Content Marketing : owned, paid & earned doesn't work

As the subject of content marketing grows into more of a discipline, I've been looking at ways to categorise the different types of CM activity you can engage in.  I therefore wanted to see if these categories mapped to the three classifications of marketing originally developed by Forrester Research. Those of Paid, Owned and Earned.

Note: For those of you that want a better perspective of this general topic of Paid, Owned and; Earned, I produced a blog post on the merging between these 3 area a few months back.
http://press20.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/paid-owned-and-earned-blurring.html

However, I have to be honest on this occasion and say "no, I don't think that Content Marketing and the Paid, Owned & Earned classification work in this context"

The Dark Side of Content Marketing

I sometimes blog about the more shady side of Internet Marketing and how you should avoid this sort of stuff (if at all possible).
Buying email lists, Black Hat SEO and other nefarious activities are still used though... primarily for short-term gains and only by some digital folk. Despite all the guidance of search engines, advice from reputable online agencies and contributions from best-practice consultants, there is still a fair bit of shadiness still used (and some clients even encourage it).

Content Marketing on the other hand is the discipline of creating and sharing content for the purpose of communicating, educating and informing prospect, customers and anyone else really. The art of great copy writing, coupled with great UX skills and fantastic creativity is rewarded in engaged eyeballs and influenced sales.

But I have been considering recently whether there a dark side to Content Marketing. Activity that isn't entirely legitimate, but that has yet to be defined as dodgy.... yet

Here's some examples I can quickly think of:

1. Writing blog posts with very similar titles & subjects (purely to try and cover a range of search terms for SEO or internal search)
2. Writing unnaturally (either to force a call-to-action or to appeal to search engines with keyword stuffing, repetition, etc.)
3. Creating meaningless (or even completely off-topic) infographics just to encourage their sharing
4. Creating numerous videos from a single original clip and posting them online under different titles and keywords.

Can you think of anything else?

5 ways to spot a crap Content Marketing agency

Content Marketing is this season’s buzz word. Like ‘Social Media’ was a few years back and ‘Web 2.0’ a few years before that… Content Marketing is apparently all the rage now.
Only there’s a big problem with that.

To try and fill the gap between client expectations and delivery of these, a bunch of agencies have recently cropped up offering: Content strategy, Content Marketing, In-bound marketing and the rest. You know the ones… they email you all the time (well, they fill up my ‘Promotions’ tab in Google Mail – which I now treat like a second inbox for spam) and make it seem like they are a reputable company and not just a bunch of people jumping on the latest digital bandwagon.

Yes, there will be the odd one out there who has actually done what they say and possibly for some brands you may have actually heard of. But a lot of them have either just re-purposed their existing Search Engine Optimisation efforts or may have worked out how to do the basics in Google Analytics (e.g. look at in-bound source URLs, print out a PDF of landing page bounce rates, etc.).
So here’s my tips on the ways you can spot a crap content marketing agency:

1. They send you an email such as “understand blogging basics” or “free website content review” when they've not even looked at your site
2. They don’t actually have any content creation and copy writing skills (they typically only offer to suggest blog posts or to analyse what you've already written)
3. They have spelling or consistency mistakes across their website (an obvious sign of poor content quality) 
4. Despite claiming to have been doing “Content Marketing for years” their own twitter feed and blog posts go back less than 12 months.
   (And watch out for the tell-tale sign of sudden flurries of blog posts all written around the same time, and then large gaps where they haven't been bothered)
5. They make wonderful sweeping statements like “you need to increase brand engagement” with no indication of how you actually do this, let alone measure it.

So. Did I miss any points? Let me know. 

True content marketing is calculating page value

I see so many articles on the subject of content marketing it makes my head hurt. They nearly all just witter on about blogs, infographics and social media, but hardly any even mention one key thing... return on investment.

Its like we've stepped back once more to either around 2008 (when social media gained a lot of attention) or the early days of the dot com bubble in the 1990's. Both were a time when a lot of people lost a lot of money, by not focusing on value.  The value of what you're doing compared to what you get out and the value you're adding.

