Define your Content Strategy

You hear the term banded about a lot these days, from PR companies through to senior managers in businesses... they all want to have and own your organisation's Content Strategy.

But what's your definition of the term Content Strategy?

Here's mine:

"A Content Strategy should aim for the creation of engaging and appropriate content that delivers improvements in the agreed Key Performance Indicators (KPI's)"


Those KPI's most often being:
- Increase online visitors & sessions
- Increase online engagement (most likely reported as a reduction in page bounce rates)
- Convert lookers to bookers (or into whatever your main commercial goal is)

What's yours?

Online success - 8 soundbites for digital improvement

I'm typically not in favour of using soundbites, without backing them up with facts or information. However I find myself using the following more and more... so thought I'd note them down for future reference.

Find and identify your audience
Turn monologues into dialogues via web and social networks
Match the style of message with the style of audience
Create, implement and analyse ideas which deliver results
Measure value and worth properly
Build engagement, loop it and exploit it
Developing a programme for continuous improvement
Evaluate, set-up, use and  tools that use the data you already own

Hopefully in another post or two I'll go into these in far more detail.

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. 

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.

The digital path to purchase

The path to purchase is dead, long live the path to purchase.

Today's shoppers now have a number of tools at their fingertips to help them chose which products to buy and consumer technology has been the facilitator of this.

Research from Google Analytics has found that over a two-day period customers now interact with a brand 4.3 times before making a purchase. Furthermore the average U.S. shopper now interfaces with a total of 10.4 traditional and online media sources prior to purchasing. That's a lot of browsing before buying (or looking before booking, if you're in an industry such as online travel).
Furthermore, according to further research by Google, online customers are now making the majority of their purchasing decision before engaging with a sales representative,

There's no doubt that the traditional way that shoppers purchase has now evolved and the marketing to these people has changed with it. However a lot of the ideas that the more technology-savvy shopper marketing agency might suggest to a client (e.g. QR codes and online store check-ins via FourSquare or Facebook Places) just don't make the impact required... and therefore turn out to be expensive experiments.

My view is that optimising shopper engagement across the path to purchase needs an integrated approach, one that pulls together: marketing, useful functionality, content and online retailing... then measured and learned from. Without this, brands and their agencies will continue to just experiment.

7 reasons your content marketing is crap

There, I've said it and it's time to admit it. Basically a lot of the current hype around content marketing is crap and so are a load of blog posts about the subject.

Here's my thoughts on why a lot of efforts into the latest online marketing trend are going to be poor, very poor:

1. You have no content plan
Are you publishing content with no editorial calendar and therefore no schedule for seasonal changes? Good content begins with a good plan of what you're going to write and when you're going to publish it,

2. You have based everything around search engine optimisation
On-page optimisation of your content is one of the key focuses of SEO, however just writing content for the search engines (and not really for your readers) isn't the right way to get engaged readers

3. You're not encouraging sharing
So you're making it harder for your readers to post the URL to different social networks or to share content with their peers. Why exactly?

4. You're not linking off to other parts of your site
Part of your reason for writing content should be that it actually drives people around your site and triggers your other site KPI's. Have you got an eCommerce site and yet you're not linking off to products you feature in your blog?

5. You're not reading what you're writing.
The way to create a sustainable audience of any long term value is with the deployment of quality, original and engaging content. Like a chef who doesn't eat what they make, you need to write stuff that you believe in. which ultimately means you have to be the first consumer of your content.

6. You're not properly measuring what you're doing
How are you going to optimise your content if you don't actually collect data about what is working for you and what isn't? Ensure you have the right goals measured and that you get regular feedback on these.

7. You're not learning
Content marketing optimisation is a slow process of test and learn, where you not only have to spend effort producing content... you have to also gain insight into what is actually working. And then you have to actually tell yourself some home truths about what isn't!.

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.

A million likes and now what?

There's a race going on by major brands to build up the amount of followers they have on Facebook in a perceived effort to gain popularity and influence. Almost daily, those of us who work in online & social media hear claims such as the one made by Burberry today that it:

".... currently boasts three million Facebook fans, which it says is the highest number of any luxury brand"

For many companies it now seems quantity is everything in social media. Its a numbers game where bragging rights to the next million milestone are the most important currency of online interaction.

But hang on..... What's the point of having all these vaguely-attached followers who have just clicked on a button saying 'like'? Where's the customer engagement? Where's the qualitative metric of improved brand recognition?

Perhaps someone had best start reminding some of these brands that a 'like' button is just that? Its a "corresponding or agreeing in general or in some noticeable respect". It really isn't the statement of 'love' they are making it out to be and just maybe they had best learn quickly how to utilise this new-found Facebook fanaticism to improved online sales?

