing at tech firms in Pittsburgh or Houston or Timbuktu compare to technology firms in areas like Silicon Valley (though if you’re from one of those “up and coming” tech cities, you probably should). But you do care about making your marketing awesome.

I present the case above to share that interesting things may emerge from a competitive or industry content audit – some expected, and some not. My audit revealed many insights beyond the scope of my initial inquiry.

As I manually slogged through hundreds of websites to gather the data (there are now automated tools for that), I couldn’t help but notice the drastic range of marketing savvy (not just across cities, but across all companies examined) as it applied to website design, social media use, content presentation and more.

Practices that seemed like pure common sense to me were completely missing from firms both well known and unknown. But there were some surprises and gems too, companies I knew I could learn something from.

Below, I share a few hard-won insights from my slog into case study content – tips I hope you can use to improve your content marketing and presentation.

3 Tips to Improve Your Marketing with a Content Audit

Tip 1: Pay Attention to Best Practices

Go into your content audit with best practices in mind, and really notice whether or not your competitors are following them.

This isn’t just about your competitors though – examining them with best practices in mind will be like holding up a mirror to your own content. You may realize, “Oh, $#&!, we’re not doing that either.” Because sometimes you are too close to your own content to gain perspective.

For example, here’s a different view of the shareability data from above.

Percentage of all 150 firms with case studies that made them shareable

The non-shareable percentage was 76%. Which just Blew. My. Mind.

Granted the data is a few years old. But now that I’ve trained myself to look for it, I still see it everywhere. I was on a website today looking at a technology firm’s case studies. There were no share buttons. I was shopping for shoes last week and wanted to pin a pair I liked to my Pinterest account. There was no pin button. And this was the website of a well-known retailer.

My anecdotes aside, just take a look at Rival IQ’s most recent RRI on High-end Department Stores. Their research revealed a number of gaps in how major brands were managing their social media presence. It wasn’t lack of share buttons they uncovered, but other best practices, such as failing to add images to tweets to increase engagement and not leveraging hashtags on Twitter and Instagram.

Tip 2: Make your Content Easy to Find and Choose

Something else I started to pay attention to, the deeper I got into my research, was just how accessible content was on a particular website.

On some sites, I had to drill down ten pages to find a case study buried on a product page. In the best case scenarios, there was a Resources button in the main menu that offered a drop down in which Case Studies or Success Stories were listed as an option. Some firms had Success Stories as an option in the main menu itself.

However large or small your website, having a Resources menu option that links to a content repository is a great practice. Individual pieces of content can still be linked to and referenced in various relevant pages throughout your site, but a centralized location that is searchable makes finding what they need quick and easy for your prospects and customers.

Consonus makes it easy to find content. The company was recently acquired; unfortunately the buyer didn’t keep this great resource page.

Consonus goes beyond just making their content easy to find – they make it easy to choose as well. There are multiple sorting options, which allows prospects to find content that is specifically relevant to their industry.

The screenshot below shows the results of a search for Resource Type = Case Study. Notice that for each case study presented, the other search fields are populated as well, so prospects would be well informed as to the relevance of this content to their own needs.

In addition to the categorization of each case study by solution, industry, etc…, descriptive value for the customer (and SEO value for the crawlers) is contained in the the title, subtitle, and brief description of each case study result.

Contrast that with the screenshot below, a simple list of company names that offers no further detail to guide a reader to understand what would be useful for them. They would have to open each case study and scan it until they found what they needed (if it was there at all).

An example of how NOT to show your case studies on your website.

The net-net here is whether it’s case studies or product features or other content, make sure the content is easy to find and comes up in relevant search results!

Tip 3: Be Open to Inspiration

Along with case study content, I was also tracking the use of customer testimonials and quotes. I paid attention to whether or not companies were using them, but also to their presentation and ubiquity throughout a particular website.

The same testimonial presented in the same spot on every page made me bang my face against the keyboard until I forgot why I was upset. Fortunately for my face, these instances were rare, but overall there wasn’t a whole lot of creativity in the use of testimonials.

But there was enough variety and a few gems from which I could distill a “do’s and don’ts” list for myself and my clients.

One of the more creative presentations of customer testimonials

And one testimonial in particular got my creative juices flowing. On the surface, it was nothing special – a standard customer quote presented adjacent to a product description and specs.

What stood out for me were two things.

1. First was the quality of the quote itself. After reading so many testimonials that basically said “<Product X> is <Superlative>!”, this one stood out for speaking specifically about the appeal and value of the product to its end user.
2. Second was the link below the testimonial to a corresponding case study.

I had not seen anyone else (out of hundreds of websites) do this, and when I saw it for the first time, it became an instant best practice for me. It also gave me ideas about other ways to build the buyer journey into the content I was creating.