So before rushing into loads of content marketing efforts and wasting everyone's time and money. .. ask yourself "do I know the value of this page I'm either creating or maintaining?".

If you don't, might I suggest you stop right there and work that out first?

The philosophy of content marketing

In a previous post I posed the Content Marketing equivalent of a long-standing philosophical question "if words are written and nobody reads them, are they really content?"

But the creation of content doesn't exist in a vacuum. To succeed at content marketing you don't just need great content... You also need:

100% code:
Just developing HTML that just about qualifies as 'fit for purpose' at the time of testing not only means that you may have issues down the line (e.g. when a specific browser is slightly updated) but may also hamper some of your SEO efforts. For example, some blogging platforms (e.g. WordPress) can take quite a lot of effort to get them SEO-friendly.

Killer UX:
Creating a fantastic user experience helps visitors browse your site with ease and complete tasks you want them to using functionality and content to inform them at every relevant step of the user journey.
So does content marketing include the use of  A/B and multivariate testing (MVT) approaches to optimise the user experience? You betcha! Alternative versions of content can have significant influence on visitor bounce rates and understanding... which can lead to improved conversion.

Exemplary 'white hat' SEO techniques
Forget the grey and murky areas of questionable search engine optimisation actions, your content marketing efforts have to be based on sound and utterly legitimate techniques. Why? Well thanks to the recent Google algorithm updates there is now an the even greater chance that less than honourable techniques could negatively affect your website's organic rankings.

Insight from digital analytics
A good analytical understanding of what your visitors are doing when they get to your website gives you the knowledge to evolve your content (text, imagery , video , animations, etc.) by changing it rapidly to respond to trends.

Does content marketing work just on your own sites?

I've been considering the question recently about where it is possible to carry out content marketing. Or to turn this into an actual question: "Can content marketing activity only be done on your own sites?"

My initial answer to this question was a clear "Yes, all CM activity needs to be done on your own sites". Or to put it into more 'consultant speak'... Content Marketing activity only utilises 'Owned' digital sources and does not involve 'Earned' or 'Paid' ones.
Note: Owned online properties are those where you have the ownership and means to change the content. Company brand sites, eCommerce portals, brochureware sites, Facebook pages (where your organisation manages what is posted there) and campaign microsites are all included in this definition.

However, whilst writing a blog post to this effect and therefore thinking it through in more detail... I realised that this initial response might not the correct one. Most content marketing efforts do start on your own sites, but ignoring the paid and earned sources means you are missing out on a significant amount of content marketing potential.

To try and explain my thinking, I've pulled the following quick diagram together:

This diagram tries to explain the following:

1. Your owned properties can be used to push content into the earned space. E.g. Via the use of social sharing tools you can extend the reach and impact of your content.
2. Your earned media can help shape influence and therefore build traffic to your owned media.
3. Paid media can help to directly bring traffic to your site.

This might be presented in some other way that conveys value or link juice more, so as-always I reserve the right to revisit this diagram in some other blog post.

Nobody sets out to read ‘content’ online

It seems that everyone is panning for virtual gold in the Content Marketing sector like it's San Francisco in the 1850's. Taking a look at Google Trends for Search, the term "Content Marketing" is currently reaching a feverish peak... somewhat helped perhaps by Google recently clamping down on paid-for advertorial links

It seems that content is having a bit of a Renaissance right now (deservedly so) and the pendulum has swung back away from "design first, content later" to "content first, design later".

But here's my revelation... Most normal people when they use the web don't start by thinking "My, I must consume some content", instead they want to:

• Read opinions
• Gain insight
• Chuckle at rants
• Understand products
• Learn from ‘how to’ guides
• Take a peek at useful information
• Compare reviews
• Watch news
• Hear another person tell stories
• plus many other combinations of the above and more.

So prior to setting out to "do some content marketing" and before considering: search engines, your 'tone of voice guidelines', the design of the page and even your boss or client's feedback... Think about the most important person. Your reader.