Measuring Social Media activity across your business

If you work for a larger company with multiple divisions (and marketing initiatives) then there is a good chance that you have more than one piece of social media activity going on at once.

There's also a pretty good chance that these different initiatives are not connected and may even be duplicating effort (or worse, working against each other).

So what do you do?

1. Audit all activity
Firstly, do an audit of all activity involving social media across your company.  Create a list of everything from those business Twitter accounts in the USA office, through to those Facebook Pages created by the German Marketing team.

2. Measure reach, impact and engagement
How? Well, for reach, its a numbers game. With services such as Twitter its easy to see the number of followers an account has and its just as easy to record the number of Facebook 'likes'. Counting up the number of people who have 'like'd each clip* or are following your channels on YouTube is obvious. Also most blogging platform now either provide statistics for the number of visitors to your blogs or allow you to integrate Google Analytics or other stats package into each page.
*YouTube also allows users to give each clip a 'thumbs down' plus has basic stats built into it now

However measuring impact and engagement is a different matter and I would therefore suggest you look at these methods as a starter:

• Twitter: 
• Look at the number of re-tweets each account gets, this will give you some idea of how valuable the followers regard the postings.
• Measure clicks on hyperlinks. You can do this either by looking at your referrer information in your site analytics package (assuming the links point back to your own site), or if you use a service like Bit.ly which integrates with Twitter, this will show you the clicks on each Tweet.
  Hayden's tip: Use Google link search to see how many people hyperlink to your Twitter account e.g. http://goo.gl/6hkt
• 
  
   Facebook
• 
  
  Look for the amount of comments and 'likes' on postings. Obviously the more followers you have, the greater the likelihood of having comments and 'likes'...
  Hayden's tip: To get a real measure, work out your average number of responses per posting and divide this by your total number of followers.. and then measure this over time.
• YouTube, Flickr, etc.
• Both these sites allow commenting on each respective file uploaded and YouTube even allows video responses to be posted. Reviewing this feedback over time will give you some idea of the content that people find interesting (in a positive or negative way - so remember to )
  Hayden's tip:
• Blogs
• Comments are the obvious way of measuring engagement with your blog content and because they are easily spider-able by search engines and social tools, you can use a variety of methods to understand the quality of the people contributing to them (e.g. http://socialmention.com/)
  You can also use your analytics package to measure more factors about engagement such as the amount of time spent on each page (paid for analytics applications may even have a specific way of working this out, such as this method from WebTrends)
  Hayden's tip: Again use Google to measure the number of inbound links to each blog: e.g. http://goo.gl/tjTn

There's obviously lots of other social networks to assess and the ones you audit and measure will depend upon the countries your business is active in. But without first taking stock of your entire social media presence, there's no way you decide which efforts are working and which are not.

The digital marketing toolkit

If you have read my recent post on The digital PR toolkit and the slightly older one about the AIDA customer acquisition process, then this one on the toolkit available to digital marketers will come as no surprise.

To quickly recap.... if we follow the AIDA customer acquisition steps as shown below, then there is a relevant role for digital PR, Marketing and Conversion specialists throughout the entire process.

The second circle shown above is what I believe is the scope of the online marketer's role in the steps to obtaining customers (I'll hopefully talk about how you keep them in subsequent postings). And taking just this circle on its own, we can show the different tools available.... again with the on-site tools shown within the sphere and the off-site ones placed outside.

The first thing you that regular readers of this blog will realise, is that there are some tools mentioned here that were also covered in my previous Digital PR Toolkit posting. This is because the roles of online PR, marketing and conversion have now blurred.

Here's a breakdown of the respective tools:

Off-site:

• Online Advertising:
  Media such as animated banners and buttons may have gone out of vogue somewhat, but there is still a lot of online media inventory available out there and its now possible to target the site or demographic sector you are after reaching. With the general ubiquity of greater broadband speeds now available, other richer formats such as video or interactive adverts are now gaining greater prominence on a lot of pages.
  
• Affiliate Marketing
  Sometimes seen as the murkier side of the industry, there is no doubt that paying someone a commission to grow your sales for you is of significant benefit. Yes, there are the downsides in that you could end up competing with affiliates when running your own activity, needing the obvious communication and management between both parties.
  
• Search Engine Marketing
  Advertising through Google, Yahoo, Bing and the like is a directly-attributable way of growing website traffic and leads for your business. Making sure you have identified the correct keywords and setting the right budget is something pay-per-click specialists know all about!
  