One idea was that instead of gating a piece of content up front, why not embed an email form at the end that takes the prospect to the next stage? Such as a thought leadership white paper that includes an email form to request a case study or data sheet that provides more specific  product information than was included in that piece, for example.

This way the onus was on creating great content that made the prospect want to request more information, rather than capturing their email upfront when they were just a super cold lead. It would have to be tried and tested to see it’s value, but the idea wouldn’t have occurred to me at all without the audit.

Ready, Set . . . . Audit!

So whether researching industry trends as I was, or researching your competition, the practice of looking closely at what is being done by other companies with a content audit can prove not only informative, but inspirational.

You not only get to see what you are already doing well and where you need work, but in the sheer volume of data you observe new ideas and directions may arise.

The post How a Content Audit Can Improve Your Marketing appeared first on Rival IQ.

Source: CDC Blog

Did you know that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a tagline? It’s “CDC 24/7: Saving Lives, Protecting People.” That’s a pretty serious mission – one that relies heavily on effective dissemination of health information, both on a regular and an emergency basis. So it’s no wonder that the CDC has invested resources in developing a social media strategy that is both broad and deep. They are everywhere from Instagram to Twitter, and are using tools such as podcasts, widgets, and even eCards to build social media connections with their community.

While healthcare is not always on the cutting edge of new applications or Internet technologies, when it comes to social media, the CDC is ahead of the game. In fact, a review of their social media guidelines reveals the thought the CDC puts into accomplishing their mission via digital marketing.

Whether tackling Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, or other channels, the CDC’s approach can be boiled down into 5 broad steps. I’d call this social media medicine we could all take!

5 Steps to Social Media Connections

Step #1: Study

Before launching into a particular social media channel, the CDC recommends taking time to not only study that channel, but to study what other organizations similar to yours are doing in that space. Sounds a little bit like competitive analysis, no? (We have a tool for that!)

Observation and analysis before launch allows you to get a handle on a number of different things:

• How does the site work?
• Who are the participants?
• What is the culture of the site?
• Who are the influencers that you will want to connect with?

Step #2: Plan

Once you have a grasp of the channel, the CDC recommends a second preliminary step. Develop a communications strategy before jumping in.

Ask yourself:

• If your organization already has a communication plan, does using a particular social media site or sites sync with that plan?
• Do you have clear objectives for the use of this channel?
• How do you plan to measure the accomplishment of those objectives? (Love this – all about data!)

And perhaps most importantly, don’t just post for the sake of posting. Have a plan and a schedule for your content. Create a content calendar to keep track of topics and dates. This is something the CDC does extremely well, particularly via their Vital Signs campaigns. These cover a different health topic every month, which keeps them on message, across channels.

Source: CDC April 2015 Vital Signs Badge

Step #3: Engage

If you planned your work in Step #2 above, then Step #3 is where it gets fun. It’s time to work your plan.

Engagement via social media is four-fold:

1. Posting original and/or syndicated content for your followers.
2. Sharing and retweeting content from partners and key influencers.
3. Promoting your site off-channel or cross-channel to build a following.
4. Participating in the conversation – don’t just broadcast your message. Engage!

Step #4: Evaluate

Finally, when all is said and done, you don’t want to guess about what impact your social media efforts are producing.

Before you even start (Step #2, if you’re counting), it’s good to have already given thought to the metrics you will be using to evaluate your success.  Then, once you’ve launched, start to take stock.

There are many things to measure and many ways, depending on what is most important to you. Some of these may include:

• Number of fans, followers, or website visits
• Demographic reach
• Engagement with your content (e.g. click-throughs, likes, retweets, pingbacks, etc…)

Analytics can be performed using site-specific tools, such as Facebook Insights; free web tools, such as Google Analytics; and methods such as surveys to assess user satisfaction. And (if we didn’t mention this before), we also have a tool for that!

Step #5: Integrate

Source: The Smithsonian

I call this the anatomical approach to social media campaigns. The cells in our body are differentiated for a variety of purposes. They grow into diverse organs and systems with distinct functions. Yet different as they are, they ultimately work in sync to produce a greater whole – a unified, living being.

Social media channels did not evolve to work together, but taking that view can be a boon to your marketing efforts.

This is the secret sauce to the CDC’s social media management – Integration. As mentioned above, they are on a number of social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc…), and using multiple avenues to disseminate their content (YouTube, podcasts, widgets, badges, eCards, and more). And while they clearly have the resources to manage such a broad communications plan, they do not tackle each channel separately.

They study each channel to understand how it works (Step #1), but when they put together their communications plan (Step #2), their strategy involves cross-promotion and integration of content.

In this way, they are able to reach the diverse audiences in a way that is personal (on the sites where those audiences spend their time), while reinforcing their health message across all channels.

As you can see in this Rival IQ report, the CDC gets strong engagement across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn & Google+. Not easy!