Further metrics of content marketing success

In one of my recent posts (here) I provided three important metrics for understanding the value of your content marketing efforts: bounce rate, pages per visit and returning visitors. Furthermore I said I believed that although these three figures are each individually important, when combined they are potentially even more useful.

However, there was a couple of metrics I did not include:

1. Sharing:
   It is possible to measure the use of social sharing functionality in several ways, including: the metrics provided by applications such as addthis / sharethis / etc. that usually come with their own built-in analytics or by tagging actions that integrate with your website analytics.
2. Conversions from links
   Within your website analytics package you should be able to track users from links within your content pages all the way through to them completing their required goals. This gives you another indication of the value of the content you are producing and how it is directly affecting your bottom line (note: it is even possible to tag each link with it's own specific identifier).

Have I missed any others?

Note:
You may also want to read my previous post on Content: Found, read, shared and measured, a useful way to categorise your content marketing activity.

Why I am not getting into Content Marketing

I think the term Content Marketing has definately become the latest buzzword of the last 6 months or so. Used and abused by digital marketers and consultants it is this season's "social media", "web2.0" or "information superhighway" and it will stay dominant until 'Semantic Web' or some other equally fancy term hits the digital mainstream soon enough.
Note: The only contender for it's crown of hype right now is 'big data'.

I think I've previously given the subject a fairly good coverage on this blog. I've written up a good explanation of what Content Marketing is & isn't, given examples of when it's crap, described how to optimise it and even gone into detail on how to measure it. However, when I also look back at posts on this blog from several years ago, I find I've covered the subject, but I've just not called it by that specific term.

From optimising press releases for social media in August 2010, through to considerations for making your content more portable in April 2008 (my, that does seem a long time ago).

So I'm going to make a bold statement.

 I'm definately not getting into Content Marketing because it's now the latest and greatest thing to be into...

.... as it seems I've already been into Content Marketing for almost half a decade.

Measuring your Content Marketing efforts

In my recent post on Content Marketing confusion I described how I thought one of the most important KPI's for the optimisation of content is the number of returning visitors to your site. You should easily be able to measure this figure using your website analytics package (such as Google Analytics, which even has a specific report for this purpose: Audience >; Behaviour > New vs. Returning ).

But l thought it might be worthwhile to take a bit of time to dig into this subject further. So I've pulled together some other important metrics for Content Marketing that I think are beneficial and how to measure them.

Bounce rate:
This metric is the percentage of all visitors who come to your site and only view one page, in other words they bounce straight off. Usually it is a positive sign if you have a low bounce rate, indicating that a higher percentage of people go on to view subsequent pages... a sign of engagement with your content.
Note: I sometimes exclude paid marketing (e.g. PPC) from this statistic, as paid traffic usually drives people to pages deep into a site to carry out specific functionality.

Pages per visit:
Again an indication of site enagement this metric is quite useful and is sometimes quoted alongside bounce rate. However care should be taken to factor in the site's user experience... for example if content is purposely split across several pages (such as to optimise advertising opportunities) then this figure will be comparatively high.

Returning visitors:
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the returning visitors figure gives a site owner a good idea of how interested visitors have previously been (e.g. interested enough to come back). However combining this visitor information with the previous two measures (bounce and pages per visit) does provide a better idea of the 'stickiness' of site content and also potential issues. For example: calculating the number of pages seen by return visitors, identifying new visitors who don't bounce and finding those pages that have a high bounce rate even for visitors who come back can each start to paint a picture of where to focus your content marking effort in the future.

Content: Found, read, shared and measured

The title of this post basically sums up my approach to the growing discipline of Content Marketing.

These four terms are section headings for my simple and effective way to assess and develop your CM strategy. Below they are broken down into the essential areas that I think needs covering if you are putting together your own content marketing approach:

Found:
It's no good creating content if nobody finds it... so ensuring your text, images and other assets can be found on the web is bloody important. This is consequently the area where Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation come together the most; as using the correct SEO techniques and being correctly indexed by search engines can mean the difference between your pages getting lots of traffic and getting practically none.

