Updated March 29, 2021

Three hundred sixty-four days a year, brands work hard creating content to build and strengthen trust with their audiences.

But on a single day in April, many brands suspend those trust-building efforts and throw them out the window by publishing content deliberately meant to fool (or worse, make fools of) their audiences.

Yes, it’s time to usher in April’s annual day of pranking. And it’s time to think before you hit “publish.”Continue Reading

With March Madness underway, millions who don’t usually follow college basketball are paying attention to the sport. Most return for the annual event because they join office pools or other contests where they complete their brackets and hope their choices make it through each round of the competition.

But this month, I’m inspired to look closer at sports writing and broadcasting – and how content marketers can learn a writing lesson (or five) from them.Continue Reading

To celebrate Women’s History Month, CMI shares our community’s  book recommendations every content marketer should read written or co-written by women.

Their input created this list of over two dozen books. I’ve grouped the recommendations into the following categories: content marketing, general marketing and business, and psychology and persuasion.

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Over a billion dollars invested in short-form content.

That’s the nine-word origin story of Quibi. An abbreviation for “quick bites,” Quibi was designed to be a mobile disruptor, a short-video streaming service featuring big-name celebrities.

It seemed like the perfect recipe for content success – people with huge fan followings in content that would appeal to audiences with supposedly the shortest attention spans in history. And it was led by two stalwarts in business and entertainment: Meg Whitman and Jeffery Katzenberg.

But six months after launch, Quibi went bust.Continue Reading

Your email newsletter database is valuable. After all, these people signed up to receive your content. They must be eager to consume it, right?

And yet, the average email open rate in 2020 was 18%. That means less than one of every five subscribers you’ve earned looks at the content you send.

Some daily e-newsletter brands have found better success. Morning Brew, theSkimm, and The Hustle have risen to the top of the newsletter game with open rates approaching 50% and subscriber totals that make the rest of us green with envy. The Hustle built something so good that marketing software company HubSpot recently bought it in a deal valued at $27 million.

What does it take to get people who’ve already expressed an interest in your brand’s content to open and (hopefully) read it? Here are some lessons content marketers can learn from these email newsletter successes.Continue Reading

Little more than two months after the pandemic shut down the world, the outcry for social justice and an end to systemic racism reverberated across the U.S.

Brands, once hesitant to get involved in social justice or conversations perceived as political, began to speak out about police brutality, systematic racism, diversity, and inclusion. They issued statements, turned their social media profiles into black squares, donated to minority-connected causes, and pledged to work more with minority-owned businesses.

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Now is the time for businesses to invest in publications they own and control.

“There’s no one you need to pitch to have your stories placed,” advises Christopher Penn, chief data scientist at Trust Insights, who outlined the decline in mainstream media sites last fall.

In 2019, enterprise software company Nutanix had the foresight to tackle that challenge. With tech media focused on the biggest companies, Nutanix created its own editorial property, The Forecast.Continue Reading

Too often, the content approval process turns into prolonged agony.

You ask, remind, and plead with reviewers to send their feedback. Once you finally get what you need, the creators make the updates. Then you have to push the approvers to sign off ASAP on the updated content. And once again, you ask, remind, and eventually resort to pleading before you publish it.

Given all those headaches, publishing content that involves trends, news, and other time-sensitive topics in an expedited manner might seem impossible.Continue Reading