Hasta La Creative!

Content marketing is all the rage these days, right? It’s the shiny new object everyone thinks is the bomb yet the practice has been around for decades in various different iterations. Well we aren’t going to quibble over the fact most every “new thing” in marketing is simply a re-invention of something else. Nope, we’re just going to hop right on the bandwagon with the rest of the lemmings and hype this thing until the next shiny new object appears.

So content marketing. Demand Metric has put together a fact-filled infographic with information from multiple sources on how content marketing has shaped up over the course of its short life.

Currently 90% of organizations market with content and spend 25% or their marketing budget to do so. Seventy eight percent of CMOs see content marketing as the wave of the future. While 91% of B2B companies and 86% of B2C marketers engage in content marketing, 62% outsource their content marketing to others.

Per dollar spent, content marketing generates about 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing and it costs 62% less.

Does it work? It would seem so. Eighty percent of people say they enjoy learning about a company through custom content, 90% find it useful and 60% seek out a product or brand after having read about it. And, 70% prefer to learn about a company through an article as opposed to an ad.

Done well, content marketing or the more complete approach of inbound marketing can, indeed, produce results. It’s why companies like Pardot, HubSpot and Marketo have experience such dramatic growth.

Of course, not all content marketing is done well. In fact, just today, writing in Digiday, Jack Marshall highlights the many problems facing content marketing including cheesy lead generation schemes, poor content and companies like Taboola Marshall claims distributes content that’s “not necessarily the type of content readers expect to arrive at when they click a link on Time.com that’s titled ‘You might also like,’ and makes no indication that the placement is a paid one.”

But, hey, there’s always bad with the good right? There are always few who will always game the system or automate it in a fashion that ruins its true intent. So it’s incumbent upon marketers to make the right choices when they decide with whom to spend their content marketing dollars. It’s not so easy when there are so many reflections bouncing off the shiny new object but over time marketers’ eyes will adjust (one hopes) and the right decisions will be made.

A recent IPG Media Lab eye-tracking study of 4,770 consumers found native ads are seen 53% more frequently than banner ads — 4.1 times per session as compared to 2.7 for banners. As well, the study found 26% of people looked at native ads as compared to 24% who looked at editorial content.

The study’s co-author and IPG Media Labs VP of Consumer Research Strategy Kara Manatt notes native ads may be the happy medium marketers have been looking for saying, “Past research shows us that neither overly intrusive nor easily ignored ads are effective. This study validates that we are on the right path to finding that middle ground.”

And of consumer acceptance of the native advertising unit, 32% of respondents said the unit is something they’d share with a friend of family member as compared to 19% for banners. Great stat but we’d really like to meet one of those 19% who actually shared a banner!

While the advertorial has been around for a very long time, do you think it will survive and thrive in this current format?

For as much as $20,000, Worldwide Motion Picture Group compares the story structure and genre of a script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success.

Relying on clicks to drive conversions for display advertising is often a dead end. Consumers most likely to click on display ads are often vastly different from your best-performing customers. This Quantcast report, part of the Adrants whitepaper series, exames why optimizing display campaigns for clicks often means anti-optimizing for sales and why conversion optimization is what really matters for ad effectiveness.

Download the report now and learn how to optimize your display campains for conversions.

Creating a web strategy to deal with the rise of mobile devices boils down to three primary options: Developing a native app, designing a separate mobile site, or recalibrating your primary website with responsive design.

Using insight from industry experts and in-depth research data, this eBook from Bridgeline Digital, “7 Reasons to Consider Responsive Design for Your Company’s Next Generation Website,” explores the advantages of using responsive design to take your web presence into the mobile era. Responsive design is a fancy term to describe a site layout that works on all devices seamlessly. You create the site once and the layout adapts to and renders properly on different screen sizes. An extremely important consideration given the dramatic increase in usage of mobile devices to access the web.

Download the whitepaper now and make sure your website is appropriately designed for mobile devices.

Conversations about your company and your products happen each and every day, all over the web. For a marketer managing campaigns across all types of media, these real-time consumer conversations can either be a marketer’s dream or your worst nightmare. At the end of the day, you just want marketing programs that work.

Bazaarvoice simplifies social-channel complexity by giving specific examples of ways social can improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness. This insight-packed resource clearly outlines six actionable strategies for leveraging user-generated content to:

• Create word-of-mouth campaigns that drive growth
• Deliver a measurable return on social investments
• Bridge the gap between brands and consumers
• Increase site traffic

Download this report now to see exactly how social drives real results for brands.

We could reduce obesity by finding its causes, but that isn’t so easy.

While content marketing may be the buzzword dujour, there’s some credence to the notion. After all, people need the right information at the right time when they are researching and deciding what to buy.

In this Yesler whitepaper, part of the Adrants whitepaper series, you will find out how to map your content to the needs and roles of your prospects as they move through the purchasing cycle.

In the whitepaper, you will learn:

• How to use content to spark an ongoing conversation with prospective buyers
• How to determine what kinds of content best meet the needs of your prospective buyers
• The importance of buyer personas and communication channel preferences
• What pitfalls to avoid as you create content for your own content marketing efforts

Download the whitepaper now and learn how to properly develop and map your content marketing to the needs of your customers.

Attention marketing directors, creative directors and everyone else who cares about how well tuned their website is for mobile devices. Uh, that’s everyone, right?

Is your current website properly designed to render perfectly on all mobile devices? If our casual surfing observations are any indication, the answer is a resounding no.