Read:
Isn't there a wonderful phrase that goes something like "if a tree falls over in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a noise?"... Well, in my opinion the same goes for your words and pictures... if nobody reads them, are they really content?
I should also mention that the quality of your content is something to watch out for. It's no good just getting the office junior to write all your website content if they've no real idea of how to correctly write for the web. Therefore scan-ability, readability and understandability are all key success factors here.

Shared:
To get your content to as many eyeballs as possible, you have to encourage it's sharing across as many platforms and formats as possible. From RSS feeds through to seeding by simple social sharing functionality, your content needs to work as hard as possible when it is is used off of your website as it does when it is on it. Also links and content out on social platforms can now significantly contribute to you SEO efforts too.

Measured:
This is probably the area least understood about Content Marketing (and therefore probably the area most likely to be missed / skipped). However it's not that difficult to get your head around, especially if you have a person in your organisation who understand your website analytics package and can obtain meaningful engagement KPI's.

Let me know if this framework works for you or if you have a better one

How digital ate the PR industry's lunch

In an article on The Drum's site a couple of days ago, there was an opinion piece by Sandy Lindsay from Tangerine PR on the ability of the PR industry to hire new and young talent to safeguard it's future.
http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2013/02/05/pr-industry-needs-act-now-safeguard-its-future

Her article mentioned that the PR industry has a job on its hands to find the right people to help it own the ‘digital space’, against 'those web bods, advertising or many others'. I  have a different opinion on this (being a 'digital bod' myself) that the PR industry has already lost a lot of this 'fight'. So I felt the need to comment on the article. Here's my rant:

I'm a 'digital bod' as you described and I think this highlights one area where the PR industry has dropped the ball. Over the years I've worked alongside many PR agencies (both in London and further afield) who continually refer to digital as "something over there that digital folks do, whilst we do PR over here". On the other hand, the digital industry now talks about 'engagement' , 'influence' and other factors that contribute to a multi-channel campaign - especially around areas such as search engine optimisation. In short, the Digital industry has moved up close to the PR industry, ate a lot of it's lunch and invented new disciplines such as Content Marketing... that should have been driven by the PR industry in the first place! Until it learns to broaden it's reach and truly understand the use and impact of digital comms, the PR industry will not attract the right young talent it needs at all and then I really would fear for it's future.

Sure, some PR agencies have embraced digital, others have created digital divisions (some only in name, or have just aligned themsleves to a developer sitting in their bedroom) but others have still stuck their heads in sand.

It will be interesting to see how the Content Marketing trend continues to eat into the domain (and lunch / budget) of the PR industry.

The great content marketing discussion

An imaginary conversation…

Firstly what do you mean by the term content marketing?

The term has been increasing in its usage for the last year and  especially over the last few months… but content marketing is usually known as the use of content (such as text and imagery) across an organisation’s owned channels (website, social networking page, etc.) to get users to a site and build engagement.

Isn’t this search engine optimisation?

No, SEO is about optimising a site (code, configuration, links AND content) to get a higher placement in search engines. Although content markers do need to consider SEO factors such as keywords, they aren’t really bothered about how sites are set up or algorithms for ranking.

So how do you get traffic via content?

You build up user traffic by being useful and relevant to the reader. This therefore makes your content more sticky (readable) and social (sharable).

So content marketing is a sub-set of SEO?

Well, not really. Content marketing also deals with topics such as internal linking to other content around a site to encourage the user to complete a specific goal. For example: to purchase a product or to sign-up for a service. 

So it’s about writing link bait then!

It’s all about producing quality content, not rubbish articles that pander to the lowest common denominator and get instant traffic based on sensationalistic headlines. The modern web user is very savvy and they tune out things they are not interested in any more, it’s an attention economy out there.

Then it’s about getting eyeballs to look at your page?

Yes, that’s right, you should write good and free content, which then allows it to be shared so it can work harder and reach a bigger audience for your brand.

