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Perhaps most reflective of this has been the award-winning juggernaut of REI's #OptOutside campaign, which won the Titanium Grand Prix on Saturday. If for some reason you weren't one of its 6.7 billion media impressions, essentially the company closed its doors on Black Friday, encouraging its employees and everyone else to get out into the outdoors. Beyond the ad, starring REI chief exec Jerry Stritzke introducing the idea from a wide-open office, the brand also created a helpful online guide to hiking trails and other outdoor activities around the U.S.
By encouraging us to drop out of the annual shopping day, the outdoor retailer aims for more sales and brand loyalty. The company said the brand's social media impressions went up 7,000%, with 2.7 billion media impressions in 24 hours, while overall the campaign attracted 6.7 billion media impressions, 1.2 billion social impressions, and got more than 1.4 million people to spend the day outdoors. Meanwhile, more than 150 other companies joined REI to close their doors on Black Friday, and hundreds of state parks opened up for free.
If Cannes is the ad and marketing industry's Oscars, than this is arguably Best Picture. The Titanium category is meant to honor work that breaks new ground, crosses boundaries, and pushes the industry forward. The win adds to the campaign's Media and Promotions Grand Prix, picked up earlier in the week, and its run of wins at other industry awards like the D&ADs, and Best of Show at the One Show awards in May....
It’s well documented that companies with a defined strategy are the ones that experience the most success on social. For others, the challenge is knowing where to start.
According to Gretchen Fox, cofounder of the social strategy and training agency Made To Order, the social media marketing industry is operating under the guise of nascence, but that’s not the reality anymore: "The industry has been around long enough that we need some procedures; we need some standards. This is our attempt at starting to create some standards"....
Brief-writing is the unsung art of content marketing. Get it right and you dramatically increase your chances of hitting a home run. Get it wrong and you’re more likely to win the lottery (it’s possible but don’t hold your breath).
And since most marketers aren’t the ones actually writing or designing or producing the content in their editorial calendars, the brief is the most important place to exert leverage and make an impact on the final product. It all starts here.
So what goes into a great content brief? The usual stuff plus six critical extras you don’t see in many briefs....
Consider this: Each month, U.S. consumers are engaging with media across a spectrum of devices. In Q4 2014, traditional TV reached an average of 285 million viewers each month with more than 181 million of these consumers watching time-shifted TV. In terms of mobile and computer users, 122 million viewers watched video on a smartphone, 146 million watched video on the Internet and 164 million people used an app/web on a smartphone. Radio is also a vibrant means of engaging with content, reaching 258 million listeners per month.
While the average American adult spent nearly a week (149 hours 14 minutes) on average watching traditional television each month in fourth-quarter 2014, other ways to connect with content were desirable as well. In that same quarter, U.S. adults spent well over 15 hours each month watching time-shifted content, close to 30 hours using the Internet on a computer, and over 43 hours using any app/web on a smartphone!
In addition, consumer’s monthly time spent listening to radio was also a resounding 58 hours and 36 minutes.Consumers are also spending a lot of time on social media: 133 million are connecting via computer, 142 million are using social media on an app or smartphone, and 124 million are using social media on the web on a smartphone....
Forrester Research said it best, “the forces of digital revolution have reached critical mass…the digital revolution threatens every incumbent firm in every industry.” The only cure for disruption is innovation and transformation. And yet, according to a recent study by Boston Consulting Group, 75% of business transformations fall short.v If ever it felt like being between a rock and a hard place, it’s now.
The irony is that one of the biggest causes of disruption, technology, is also one of the keys to transformation. The other big factor producing an almost constant state of disruption is the change in the way people engage with brands and interact with each other. The popular wisdom is that this is the fault of the millennial generation. They don’t act like their parents. Well, that’s been true of every generation.
But what is different this time is in concert with the advances of technology and the uncertainty of the economy, the age of sharing is replacing the age of coveting. Millennials don’t need to own their own car, they can rent a Zipcar. They’re quite happy subscribing to a service rather than outright being it....
One of my favorite books of all time is David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart in which he highlights the ways in which we’re deluded into thinking we are rationale individuals and yet we all fall prey to the whims of psychology. The same is true for marketing psychology and I felt compelled to put this guide together on nine ways marketers can use it to influence consumer behaviour....
In a global world, brands need to speak a lot of different customers’ languages. And, as mobile, social and software increasingly break down traditional communications borders to transform how brands communicate with consumers, marketing leaders are facing new strategic challenges as they look to develop global marketing fluency....
As CMI research shows, marketers with a documented content marketing strategy are more effective than those who don’t have a written strategy. Yet, only 27% of B2C and 48% of B2B marketers have developed a plan.
If you lack a written strategy, a one-page plan is a great place to begin. If you have a detailed strategy but struggle to gain traction, boiling it down to one page will make it easier. A one-page strategy can help you:
- Crystalize your content marketing strategy
- Gain stronger buy-in more quickly from executives or clients
- Keep content producers strategically aligned...
What are your digital marketing goals for the months ahead?
If you’re looking to increase your content’s social shares (as so many of us are), we’ve got some amazing new research to share on how to create an ideal outreach strategy for your industry.
BuzzStream and Fractl have collaborated to give you a jumpstart on optimizing your outreach for social traction. We analyzed 220 high- and low-engagement websites from 11 major verticals that produce content.
The result? A roadmap for planning for social success with your outreach strategy....
We’ve learned by now that B2B marketing often involves targeting a market-savvy and knowledgeable audience. However, usually the selling business is full of knowledgeable experts as well, and quite often they rely on their experience and instinct to make marketing decisions “on a whim.” While there is no denying that industry experience is a powerful resource, B2B companies that rely on instinct rather than data run the risk of generating ineffective or even damaging, marketing strategies and campaigns.