Some ways this may work include:

• Content syndication – so that partners and subscribers get timely and consistent updates when you publish.
• Cross-channel promotion, such as tweeting about (and linking to) your latest blog post, or utilizing an SMS campaign to point subscribers to your latest YouTube video.
• Ensuring all of your content is easily shareable so that your followers are empowered to promote your content for you.

Time for You to do a Social Media Health Check!

It’s no wonder the CDC achieves social media connections extremely well. Their purpose for being is the health and well-being of the nation, so an integrated (or anatomical) approach to social media could just be a part of their paradigm.

While this approach may seem like a no-brainer for your businesses as well, many companies often miss the mark. A recent Rival IQ RRI on High-end Department Stores revealed little to no cross-channel consistency in content or branding. This is a good time for you to step back and see how you’re doing across these five areas.

Take a cue (or a pill!) from the CDC to get your social media strategy in top shape!

The post How the CDC Saves Lives through Social Media Connections appeared first on Rival IQ.

Photo Courtesy of: stevenwilsonbeales.com

A good content marketing strategy needs to encompass more than how to talk about your product or service on a different channel. Much too frequently, content just looks like advertising in disguise – and not a very good disguise at that.

Brands need to think more like publishers than advertisers. Your role is to help, educate, inform and even entertain. Not push product. 

But how do you do that?

How to Think Like a Publisher

Few resources articulate exactly how to think like a publisher better than the book, “Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content” by Colleen Jones. An in-depth, clear approach to creating, publishing and managing influential content.

The book is far too rich to summarize in full here, but a great place to start, especially for firms just getting started with content marketing or looking to refresh their approach, is Chapter Three, “Context: Where Clout Begins and Ends.”

In this chapter, Jones tackles the issue of planning for effective content – in other words helping you establish your content marketing strategy.

Photo Courtesy of: desiraeo.com

The 5 W’s of Great Content Marketing Strategy

She argues that, to do so well, one must understand its context (the gestalt around a piece of content), and introduces her version of the 5 W’s to describe that gestalt: why, who, what, when, where. 

#1:  Why are you creating this piece of content?

Ask yourself: What outcome do you hope to achieve with this content?

According to Jones, content planning begins here, asking what result you hope to achieve for your business or cause by creating and publishing a particular piece of content.

The answer usually consists in one of two broad outcomes:

1. Getting someone to take action
2. Getting someone to change his/her attitude about your brand.

In reality, it will likely require a combination of both facilitating your desired action and influencing customer attitudes. Yet, many marketers focus only (or primarily) on the first one – a call to action. 

Photo Courtesy of: Marketingland.com

#2: Who are you targeting?

Ask yourself:  What audience am I trying to reach, persuade or inform with your content? 

This can include many different elements or demographic information, such as age, gender, job title, etc. 

If you already have done research and developed user personas that describe your target audience(s), the next step is to examine what synergies and gaps currently exist.

Start where they are in relation to your brand and compare it to where you’d like them to be. The gap is what you plan your content to fill.

For example, if you’re a new brand, then a likely major gap is that of awareness. Content that introduces you to the consumer should be a goal. Synergies are where you are already aligned your content to this goal.  

#3: What is your brand identity?

Ask yourself: Who are you?

Of course, to introduce yourself to the consumer, you must first know who you are.

Does your organization have a mission statement? Have you conducted a brand audit? Do you know which brand attributes or qualities you want to highlight in your content?

Photo Courtesy of: Forbes.com

#4: When will this content be delivered?

This is a fairly straight-forward question.

Timing can be time of day (e.g. an infomercial airing in the middle of the night), season (summer, Christmas), or a special event (the Super Bowl).

Timing also covers things like what is happening in the world currently or what market trends are currently prevalent, both of which can affect the substance and delivery of your content.

#5: Where will this content be delivered?

What is the medium for content?

Web presentation of text and graphics will differ stylistically from that for print or television, for example. And if content is being shared via a particular forum, say a social media channel, that community will have its own etiquette and expectations for your content and how it is presented.

Photo Courtesy of: ubermarketing.co.uk

Put the 5 W’s to Work for Your Content

Asking (and answering) these questions prior to creating a piece of content or a series of collateral is essential if you want that content to be influential.

Once you’ve mastered the approach outlined here, you can use the rest of Clout to uncover the art and science of great content marketing strategy using principles from rhetoric and psychology. The author also helps you plan for and evaluate your content marketing efforts.

For any brand serious about their publishing efforts, I recommend both reading this book and putting its strategies into practice. 

The post Using “Clout” to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Rival IQ.

As more companies invest in content marketing as a means to educate and engage their clients and potential customers, the result is both a lot more content and more noise. Just being heard in a crowded content market is becoming difficult.

3 Reasons Interactivity + Content = Attention

Reason 1: It’s New

Standard content formats such as case studies, white papers, web copy, blog posts and webinars are so ubiquitous, it may not enable you to stand out. Interactive content not only offers creative marketers with new and interesting formats to convey and display their messages, it also offers the audience a novel content format in which to consume it.