But isn’t that syndication?

No, however the content that is written can be syndicated out, such as via an RSS feed.

So what Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) should a Content Marketing person measure?

Although usual website metrics, such as visitors, visits and subsequent conversions should obviously be measured, one important measurement of content marketing success is repeat visits from the same visitor. You should be able to find this information in your website analytics package and further segment it by the content areas on your site. As a rough guide, the more users come back, the more they’re engaged.

But doesn’t this affect conversion rate for an eCommerce site?
Yes, repeat visitors could affect your ‘look to book’ ratio, because just increasing the number of ‘looks’ to your site will make your site look like it is less effective. It is therefore just as important to look at how your content pushes users to convert (book).

So how will this area evolve?
Content Marketing Optimisation (CMO) is not a term currently well known, but a lot of people jumping on the content marketing bandwagon right now will quickly be asked to justify their investment of time, 3^rd party copywriting, etc.  So just as SEO took a while to emerge as a longer-term disciple that observes, learns and improves the bottom line; so content marketing optimisation by using insight gleaned from analytics packages will tell website owners what content is working and what is not.

Content Marketing confusion

I think there’s a huge confusion over what Content Marketing is (for example, even the Wikipedia entry defining what it is gets very confused). 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing 

In my opinion, Content Marketing is not just about acquisition of visitors via sharing, search, syndication and so on… it is about engagement. Or in other words, about getting users to come back to your site once they have already visited. Therefore an important success criteria is not just the typical ones such as visitors and subsequent conversions. It is also about returning users and how frequently they come back to your site.

Let's also be clear, content marketing is not search engine optimisation. Although the two are potentially mutually beneficial, SEO deals with the optimisation of the code, configuration and the content of the site. SEO is also typically is seen as a way of acquiring visitors who convert… not a way of retaining them.


Therefore an admission... I need to make an amendment to my recent presentation on content marketing optimisation, where I show the feedback loop from both search rankings and website analytics.


The example KPI's I give as the metrics to use to update content are visits & visitors, bounce rates and conversion. However I didn't give engagement or return frequency as one of these figures... and should have.

Content Marketing Optimisation - presentation

To try and explain both the alignment of the typical website delivery process (engage, specify, design, develop, test & launch) with the approach needed to deliver website content, I put the presentation below together.

Both processes need to closely align, but then once content it delivered it needs to be updated in a cyclical process. This content marketing optimisation approach need to factor in not just the brand (e.g. values, voice, etc.) but also other considerations such as the relevant SEO terms to target.

As always, the presentation is a 'straw man' and I'd value any feedback anyone has on this.

Content Marketing Optimisation

Content Marketing needs a lot of thought and effort to do it correctly, so it is definitely not something you should rush into. You first need a content marketing strategy, and then you need the right team & appropriate inputs to be able to create the content. But creating content across your owned marketing channels (website, social media sites, etc. ) is not the end of things… content needs continual review & refinement to improve its effectiveness as an in-bound marketing (and conversion improving)channel.  But, just updating content to make it more timely and relevant for the sake of it is a thankless and unnecessary task.

To truly optimise your content marketing over time, you not only need to back in the results of your efforts (visits, bounce rates, pages viewed per visit, conversions & other goals)  but you really need to take this information and use it to create further content or amend your existing content.

You web analytics package should help give you the information you need to produce various insights into what your content is doing for you. In fact, Google’s new A/B testing tool (which I have decided not to use as it currently looks a fairly immature product) is now called ‘Google Analytics ContentExperiments’, now indicating the search giant’s emphasis of the benefits of content optimisation as a means of gaining decent website traffic.

However, let me just state that I believe content marketing is not (as a lot of other people have stated) just about SEO. Search Engine Optimisation is just one of the tools in the content marketer’s toolbox and should therefore be considered along with everything else.

In other words, you need to consider content marketing optimisation as business as usual, in just the same way as (hopefully) your online PR, eCommerce merchandising and other staff currently consider search engine optimisation.