Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As content marketing becomes more and more mainstream, brands are increasingly realizing that they can’t simply “do content marketing” and call it a day. No, they have to do it right, and they have to know that their content is actually working. But what does it actually mean to have content that works? And is it driving brand favorability?

That’s a huge question that brands are struggling with, as recent data shows that 78 percent of marketers struggle to measure the ROI of their content marketing. With bigger and bigger budgets being thrown into the brand journalism space, it’s important that companies have a real statistic they can rely on to prove that their storytelling is worth the investment....

Executives want to know a marketing strategy’s expected ROI before they commit money and resources to it. But content is a different animal than other marketing initiatives. It doesn’t produce impressive short-term results; it bolsters long-term profits. Once a content marketing strategy proves its worth, executives feel more confident investing in it. The challenge is convincing them to take the initial plunge.

Here are six selling points you can use to persuade your company leaders that content marketing will go the distance for your brand

I was watching an episode of Shark Tank this past week featuring young entrepreneurs. One of the entrepreneurs was Carter Kostler, the 15-year old owner and creator of Define Bottle, a fruit-infused water bottle.About 2 minutes in the episode you’ll see the sharks ask Carter about his revenue – $65k in about 6 months, 50% of which came from online sales. He sells each bottle for $30 at a cost per bottle of $10, so not a bad margin overall.

The reason I’m writing this post is for Mark Cuban’s line of questions that starts around 3:34:

Mark Cuban: “What about online? Where is your online traffic coming from?”

Carter: “Well, early on I created fruit infused water recipe websites. My goal was to promote the Define Bottle on those websites.”

Mark: “OK, what kind of traffic are you getting, what kind of conversion are you getting, and what do you know about your customers?”...

According to the recently-released annual Ranking Factors Study from Searchmetrics, Google has made some big changes in how its algorithm evaluates content and assign search rank.   

Content quality is the recurring theme of the study, which offers  important lessons and opportunities for content marketers, public relations pros, bloggers and anyone else publishing digital content on the web....

“High quality, relevant content is increasingly the focus of search. This type of content ranks better on average, and is identifiable by properties such as a higher word-count and semantically comprehensive wording, as well as often being enriched by other media, such as images or video.” – Searchmetrics 2014 Ranking Factors Study.

Human signals

Before we dig into tactics, first we need to look the signals that indicate content quality to Google.  Topping the list is a metric that is new to the top ten factors — the click through rate.  This is an important change and it emphasizes the importance of user actions as indicators of quality.  The majority of search rank factors are derived from social signals, and like the click through rate, these also indicate content quality.  User actions and social signals are derived from human interactions with content, and Google is assuming that people won’t like, share, post or click on content they don’t consider useful or interesting....

The best times to post on social media are when the people you want to see the content are on the network.

That’s the easy answer.

And not a useful answer.

After digging around the Internet a bit, I thought I’d compile some research I found from within the past year, breaking it up into more palatable chunks of information. I’ll be referencing several sources in this blog post, including:

- Neil Patel’s research and compiled data on Quick Sprout

- Elle & Co. compiled research

- SurePayroll’s compiled research

- Huffington Post’s compiled research- Buffer’s research

- Fast Company’s compiled research....

According to Meeker’s 2014 Internet Trends Report, the average article reaches half of its total social referrals within 6.5 hours on Twitter and 9 hours on Facebook.

In other words, content grows old quickly, and communicators have only a fleeting moment to make a memorable brand impression on audiences scrolling through an endless stream of information on their newsfeeds.  

Amy Binder, owner and CEO at RFBinder Partners joined PR Newswire’s Senior Vice President of marketing, Ken Wincko, for an exclusive roundtable discussion on the growing impact of visual communications in integrated campaigns. The conversation explored various case studies and successful tactics that brands should incorporate into their visual storytelling strategies....