Reason 2: It’s Interactive (Duh?)

The more engaging a content experience is, the more likely it is to be sticky. Nuff said.

Reason 3: It’s Longer Lasting

Interactive content has a greater chance of being an evergreen asset, because it’s less likely to have a publication date stamped on it. As long as it remains relevant and useful to prospective clients, it never has to be retired.

Beyond being more engaging and, therefore, more likely to get noticed, interactive content provides another big benefit for marketers – more data.

For example, an assessment that walks a prospect through a series of questions before offering them a white paper or other piece of content gives the salesperson not only a name and email address (assuming the content is requested), but a deeper look into the circumstances and needs of the prospect in question.

This type of information gathering isn’t limited to questions and surveys. Any interactive piece of content can be used to record customer behavior and interests.

Types of Interactive Content Marketing

Calculators:

Math may not excite many of you (come on, you’re supposed to be data-driven!), but calculators can offer big benefits in terms of user engagement when they solve a customer need.

For example, with student load debt in the United States estimated at over 1 trillion dollars, you can bet that the repayment calculator at the Federal Student Aid website gets a LOT of use.

This student loan repayment calculator is a great example of interactive content!

You input the amount you owe, your tax filing status, and your adjusted gross income, and the calculator returns estimated payments per month across 6 different repayment plans. It’s simple to use and is extremely helpful for those trying to understand their repayment options.

Games:

Gamification – the use of game design techniques for non-game activities – has been a buzzword for awhile, but certainly has room for expansion in the digital marketing world. Magnum made a huge splash a few years ago with its Pleasure Hunt game, where you travel through the Internet gathering chocolate buttons. It proved so popular that it spawned three sequels.

The Magnum Pleasure Hunt takes you all over the internet scoring points! It’s a bit addicting – like chocolate.

I started this blog posted thinking I wanted someone to create a “choose your own adventure” style commercial, but it looks like Perrier already did it. Last year, they launched a hunt of their own – Perrier’s Secret Place – where players can interact with over an hour of video by taking the perspective of a guest at a party. If they mingle and gather enough clues to locate the secret bottle of Perrier, they are entered into a sweepstakes to win various goodies.

Assessment Tools:

When Hubspot launched in 2007, its first free tool was a website grader that scored a user’s website by analyzing inbound links, SEO, social media and traffic, among other variables. It also provided feedback to users on how to improve their site. To date, the tool has scored over two million websites and certainly contributed to Hubspot’s success as a marketing leader.

Free tools like Hubspot’s website grader, or any assessment that helps your customers gain insight into their lives or businesses, or how they are performing in relation to their peers, is a great way to engage and earn trust.

Check out your website: https://marketing.grader.com/

Apps:

This is a broad category, but I’ll narrow it down here by focusing on visualization apps.

One industry that has made use of this interactive approach to shopping is the home improvement space. Many of the major brands have visualizers that allow customers to arrange a virtual room with different types of paint, flooring or cabinets. A tool from Provia allows you to upload a photo of your own home and then swap out materials to see what your renovation might look like.

Provia interactive application

Another industry where visualization apps are being developed is fashion. Want to know how an outfit you are viewing online will fit you? Just pop it onto your 3D avatar and have a look. These types of apps answer customer questions and remove obstacles to purchase.

Quizzes:

Quizzes are simple ways to add interactivity to your web content. Brinker mentions Buzzfeed as having garnered over 40 million views for some of its quizzes. Topics like “Which Famous Ginger is your Soulmate?” may seem inane, but sometimes fun and easy is the path to engagement (you know you can’t resist those quizzes!).

Heck, I just learned from a quiz on The Oatmeal that I could defeat a swarm of 22 Justin Biebers. The quiz was hilarious, and if I didn’t already enjoy The Oatmeal, it would have warmed me right up to its style of humor, and convinced me to come back for more content.

Of course, quizzes don’t have to be funny, just engaging.

Other Ways to Get Interactive

These are a few of the types of interactive content marketing you can try. Interactivity can also be added to eBooks, videos, maps, charts or infographics, and more.

Ultimately, you are only limited by your imagination. Be as creative as you can be, make it useful for your customer, and reap the rewards of increased engagement.

And share your interactive content ideas and experiences!

The post It’s Alive! Interactive Content Marketing appeared first on Rival IQ.

Image source: Salesforce

Salesforce recently released its 2nd annual State of Marketing report, an indepth look at 2015 marketing trends and priorities. Its research is based on survey results from over 5000 marketers worldwide (double the number of respondents from their inaugural report).

Two Major 2015 Marketing Trends Emerged:

1. A Shift to Digital:

Respondents indicated they planned to reallocate 38% of their marketing budgets toward digital advertising and away from traditional mass marketing methods. The breakdown for this shift was 34% for B2B marketers and 42% for B2C marketers.

