Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Content marketing that combines paid, earned, and owned media is a simple strategy that leads to publisher partnerships that can drive success for both parties.

When I discuss our content marketing plans — and our budget — I make a point of letting all publishers know that my goal is to become a partner with them. And if you talk to anyone I’ve purchased advertising from, many of them have not only become good friends, but we’ve also helped each of our businesses grow in the process.

The ad placements are just one part of a three-legged media stool that combines paid, earned, and owned media. This convergence helped create a simple content marketing strategy that led us to start thinking about publishers in a whole new way while putting an end to interruptive advertising....

...I think the best marketing metrics look at the total cost of marketing, including program spend, salaries of the team, and overhead, and relate that cost to the results you care about -- revenue and customer acquisition. Other metrics like cost per lead, cost per follower, or cost per page view can be useful to look at within a marketing team, because they can help you make decisions about where to focus and what parts of your marketing process are broken; but most CEOs really just care about the cost and the net results, not the interim steps. This list of metrics is meant to focus on the most critical measures of marketing that your CEO will likely want to discuss with you.

Here are some metrics I've found useful over the past 5 years at HubSpot while growing our company, working with our CEO and CFO, and talking with our board members. I don’t have all the answers -- so please add your favorite metrics and thoughts on these metrics in the comments....

Compete ran some numbers last month on the average income levels for each of the top 6 social networking sites in the US.

...LinkedIn of course has a larger percentage of high income wage earners than most social networks. But if the numbers below are correct, Google+ has an even more affluent user base than LinkedIn.

Google+ has the highest percentage of it’s user base from those making $100k and above. LinkedIn counts 27 percent of their social network from this same group....

Where does all of that real-time chatter go when the moment has passed? Some entrepreneurs think it could fuel the next generation of disruptive products.

“What are you doing right now?” Facebook asked its users in 2007.

The social network, and its peers, have since become less dedicated to the present moment. Facebook has created Timeline, a historic presentation of daily posts.Foursquare has turned its vault of real-time check-ins into a valuable recommendation engine. And Twitter recently launched a feature that allows users to download their tweet archives. For the first time, social media platforms are looking back.

By facilitating constant, real-time conversation, these platforms inevitably created a detailed log of the past. As a habit of sharing and an emerging quantified-self movement merge, the potential to recycle our real-time content grows.

The next big thing, some entrepreneurs believe, will leverage not “right now,” but “then.” Here’s why:

Content Gets Less Valuable Over Time. And Then It Gets More Valuable....