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With only 21% of B2B marketers saying they are successful at tracking content marketing ROI, it’s inspiring to see success in an unexpected (even perceived as stodgy) environment: academic medical centers. We’re proud to share the story of Wake Forest Innovations, the commercialization arm for Wake Forest University and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. I was fortunate to speak with its Director of Marketing and Business Development, Vishal Khanna, who is a finalist for Content Marketer of the Year. (The award will be announced at Content Marketing World in September.)
Vishal was chosen as a finalist for his dedication to performance in content marketing. While you may not work for an entity in an academic medical center or a university, you will find insights and lessons to learn from Vishal’s story. He and his staff of one full-time-equivalent employee and two 30-hour-a-week contractors rock performance by executing a content marketing strategy that an agency helped them develop....
According to the Custom Content Council, 61% of consumers say they feel better about and are more likely to buy from a company that delivers custom content. This is just one reason brands have jumped on the content marketing bandwagon.
So how can a brand distinguish itself if every company is creating content?
According to Ogilvy Singapore’s Barrie Seppings, “In the era of big data, we need stories in order to build marketing messages that are both ‘accurate and human.’”
The most successful marketers know that it’s all about telling stories....
Content is the core of any strong digital marketing strategy, and a strong narrative is the foundation of all good content.
When the iconic high-fashion house Chanel sought to revolutionize the way it engaged with customers, content and technology was at the forefront of its approach.
The 105-year-old brand has a clear advantage when it comes to storytelling – a rich history. The legacy of the company’s late founder Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel is so compelling, that the brand’s insignia – two interlocking C’s – is one of the most recognized and respected in the world.
Not only has the company managed to ramp up engagement with the development of their highly interactive, commerce-driven website, it has astutely leveraged the modernist philosophy of its creator, Ms. Chanel, best exemplified in the following quote...
...Great stories are interesting. They take you away from where you are into a head space that taps imagination and visualization. Complex ideas can be quickly conveyed though stories. Otherwise distracted audiences are kept at attention with stories. The interestingness of stories helps create a competitive advantage for those telling them by providing information in a way that connects on both intellectual and emotional levels.
No matter what business situation or geographic location you find yourself in, you simply cannot go wrong having a great (and relevant) story to tell. With each content object you create, always answer the question: What’s the story in this message?...
Earlier this week, Coca-Cola declared the corporate website dead.
Take one quick look at their new corporate website and I think you will see an example of the future of quality content marketing. They are clearly displaying how the art of storytelling not only can influence our preference for a brand or product, but surely their intent is to also reach a search engine position of respect and power....
Using storytelling to sell a product, brand or service isn’t in any way a new concept. The developing technology around us however, has given us new ways in which to engage and interact with our audience. Content marketing has become increasingly important as brands realize that in order to speak to their customers they need to invest in content that matters. The more brands have begun to focus on quality content, the more it becomes clear that storytelling is a key component to the content marketing process.
You wouldn’t (willingly) sit through a terrible film, or keep reading a book that you thought had a terrible plot, so why should people read your content if it doesn’t have a good story behind it?...
Somewhere between a PowerPoint presentation and a full-fledged video is the audio slideshow. Creating audio slideshows can be a good way to add meaning to slides that otherwise might not mean much without a presenter. Here are some ways that students can create audio slideshows....
Discover how your company can easily integrate characters and stories consumers want to share into your content, as well as examples of brands getting it right. The best marketing transcends corporate messaging, and becomes stories about people and characters which beg to be shared.
Aflac’s duck has been telling their company’s story for around 13 years now, and has increased their company’s recognition from 13% to 90% of consumers along the way. While content and social media best practices may change, few marketing tactics have more staying power than brand storytelling.
Storytelling isn’t just for brands who can claim over a century of history, like General Electric, or IBM. It’s for any company with the savvy to create a consistent customer experience online. As Debbie Williams of SPROUT Content puts it, your story is made up of “all that you are, and all that you do.” Brand storytelling isn’t about creating the perfect hero on your first try, it’s about finding ways to integrate your company’s history, goals, values, and audience into every component of your content marketing strategy....