2. A Consolidation of Focus:

While marketers in the 2014 inaugural survey appeared to be taking a scatter-shot approach to marketing, the data from 2015 reveals a sharp consolidation of focus to two main channels – Social and Mobile.

Here are my top six takeaways from the 2015 State of Marketing report that I hope can help you as you move through 2015.

Learning #1:  Social Media IS Strategic and Measurable

In the Salesforce research, 64% of respondents reported social media as a ‘critical enabler of their products and services.’ This is up a whopping 39 points from 2014 when only 25% of marketers made the same claim. The number claiming social as an important revenue driver nearly doubled as well. This is great news for marketers, and if you are not already using this data to show why your organization needs to invest in social strategy, then do it now! 

As you are doing that, be sure to provide regular reports, showing the top strategic metrics. As you can see from the Salesforce research, social media-driven Web traffic, and social media audience engagement are two of the most vital metrics to share.  One of the ways to show strategic value is to show the data behind it!

Learning #2:  Focus on Social Channels with Greatest Impact

We have recommended previously in this blog to focus on the number of social networks you can handle and really rock, as opposed to trying to be everywhere. The Salesforce research validated this by showing the strong focus marketers are taking on a few key social channels. 

The top 3 social networks (with percentage of marketers currently using them) were:

1. Facebook (80%)
2. Twitter (70%)
3. Linkedin (62%)

Learning #6:  Bring Email and Mobile Together

What the Salesforce report suggests is tying these two together. Increasingly, emails are being opened on smartphones and tablets. To make sure this is a great experience for your customers, invest in responsive design and tools that enable you to automatically send in relevant formats or adjust.

While the report did not say this, I would advise making sure your Website does the same – nothing worse than trying to read a non-responsive design website on my smart phone.

Make sure your emails are responsive to mobile phones!

Read the Full Report Yourself

There’s a lot more data in the report. I recommend you take a few minutes and review the full report, and let us know what you learned about 2015 marketing trends, and how your spending priorities and marketing mix compare.

The post 6 Takeaways from the Salesforce 2015 Marketing Trends Research appeared first on Rival IQ.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray Opens the event
Image Source: GeekWire

From the string of success stories that crossed the stage throughout the day, it became clear these were not just the worlds of a mayor pumping up his own town.

In between all the Go Hawks! chants, speakers gracing the stage included 2014 Entrepreneurs of the Year Matt Ehrlichman of Porch and Dan Price of Gravity Payments; Sarah Bryant, CEO of Koru; former Napster and current co-founder of Ivy Softworks, Jordan Ritter; and many others. Exiting co-founders of Concur, Rajeev Singh & Mike Hilton (who recently sold their company of 22 years to SAP for $8.6B) showed up on their last day of work to talk about their entrepreneurial journey.

Entrepreneurs Focus on the Importance of Culture and Passion

Amidst a host of great stories and insights, the one theme threaded throughout nearly every conversation was the important of culture and passion to a startup’s success. Why are you doing what you are doing? What are you trying to build? How can you get it right from the start? Vital questions.

Here are some key lessons I took away from the speakers.

Lesson 1: Culture must be intentional from the start

Kristen Hamilton, CEO of Koru, discussed her experience at Onvia, where she served as CEO and helped take the company public during the dot-com bubble. Founded in 1997, Onvia was generating $147 million in revenue by the time they went public in March of 2000. But when the bubble burst, the team didn’t hold together.

Image Source: GeekWire

Sporting a T-shirt that read “Build-Break-Learn” as though to emphasize her story, Hamilton explained what she is doing differently at Koru. Creating a winning culture requires being intentional and starting early (both points that were echoed by others throughout the day). She suggested establishing your startup’s culture before the company grows to 50 people.

Hamilton shared a few of the values that comprise Koru’s culture:

• Foster a “we” mindset.
• Strive to fail fast and cheap (Hamilton emphasized this was a lesson derived directly from Kovu, where failure of any kind was not acceptable).
• Engage in “radical authenticity” and consider feedback a gift.
• Believe you can do anything, but know you can’t do everything.

Deliberately fostering the culture of your team creates a solid foundation that can withstand shifts in the economy and the direction of the company.

Lesson 2: Culture must be top down

Mike Hilton and Rajeev Singh of Concur had quite a bit to say on the importance of company culture. Concur started out in their shared apartment in 1993 and over the next 22 years grew to an $8B valuation. But that path was not a straight line of success.

Image Source: GeekWire

Like Onvia, Concur also went public during the dot-com boom. Their share price rocketed from $12 to $60, but not long after plummeted to just $.28 and the company was in danger of being delisted. There was a point where they had more cash in the bank than their market cap.

