Dennis is an independent marketing consultant who works with brands on content marketing, product messaging, and social media marketing. Formerly, Dennis led the content marketing function at DNN Software. Dennis curates an email newsletter called Content Corner and publishes marketing-related content on Medium. Feel free to reach out to Dennis on Twitter @dshiao
To succeed in content marketing, you need to be in for the long term.
With direct response marketing, ROI can be measured in weeks or months. With content marketing, however, it can take a year or more to see a return on your efforts. When hiring a content marketing agency, brands ought to plan for a long-term relationship.
The keyboard and mouse may soon become relics.
By 2020, 30% of web-browsing sessions will be done without a screen as voice-first interactions rise, according to Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Predictions for 2017 and Beyond.
With voice search, your inquiry receives a single answer, which is determined by what’s in Google’s answer box.
Jesper Laursen, CEO of the Native Advertising Institute, defines native advertising as “paid advertising where the ad matches the form, feel, function, and quality of the content of the media on which it appears.”
Your target customers are elusive. They’re online all day and consume a lot of media, but how do you reach them with your media and your message?
Native advertising can be a solution.
Consider the following via research from Think with Google:
You’re a contestant on a Content Marketing Game Show and you see three marked doors.
Behind each door is a content marketing position. Is your dream job behind one of these doors? Let’s see.
Door No. 1: Apple!
Door No. 2: Acme Accounting!
Door No. 3: ABC Plumbing!
With Door 1, you get to tell customer stories about the Apple Watch, iPhone, and Apple TV. With Door 2, you create content about forensic accounting – a topic that’s boring and complex for most. And with Door 3, you create content marketing for a service that’s undifferentiated.
Let’s begin with some simple math:
0.28 x 0.47 x 0.15 x 0.65 = 0.0128
The answer, expressed as a percentage, is 1.28%. I know what you might be thinking: What happened to the content I’m used to reading here at Content Marketing Institute?
Let me explain.
Take the four numbers on the left side of the equation and turn them into percentages:
Until recently, the closest I’ve come to understanding artificial intelligence is knowing that it powered tools in my martech stack (e.g., marketing automation, predictive lead scoring, etc.).
Beyond that, I found the concept hard to grasp until Chris Penn’s presentation at Content Marketing World, How to Use AI to Boost Your Content Marketing Impact.
Chris, co-founder and chief innovator at Trust Insights, covered several real-world applications of AI. His examples helped transform abstract concepts into tangible use cases.
Let’s play word association: I’ll say a word, then you answer with the first word that comes to mind.
The word is “LinkedIn.”
Did you answer “career”?
If you did, you’re in the same camp as many LinkedIn users who think of their LinkedIn profile as their online resume. You list your recent jobs and what you accomplished at them. You send connection requests to current and past colleagues, along with peers in your professional circles.
You solicit and provide endorsements and recommendations. You keep your profiles polished and attractive. You then take an inbound marketer’s approach, where you sit back, relax, and wait for that dream job or that dream client to find you.
Brands earn $38 for every $1 they invest in email marketing programs, according to Email Marketing ROI: The Factors That Lead to Better Returns, a research report published by Litmus.
In other words, brands generate a 3,800% ROI on email marketing.
Brands generate 3,800% ROI on #email marketing via @litmusapp #research. Click To TweetYet, emfluence’s Email Marketing 2018 Benchmarks Report shares that organizations are slow to adopt email marketing automation – only 2% of emails sent by B2B organizations and 3% for B2C organizations are automated.
My teen daughter has not watched television since elementary school. She gets her news and entertainment from YouTube.
While younger generations account for a lot of views, YouTube is ubiquitous across the generations, attracting 1.9 billion users each month. Every day, people watch over a billion hours of video.
While viewers have an unlimited supply of videos to watch, it’s a different story for marketers. With so much content available, how can creators gain a fair share of users’ attention?
