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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....
Most inbound marketers spend a lot of time creating content, and it can be a struggle to constantly come up with fresh content ideas. However, the key to creating effective inbound content is to know what you have already in your content inventory. Creating an inventory of effective content means mapping your content to the appropriate stage in The Buyer’s Journey. Once you know what content you already have, you can analyze the entire library to identify opportunities and holes, and then create a new content offer that fills out the gaps in your content library. For those of you up to the task of doing a content mapping yourself, read on! This blog post will cover a three-step process to help you create the content you need to align with The Buyer’s Journey. Let’s get started!...
For instance, take a look at how these two elements play out:
B2B – Within the confines of B2B, it appears that videos reign supreme in regards to marketing. Video is easy to watch, and has a way of exploring ideas, reviews, and more. This is telling, especially for those that are working within commercial grade sales. The instructional potential of videos also suit the common transaction of ideas and techniques between businesses.
B2C – As far as consumers are concerned, blog posts seem to be the content that works best here. Consumers consider blog data and reviews that take the format of personal experiences over video or other marketing elements. Essentially, customers prefer authentic and relatable content – testimonials from like-minded people, for example....
With online and mobile media set to transform primary and secondary education, professional development won’t be far behind. That’s the bet Inc. magazine is making with the launch of a new online education program, bringing in experts and top execs from across the business world to teach courses -- and, yes, assign and grade homework (but no tests!).
The new online education program is kicking off with a five-week course on entrepreneurship, called “The Inc. Startup Accelerator,” which according to Inc. president and editor-in-chief Eric Schurenberg, will “help you with everything you need to know about creating a business -- starting it, protecting it, and marketing it.”
Schurenberg will host the course; individual classes will be taught by a series of guest lecturers, including Eric Ryan, the founder and CEO of Method, Susan Lyne, CEO of BBG Ventures, Sabrina Parsons, the CEO of Palo Alto Software, and Ben Huh, founder of I Can Has Cheezburger, among others....
A much-ballyhooed Gallup study uncovered some ugly “truths” about social media, including a reputed inability to influence purchasing decisions. According to the study, 62 percent of Americans say Facebook, Twitter and their ilk have no influence on whether they purchase a product.
Although asking consumers to accurately recount the advertising methods that ultimately drove them to purchase is likely a fool’s errand, many marketers who have attempted to correlate standard social metrics to sales and other conversions have struggled to make a connection.
As a result, in many marketing shops the number of likes, shares and retweets a brand receives daily is lessening in importance. But that doesn’t mean social media offers nothing of value — advanced marketers are leveraging social data for reasons beyond direct marketing tactics....
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...
According to a study by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs only 38% of B2B companies think their content marketing is effective. The same study also states that only 35% of the companies have a documented content marketing strategy.
My guess is that some of these companies do not even know whether they are effective or not. They cannot say what “effective” really is in regard to content marketing without goals, metrics etc. It would certainly help with effectiveness of content marketing to have a strategy at hand.
Here are 9 essential elements any content marketing strategy should include....
Do you need some help to get started with your social media marketing plan? If you want to attract and engage social-media fans and followers — and convert them into paying customers — you need to map out a clear, goal-oriented social media plan.
If you don’t, it will be obvious to your fans and target market that you are disorganized. In addition to damaging your brand, you’ll risk losing sales by sending your audience to your competitors.
If you’re starting from scratch, it can feel overwhelming.
You know that others have been successful at social media marketing, but there are so many moving parts that creating a plan of your own can be daunting. If you are brand new to social media and looking for a straightforward way to start, follow the advice below....
Ninety-three percent - that’s how many organizations said they rely on content marketing for brand building and demand generation this year according to the Content Marketing Institute. With 87% of buyers stating that digital content has a large impact on their purchasing decisions this year, it’s clear that content marketing is on the ups.
So who’s doing it really well? Which brands have rocked the boat and set the example? We scoured our archives and asked content marketers to weigh in, and here’s our list of the 25 Top Content Marketers of 2014....
The number of shares an article receives has become ubiquitous in online content; widgets that show shares, tweets, pins, and +1s appear front and center on nearly every post you read (or, in this case, just to the left of this paragraph).
Just how many times does content get shared? Where do people prefer to share it? And are some publishers more effective than others at generating highly shared content? These questions are crucial to content marketers looking to understand the key components of a viral marketing success, and our recent research collaboration with BuzzSumo is here to give you some answers....
Forget the funnel. Take that outmoded sales model and hide it in the back of the drawer. These days, marketing to consumers is a fundamentally different process. A recent webinar, Marketing Performance Accountability – evolving from campaign to customer-centric perspectives, sheds light on a new paradigm that forward thinking marketers are adopting.
Customers have changed, and are now far more in control. “It’s very chaotic,” said Cory Munchbach, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Consumers have so much control over the information they consume. It’s an intentional chaos.”
The path from prospect to buyer has morphed into a nonlinear process. Customers are outrunning traditional marketing campaigns, according to Munchbach. “Their needs arise without being prompted by traditional campaigns.”...
Content marketing costs less than advertising, and more people engage with it.It sounds like a revolution but actually there are some rather unkind hidden truths in all of this.
Much like the pigs at the end of Animal Farm, with the evil predecessor gone, what’s replaced it looks… very similar indeed.George Orwell, Animal Farm: "Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which..."
Ramp up your visual content on social media in 5 minutes with these (free) 17 customizable templates.