During this time, they had a conversation about what type of company they really wanted to be if they survived the crisis. They deliberately focused on culture and building something the entire team could be proud of. They clearly succeeded as many employees stayed with the company through that crisis and to this day.

Some of their suggestions were:

• Money is not enough. Employees need to know WHY they are doing what they are doing. Give them a purpose!
• Live it! Leadership needs to lead by example.
• Write it down. Know your values and culture and evaluate potential candidates against it. A great resume is not enough – evaluate if the candidate shares your beliefs as well.
• Assess current employees by the same standard. Even a high performer, if they are toxic or don’t reflect company values, may need to be let go.

Lesson 3: Values and purpose first

Image Source: GeekWire http://www.geekwire.com/2015/geekwire-radio-napster-co-founder-jordan-ritter-tech-vet-brian-valentine-new-venture/

Reiterating Mike Hilton’s point that executives need to lead by example, Jordan Ritter shared a story about a time where he and a co-founder had different values, and that conflict resonated throughout the company, leading a culture of fear and mistrust.

His point was that startup life is a lot like riding a roller coaster that is still in the process of being built.  The highs and lows require a great team to support each other and weather the ride. A startup is not just a job, but a family.

He suggested:

• Always interview for values first (because it is better to suffer alone than with fools)
• Define your values early and stay true to them
• Make a habit of praising and critiquing team members in terms of your values; keep them ever-present

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/12/11/porchcom-usa-today-entrepreneur-of-the-year/20203863/

Porch CEO, Matt Ehrlichman, had similar advice. He suggested being very intentional about the type of company you want to build. Write it down early and be conscious about it because it is very difficult to change later.

The plus side of this is that if you do this early, and make sure the initial core of the team all share and embrace your values, then it spreads organically as the company grows.

Lesson 4: Passion and purpose are critical! 

Nearly every entrepreneur and VC that crossed the stage posed the same question: Why are you doing what you are doing?

Their consensus was that if you are in the startup game just to make money (or considering entering it under the delusion that you’ll have more time “being your own boss”) then you’re in it for the wrong reasons.

Startup life is hard (see Jordan Ritter’s roller coaster analogy above). Besides having a great team with shared values for support on that journey, one other thing is required: Passion (or in another word, Purpose).

The problem you are trying to solve needs to be big enough and personal enough to carry you through.

What are your lessons?

I think these insights above are universal. There’s a reason we keep hearing the same themes over and over again. To learn more about what these leading entrepreneurs had to say, you can check out GeekWire’s coverage:

Startups Say the Darndest Things: http://www.geekwire.com/2015/startups-say-darndest-things-top-quotes-geekwire-startup-day/

CEO tough love: 11 tips from GeekWire Startup Day: http://www.geekwire.com/2015/ceo-tough-love-11-tips-geekwire-startup-day/

The post Four Lessons from GeekWire Startup Day appeared first on Rival IQ.

“You will pay attention to my advertisement, Mr. DeLarge!”

How can advertisers get your attention in this multiscreen world?

If only we lived in A Clockwork Orange world (as disturbing as that might be), we’d at least never have to worry about whether people were paying attention to our ads. We know from a recent post here at the Rival IQ Blog that understanding attention is vital for creating effective social media campaigns.  But attention is an elusive beast to measure. For over 50 years, advertisers have been using reach and frequency as proxy’s for attention.

These may have been reasonable metrics in the 1960s – a time when an ad buy across the three major networks ended up reaching over 70% of a brand’s target audience.[i] In a medium for which remote controls weren’t even developed until 1978, marketers could be relatively sure they had a captive audience.[ii] But with the rise of digital marketing and the proliferation of mobile devices, reach and frequency provide less and less certainty that your message is being paid attention to, let alone even seen.

This Nielsen 2103 study shows what mobile devices users do while watching TV.

Introducing the Attention Index

In order to measure the impact of multiple device usage on video advertising effectiveness in this multiscreen world of ours, AOL partnered with Nielsen to develop a new metric – the Attention Index. The study included nearly 3000 individuals and gathered data from them via in-person testing, surveys and in-home ethnographies. The graphic below lays out their findings for the impact of viewing on multiple devices for brand recall.

Their measure took into account not only distraction from devices, but distractions from other people as well. As the graph shows, when you add any device to a TV viewing session, ad recall drops precipitously from 83% to 23%. There are similar, though less drastic, drops when adding a second device to viewing from a laptop, phone, or tablet. In other words, while we love multiple devices, we lose attention span in our multiscreen world.

More screens and distractions means more advertising

The upshot of knowing that this drop in recall occurs is that marketers can take it into account when planning their campaigns and ad spend. And that’s where the Attention Metric comes in. AOL proposes that this number can inform advertisers how much more often an ad needs to be viewed to compensate for the distraction factor.

