Category Archives: Content Marketing

Content marketing stories

Why rent when you can buy? The argument for marketing platforms.

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In my last post, I argued that Facebook’s decision to shift their news feed algorithm away from publishers’ posts and back towards friends’ and family members’ posts should encourage marketers to build platforms as a hedge against changes that might hurt them.  Solid advice.

Now what the hell is a marketing platform and why should marketers invest in one?

In terms of description, a marketing platform is a long-term marketing initiative, often but not always digital, that engages customers and prospects at one or more points along the customer journey in a brand-owned space.  Let me emphasize that last point about a brand-owned space.  In some ways, platforms work like branded content in reverse; rather than engage consumers in a trusted publisher’s space, platforms build brand trust by becoming media properties themselves.

Some of my favorite examples of marketing platforms include:

Society of Grownups, Mass Mutual’s content platform for adult financial education

These models are about as psyched as you are to learn about IRAs

Society of Grownups speaks to a segment of recent-ish college graduates who need to start making financial decisions with lifetime consequences.  Creating the Society of Grownups platform gives Mass Mutual’s content some credibility without relying on a publisher brand.  They update it frequently with new articles, graphics and calculators to encourage ongoing learning.

DIY Projects & Ideas, Home Depot’s tool and project tutorial series

Now I have a nail gun. Ho. Ho. Ho.

Home Depot has, of course, featured live tutorials in their stores for ages (and these, incidentally, serve as a great example of non-digital platforms).  Putting these tutorials online might represent an obvious next step for our connected and busy world.  However, they also encourage consumers and maybe even some pros to keep visiting the site and to build their trust with Home Depot.

Yeah?  So?  Why should I spend money on one?

Obviously, platforms such as these, which depend on fresh content and functionality, don’t come cheap, so why build them?

In terms of the investment discussion, it helps to think of platforms as a way to buy your audience’s attention rather than to rent it.  A successful platform reduces the need to acquire and re-acquire customers and prospects every time they reach the “shop” or “buy” phase of the customer journey.  They keep showing up because the platform has something of value for them.  Continued visits build brand trust that ultimately leads to purchase.

Speaking specifically of digital platforms, they can also play a valuable role as CRM tools.  At their simplest, any platform can have a “buy now” button or something similar.  The nail gun video above has links beneath it to drive users to a nail gun buying guide that leads to product pages.  More subtle approaches can gather data about visitors (assuming proper permissions, of course) and provision them with appropriate content and offers when they display buying behavior.

In a subsequent post, we’ll discuss how to build, maintain and most importantly measure the performance of marketing platforms.  For now, though, think of what you could do with your audiences if they belonged to you and not Facebook.

Facebook’s Revised News Feed is a Hint-and-a-Half for Your Ass

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Pundits have not yet finished the volley of thought pieces in the wake of The Zuck’s decree that his kingdom’s news feed will focus more on posts by your friends and families and less on posts from publishers and, more to the point for our purposes, brands.  This move reminds me of the advice of noted marketing guru Eddie Murphy to people in horror films: “that’s a hint-and-a-half for your ass to get out.”

OK, maybe I exaggerate a little by suggesting that brands get out of Facebook (hey, clickbaiters gonna bait), but I think they should stop relying too much on Facebook for engagement and start building their own platforms.

It’s not an ark.  It’s a species diversity platform.

First, let’s acknowledge that no one, maybe not even Zuck himself, knows what the news feed change really means.  On the face of it, the change seems to limit opportunities for brands to buy their way into Facebook users’ consciousness.  However, Zuck didn’t become a gajillionaire by ignoring marketers’ and publishers’ wants.  Based on my studies of the Mafia and OPEC, I suspect that the Hoodied One wants to drive up margins by artificially limiting supply.  Take that as someone who grew up in the home state of Tony Soprano and Exxon.

Regardless of Facebook’s endgame, marketers should take this moment to acknowledge the media duopoly.  Facebook and Google account for 77% of all digital ad dollars spent.