• Search Engine Optimisation
  Why pay for traffic when you can gain prominence in search engines results for free? If you have focused an entire marketing budget on directly measurable clicks (e.g. via PPC), you would probably have missed the opportunity to promote your site up the organic rankings as well.
  
• Micro-sites (or one-page microsites)
  Sometimes you either don't want to or just cannot make changes to the main organisational website to support a customer acquisition campaign. This could be for a number of reasons, including: timescales, budget, flexibility of design or just because you want a different campaign-specific URL. Then a microsite (or even just a clever one-page site) is often the most practical approach.
  
• Email Marketing
  Email was one of the first Internet applications and is still an effective tool for marketing to new and existing clients. Just make sure your email marketing campaigns area working as hard for you as they possibly can. (Hint: Just because its an older technology, it doesn't mean you should stop being innovative in its use)
  
• Competitions
  Some may see this purely as a tool for gaining leads (or email addresses) and to a certain extent that's true. However a clever competition can be sponsored or contain various questions that could segment your audience better (Hint: to be able to market to them better in the future). There is also a huge opportunity missed by so many online competitions to drive customers through to websites at the end of the competition form.
  
• Sponsorship
  Although many see sponsorship as a brand-building exercise rather than a marketing one, in the online world sponsorship on some sites can contain clicks through to the target website and help in the customer acquisition process.
  
• Social Media Marketing
  In the last few years, advertising spend has started to follow users into social media. And with one main reason... that's where Internet users are spending so much of their time. Sure, there needs to be a mindset change in creating a two-way dialogue with consumers rather than just a one-way monologue as conventional marketers do... but the integration of paid advertising with social media engagement creates a potent mix that most online marketers will not be able to ignore.

Multi-channel dialogue - is your organisation ready?

I've already mentioned how the increased complexity caused by a number of communication channels can create disjointed or even contradictory messaging.

Nevertheless customers still want to trust companies they buy from, despite an erosion of that trust (particularly financial institutions) over the last few years. And (surprisingly) many would still like to build a lasting relationship with those companies.

But this can no longer be done just using one channel of communication (such as the phone or email), there's the need for a more innovative & creative approach to gaining customer trust and enhancing the customer experience at the same time.

A dialogue with the customer has always been a very successful method of building customer loyalty and now newer digital methods such as Social Media are available to engage customers in consistent and continuous dialogues across a number of channels.

But not all organizations are ready for this level of constant communication, despite its obvious way of creating differentiation in today’s market. Is yours?

Funnels

I'm a believer in the use of diagrams to depict complex situations (or just those where a picture paints a thousand words). And the diagrammatic use of funnels to show a development, progress or evolution is something I've come across quite a lot in my work.

Here's a few that have caught my eye:

1. The ecommerce Funnel:

Also known as the conversion funnel, this diagram shows the visitor drop-off at each stage along the online purchasing process, from homepage to sale confirmation.

2. The marketing funnel:
Also known as the 'advocacy' funnel, this plots user relationship along reducing path of engagement. There are numerous different versions of this funnel and each roughly follows the AIDA(s) marketing steps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_(marketing)

Thanks to http://www.relationship-economy.com/ for image

3. The Twitter Funnel

In an interesting article recently on Mashable, Tim Trefren covers the Twitter sign up funnel and plots the 5 stages of initial usage:
1. Hit homepage

2. Go to signup page, fill out registration form

3. Browse suggested topics

4. Add e-mail friends

5. Search for someone

4. The Social Media Funnel:

Taking this to a higher-level, John Bell from Ogilvy360 has created his version of the Social Media Funnel.

Marketing & Product

There's a fantastic presentation from Paul Isakson on the future of Advertising, Brands, etc.
http://www.slideshare.net/paulisakson/whats-next-in-marketing-advertising-318143

He tackles the issues of product, communication and marketing, but frankly puts forward the idea that those who are not engaging.... "are screwed"

Content is the new currency and Engagement is the new Marketing... discuss.

Famous for 15 minutes

(Well, more like 15 seconds)

A great thing happened toward the end of my working day yesterday. I was on http://www.twitter.com/ and an announcement came from Jeremiah Owyang, that the Forrester Marketing Conference was being streamed from the Hyatt Regency hotel in LA. It turned out that he was in the front row of the conference with a hand-held video camera, with an accompanying chat forum running via ustream.tv

I tuned in and watched & listened, first to Forrester Researcher Harvey Manning and then, following the presentation from Brian Haven on Engagement, Jeremiah asked the forum if anyone wanted to ask a question.

A few minutes later, my question was asked by Josh Bernoff at the live event and answered by Brian Haven.

Take a look at the recorded footage:




A big "thank you" to Jeremiah for allowing me to participate in the Q&A session