Attention Index for DVR and ad skipping, from AOL

Attention Index for Millennials, from AOL

In their summary of the research, Venture Beat explains, according to the metric: “TV advertisers need 17 percent more impressions than the impressions of ads in short-form videos on hand-held devices, to get the same effect.” It’s not a bad thing to know, and becomes more useful when broken down by age, gender and certain behaviors (like ad skipping), all of which AOL/Nielsen include in the study.

Advertisers should focus more on mobile

Image source: The Onion

What is clear from the AOL/Nielsen research is that in our brave, new multiscreen world, some devices fare better than others in terms of brand recall from video. Mobile phones and tablets, perhaps due to their smaller screens and the need to view them more closely, do better than television and laptops. Other research bears this out as well, supporting the idea that for video advertising, mobile may be the best bet for marketers.

For example, not only do mobile viewers maintain better recall for video ads, recent research from Vdopia suggests that they express a greater willingness to sit through short video ads, especially when those ads are the gateway to free content of interest to the viewer.

Image source: Vdopia

So the question then is, if video ads are an important part of your marketing mix, what is your mobile strategy? Heck, that’s a good question even if video ads aren’t a priority for you. Maybe we’ll cover that in a future post…

Multiscreen world to become even more complex

The trend of using multiple devices or screens at once is not likely to decelerate any time soon. In fact, with the introduction of smart watches, Google Glass and who knows what else, it will only be increasing.

Share your ideas of how marketers can get their target users attention amid this multi-device reality.  And in the meantime, happy viewing!!

[i]           http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/28/the-new-pitch

[ii]          wunderman.com/system/articles/3/original/11139_how_to_think_digital.pdf

The post How to Grab User Attention in Our Multiscreen World appeared first on Rival IQ.

Six Types of Twitter Conversations, Illustrated
Source: Pew Internet Research

Research Identifies Six Twitter Community Archetypes

A recent collaboration between the Pew Internet Research Project and the Social Media Research Foundation (SMRF) has identified 6 “archetypes” for the types of conversation networks that form among Twitter users. Replies, mentions and connections among users were all captured and used to create a network map for each topic’s participants. This mapping is particularly useful for marketers seeking a deeper understanding of how to be influential within their Twitter community groups.

To conduct their research, Pew and SMRF used NodeXL, a Microsoft Excel plugin that assists with data analysis and visualization. They performed keyword searches to extract sets of tweets on particular topics and then applied NodeXL to analyze the network structure of the conversations around each topic.

After analyzing thousands of Twitter conversations, six recurring topologies emerged:

Type #1: Polarized Crowds

Polarized Crowds occur when two groups are discussing the same topic but not with each other. Political conversations are a good example of this, where liberals and conservatives discuss the same issue extensively within their own group, but have little to no overlap between them. They cite different news sources and use different hashtags in their tweets.

Here’s a great example from the polarizing topic of gun control.

Heritage Foundation and Andre Picard taking polarizing stances on gun control.

Type #2: Tight Crowd

The Tight Crowd is a closely connected group united around a particular topic. These networks often share multiple interconnections among their members. Such groups may occur among learning communities (e.g. tweets coming out of a professional conference) or networks formed around shared professional goals. The visualization below shows the tight connectivity in a network of digital community managers.

Source: nodexlgraphgallery.org

Type #3: Brand Clusters

Brand Clusters are much more fragmented than Polarized or Tight Crowds. Rather than interconnected networks of participants, Brand Clusters are comprised of many disconnected individuals who share interest in a topic or brand and tweet about it independently of each other. The graphic below maps a network of people discussing Apple. Compare the density of this conversation to the one of digital community managers above.

Source: nodexlgraphgallery.org

Type #4: Community Clusters

Community Clusters share qualities with Brand Clusters. Both have a large number of disconnected individuals tweeting about the same topic. But they distinguish themselves by developing a set of denser, interconnected sub-groups that also participate in the conversation.

Type #5: Broadcast Networks

Both Broadcast Networks and Support Networks take the shape of the hub and spokes on a wheel. In the case of Broadcast Networks, they revolve around a media outlet or celebrity hub. The spokes face inward because conversation participants are talking about or sharing content from the hub.

The graphic below shows (on the left) the hub – Paul Krugman, in this case – and the spokes represent direct followers discussing one of his blog posts. The right side of the graphic demonstrates how visible and of interest the content was to those not directly connected to him.

Source: nodexlgraphgallery.org

We thought we’d also see what this looks like on Twitter itself. Here’s recent conversation with Paul Krugman on Twitter.

Type #6: Support Networks

Support Networks are the inverse of Broadcast Networks in that the spokes are directed outward from the hub. In real terms, this means the hub is doing the communicating and sharing with others.

These are most common with companies who set up support accounts on Twitter to respond to comments and address issues tweeted by their customers.

What Does This Mean for Marketers?

While this is by no means an exhaustive list of the types of Twitter community archetypes, it is an in-depth and fascinating first step to understanding the shapes these communities can take.