As an alternative, look to create platforms rather than campaigns.  Specifically, I mean digital platforms such as The Wirecutter, an e-commerce platform owned by the New York Times or American Express OPEN’s Forum platform.  While campaigns and platforms both engage consumers around a brand, platforms seek long-term engagement rather than a limited time capture of consumers’ attention.  To put it another way, platforms help engage consumers when they’re interested in something, not merely when marketers have something to say.

Over time, successful platforms reduce the need to rely on Facebook or Google to snag consumers’ attention.  They become self-sustaining.  Facebook can restrict its news feed to French bulldogs for all your brand cares.  As my friend and mentor Tim Suther likes to say, “why rent your customers when you can buy them?”

Take the hint.  Build a platform.

Why Not Blockchain for News?

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For the first time since color film, Kodak might be onto something.

Provider of mobile technology since ’88.  1888.

Pundits have already savaged The Great Yellow Father‘s entry into blockchain with KodakCoin.  After all, Bitcoin and cyrptocurrency hype continues to soar despite cautions from pretty good sources.

However, before consigning KodakCoin to the scrap heap, consider what Kodak and its partner WENN digital media created the product to do.  They intend to take advantage of blockchain’s distributed ledger to track the usage of photographs.  If you’ve never waded into the mire of photography digital rights, consider yourself lucky.  Fair, compensated use of photographs bedevils photographers and commercial entities who use photographs alike.

Also consider the larger opportunity: fake news.

Photo manipulation (e.g. Photoshop) has forced us to question the reality of a photograph since the days of Matthew Brady.  Now the ability to create a realistic photograph from nothing but algorithms has started to emerge.  A distributed ledger could verify that a picture of, say, Elvis shaking hands with President Nixon, really happened.

Why stop at photos?  Couldn’t we use a blockchain-driven technology to allow consumers to see who actually created a news article or video?  Sure, we can assume that a story appearing on the Wall Street Journal’s website really came from a WSJ reporter.  However, when we see a dubious news story in our Facebook feed, couldn’t something like KodakCoin let us know where it really came from?

I can’t wait to see how Kodak–wait for it–develops this idea.

Strategy in the Era of Brute Force Marketing

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Will marketing strategists become the horse grooms of the 21st century?

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Nice work if you can get it

Grooming horses probably seemed like a nice job in the 19th century.  After all, you got plenty of exercise and got to work with animals.  What’s not to like?

Well, in a word, Buicks.

Just as one form of technology destroyed the jobs of hundreds of thousands of horse grooms, another may lay waste to the jobs of thousands of marketing and advertising strategists.  As more and more digital marketing tools adopt optimization features, some of the core functions of the marketing strategist may begin to seem redundant.  However, I think that smart strategists will regard these tools not the way that John Henry regarded the steam drill but rather the way the first taxicab driver regarded a Model T.  That is, technology doesn’t take jobs away; rather, it makes them bigger.

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Book Review: Hamilton

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While it may seem counter-intuitive that Lin-Manuel Miranda chose to portray the life of one of America’s most patrician Founding Fathers via hip-hop, it shouldn’t.  This descendant of a Scottish laird had words.  Lots of words.

He wrote poetry as a young boy clerking for a merchant in his native Caribbean.  He wrote his first political tracts as a student at King’s College before the Revolution and the institution’s name-change to Columbia.  He wrote dispatches after dispatches as an aide-de-camp to General George Washington.  Most significantly, he helped write the United States Constitution and, most importantly for us marketers, the first great piece of content marketing in the new republic, the Federalist Papers.

While the Federalist Papers represent content marketing at its best, other Hamilton publications show content marketing at its worst.  These extremes serve as good guideposts for modern content marketers.

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Data’s Inigo Montoya Problem (Part II)

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If you’ve had campaigns fail because of bad data, then maybe you’ve fallen victim to the “Inigo Montoya problem of data.”  That is, maybe you’ve used data that don’t mean what you think they mean.