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Andrew Essex thinks we are living in an unprecedented glory age for content creators and marketers. Essex, vice-chairman and co-founder of the unique, adaptive ad agency Droga5, and quite a forward-thinker when it comes to content marketing, believes that our current situation as far as content creation and marketing goes has changed for the better, many times over.
In a talk he delivered at the 2015 NewsCred #ThinkContent Summit, he challenged us to think about content differently. His presentation made us consider that ads may be a thing of the past and what we as content creators and marketers should be aiming to do is to build on our idea of storytelling....
...For example, a selfie of a young twenty-something with a snowboard at a ski resort represents both the endorsement of a product, an endorsement of an activity, as well as an identifier of someone saying “I am a snowboarder”.
While its easy to dismiss that this is just a photo, the movement signals a future that we here at Curatti dub The Content of People, or the Internet of People. Note that this sounds a little bit like something similar, The Internet of Things, better known as IoT. That’s because in some sense, people and things are converging as we head towards an even more digital society — as consumers associate themselves with things and items, they become that item, as opposed to that item molding who they are. What you’re now seeing is a world where products no longer define people, but a world where the end user defines the product. Identity ultimately will (and has begun to) shift.
How to Execute in the Content of People (CoP)
Executing in the Content of People is a challenge, but not entirely impossible. As I look to the future of marketing and storytelling, here’s how I see the CoP impacting how marketing is done....
The old novelty marketing ideas don’t work any more. With over 825 million Facebook posts a day, 7,500 Tweets a second, and at least 86 different social networks with over 1,000,000 users, your audience is constantly bombarded with blogs, jokes, memes, news, reviews, pictures, and other things on social media that aren’t related to your brand. At the beginning of 2014 there were over 180 million websites on the Internet (one website for every 40 people on the planet), most will have social pages churning out posts that compete with you for clicks and attention.
People have such social fatigue that by the time your post arrives in someone’s feed you could be the 200th thing they’ve seen that minute and they’ll move on to the 201st less than a second later.Your socially fatigued customers live in an age where ‘good’ isn’t good enough, and ‘excellent’ is barely remembered.
To truly stand out you need to create a real impact and connect with your audience on a deeper level than just pretty pictures and humour. Here’s eight key components that successful marketers use to turn socially comatose casual browsers into chipper consumers....
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Via Ana Cristina Pratas
You can have the most useful information in the world for your target market but if you don’t package it so your audience can understand, it’s useless. You literally have seconds to win your audience’s attention or they’re onto the next thing.
How do you make your content stand out and grab your audience’s attention? Tell a good story. It provides an emotional connection and context that draws your audience in and makes them remember it....
We talk a lot about the importance of storytelling when it comes to your small business or nonprofit blog or website, and even how you use social media. We’ve moved away from merely spitting out messages, particularly hard sales or marketing messages, and are now emphasizing the need to tell your story.
Your story as a brand, your story as an owner or manager, and the stories of your employees, customers, and clients. Telling your story isn’t just a matter of having something to talk about. There are actually a number of reasons why it makes good sense, and why you should take the time to rethink your online strategy, and begin telling your story...
Adding an audio message to your classroom blog or website can be a good way to help deliver important messages to your students and their parents. Posting an audio message, even if it covers the same content as a written message, can increase the chances that a visitor to your blog will take notice of something important.
Adding an audio message to your blog or website is not difficult to do. Here are five free services that you can use to add an audio message to your blog or website....
... The result is a fragmented group of social media actions that, as we witnessed with the Twitter-Instagram spat this year, don’t care to include content from competing social networks. If Facebook-Instagram/ /Twitter/Pinterest/Tumblr/Quora don’t have to play nice with each other, they won’t. This fragmentation will likely continue. It doesn’t appear we’ve maxed out on social networks. Every time a new social network blows up, we ask if we really need yet another one and eventually learn that yes, we do. We’ll all be Snapchatting in no time. What’s more, with each progressive social network, the barrier to contributing content keeps getting lower. The box has shrunk from a big, intimidating blank text box of blog CMS’s to a simple one-line bar... This is why I think some of the most exciting startups in social media are the ones that help us make these small, fragmented pieces of content into richer stories....
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Terrific tips and inspiration for content marketers. Recommended reading. 9/10