If you haven’t already asked yourself these questions, now is the perfect time to reflect:

• What kind of Twitter community are you trying to build?
• What shape do you want your network to take?
• Do you want the fragmented, isolated following of Brand Clusters, or a more tightly knit, interconnected community around your product or cause?
• What specific actions are you taking to create it?

For example, if you want to be in the driver’s seat of your brand conversation, a Broadcast Network might be your goal. One way to get there is to use content marketing strategies to publish thought leadership pieces that inspire and engage your followers and fans.

Use Influencers to Shape Your Community

Do you know who your influencers are? In the Pew/SMRF research above, certain individuals were identified as holding positions of power in conversations. Highly connected and influential, these individuals can be instrumental in expanding your brand conversation. But first you need to identify and engage with them. A great way to start is by using the new Rival IQ Top Twitter Mentions feature.

Here are top Twitter Mentions for a Cruise line

What Are Your Thoughts?

A summary as brief as this can’t do a project this extensive justice. We recommend checking out the full report. It provides plenty of food for thought on how to understand your Twitter community. Share your own insights and takeaways with us below!

The post What Type of Twitter Community Are You Building? appeared first on Rival IQ.

One of the most prominent question on any social media marketer’s mind is “How do I get my content noticed?” This is particularly true when trying to improve Facebook engagement or build community on any social media network.

Sonya Song, McKnight-Mozilla Fellow at the Boston Globe has published extensive research on what drives engagement with news content on social media, particularly Facebook. The lion’s share of Song’s analysis tries to answer this question. Social media mavens will find it fascinating in its own right, but her findings are relevant outside of news publishing. Marketers looking to up their game with customers can glean insight and inspiration for their Facebook engagement and other social media campaigns as well.

Sonya uses Daniel Kahneman‘s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, as a starting point for explaining her data. As should be obvious from the title of his book, Kahneman describes two modes of human attention – Fast and Slow.

Source: http://www.greenbookblog.org/2012/03/15/lessons-from-thinking-fast-slow-system-1-and-system-2/

PAY ATTENTION to BREAKING NEWS!

Fast thinking, also called System 1, is largely unconscious, automatic and just a little bit lazy. If it can relax and breeze by, it will, but it is operated by those parts of our brain evolved for survival. If a shadow suddenly looms overhead, you will instinctively look up to see if something is falling down on you.

The first part of this post’s title — PAY ATTENTION! — was designed to grab your System 1’s attention. In Song’s analysis of news content, “BREAKING NEWS” is a corollary and was shown (along with other uppercase words) to produce higher reach. Reach, according to Facebook’s metrics, is “the number of unique people who have seen your post.” Part of the reason uppercase letters work to grab our attention is because they are easy to read. (Like I said, System 1 is lazy.)

Images work in a similar way. In Song’s analysis, pictures accompanying a news story not only increased reach, but also two other Facebook metrics – engaged users and talking about this. (I know you clicked on this post because of the kitty.) Other ways to appeal to System 1 include shorter paragraphs, more white space, and a lower readability level for your content. Data consistently shows that optimized images can vastly improve Facebook engagement.

Source: Rival IQ: Most engaging Facebook posts for Coffee Market Landscape

Marketers Must Appeal to Fast and Slow Thinkers

Of course, if big fonts, small words and kittens were all it took to succeed on Facebook, no one would be reading this post. The truth is that appealing to System 1 works, and has its place in a marketer’s arsenal. Yet overuse of techniques tailored to System 1 sacrifices quality for quantity.

Slow thinking, or System 2, on the other hand, is both conscious and effortful. System 2 is what you are using when solving a math equation, or when reading more sophisticated text. Upping the readability level of your content is one way to engage this system. In Song’s analysis, complex text was correlated with more comments on Facebook, likely because readers had slowed down and spent enough time with the content to form an opinion.

Ideally, marketers will balance their use of both systems in their marketing efforts, or better yet, combine the two for greatest effect. One trend Song noticed is that headlines possessing what she calls a “turning point” get increased discussion on Facebook. Here is an example of such a story:

In this example, the turning point takes the form of problem/solution (runners failed to finish but are invited back). Song argues that the change in story direction serves as a surprise that slows the reader down long enough to notice and become engaged via System 2. But it also conveys a triumph (a positive outcome for the runners who did not get to finish in 2013). The positive emotion appeals to System 1’s more primitive sensibilities. The two together lead to more social media engagement with the article.

What Social Media Psychology Will You Use?

Song’s full post contains more in-depth analysis from her research and goes further into discussion of the role that emotions, self-image, and even personal relationships play in whether and how people engage with content on social media. There are also plenty of pictures as well as statistics for both your Fast and Slow reading pleasure. Share with us below what you plan to put to use in your next social media campaign!

The post PAY ATTENTION: Using Psychology to Improve Facebook Engagement appeared first on Rival IQ.