Previously, I discussed the origins of bad marketing data.  Now I’d like to discuss how to fix the problem.

First, I recommend something so exciting that you probably will not finish reading this post before trying it: read the dictionary.

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Yeah, yeah.  I know.  All characters, no plot.  Wait, no.  That’s the phone book.

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Your Campaign Needs a Kill Switch

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Just a quick note before getting to part 2 of “Data’s Inigo Montoya Problem.”

Your digital campaigns need an “off” switch.  Seriously.

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Don’t have one?  Get one.

As many people did, I visited Twitter Friday night to get a sense of the tragedy in Paris as it unfolded.  Along with breaking news and some poorly-conceived instant opinions, I saw some perfectly normal tweets about marketing ideas from marketing experts I follow.  Or, rather, I saw what would have been perfectly normal tweets about marketing ideas had every person in the Western world not had Paris on his or her mind.

I won’t name names, but several marketers persisted in posting articles even as other posts listed numbers of dead and wounded.  Marketing emails continued to pour in as well, often with mundane Holiday sales.  I can only assume that the marketers in question had scheduled these posts and emails hours if not days ago.

As a marketer, you probably don’t need a complex strategy to address major tragedies (I’d make exceptions for brands that have a role to play in the aftermath of tragedies, such as telecommunications brands).  You do need an “off” switch to stop your campaigns immediately.  In addition, you need someone senior enough and sober enough to make the decision to use that off switch.  If you can’t accept the basic human decency argument, then at least pay attention to your response; I can’t believe people want to read your tweets and emails when tragedy strikes.  Your exposures have probably gone to waste in times like these.

Anyone wishing to use the argument of “if we stop marketing, then the terrorists have already won” may meet me on the field of honor at dawn.

Behind the Numbers: Which Child is Your Favorite?

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Behind the numbers is a recurring feature on this blog, designed to demystify charts, graphs, tables and all manner of data.

Do you have more than one kid?  Quick, which one do you love the most?

Uh huh.  That’s how I feel about this survey:

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H/T to MarketingProfs

At face value, this chart suggests that a plurality of marketers don’t know which digital channel drives the most revenue.  Pity these poor marketers.  As they sit, watching money come in through the mail slot, they gaze in wonder as to its origins.  Perhaps it works like this:

Amiright?

How many of those 33% answered “not sure” or selected one of the other channels because they would have preferred to answer “it’s complicated?”  Certainly, anyone who runs more than one digital channel (e.g. everyone) understands intuitively that all the channels play on one another.  Sure, someone may have bought from an email, but maybe she wouldn’t have received the email had SEO and content marketing encouraged her to sign up for in the the first place.  For that matter, neither content marketing nor the website itself appear on the list.  What’s up with that?

Without stepping into the attribution debate, it stands to reason that most marketers couldn’t select a single most important channel any more than they could select a single best child.

Unless you’re Archie Manning.  Then it’s clearly Eli.

I don’t want to die alone. Pass the guacamole.

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Superbowl 49 had more viewers than any other in history.  Turns out that football wasn’t the only thing on everyone’s mind:

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That’s right: 3% of you were using dating apps on your phone or tablet during the game.  By my calculations, that’s 1.6 million Americans (114 million viewers x 46% using apps x 3% using dating apps).  Roughly speaking, the population of Philadelphia was looking for love on Sunday night.  (Understandable, given that a 10-6 record didn’t merit the Eagles a playoff berth.)

If I were Match.com or even Ashley Madison, I’d really want to break those numbers out further (male vs. female, straight/gay/bi/etc., age ranges), but if nothing else, I’d at least consider running local TV spots in key markets during the game and have football or I-hate-football content or offers on the app as well.

For the record: I logged one Tweet and ten Facebook updates.  I even spoke with my wife during the game, so don’t get any ideas!