The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

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The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing - Whiteboard Friday Posted: 24 Apr 2014 05:18 PM PDT Posted by randfish It's probably pretty clear to everyone that content marketing takes time, but there's a common misconception in just how much time. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand warns us of an overly optimistic mindset, and shows us how things really (usually) end up happening. For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard! Video transcription Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to talk a little bit about content marketing and specifically this giant myth, this misconception that exists in the content marketing field about how the practice really works. This hurts a lot of people. This hurts people on the SEO side. It hurts people who do social media. It hurts people who invest in actually building the content, and it hurts teams and executives and people who plan and strategize around what content marketing can and can't achieve and how it should work. You know, I really came to this because I think it's been something that's been bubbling up in the world of content and inbound marketing for a long time. But I was speaking to a number of startups yesterday afternoon here in Seattle. I was talking to them about how we at Moz produce blog posts, video content, like Whiteboard Friday, presentations, and webinars in all of these different mediums. I got this question, like, "Okay, it must be the case . . . how do you put out a blog post, Rand, that once you launch it, once people read it, they're actually going to go and buy from you?" I had this moment of, "Oh my God, this happens all the time." People think that the reason you're putting out content is so that someone will consume that content and be inspired from it to go and make a purchase. This is how the myth works. Step one, oh yeah, you know, ta-dak I created this amazing piece of content. Look, it's got lovely parallax scrolling, and responsive design, and beautiful graphics, and a lovely layout. Fantastic content. Wow. All right. People are going to download that. They're going to share it. They're going to love it. Step two, thankfully, people are thinking about this at least. All right, I'm going to go tweet and Facebook share and put it on Google+. I'm going to point a bunch of links to it. I'm going to put it on my LinkedIn account. I'll promote that content through all of these platforms. Then, look at these hordes of people right there. Not the most attractive horde. A little gangly. But, wow, that's really good. We should sign up for whatever these people are selling. They must be amazing, right? The visitors who experience the content, and then some percent of them, like oh maybe 2% are going to go and convert. This doesn't happen, does it? This is not actually how content marketing works. But it's how a lot of people invest in and think about content marketing. But it almost never happens. With a few rare exceptions, this is not how content marketing really works. How it actually works is you repeat step one and two many, many times, again and again and again and again until you start to get good at the process, until you start finding the XYZ, the piece of amazing content that really is going to resonate with your audience. That takes a lot of trial and failure. It really does. Step three is entirely a myth. It is almost never the case, practically never the case that someone goes, experiences a piece of content from a brand they don't know about or haven't heard of, or experiences that content for the first time and then immediately goes, "I wonder what they sell. I should buy whatever that is." Or even sees kind of a plug or a pseudo-plug for their product inside that content and goes, "Yes, you know what, I'm just going to buy that right now." That almost never happens. What really does happen is that people come many, many times. They essentially grow this memory about your brand, about what you do, and they build up kind of what I'd call a positive bank account with you. But that bank account, there are not coins and money in there. There are experiences and touches with your brand. Those content touches, and those social media touches, and those touches that come through performing a search and seeing you listed there, those build up the capital in the account. Once you reach a certain level of memory and positive association about the brand that you've experienced all these things through, when you have the need for the product or the service or whatever it is they're offering, then you might remember to sign up with them. Or you might perform a search query, and because they've done all of these things, they're more likely to have grown their rankings and their authority and possibly to be personalized in your personal search results. That brand might show up higher because you've experienced lots of interactions with them. Because of that, then you make that purchase with them. As a result of this mythology, a ton of people and teams who invest in content marketing fail to properly plan for the required time and effort needed. That's hugely costly, because it means that a ton of pressure sits on the content marketer, and the social media marketer, and the SEO, oftentimes one person or a very small team of people who all do inbound marketing together. You don't have the budget or the bandwidth or the belief from your executives or your client, if you're being hired as an agency, to get to where you need to get to. They fail to invest in the practice long enough, and they just give up too early. This doesn't work once, and a lot of the people who would have invested in content marketing, for the long term, are out of the game. This doesn't work three, four, five times and a lot more. Now, this is, in some ways, actually a good thing for people like you and I, because it means that we don't have nearly the competition that we would otherwise have, which is kind of a beautiful thing. If this stuff were easy, everyone would be doing it. The field would be saturated. It would be very, very