5 content marketing lessons and insights from Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti
Buzzfeed is a modern publishing phenomenon. Best known for listicles, GIFs and click-bait headlines, the company has now diversified into new areas, including politics, world news and even motion pictures.
According to Buzzfeed, 2014 revenues surpassed $100 million and their post in February asking people to vote on the colour of a dress has generated over 38 million views. Buzzfeed hasn’t found success by chance. Their business model and overarching content strategy has enabled them to consistently reach and engage a wide audience with a diverse set of stories, pictures, quizzes and breaking news.
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Technical options and tools for creating more engaging content marketing
A brief history of animation on the web.
Since the beginning of the Internet, the web has been constantly and rapidly evolving. The evolution of the web has been directed by predominantly 2 conflicting factors. The first factor being content providers and readers who are always seeking for more complex and exciting forms of content. The other factor is the technology that provides the foundation of the web which allows users to have the type of content they require. It is both of these factors that have driven the web forward and brought us the web that we know and love today.
One form of content that has always been a requirement for users is animated content. However, technology has often limited the capability of animation on the web. One of the first signs of animation on the web was the introduction of the…
A Q&A with Liam Fisher of BuiltVisible giving actionable advice and tools for people looking to improve their content marketing campaigns in the year ahead
Getting started with content marketing can be tough – from researching your audience through to executing a campaign across multiple mediums and devices, there’s a lot for the digital marketer to cover.
Often it comes back to really understanding what content marketing can bring to your business, who your audience is and what’s most likely to resonate with them, and what it is you need to achieve as a business from your content marketing.
To add a bit more to the conversation, I sat down with Liam Fisher the creative lead at Builtvisible, to talk about his views on content marketing and to share some actionable advice for people looking to improve their campaigns.
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17 Mar 2016
Ensure your email isn't unloved, underestimated or untapped
I feel that often, charities are missing a trick or two with email. Due to its ubiquity and apparent cheapness, it is often not given the credit it is due. There are clear merits for charities using email, it is cost effective, it can be well-targeted and can enhance both real life and online experiences.
Barriers for lack of email marketing with charities
Looking at this in more detail, what are the barriers to success for charities running successful email programmes? Some of the reasons for this are:
Email is not perceived as a valuable asset, particularly at senior level, so it is not given the staff and budget required to work successfully.
Lack of joined-up thinking – often the email programme is run by the communications team but the valuable understanding of the audiences is not well understood (as this knowledge lies usually with the services and…
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16 Mar 2016
Overcoming objections to use of social media in not-for-profit organisations
Social media can be beguiling, stimulating, addictive, confusing and at times downright frustrating. In my experience, Not for Profits, like commercial organisations, are still grappling with how much valuable staff time and resource should be deployed to this burgeoning and proliferating media.
In order to fully embrace and capitalise on social media often objections, real or perceived, need to be overcome to win over internal stakeholders. Common concerns include:
Suppose people post negative comments about us?
How can we control it?
Do we need 24/7 resourcing?
How can we prove that it works?
Isn’t this distracting us from the important work we’re doing?
Do we have enough content to be able to have a credible presence?
Although charities face the same challenges of many other professional organisations, they do have some distinct advantages:
Source of truth and integrity: Trust as we all know is very important online and, like all…
Improving re-engagement emails to help bring a dead email list to life
According to MarketingSherpa, on average, marketers lose 25% of their email list every year. HubSpot have also modelled email database decay and suggest a similar figure if you don't take action. Essentially, subscribers stop engaging with your brand which results in fewer clicks and unsubscribes meaning that the number of active email subscribers falls.
Added to this, the role of subscribed yet unengaged consumers can be crucial when it comes to hurting the inbox placement rates, which can ultimately lead you to spam folders. So, what to do when your holy emails are being flagged as this hex called spam?
Re-engagement emails- the divine jackfruit can act as an elixir to bring your dead email list to life. Due to its inherent specification, re-engagement emails only target inactive consumers that give your email campaigns an accurate perspective.
According to the Stats…
If you are going to optimise your digital campaigns you need to measure them accurately
How do you measure the effectiveness of your digital campaigns? In this video, Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights talks to Grant LeBoff, founder of the Sticky Marketing Club about tools and key metrics to use for digital campaign tracking monitoring that companies should start to consider. Have a watch to find out all about the best practices in the area of measuring your campaigns.
[arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFebyszqGKA" /]
Or here's the transcript for the quick version:
Grant Leboff: So Dave, one of the things that business owners, marketing managers, really struggle with, I think, a little bit on digital, is measuring the effectiveness of what they are doing. How would you go about looking at that?
Dave Chaffey: Yeah, that's right, Grant. It's a huge challenge. Almost every business I talk to hasn't really got that nailed yet. The good news…
Understanding the true value of customer loyalty programs
According to Colloquy, there are 3.3 billion loyalty program memberships in the United States alone. When you consider that the entire U.S. population is only 319 million, the amount of loyalty programs per person is staggering. The average member is enrolled in over 13 programs and 71% of those earning $100K+ use loyalty programs.
76% of shoppers think that loyalty programs are a part of their relationship with brands. But most businesses focus their programs on discounts. You can’t substitute discounts for brand loyalty. There is an emotional aspect to shopper behavior that brands can’t ignore.
97% of loyalty programs are transaction-based, where customers receive discounts for purchases. While this is a foundational aspect of a rewards program, most businesses don’t go beyond that. Only 25% of them reward customers for some type of engagement. If you make your customer experience…
Facebook rolls out instant articles to everyone on April 12th
Importance: [rating=5] (For Publishers)
Recommended source: Facebook Media
Facebook’s Instant Articles is only nine months old. But, given its great success over that gestation period, Facebook has now deemed it developed enough to be unleashed on publishers of all stripes.
What is Instant Articles?
If you not all that familiar with Instant articles, it’s probably because it works so seamlessly you haven’t really noticed it. When you click on an article from a news publisher that uses Instant articles whilst on a mobile device (most of the bigger publishers do now), then instead of being taken to the publishers site and waiting for the whole thing to load, which can often take a fair while on a mobile device and consume a considerable amount of data, you are taken to an Instant articles page hosted by Facebook. This massively improves load times and keeps…
Going beyond opens and clicks to evaluate and improve subscriber engagement with your email programmes
How engaging are your emails? It’s likely that you review open and clickthrough rates for individual email campaigns and newsletters, but can you measure and prove how engaging your email marketing is on a long-term basis across multiple emails starting with the first welcome email. Dan Hare showed that it's challenging - he presented data which shows between 50-90% of subscribers may never open or click in a 6 month period.
In this article I’ll show some more advanced techniques we recommend to assess subscriber engagement which go beyond the basic email metrics of delivery, open and clickthrough rates.
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