You've heard it before and you'll hear it again: social media is getting more visual every single day. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest have increasingly adopted more visually oriented layouts and promote more visually appealing content when possible. ... And that's because visual content works. For example, in just one month after the introduction of Facebook timeline for brands, visual content -- photos and videos -- saw a 65% increase in engagement.
So if we want to promote our inbound marketing content, we need to jump on board -- even if we don't have great design chops. There are tons of resources out there to help you easily create visual social media content (including our brand new free download of 17 Customizable Templates for Creating Shareable Graphics on Social Media)....
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Have you been thinking about turning your organization's communications into your version of a metropolitan newspaper newsroom? Here are some examples you should look at.
To say native content has grown since last year would be an understatement. In 2014, Pressboard combed through 1,500 pieces of content for our "best of" list -- this year it was closer to 7,000. To give you an idea of how far the space has come, we had to buy VR headsets just to review a couple of the entries.
2015 was the year that native content moved from experimental to fundamental and nearly every major publisher and brand discovered the power of stories, instead of ads. Here are some of the best from the last 12 months...
Nine out of 10 of the 2,008 consumers surveyed said they multiscreen. 40% reported feeling distracted while using multiple screens, as do 47% of millennials. This content overload has led to increased selectiveness from consumers, and the content market gets more competitive as a result.
73% of consumers said that content “must display well on the device” and there are several common traits that turn users away including...
Have other quotes you love? We’d love to hear from you! Tweet us @NewsCred with the hashtag #ThinkContent. - "Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left." - Seth Godin
- "We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in." - Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson
- "Behind every tweet, share and purchase, there is a person. Care more about the person and less about the share." - Shafqat Islam, CEO and Co-Founder at NewsCred
- "If great content is the hero, then banners are the villain." - Michael Brenner, Head of Strategy at NewsCred
"- Banners have 99 problem and a click ain’t one." - Scott Sorokin, Chief Strategy Officer at Razorfish
- "Marketing used to be about making a myth and telling it. Now it’s about telling a truth and sharing it." - Marc Mathieu, Global SVP of Marketing at Unilever...
But usage doesn’t mean it’s working. And I get asked all the time, “What types of content work best for this stage of buyer’s journey?”
The honest answer is, “It depends.” It depends on your industry, the content consumption habits of your buyers, the complexity of your product or service. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach.
But there are at least six kinds of content I’ve seen as invaluable to just about every B2B marketing organization. So I’m going to name the go-to content types for B2B, along with an explanation of why they’re so useful....
What I love about social media is that is really levels the playing field and allows small businesses to connect one on one with their customers in an intimate way. Marketing is about building relationships with your current, past and future customers. Social media is about sharing great content to communicate in a new way.
Via Kamal Bennani
I decided to share the 15 questions we find are critical for any organization going into any content marketing campaign. And if your company is in the process of embracing content marketing, and you haven’t yet answered each of these questions, I’d strongly urge you to answer them before moving forward. Here goes,...
Not only are you hectically hurrying to close out the year on a good note, you’re also pressured to produce your budgeted marketing plan for the year to come. It can often feel like the month itself is draining your very life force… but maybe it’s not just the month. Maybe, you have something stalking you from the shadows… Maybe something is steering you down dark paths you’d normally avoid… Maybe… you have a vampire in your midst, and nowhere would it be more apparent, than in your content.
Your content, you see, is a reflection of the lifeblood of your organization. It carries all the qualities, characteristics, and attributes that make your organization unique and valuable to your target audience. Certain dark forces, however, can eat away and this energy in your content. These marketing vampires can manifest themselves in multiple forms, so to swiftly slay these evil spirits, here are 5 of the most common vampire varieties along with their most effective weaknesses.
Online events, whether they are in the form of a conference, a webinar, or a Twitter chat are great ways to position any brand as a thought leader in a niche and acquire new followers and/or leads. Of course, you have to get people to actually sign up for said epic online event, right?
Well lucky for you I have hosted a handful of these bad boys and am one of those people who shares everything—even an inside look at her marketing strategies.Another lucky star for you today is that Stephen Wynkoop, owner ofVconferenceOnline—a platform that hosts online events—was more than happy to weigh in and share his observations of what makes a successful event.Now, take a moment to check out these easy to implement steps to make your online event a success!...
Gaining momentum on Pinterest isn't easy. It takes time, patience, and a well thought out strategy. This post is not about tips that will get you there, though. We've been through those before.To get good results, you need to see things for yourself, not jut read theoretical tips. The brands below are doing everything right, showing us how Pinterest should really be done. Learn from them!...
Content marketing is growing up.According to “Quarterly Intelligence Briefing: Digital Trends for 2013,” content marketing became the number one priority for marketers in 2013. And why not?
Content marketing works because it’s a uniquely powerful way to generate excitement around your industry and products.
But if content marketing is ultimately meant to drive interest in your products, the irony is that any given piece of content is best thought of as a product in itself: you’ve got to determine if there’s a market for your content, and then create and distribute it, just as you do with your products.
This means that we can learn a lot about content marketing simply by looking at how the product life cycle works....
... The general public are becoming much more savvy around this data value exchange, and their expectations for what they get in return are increasing.
Relevance is key, and that means serving your customers and prospective customers with meaningful content that services a current need for them, and content which is served via a medium (or channel) that suits their behaviours. Knowing all the about 'who' on its own is no longer enough, it needs to be complimented by the 'when' and the combination of both is where real-time relevance can be provided.There is a simple hierarchy model that can be applied to help ensure relevance can be delivered, and it would be good to hear your opinions on this in the comments section....
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Good story. Great campaign. Exceptional content marketing results!