hard to compete, even harder than it already is, and it is plenty hard. A lot of these folks fail to consider SEO properly, because what happens is they think of content marketing almost like it's a viral effort. It's just going to spread. We're not worried about where we might rank in search engines with this stuff or whether this helps our search rankings for other things. So they do a few things that are really dumb. They don't take this piece of content and put links to potentially relevant stuff on their site inside there, and they don't internally link to it well either. So they've almost orphaned off a lot of these content pieces. You can see many people who've orphaned their blog from their main site, which of course is terrible. They'll put them on subdomains or separate root domains so that none of the link authority is shared between those. They don't think about sharing through Google+ or building an audience with Google+, which can really help with the personalization. Nor do they think about using keywords wisely. When you don't use keywords wisely on content pieces, remember, content pieces can, because of their potential to earn links, and social signals, and user and usage data signals, and all of these things that have primary and secondary impacts on your rankings, because they don't consider those, they don't have the opportunity to then bias the search results in the personalized results or to rank in the non-personalized results that they could've otherwise had. A lot of them fail to do the right math on content versus other forms of marketing, either overly optimistically, or if they've had bad experiences investing, overly pessimistically. Therefore, you're not comparing things truly and honestly when you consider where to put budget, where to put people. Last, but not least, is many, many folks fail to correctly attribute conversions and assisted conversions. What we know about people is that the path looks like this. For this person here, the path might look like visit one, visit two, visit three, visit four, and then a conversion. Actually, at Moz, did you know that it's I think on average seven and a half visits before someone takes a free trial? So you might be watching this Whiteboard Friday, and this is one of your first brand experiences with Moz. On average, you're going to have six or seven more visits before you might take a free trial of our software. Those might be spaced out over months. We might lose the cookie through Google Analytics that actually even tracks your visit. So there's no real way to tie it back. A lot of the investment has to be either serendipitous, or we're going to need some very fancy tracking. Moz has used, I think, KISSmetrics and Mixpanel, those kinds of things. Many other folks do as well to try and tie together those many visits and see when does a conversion actually happen. If you can build this, if you can build a system that says gosh people who visit one of our blog posts at least, or two of our blog posts at least, or watch a video from us, or take this other action, or consume this viral piece of content that we've created are more likely to in four or five visits from now make a conversion with us, then you can truly track the impact of this. To me, it's a little bit like looking at a soccer team, for those of you outside the U.S. a football team, or a basketball team and saying only the person scoring the goal matters. There's no one who gave a great pass. There's no one who assisted them in getting that basket. It's just about the person scoring the goal. That really minimizes the impact of the rest of the team, or in this case the rest of the process. So this mythology, this misconception can be really dangerous. Hopefully, you're going to fix that with your teams and your clients. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

2014 Inbound Marketing Trends Posted: 24 Apr 2014 04:09 AM PDT Posted by Kurtis It's no secret that 2014 holds several promising opportunities for inbound marketers. The industry is projected to see a lot of continued growth aided by increased budgets for the year. Earlier this year, Cyrus wrote a post announcing the Moz Industry survey results. According to that survey, there seem to be a few slight shifts in demand for certain marketing activities, which ultimately has an effect on where marketers are allocating most of their time. Though some of the data in this post includes data from the Industry survey, most of what you will find is a collection of information from 12 other sources. For more granular details, you can dive into the Slideshare embed at the end of the post. Let's dig in! Marketers reported that demand for content creation increased by 70.94% in 2013, falling in line with most projections from early 2013. This trend is also expected to continue throughout 2014. Analytics was the second highest in demand, with an increase of 64.46%. Link Building saw the biggest decrease in demand at 20.2%, followed by Email Marketing at 12.06%, Keyword Research at 11.03% and Link Removal at 10.87%. When comparing demand vs. the percent of what Marketers are spending their time doing, the matchup is very similar. It makes sense. The biggest demands go hand in hand with where Marketers are allocating their time—Analytics, Content Creation, Social Media Marketing, and Keyword Research. The Inbound Marketing industry is constantly changing and sees a ton of new, useful information on the regular. Keeping up on the latest industry knowledge is key; but what are the most popular avenues to stay up to date on the latest industry trends? Surprise! (Not really.) 