9 Keys To Brand Publishing Success
Brands are struggling to connect with their audience using traditional marketing techniques.
As consumers, we are bombarded with thousands of promotional messages each day. And yet we continue to expect brands and publishers to engage with us directly.
In order to save marketing, brands need to begin to think and act like publishers, putting promotional messages and interruption techniques aside and seek to connect with their audience through stories they love.
“The audience has spoken. They want stories.” ~ Kevin Spacey
Few brands have been successful with content marketing. Many lack the cultural courage to reject the business intuition to talk about itself. To promote itself on banners, billboards and baseball stadiums.
As one senior marketer told me recently, “the business asks for things you know won’t work. But in order to gain their trust you have to give them what they asked for. And then take the trust you’ve built and try to educate them on what will work.”
The Content Marketing Institute reported that 90% of businesses are using content marketing and still less than half have a strategy defined for their content.
And while a majority of businesses (73% according to CMI) have now put someone in charge of content marketing, most have no authority to manage content like a strategic asset, and to shift the campaign mindset.
Instead they are handed a small amount of money and tasked with building a content marketing campaign!
Content marketing at most companies today is still a tactical solution to a tactical problem.
- Need a thought leadership website? That’s content marketing.
- Someone wants an interactive e-book? That’s content marketing.
- Want a viral video? Of course you do. That’s content marketing.
- How about a native ad? That’s content marketing.
But the challenge goes well beyond cultural shifts that simply will take time and attrition. Brands today lack the people, process, and technology to produce great content at scale.
It is not enough to create great content. It is not enough to publish great content. Content needs to become the fuel that lights the fire of regular and consistent conversation with your customers of tomorrow. And that requires scale: the ability to reach escape velocity.
Content needs to become institutionalized within the strategic marketing budget process.
“Banners are dead. Can we please kill the banner?”
This is a statement I overheard at a recent conference on content marketing. “Every dollar spent on banner advertising is wasted,” The attendee continued.
And while consumers reject banners at rates greater than 99%. And millennials have shown to completely ignore them, digital banner ad sales were up last year by more than 10%.
Why are brands throwing good money after a marketing technique that is so bad?
I think part of the answer lies in the shift still taking place from print to digital. As brands shift their dollars to online, social and mobile platforms, banners are the easy tactic. Creative agencies can design and produce them. Programmatic platforms and media buyers can insert them. And so we are seeing a race to the bottom where the inventory is getting sold at lower prices. Publishers are seeing lower revenues. Brands are seeing less effectiveness. And consumers just keep getting pissed off.
So while the shift from print to digital might be causing this short term bump in banner ad revenues, the real shift is happening from paid to earned to owned.
Brands have been taking their budgets in paid media and testing new forms of advertising with social platforms, sponsored content, and native ads. More recently, brands like Unilever and GE have even begun shifting their spend further into “owned” media.
And for this, they have a short-term tactical problem: content.
Integrated Digital Medial
Today’s consumer is active on the web, in social, on their mobile devices. And when they want to interact with a brand, they expect to see that brand on the channels they use.
Advertising across all the possible consumer touch points is simply not viable or sustainable for any brand.
And so the business needs to earn its way onto platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and more. And then they need to find a way to bring them back into the brand experience. Consumers have to want to go there.
Leading brands are looking to “shout louder than they spend” as GE’s Beth Comstock has explained in their move to an integrated digital approach.
Integrated digital marketing maximizes the effect of digital spend by focusing on quality content (owned) that gets amplified through social (earned) and some (paid) promotion.
To be effective, brands cannot rely on one platform, technique or approach. Creating content at this kind of scale requires investment, strategy, and people – all working together on common platforms with defined processes.
What are the key factors for content marketing success?
In order to be effective with content marketing, brands need to understand the criteria for success. When these are not in place, it increase the risk of the program.
- Clear, measurable and attainable objectives
- A well-defined target audience
- An internal program owner accountable for success
- Understanding of the current / desired customer journey
- Ability to scale quality content to meet audience needs at each stage
- Full editorial control
- Openness and flexibility to shift methods based on KPIs and reporting insights
- Open, consistent communication between the program owner, internal stakeholders and external partners on milestones, expectations, progress, issues and gaps
- Resources for analysis and testing new ideas
Just Give It To Them
At some point, this comes down to the simple idea of just giving your customers what they want.
The content marketing opportunity is so clear to me that I bet my career on it. I know many brands are struggling to realize the potential of content marketing and brand publishing.
But with a little courage to make the right changes in budget, people and strategy, along with an understanding of the key success factors and risks to content marketing success, I know we will make it. And it will be fun.
Helping to create marketing that people might actually love? I’m in!
4 thoughts on “9 Keys To Brand Publishing Success”
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Excellent piece Michael with actionable advice. Question–Can you qualify who is defined as “the business”? If a retailer, is it their end consumer/target demo? Or internal data at company X that is in conflict with what consumers say they want? Thanks @armco
As one senior marketer told me recently, “the business asks for things you know won’t work. But in order to gain their trust you have to give them what they asked for. And then take the trust you’ve built and try to educate them on what will work.”
Thanks Andrew, “the business” in this context was meant to refer to business executives. Or as I love to say, “behind every piece of bad marketing is an executive who asked for it.” I think it is generally ego that prompts executives to ask for specific kinds of marketing. The CMO should understand the business goals and be given the authority to create the most amazing marketing he or she can. But the CEO and other execs are the face of a company. So obviously they will want inout into the final product.
That philosophy travels all the way down the executive ranks to the point where every tactic likely has a non-marketing manager not just “asking for a cake, but telling marketing what ingredients to use and how to bake it.”
In the end, no one wins.
Love the succinct definition of owned, earned and paid. I hear loads of different versions of this.
Thanks Sarah, I think this provides all the context needed for the change happening in marketing today!