Remember the difference between B2B and B2C consumer buying habits. Do B2B consumers generally make purchases on a whim? Most likely no. Therefore, should your marketing be done on a whim?
Here are some examples of how to conduct data driven marketing and apply it to your marketing strategy.....
Brands like Amazon, Netflix, OKCupid, Pandora and Twitter are tracking customers’ online behavior to produce targeted offerings and increase sales. What stats are they looking at and offering as a result, you may ask? This infographic tells all....
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“Every good content strategy starts with a “content audit,” which is a fancy term for figuring out what you’ve got, what the other guys have, and most importantly what opportunities you’re missing out on. If you don’t know a whole lot about SEO and don’t have time to read a dozen content strategy books, try these quick and dirty tips to get a feel for what your current content situation is.
Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a content strategist for Cheerios, the classic cereal brand from General Mills. Pop open an “incognito window” in your browser that’s detached from all of your personal search history....
Demand marketing combines content marketing, public relations (PR), and social media to create the perfect outreach vessel, and this infographic dives right in on how this approach can be used to bring your message to the exact place you need it: right in front of your customers.
70 percent of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads. Don’t get lost at sea with your marketing plan – You need all three components in order to keep your ship afloat....
According to the “Customer Experience Optimization Report” by Econsultancy and Ensighten, 96% of company marketers and agency respondents (including vendors and consultancies) consider customer experience optimization somewhat important or critical.
Marketers who take pride in their customers' experiences can leave a major (paw) print on their organizations. In fact, 94% of marketers and 79% of agency respondents say that higher engagement and conversion rates are among the many benefits of customer experience optimization. Better brand perception and loyalty (66%, 47%); renewal, cross-sell, and upsell (50%, 41%), and increased average order value (22%, 29%) are also benefits for marketers and agency professionals, respectively....
SUMMARY: We recently published data about how customers want to communicate with companies. A MarketingSherpa reader wrote in to ask for empirical data showing how different age groups and generations prefer to communicate with companies. In this Chart of the Week article, we take a deeper dive into the data to discover how age affects channel preference....
The last 48 hours of my life were total madness. This is what I did.
Since I’m involved with startups on a daily basis, working on product development and (business) strategy, I’ve always been keeping lists of interesting tools and resources that could be interesting to use. Thinking of something I could create, I thought it would be fun to build a simple and useful site that could help makers find resources and tools while building their startup.
The first thing I did was writing down all categories I could think of that would suit a startup’s needs. I ended up with 50, and made a huge Excel sheet where I entered all the stuff I’d already saved. From there on I started collecting more resources and filling up the empty spaces....
Forget metrics and marketing objectives. Ask yourself what business challenges the marketing team is accountable for solving. Then, set the content performance indicators based on the ultimate results you want to bring to the table. Not every type of content will resonate with all audiences at any stage in their buying journey. That’s why you need a strategy.
As you approach content marketing, set your priorities before you decide on formats or frequency. Ask yourself questions like: - Do we need to build more brand awareness, because buyers don’t even know who we are?
- Do we need to get more traffic to our website?
- Do we need to do a better job of engaging online visitors?
- Do we need more email subscribers, and more contact names for sales?
- Do we need to do a better job of nurturing our leads, or cross-selling products to our customers?...
Each year we see continuous change and growth in the digital arena. As such there is a regular flow of new digital insights and information to keep on top of - a consuming task for any business leader. Last year we released Five digital strategy reports you should read from 2013. Given the great feedback, we've once again selected four reports released in 2014 that provide valuable insights to business leaders looking to build or improve their digital strategy....
This week, I want to share a recent conversation with Marc Mathieu, SVP of Marketing at Unilever. He explains that while marketing used to be about creating a myth and selling, it’s now about finding a truth and sharing it. And to that I say amen. Technology, Marc explains (and as we all know), has changed the way people communicate, making it more open and real-time. Thus, the onus is on us to understand and embed it into our marketing strategies and approach. A few of other things that really resonated with me
Here are 25 of the questions I’ve been asking to B2B companies about content marketing. Maybe some of these will make you think about your own content marketing program and opportunities to expand, enhance, and optimize it. I sprinkled throughout some of the tools we often use and recommend. I’ll work on a full tools blog post for early next year.
These are listed alphabetically, but I’d love to know which of these are most interesting and relevant to you, so please vote up the ones you like best on this Listly
When debate around sheryl sandberg's 'lean in' took a negative turn, agency sparks and honey urged client to scrap key theme of upcoming effort.
When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's modern feminist manifesto "Lean In" ignited negativity, Hyatt was forced to pull the plug on a main element of its content marketing strategy, months in the works. The quick decision was based on numbers as much as gut instinct. Hyatt's agency Sparks and Honey was monitoring digital discussions surrounding a theme the young Omnicom shop had determined was a good one for the hotel chain to hook to its brand: "women having it all."
"They called me up to say it's getting a little bit dark in that space," said Dan Moriarty, director of digital strategy for Hyatt, who said the firm originally intended to include the concept of women having it all as one of the trends around which it planned to build a campaign aimed at career-minded women.
When, about two days before the activation was planned to start, Sparks and Honey showed Hyatt it had tracked 80-some negative reactions to Sandberg's book, the partners decided to scrap the theme, despite three months of planning.
Instead, they replaced it with "travel hacks," or digital tools for making the most of travel. Other trends that Sparks and Honey had isolated as appropriate to align with Hyatt this spring were also relatively innocuous: among them yoga and meditation, getting a good night's sleep and maintaining rituals while traveling....
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Good story. Great campaign. Exceptional content marketing results!