93.97% of Marketers use blogs as their go-to source to keep up with the latest industry shifts. Not too far behind were Social Media at 74.01% and Online Guides at 73.37%. Of those surveyed, 45% say they spend more than 2 days per month researching and learning about the latest trends in SEO—more than any other area of digital marketing. I think it's fair to say SEOs are like a bunch of sponges soaking up water. Except in this case, the water is actually knowledge. SEOs = Content Carnivores! SEO Key takeaway: Budget increases are helping companies implement more marketing automation. The results from the Moz Industry Survey reveal that Digital Marketers will have increased budgets in 2014, if projections stand correct. That's great news for the industry as a whole and shows the SEO industry continues to grow. According to ExactTarget, 73% of those surveyed are currently using SEO/SEM in their marketing efforts and 71% are using some form of Content Management platform. The current and projected similarities between the two are across the board, due to the fact that both go hand in hand with one another, though Content is projected to grow slightly more than SEO/SEM in 2014. Marketing Automation tops the list for where most Marketers plan to increase budgets, according to ExactTarget. It is clearly one of the most popular avenues for increase budgets this year, but it is imperative to understand that it helps scale your efforts; not actually do marketing for you. Once you've determined that it's time to invest in marketing automation, consider the platform that best suits your goals. HubSpot has a great learning guide that does a fantastic job explaining everything you need to know before making the financial commitment, and I strongly encourage you to read it; even if you aren't planning on adding it to your mix of tools this year. Content Key takeaway: Create a strategy so you have time for the king. It is clear that Content is, and will continue to be, king of 2014. A large percentage of B2B Marketers are or plan to spend a decent amount of their budgets on Content this year, but it looks like there is still plenty of room for improvement. Data from CMI indicates 49.5% of Marketers don't have a documented content strategy and are challenged with producing engaging content. Not having enough time is also a common thing we hear when it comes to content creation. The first step in the right direction is coming up with a strategy. Once there is a plan in place and you have nailed down your target market, you are one step closer to writing content specifically tailored to the group you want to reach. Creating a list of topics and a schedule for the posts is the next vital step. Believe it or not, schedules do help save time; it's just a matter of putting in the time to save time. Social Key takeaway: Use the network your target demographic is using. Facebook continues to be the Social network of choice for most internet users, though some suggest it has reached its peak usage from the younger demographic. Despite those claims, Facebook continues to have the highest frequency of Social Media site use with 63% daily visits, according to PEW Research Center. With the highest number AND the most engaged users, Facebook continues to dominate the social landscape. The key takeaway with Social Networks boils down to what channel your target market happens to be using. For example, if you are primarily targeting a female audience, consider focusing on Pinterest. According to a survey from Pew Research Center, one third of women in the U.S. use Pinterest. If you are able to focus on multiple Social Networks, look at the cross tabulation of Social Platforms for your target demographic to help determine where you should allocate your time and effort. Mobile Key takeaway: Put responsive design in your 2014 roadmap! More and more people are purchasing smartphones these days, and the trend continues to climb the charts. On top of that, sales of tablets are also taking off—outperforming both PCs and laptops in the last quarter of 2014, according to IDC. Consumers have over 100 tablets to choose from these days, and the number of options continues to increase. Pew Research Center says that 90% of all Americans own a phone; 58% of which are smartphones. Of those, 63% mostly use their phone to access the internet. If your website isn't responsive, it is highly likely that you are missing out on an ever growing user-base. With location-based services on mobile devices, we can connect in ways that were unimaginable only four years ago. Most people don't let their mobile out of their sight—44% of cell owners have slept with their phone next to their bed because they wanted to make sure they didn't miss any calls, text messages, or other updates during the night. We have the ability to know where our customers are and what their schedule looks like (through their calendar). Are we far off from walking into a store and automagically receiving special offers on our phone without using foursquare to check-in? The sky is the limit! Whether you decide to make a mobile app or create a responsive website, 2014 is the year to get mobile on your roadmap. Local Key takeaway: Local mobile searches convert, so make sure you're the one that shows up. The evolution of local has rapidly improved over the past year and will continue to do so throughout 2014. As mobile usage continues an inevitable upward trend, local searches on mobile devices will also soar. According to LocalVox, 88% of local mobile searches convert to a phone call or visit within 24 hours. It's clear that not keeping up with your local SEO will only help your competitors. Email Key takeaway: Email marketing increasingly provides a great value for a low cost. Email is one traditional marketing channel that continues to show steady growth. According to ExactTarget, "98% of marketers plan to increase or maintain their spend in 2014. Email Marketing was among the top five at 58%." Being among the lowest cost per lead, also producing high quality and quantity of leads, it's no wonder Email Marketing continues to be one of the favorite channels amongst online marketers. Despite what you may think, email marketing is a channel that continues to grow as marketers fine-tune their message to be more personal and capture the readers' interest. In the past, it was common for email marketing to be impersonal and somewhat spammy. As time has passed, we have learned how to better reach our audiences through video, high quality photos, responsive newsletter templates, and of course, well written content that all comes together to make readers want more. For a more in-depth look at the data, feel free to take a gander at the slides on SlideShare! 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