If you haven’t already, you should seriously be considering how to revamp your digital marketing strategy to cope with the mobile takeover. Make no mistake about it, the mobile revolution isn’t coming. It’s already arrived.

Creating a web strategy to deal with the rise of mobile devices boils down to three primary options: Developing a native app, designing a separate mobile site, or recalibrating your primary website with responsive design.

Using insight from industry experts and in-depth research data, this eBook from Bridgeline Digital, “Seven Reasons to Consider Responsive Design for Your Company’s Next Generation Website,” explores the advantages of using responsive design to take your web presence into the mobile era. Responsive design is a fancy term to describe a site layout that works on all devices seamlessly. You create the site once and the layout adapts to and renders properly on different screen sizes.

Download the whitepaper now and make sure your website is appropriately designed for mobile devices.

Here’s a snapshot at Twitter share of voice and sentiment for top companies in several major industries: Media & Entertainment, Finance, Retail, Telecommunications, Quick-service restaurants, Health, Auto, Nonprofits, Alcohol, Travel, Tech, and CPG.

For each industry, social insight firm Topsy made a chart showing the share of voice for the top 10 businesses or brands with the share of Twitter mentions for each brand across the entire year including events that caused particular spikes.

The charts also show a list of the brands (combining name and Twitter handle) ranked by Topsy’s social sentiment score. To compute the sentiment score, Topsy analyzes about 200 million English-language tweets each day, computes minute-by-minute sentiment for every term in every tweet, and creates scaled scores for all terms, such as the brands and businesses listed here. The scores range from 0 (negative) to 100 (positive), with 50 as neutral.

1. Media and Entertainment

Disney takes the cake for top sentiment score in the Media and Entertainment industry in 2012. (This might also be due to mentions of vacations at the popular Disney parks.) The Discovery Channel and HBO follow in slots 2 and 3, and the MTV video music awards in September caused a huge increase in Twitter chatter:

2. Finance

American Express comes out on top in the financial industry with an average sentiment score of 89.4 for the year. Visa and Mastercard follow closely behind with 83.6 and 71.2, respectively. In terms of chatter volume, when Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith resigned in March, posting a public account of his resignation for the New York Times, tweets about Goldman Sachs spiked significantly. In addition, talk surrounding British bank HSBC grew quickly in both July and December, when the bank was under fire for money laundering allegations.

3. Retail

Best Buy had the highest Retail sentiment score on Twitter, followed by Lowes and Costco. There were also spikes in conversation for Walmart, Best Buy, and Macy’s on Black Friday:

4. Telecommunications

Boost Mobile ranks #1 for Twitter sentiment among telecommunications companies, followed by AT&T and Century Link as #2 and #3. Major spikes in tweet volume over the year were for T-mobile in May, when the company ran their 4G Tweet Race promotion, and for AT&T in September, when their online “It can wait” pledge – a call to not text while driving – was trending:

5. Quick-service restaurants

The quick-service restaurant with the highest sentiment score for 2012 was Starbucks, with a score of 88.8. Sonic (86.3) and Chipotle (84.3) weren’t far behind. The only signifiant hike in Twitter chatter came from backlash surrounding Chicken fast food restaurant Chick-fil-A in July-August, when company founder Dan Cathy defended Chick-fil-A’s stance against gay marriage:

6. Health

Gym and fitness center 24 Hour Fitness received the #1 spot by online sentiment for 2012 with a high average of 90.7. Popular dance-fitness program Zumba follows closely behind with a score of 89.4:

7. Auto

Which car brands were the most popular this year? Scion takes the cake, while Acura and Audi follow. A small spike in chatter surrounding Acura occurred during the 2012 Superbowl, when their website crashed temporarily:

8. Nonprofits

In the nonprofit sector, United Way, Charity :water and World Vision steal slots 1, 2, and 3 in a close race for highest sentiment score in 2012. The largest spike in volume surrounded the Invisible Children organization, which released a video in March exposing the Lord’s Resistance Army warlord, Joseph Kony, and the plight of African children under his influence. Shortly thereafter, the organization saw widespread criticism for its “hollywood style” campaigning, and controversy surrounded the charity’s leader:

9. Alcohol

Which types of drinks did people kick back with this year? Natural Light, Bud Light, and Guinness were the Twittersphere’s top 3 choices in 2012, with huge spikes in conversation for Bud Light advertisements during the Superbowl and for the classic Irish Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day:

10. Travel

Just as we found in our last airline ranking blog post, Virgin America has the highest average online sentiment in 2012. (For this post we analyzed sentiment for both name and Twitter handle, so the scores are somewhat different.) Virgin America was followed by Travelocity and Expedia, both discount travel booking websites. The largest increase in chatter involved British Airways in June-July, when they became fully integrated with the former British Midlands International. At the same time, British airways also ran a Twitter contest to win lunch with the British boy band One Direction.

11. Tech

While online market giants eBay and Amazon take the top two slots for sentiment score, the most significant hikes in chatter involved Apple. When Apple stock topped $600 a share in March, Twitter was abuzz with opinions and hopes for the tech company’s future. In addition, the social Web lit up with more Apple discussion in August-September, when Apple won their copyright battle against their competitor Samsung:

12. Consumer packaged goods

Finally – what common products were Twitter users buying this year? It seems that beauty products by Covergirl and L’Oreal scored the highest sentiment scores, followed by the Pillsbury baking brand (a branch of General Mills/Smuckers). In addition, Pepsi was a popular topic of conversation after their television commercial efforts, both during the Superbowl in February and for their later Drew Brees vs. One Direction commercial aired in October: