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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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Why Video Holds the Key to Authentic Community Building

It’s no secret that paid media is failing. With the rise of savvy consumers and the prevalence of ad-blocking technology, traditional paid media models are simply no longer viable. Instead, brands are increasingly turning to content as the go-to solution for media advertising. Content marketing positions products and services uniquely within informative and entertaining content that a consumer will not only relate to, but also seek out. As they say, content is king.

And if content is king, video is his queen. Content marketing has evolved beyond B2B whitepapers and B2C blog posts driven by SEO. While these forms are still valuable, video has recently established itself as the number one form of content, as brands find wild success with everything from documentary-style brand stories to full-fledged YouTube influencer channels.

While video storytelling is an established trend, the reality is that we’re just getting started. Today, video accounts for one-third of total online activity, and users on average watch 33.4 videos each month. What’s more, nearly 40 percent of online viewers find video ads credible.

The Secret to Video’s Rising Star

Facilitating video’s rise is the decreasing cost of production—a video that used to cost $10,000 can now be made for less than $2,000. There are also more homes for video content than ever before, thanks to consumers’ growing appetite for the medium. Facebook Live, Instagram, and Snapchat stories, and the integration of multimedia posts into everything from company landing pages to blogs, means that it’s possible to syndicate one piece of content in multiple places, stretching marketing dollars even further.

Beyond cost, the benefits of video are alluring. First and most obvious is the possibility to go viral and reach a huge audience. Even if video content doesn’t go viral, chances are it will still outperform paid media and traditional content marketing. The videos I produce, for instance, net far more views, engagement, and shares compared with blog posts or traditional email campaigns.

Finally, there’s analytics. With video, you can track retention and engagement far more closely than with blog posts or other written content. Measuring what time your users drop off from watching your videos can provide vital insight into how you can better refine your product, service, or story to improve the next time around.

Strategies to Guide Your Video Journey

Video has a strong effect on the human psyche, so some strategy is necessary to ensure brands select the type of video that best aligns with their goals. With produced content, brands have control over their story, but in a way that feels fresh and alive. It allows them to storyboard an aspirational world for the consumer to get lost in. Live streaming, on the other hand, offers the transparency and authenticity that audiences crave. It’s an effective tool in building trust between the consumer and the brand—the consumer perceives that there’s no advertising trick at play. What they see is what they get.

There’s no better way to build a strong brand community. So how can brands harness this powerful medium to tell their stories, build communities, and attract customers? Use the following three strategies to guide your video journey.

There’s no better way to build a strong brand community than video. Click To Tweet 1. Don’t Deviate from Your Soul-Level Story

Your soul-level story is the component of your brand narrative that is emotional, aspirational, and will hit consumers in the gut. It’s that intrinsic, hard-to-point-to part of the narrative that drives your company.

Airbnb’s soul-level story, for instance, is the idea of global community and that we can belong anywhere. With Casper, it’s the idea of sleep being the most fundamental need, and that when we sleep well and dream well, we can achieve anything in our waking life.

One way to figure out your soul-level story is to ask yourself what your brand offers consumers that your competitors can’t. Think beyond the features of your service, and dig to uncover the psychological benefit you deliver. Maybe it’s trust and security, or community and education. Another effective strategy is plugging your target consumer into a hero’s journey. For instance, if you are a financial services company and your consumers are in a rags-to-riches story, consider what they need to be a hero in their quest. When you identify what role your brand plays in their journey, you get to be the tool that helps them succeed—not unlike a magic wand.

Once you’ve nailed down your narrative, infuse it into every piece of content you create. Whether it’s a small meme, GIF, a Facebook ad that costs $10, or a billboard that cost thousands, don’t let anything out into the world if it doesn’t resonate and reinforce the soul-level story of your company.

2. Don’t Underestimate the Work It Takes to Go Viral

You might see a viral video and be tempted to think, “I can do that,” but it’s easier said than done. Just consider the amount of video added to the internet each day. Upwards of 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute—yes, every minute.

There are different benchmarks for what constitutes a viral video. Some experts say you need 100,000 views, and others say it depends on the rate of consumption. Either way, it’s important to know that viral content takes work—sometimes dozens of small tweaks and iterations to get it perfect. It is possible to have a big hit, but it rarely comes overnight.

To know whether you’ve got a potential hit on your hands, ask yourself if you’re engaged during every second of the video. If your attention drops off for even a moment, you’re not there yet. Also be sure to get others outside your industry and target demographic to chime in. To go truly viral, your video must have wide appeal.

3. Don’t Just Measure Views

Let’s get one thing straight: You can buy video views by boosting posts and promoting video content on social channels. This can be an effective method for seeding content and garnering impressive numbers, but at the end of the day, you’ll lose out on ROI because you won’t be getting those users through your sales funnel.

The whole point of content marketing is to get you in front of your users as organically as possible to make sure they are individuals who are truly interested in buying your product or service. Organic engagement in the form of likes, comments, and shares is a good indicator that a consumer is in your funnel.

Once you have a consumer in your sales funnel, make sure you know the action you want the video to drive, whether that’s signing up for an email list or downloading an ebook. Brand awareness is great, but push it further by setting up the appropriate landing page or community platform (such as your blog or Facebook page) for people to navigate to once they watch the video. If you don’t give consumers an opportunity to learn more, you’re missing an opportunity to keep them engaged.

Video is key to achieving that inspirational and aspirational element that every brand strives for—and it’s far more compelling than any other type of content. We’re just starting to explore all the ways the medium can be used to entertain consumers, build authentic communities, and spread brand awareness. There’s no better time to bring your story to life.

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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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A Primer on B2B Social Selling with LinkedIn – Part 2

Last month we started our discussion of social selling on LinkedIn. If you missed it, you can catch it here. As a reminder, social selling on LinkedIn or on any other platform is only about two things … Connecting with the right people and … Building individual relationships with these same folks The right people

Author information

Craig Jamieson

Craig M. Jamieson contributes a monthly column on Social Selling. Craig has been in B2B sales since 1977 and during that time has served in a variety of positions including; sales manager, division sales manager, national sales manager, district manager, and as a business owner. He is the managing partner of Adaptive Business Services in Boise, Idaho which owns and operates NetWorks! Boise Valley B2B Networking Groups, is a Nimble Social CRM & HootSuite Solution Partner, a TTI Performance Systems VAA, and Craig also conducts workshops and seminars relating to sales and social business applications. +Craig Jamieson

A Primer on B2B Social Selling with LinkedIn – Part 2 by Craig Jamieson -Maximize Social Business

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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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4 Tips for Successful Social Media Contests

Do you run social media contests for your business? Looking for ways to make your contests deliver more than entries? A strong social media contest can generate real value for your business. In this article, you’ll discover four tips for executing a successful social media contest. #1: Appeal to Prospective Customers, Not Just Entrants The

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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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Do We Still Need to Disavow in the Era of Penguin 4.0?

Posted by MarieHaynes

It has now been six months since the launch of Penguin 4.0. In my opinion, Penguin 4.0 was awesome. It took ages for Google to release this update, but when they did, it was much more fair than previous versions of Penguin. Previous versions of Penguin would cause entire sites to be suppressed if the algorithm thought that you'd engaged in manipulative link building. Even if a site did a thorough link cleanup, the suppression would remain present until Google re-ran the Penguin algorithm and recognized your cleanup efforts. It was not uncommon to see situations like this:

I saw many businesses that had looooooong periods of time of suppression — even years!

According to Google spokesperson Gary Illyes, the new version of Penguin that was released in September of 2016 no longer suppresses sites:

Now, instead of causing a sitewide demotion when Penguin detects spam, they’ll simply devalue that spam so that it can’t help improve a site’s rankings.

I’m guessing that it took a lot of brainpower to figure out how to do this. Google now has enough trust in their ability to find and devalue spam that they are comfortable removing the punitive aspect of Penguin. That’s impressive.

This change brings up a question that I am asked several times a week now:

If Penguin is able to devalue spam, is there any reason to disavow links any more?

I've been asked this enough times now that I figured it was a good idea to write an article on my answer to this question.

A brief refresher: What is the disavow tool?

The disavow tool was given to us in October of 2012.

You can use it by uploading a file to Google that contains a list of either URLs or domains. Then, as Google crawls the web, if they come across a URL or domain that is in your disavow file, they won’t use links from that page in their calculations of PageRank for your site. Those links also won’t be used by the Penguin algorithm when it decides whether your site has been involved in webspam.

For sites that were affected by Penguin in the past, the disavow tool was an integral part of getting the suppression lifted off the site. It was essentially a way of saying to Google, “Hey... in the past we made some bad links to our site. But we don’t want you to use those links in your calculations.” Ideally, it would be best to remove bad links from the web, but that’s not always possible. The disavow tool was, in my opinion, super important for any site that was hit by Penguin.

For more in-depth information on using the disavow tool, see this Moz post: http://ift.tt/1LmoM7S

What does Google say about using the disavow tool now?

It wasn’t long after the release of Penguin 4.0 before people starting asking Google whether the disavow tool was still necessary. After all, if Google can just devalue spam links on their own, why should I have to disavow them?

Here are some replies from Google employees:

Now, the conspiracy theorists out there will say, “Of course Google wants you to disavow! They need that data to machine-learn for Penguin!”

Google has said that Penguin is not a machine learning algorithm:

And even if they ARE using disavow data for some kind of machine learning training set, really, does it matter? In my opinion, if Google is saying that we should be still using the disavow tool, I don’t think they're trying to trick us. I think it still has a real purpose.

Three reasons why I still recommend using the disavow tool

There are three main reasons why I still recommend disavowing. However, I don’t recommend it in as many cases as I used to.

1) Manual actions still exist

You do NOT want to risk getting a manual unnatural links penalty. I have documented on Moz before about the many cases I've seen where a manual unnatural links penalty was devastating to the long-term health of a site.

Google employee Gary Illyes commented during a podcast that, when a Google webspam team member looks at your site’s links, they can often see labels next to the links. He said the following:

“If the manual actions team is reviewing a site for whatever reason, and they see that most of the links are labeled as Penguin Real-Time affected, then they might decide to take a much deeper look on the site... and then maybe apply a manual action on the site because of the links. ”

In other words, if you have an unnatural link profile and you leave it up to Penguin to devalue your links rather than disavowing, then you’re at risk for getting a manual action.

Of course, if you actually do have a manual action, then you’ll need to use the disavow tool as part of your cleanup efforts along with manual link removal.

2) There are other algorithms that use links

Link quality has always been important to Google. I believe that Penguin is just one way in which Google fights against unnatural links algorithmically. One example of another algorithm that likely uses links is the Payday Loans algorithm. This algorithm isn’t just for payday loans sites; it also affects sites in many high-competition verticals.

Bill Slawski recently posted this interesting article on his thoughts about a recent patent filed by Google. In one place, the patent talks about a situation where a resource may have a large number of links pointing to it but there is a disproportionate amount of traffic. In cases like that, the page being linked to might actually be demoted in rankings.

Now, that’s just a patent, so it doesn’t mean for sure that there's actually an algorithm behind this... but there could be! Makes you think, right?

Google is always trying to fight against link spam and Penguin is just one of the ways in which they do this. If there are links that are potentially causing my link profile to look spammy to Google, then I don’t want them to count in any calculations that Google is making.

3) Can we trust that Penguin is able to devalue all spam pointing to our site?

The official announcement from Google on Penguin is here. Here's what it says about devaluing as opposed to demoting:

"Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site."

This statement is not clear to me. I have questions:

When Google says they are “adjusting ranking,” could that also be negative adjustments?

Can Penguin possibly demote rankings for certain pages rather than affecting the whole site?

Can Penguin possibly demote rankings for certain keywords rather than affecting the whole site?

As posted above, we received some clarification on this from Google employees in a Facebook post (and again via tweets) to tell us that Penguin 4.0 doesn’t penalize, but rather devalues spam. However, these are not official statements from Google. These statements may mean that we never have to worry about any link pointing to our site ever again. Perhaps? Or they could mean that there's less need to worry than there was previously.

Personally, if my business relies on Google organic rankings in order to succeed, I'm a little leery about putting all of my trust in this algorithm’s ability to ignore unnatural links and not let them hurt me.

Who should be disavowing?

While I do still recommend use of the disavow tool, I only recommend it in the following situations:

For sites that have made links for SEO purposes on a large scale – If you or an SEO company on your behalf made links in low-quality directories, low-quality article sites, bookmark sites, or as comment spam, then these need to be cleaned up. Here's more information on what makes a link a low-quality link. You can also run links past my disavow blacklist if you're not sure whether it’s a good one or not. Low-quality links like this are probably being devalued by Penguin, but they're the type of link that could lead to a manual unnatural links penalty if you happen to get a manual review by the webspam team and they haven’t been disavowed.

For sites that previously had a manual action for unnatural links – I've found that if a site has enough of a spam problem to get an unnatural links penalty, then that site usually ends up collecting more spam links over the years. Sometimes this is because low-quality directories pop up and scrape info from other low-quality directories. Sometimes it's because old automated link-generating processes keep on running. And sometimes I don’t have an explanation, but spammy links just keep appearing. In most cases, sites that have a history of collecting unnatural links tend to continue to collect them. If this is the case for you, then it’s best to disavow those on a regular basis (either monthly or quarterly) so that you can avoid getting another manual action.

For sites under obvious negative SEO attacks – The key here is the word "obvious." I do believe that in most cases, Google is able to figure out that spam links pointed at a site are links to be ignored. However, at SMX West this year, Gary Illyes said that the algorithm can potentially make mistakes: If you have a bunch of pharma and porn links pointing at your site, it’s not a bad idea to disavow them, but actually in most cases I just ignore these. Where I do recommend disavowing for negative SEO attacks is when the links pointing at your site contain anchors for keywords for which you want to rank. If it’s possible that a webspam team member could look at your link profile and think that there are a lot of links there that exist just for SEO reasons, then you want to be sure that those are cleaned up.

Who does NOT need to disavow?

If you look at your links and notice some "weird" links that you can’t explain, don’t panic!

Every site gets strange links, and often quite a few of them. If you haven’t been involved in manipulative SEO, you probably do not need to be disavowing links.

When Google takes action either manually or algorithmically against a site for unnatural linking, it's because the site has been actively trying to manipulate Google rankings on a large scale. If you made a couple of directory links in the past, you’re not going to get a penalty.

You also don’t need to disavow just because you notice sitewide links pointing to you. It can look scary to see in Google Search Console that one site is linking to you thousands of times, especially if that link is keyword-anchored. However, Google knows that this is a sitewide link and not thousands of individual links. If you made the link yourself in order to help your rankings, then sure, go ahead and disavow it. But if it just appeared, it’s probably nothing to worry about.

Borderline cases

There are some cases where it can be difficult to decide whether or not to disavow. I sometimes have trouble advising on cases where a company has hired a medium- to high-quality SEO firm that's done a lot of link building — rather than link earning — for them.

Here's an example of a case that would be difficult:

Let’s say you've been getting most of your links by guest posting. These guest posts are not on low-quality sites that exist just to post articles, but rather on sites that real humans read. Are those good links?

According to Google, if you're guest posting primarily for the sake of getting links, then these are unnatural links. Here's a quote from Google employee John Mueller:

"Think about whether or not this is a link that would be on your site if it weren’t for your actions…When it comes to guest blogging it’s a situation where you are placing links on other people’s sites together with this content, so that’s something I kind of shy away from purely from a link building point of view. It can make sense to guest blog on other people’s sites to drive some traffic to your site… but you should use a nofollow."

If you have a small number of guest posts, Google is unlikely to go after you. But what if a webspam team member looks at your links and sees that you have a very large number of links built via guest posting efforts? That makes me uncomfortable.

You could consider disavowing those links to avoid getting a manual action. It’s quite possible, though, that those links are actually helping your site. Disavowing them could cause you to drop in rankings.

This article could easily turn into a discussion on the benefits and risks of guest posting if we had the space and time. My point in mentioning this is to say that some disavow decisions are tough.

In general, my rule of thumb is that you should use the disavow file if you have a good number of links that look like you made them with SEO as your primary goal.

Should you be auditing your disavow file?

I do believe that some sites could benefit from pruning their disavow file. However, I have yet to see any reports from anyone who has claimed to have done this and seen benefit that we can reasonably attribute to the recovery of PageRank that flows through those links.

If you have used your disavow file in the past in an effort to remove a manual action or recover from a Penguin hit, then there's a good possibility that you were overly aggressive in your disavow efforts. I know I've had some manual penalties that were really difficult to remove and we likely disavowed more links than were necessary. In cases like those, we could go through our disavow files and remove the domains that were questionable disavow decisions.

It’s not always easy to do this, though, especially if you've done the correct thing and have disavowed on the domain level. If this is the case, you won’t have actual URLs in your disavow file to review. It’s hard to make reavowing decisions without seeing the actual link in question.

Here's a process you can use to audit your disavow file. It gets a little technical, but if you want to give it a try, here it is:

(Note: Many of these steps are explained in greater detail and with pictures here.)

Download your disavow file from Google: http://ift.tt/U0eJtA

Get a list of your links from Google Search Console. (It’s not a bad idea to also get links from other sources, as well.)

On your CSV of links, make a column for domains. You can extract the domain by using this formula, assuming your URLs are in Column B: =LEFT(B1,FIND(“/”,B1,9)-1) You can then use Find and Replace to replace the http, https, and www. with blanks. Now you have a list of domains.

On your disavow file, get a list of domains you've disavowed by replacing domain: with blanks. (This is assuming you have disavowed on the domain level and not the URL level.)

Put your new list of disavowed domains on the second sheet of your links spreadsheet and fill Column B down with "disavowed".

Now, on the links list, we’re going to use a VLOOKUP to figure out which of our current live links are ones that we've previously disavowed. In this formula, your domains are in the first column of each spreadsheet and I've used 1000 as the total number of domains in my disavow list. Here goes: =VLOOKUP(A1,sheet2!$A$1:$B$1000,2,FALSE)

Now you can take the domains that are in your disavow file and audit those URLs.

What we’re looking for here are URLs where we had disavowed them just to be safe, but in reality, they are probably OK links.

Note: Just as in regular link auditing work, do not make decisions based on blanket metrics. While some of these metrics can help us make decisions, you do not want to base your decision for reavowing solely on Domain Authority, spam score, or some other metric. Rather, you want to look at each domain and think, “If a webspam team member looked at this link, would they think it only exists for SEO reasons, or does it have a valid purpose outside of SEO?”

Let’s say we've gone through the links in our disavow file and have found 20 links that we'd like to reavow. We would then go back to the disavow file that we downloaded from Google and remove the lines that say "domain:example.com" for each of those domains which we want to reavow.

Upload your disavow file to Google again. This will overwrite your old file. At some point in the future Google should start counting the links that you've removed from the file again. However, there are a few things to note:

Matt Cutts from Google mentioned in a video that reavowing a link takes "a lot longer" than disavowing. They built a lag function into the tool to try to stop spammers from reverse-engineering the algorithm.

Matt Cutts also said in the same video that a reavowed link may not carry the same weight it once did.

If this whole process of reavowing sounds too complicated, you can hire me to do the work for you. I might be willing to do the work at a discount if you allow me to use your site (anonymously) as a case study to show whether reavowing had any discernible benefit.

Conclusions

Should we still be using the disavow tool? In some cases, the answer to this is yes. If you have links that are obviously there for mostly SEO reasons, then it's best to disavow these so that they don’t cause you to get a manual action in the future. Also, we want to be sure that Google isn't using these links in any sort of algorithmic calculations that take link quality into account. Remember, it’s not just Penguin that uses links.

I think that it is unlikely that filing a disavow will cause a site to see a big improvement in rankings, unless the site is using it to recover from a sitewide manual action. Others will disagree with me, however. In fact, a recent Moz blog post showed a possible recovery from an algorithmic suppression shortly after a site filed a disavow. I think that, in this case, the recovery may have been due to a big algorithm change that SEOs call Fred that happened at the same time, rather than the filing of a disavow file.

In reality, though, no one outside of Google knows for sure how effective the disavow tool is now. We know that Google says we should still use it if we find unnatural links pointing to our site. As such, my advice is that if you have unnatural links, you should still be disavowing.

I’d love to hear what you think. Please do leave a comment below!

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#Do We Still Need to Disavow in the Era of Penguin 4.0?

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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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What Makes Mozzers Tick? (An April Fools' Day Alternative)

Posted by Nick_Sayers

After five years at Moz, I’ve found that I work with some of the most creative and talented people I’ve ever met. When it came time to brainstorm ideas for an April Fools video this year, rather than tricking people like every other company does, we decided instead to showcase a few of the talented folks around the Mozplex. Alongside Kristina Keyser, we shot and edited this video so you can see what makes us Mozzers tick when we aren’t building sweet SEO software.

We know a lot of you, in the community, have random hobbies like us — we’d love to hear about them! Please share them with us in the .

Looking for more information on all the cool stuff you just saw? We have that for you, too!

Check out my movie, The Last Buck Hunt, on Amazon Prime.

If you want to sing Teenage Dirtbag like Chiaryn, start with this karaoke wiki.

David would like for you to check out his Seattle-based band, Your Favorite Friend.

The Modern Quilt Guild is a great place to meet other quilters and find meet-ups to show off your work.

If you're looking for a great community around knitting, Alex recommends Ravelry.

In the mood for some pop punk? Check out Kevin's old band, Miracle Max. (But we also secretly think you should check out this article as well.)

Abe would like for you to know more about making old-school gaming beats by checking out Chip Music’s forum.

It's really cool to see that Katie does martial arts at Seven Star Women's Kung Fu, because it's rare to see schools like this just for ladies.

Looking for beautiful pictures from around the world? Peep Kristina's photography.

Looking to get super duper ripped like Lucas? Learn more about Bodypump.

Looking to adopt a dog in the Seattle area? Janisha recommends starting your adoption search now.

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#What Makes Mozzers Tick? (An April Fools' Day Alternative)

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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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How Breaking the Fourth Wall Sparks Great Storytelling

Your marketing firewall can get between you and your audience.

Last year I wrote a content piece about live streaming (I was honored that it was a top ten post on Convince and Convert for 2016, and thanks to Brian Fanzo, whom I interviewed in the article). The piece focused on how brands are finding success by letting users in on behind-the-scenes events. It’s also something I wrote about in my book, Stop Boring Me! It’s time to break the fourth wall in storytelling. That’s key to brand success in 2017.

Company walls are porous anyway. Whatever happens in companies does not stay there. There is no “us” and “them”—there is only a “we.” It is time for companies to take this artifice that gets between themselves and audiences down.

It’s time to break the fourth wall in storytelling—the key to brand success in 2017. Click To Tweet Break the Fourth Wall

Breaking the fourth wall happens in performance when an actor (improviser, comedian, etc.) interacts with the audience and brings them into the performance. It creates the “we.” It says to people that there is no wall between us and the audience. And, in the corporate space, it signals that there is no wall between the company and its customers.

Truly, there isn’t—there is only the shared “we.” Improvisers (I am a businessperson and an improviser) know this well. Without your best customers, you have no brand. They own the brand, so it’s time to let them in on where it makes sense. As I said to the attendees at the Visual Storytelling Institute Conference when I gave my keynote, “When you break the fourth wall to engage your audience, you create magic.” Because when you allow people to participate in the direction of the experience as it happens, you create a shared experience of “we.”

This is a storytelling imperative for companies this year.

How Can Brands Break the Fourth Wall?

Here are a just a few ways to let users in. You can also reference some of these ideas in my article on 10 ways to kill boring content.

1. Explore Behind-the-Scenes Live Video

Allow your users backstage and behind the scenes with live video. Fashion companies have done this well, certain tech conferences have done this, and Target has done this especially well with fashion (they did a behind-the-scenes of the commercial the company did with Gwen Stefani, for example). Target could go even further, for example, and allow real kids in to test toys during holidays.

2. Bring Them Along for the Journey

Allow customers in on your next steps. Starbucks does this: They invite their VIP customers to tour their headquarters and meet with CEO Howard Schultz to preview new products, ideas, and experiences and give feedback on what’s new with the company. That builds great relationships with micro-influencers. One of their biggest micro-influencers is Starbucks Melody.

3. Embrace User- and Employee-Generated Content

Co-create content with your users and partners (as well as employees). Ask them to share their experiences with you. Tough Mudder does an amazing job—most of their content is user-created based on their group participation experiences (community videos are great!). It creates the “we.” GoPro does the same thing (its Instagram feed is all customer videos). This allows people to share their world so others can experience that same point of view. We will see more of this, especially as VR and AR become more pervasive in storytelling and in commercially viable applications beyond just gaming.

4. Co-Create with Customers

Co-create products and services with users. Dell does this with features on Ideastorm, and so does Proctor & Gamble. What percent of innovations, products, or service ideas come from your customer communities?

5. Encourage Customer Storytelling

Allow customers to tell their stories of your brand, and use that as your content. Let go a bit, and trust your best employees and customers. Your best customers want you to succeed. Let them help you. Lay’s Do Us a Flavor contest is a great example here. So is IBM’s Smarter Planet.

6. Build Vibrant Community

Build a community where your ideal users advise and give feedback as well as help other users. Spiceworks does a great job here, as does Intuit’s Quickbooks community. In these communities, the glue that keeps people coming back is that users develop relationships with other users by helping each other.

Let your best users into your world. Let them help you be better. Start with small things—video behind-the-scenes tours and Q&A sessions can help, as can asking your users to create content or co-create it with you. Start small if it’s new. Just start somewhere. Your brand doesn’t talk at users; it’s owned by them. They decide what your brand is. It’s time marketing acted like it.

How will you take the company wall down? I would love to hear from you.

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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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The Golden Age of Social Media Influencers (WangHong) in China

There are more than 800 million internet users in China, who are permanently connected to their mobiles, tablets, and computers. Despite this huge number of potential online consumers many new companies entering the market struggle to attract customers. How can you target the Chinese market online more effectively? What new strategies are brands and companies

Author information

Olivier Verot

Olivier Verot contributes a monthly column on Chinese Social Media. Olivier, who describes himself as, "A French man lost in China for several years," speaks Chinese, reads Chinese, and uses Chinese social media almost everyday. Passionate about Digital Marketing, in 2012 he realized his dream : to open an agency to live from his passion. Olivier likes to share his knowledge with others, exchange ideas, and is always open to meeting new and interesting people in Shanghai.

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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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Who’s Reading Your Blog?

Who’s reading your blog? How much do you know about your visitors and readers, really? This is a very important question to have an answer to, and one that many fail to seek an answer to. Preferring instead to focus on the numbers. But is that enough? Do YOU know who’s reading your blog?Why do

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Lilach Bullock

Lilach Bullock contributes a monthly column on blogging. Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street. She’s a hugely connected and highly influential entrepreneur. Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers and was crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle. A recipient for a Global Women Champions Award for her outstanding contribution and leadership in business. When Lilach isn’t working she enjoys spending time with her family and is an avid fan of Zumba. +Lilach Bullock

Who’s Reading Your Blog? by Lilach Bullock -Maximize Social Business

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#Who’s Reading Your Blog?

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How to Use Facebook Stories for Marketing

Is video part of your marketing strategy? Are you wondering how Facebook’s short-form video format could help your business? Facebook Stories brings a new video format to Facebook that closely resembles Instagram Stories. In this article, you’ll discover what you need to know to succeed with Facebook Stories. About Facebook Stories If you’ve not used

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Schema.org Just Released New Restaurant Menu Markup &mdash; Here's How to Get Started

Posted by TouchPointDigital

By now, most people who follow SEO are familiar with structured data, the Schema.org vocabulary, and rich snippets. Even those who know very little about SEO appreciate the benefits of adding structured data to their websites, namely that they might be able to get rich snippets in search results.

Of course, the main benefit of structured data is that it helps search engines better understand your content, which in turn helps them rank it more appropriately in search results. But we’re not here to discuss the what and why about structured data; there are plenty of other articles online that have covered that topic nicely.

Now, while Schema.org is not a comprehensive vocabulary that specifically covers every type of business — and it’s not meant to be — any business can use it to mark up their website’s content. But there’s one industry that so far has been rather limited as to what they could do with schema: restaurants.

Sure, it’s true that restaurants could always mark up the usual information such as their name, address, phone number, hours and so on. But when it came to marking up the most important information on their website — their menu — the only thing available to restaurants was one lonely menu property. That property could either point to the URL where their menu could be found, or they could mark up their entire menu simply as text. There was no way of truly marking up individual menu items and their prices, let alone specifying different types of menus such as breakfast, lunch, dinner, and so on.

Well, restaurant owners (and those who do SEO for restaurants) — rejoice! With their latest release, Schema.org has added several new properties and types that will allow marked-up menus to truly be "structured" data. And while this article is addressed particularly to restaurants, any business that serves food or drinks (such as coffee shops, bakeries, cafes, bars, and so on) can use these new properties and types to mark up their menu(s).

The new menu properties & types

The first thing you'll notice when you visit the http://ift.tt/WlfUpY page is that the menu property has been replaced with the hasMenu property. But if your current markups are still using the old menu property, don’t worry — everything will still work until you get around to updating things.

Here’s what else has been added for restaurant menus:

A new menu type. Menus officially become entities in Schema.org with their own properties and subtypes.

The new Menu type includes a hasMenuItem property. This property would be used to point to the (also new) MenuItem schema type, which is what would be used to mark up individual menu items.

Since most restaurants feature a few menus such as one for breakfast, one for lunch and one for dinner, there is a new hasMenuSection property and a MenuSection type that can be used to mark up the various menus. And you can also use it to mark up the different sections of each particular menu such as the appetizers, salads, main courses, and desserts on a dinner menu.

For each MenuItem, we’re able to mark up the name, description, price, and nutritional information. And while it’s not new to schema, you can also use the suitableForDiet property to denote if the menu item is low calorie, low fat, low salt, vegan, gluten-free, or suitable for various other restricted diets.

How to mark up restaurant menus with Schema.org

As you can see, our ability to mark up menus has become much more robust. So let’s put it all together now with some examples. We’ll be using JSON-LD, since that’s what Google prefers, and we’ll be marking up the menu of an Italian restaurant.

On the home page

On every page of the website, especially the home page, we want to point search engines in the right direction as to where the menu can be found. Keeping in mind that Google’s guidelines state that we should only mark up content that’s visible on the page, we can’t exactly include the entire menu in our home page markup unless the entire menu is published there. Instead, we’ll simply use the hasMenu property on the home page to point to the menu page, like this:

In fact, on any page of your website that includes some schema markup, you could use the hasMenu property to point to the URL of the menu page.

When you have more than one menu

Now, in our example, the restaurant only serves dinner and has only one menu. But sometimes restaurants are open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and of course have separate menus for each. In that case, we would do this on the home page:

"hasMenu": [ { "@type": "Menu", "name": "Breakfast", "url": "http://ift.tt/2nNj99N" }, { "@type": "Menu", "name": "Lunch", "url": "http://ift.tt/2oshF86" }, { "@type": "Menu", "name": "Dinner", "url": "http://ift.tt/2nNhJw1" } ],

Starting the menu page markup

Switching our attention to the actual menu page, let’s say that the menu was only served between 5:00pm and 11:00pm. So, on the menu page, our markup would begin like this:

Marking up sections of the menu

Next, we can begin marking up the various sections of the menu and the individual menu items. First, we’ll start with the appetizers. For the first appetizer, we’ll include in our markup the name, a brief description, and the price, which should be the minimum for any menu item. In our second appetizer markup example, we’ll also include an image, the nutritional information, and the fact that it’s gluten-free:

"hasMenuSection": [ { "@type": "MenuSection", "name": "Appetizers", "hasMenuItem": [ { "@type": "MenuItem", "name": "Fried Eggplant", "description": "Served with Italian red gravy.", "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "7.95", "priceCurrency": "USD" } }, { "@type": "MenuItem", "name": "Fried Calamari", "description": "Served with Italian red gravy or honey mustard.", "image": "http://ift.tt/2os9Rn3", "suitableForDiet": "http://ift.tt/2nNa5lC", "nutrition": { "@type": "NutritionInformation", "calories": "573 calories", "fatContent": "25 grams", "carbohydrateContent": "26 grams", "proteinContent": "61 grams" }, "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "7.95", "priceCurrency": "USD" } } ] },

By the way, schema dietary restriction enumerations also include DiabeticDiet, HalalDiet, HinduDiet, KosherDiet, LowCalorieDiet, LowFatDiet, LowLactoseDiet, LowSaltDiet, VeganDiet, and VegetarianDiet. Feel free to use one or more of these enumerations when they apply.

Marking up the menu items

Let’s say we’ve marked up all of the appetizers and we’re ready to begin marking up the next menu section, which in our case are the soups. Sometimes menu items such as soups are available in two or more sizes. We can mark up the available options by using a separate offer markup for each along with the eligibleQuantity property, like this:

{ "@type": "MenuSection", "name": "Soups", "hasMenuItem": [ { "@type": "MenuItem", "name": "Lobster Bisque", "offers": [ { "@type": "Offer", "price": "6.75", "priceCurrency": "USD", "eligibleQuantity": { "@type": "QuantitativeValue", "name": "Cup" } }, { "@type": "Offer", "price": "9.95", "priceCurrency": "USD", "eligibleQuantity" : { "@type": "QuantitativeValue", "name": "Bowl" } } ] }, { "@type": "MenuItem", "name": "Creole Seafood Gumbo", "offers": [ { "@type": "Offer", "price": "6.75", "priceCurrency": "USD", "eligibleQuantity": { "@type": "QuantitativeValue", "name": "Cup" } }, { "@type": "Offer", "name": "Bowl", "price": "9.95", "priceCurrency": "USD", "eligibleQuantity" : { "@type": "QuantitativeValue", "name": "Bowl" } } ] } ] },

Putting it all together

After we’ve marked up all of the soup items, we can move on to marking up the other menu sections and items using the same format. And that’s it. Putting it all together, our JSON-LD menu markup would look something like this:

Of course, this is just an abbreviated example of a marked-up menu; we would certainly include more information about the restaurant as well. But hopefully you now understand how to mark up the various menu sections and items.

So, after all of that, what you’re probably wondering about now is…

Will Google use this?

Good question. To be honest, providing a definitive answer to that question right now is impossible. But if pressed, I would say, "Yes, it’s very likely."

Consider what Google already knows and does with restaurant menu content. If a restaurant has published their menu on a third-party site like SinglePlatform, Google can pull the data and display it in search results:

Fortunately, SinglePlatform marks up restaurant menus with structured data, albeit the "old way" by using the ItemList and ItemListElement schema types. But the fact that Google uses SinglePlatform’s structured data bodes well for these new menu types and properties, since they were specifically created for menus and are much more robust than what we previously had. Restaurants can do things now that they couldn’t do before with structured data.

We also know that Google’s goal is to display search results that are as accurate as possible. The problem with menus that are published on third-party sites is that they’re usually not kept up-to-date. Restaurant menus constantly change; which restaurant owner or manager has the time to update the menu on their website, on SinglePlatform, on Yelp, and on any other website that their menu is published on? I’m not telling restaurants to stop publishing their menus on those sites; they definitely still should. But by using the structured data markups that have become available, restaurant websites can now become the primary source that Google uses to gather data regarding what they serve.

And perhaps Google will begin implementing new rich snippets for restaurant menus and menu items — who knows? But at least we can now provide them with everything they need if they wanted to.

Let’s also not forget about how much voice search is growing. Wouldn’t it be awesome if, say, a pizza restaurant could attract new customers immediately because someone said, “Hey Google, which restaurants in New Orleans serve gluten-free pizza?” and Google knew exactly which restaurants did and what kinds of gluten-free pizzas they offered, all because of their thoroughly marked-up menus? That’s a situation that I could foresee happening.

The future of restaurant and menu markups

I realize that not every restaurant menu scenario is perfectly covered with these new menu properties and types, but hopefully you now at least have plenty to get started with. Keep in mind, too, that the Schema.org vocabulary continues to evolve and so will this particular area of schema. You're welcome to participate in the evolution of Schema.org through the discussions on Github. If you think that you have a great suggestion, please feel free to join the conversation.

And if you have any questions about the above, don’t hesitate to ask them in the comment section and I’ll do my best to help.

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#Schema.org Just Released New Restaurant Menu Markup &amp;mdash; Here's How to Get Started

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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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Excellent Landscaping Solutions in St. Joseph Mo

Excellent Landscaping Services in St. Joseph Mo In regards to lawn and landscaping services in Saint Joseph Missouri, Triple T Lawn Care is proud to offer superb, efficient, friendly landscaping in the St. Joseph Mo area metropolitan areas. With our experienced and pro landscaping crews, we are able to transform your lawn, garden, yard or

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#Excellent Landscaping Solutions in St. Joseph Mo

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Facebook Stories Launch Globally: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week Facebook Rolls Out Facebook Stories and Other Snapchat-like Camera Features Globally: Facebook rolled out a new in-app camera

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#Facebook Stories Launch Globally: This Week in Social Media

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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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6 Internal Gaps that Disrupt the Customer Experience

Gaps contribute to poor customer experiences. I have written about these in the past. I have also written about tools that can help brands close or eliminate these gaps. The stakes are high! A customer is 4 times more likely to buy from a competitor if the problem is service related vs. price or product related. (Bain

Author information

Joe Ruiz

This monthly Social Customer Experience Marketing column is contributed by Joseph Ruiz. Joseph is President of Strategic Marketing Solutions, a full-service marketing and consulting firm specializing in web-based integrated Relationship Marketing. Joseph thrives on the ever-changing nature of marketing in the digital age, embracing interactive opportunities, while applying three decades of hands-on expertise in online and traditional marketing. When he’s not helping business-makers navigate through complex marketing challenges, Joseph enjoys reading, working out and traveling just about anywhere…anywhere you can get a digital signal, that is. +Joseph Ruiz

6 Internal Gaps that Disrupt the Customer Experience by Joe Ruiz -Maximize Social Business

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#6 Internal Gaps that Disrupt the Customer Experience

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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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Google Analytics: How to Analyze the Behavior of Your Site Visitors

Do you want to learn more about how people use your website? Wondering how the Behavior reports in Google Analytics can help? To explore how to navigate the Behavior section of Google Analytics, I interview Andy Crestodina. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media

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#Google Analytics: How to Analyze the Behavior of Your Site Visitors

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Minimum Viable SEO: If You Only Have a Few Minutes Each Week... Do This! - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Even if you know — deep down in your heart of hearts — how important SEO is, it's hard to prioritize when you have less than 3 hours a month to devote to it. But there's still a way to include the bare minimum, even if you run on a tight schedule. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers a minimum viable SEO strategy to give those with limited time a plan going forward.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, Minimum Viable SEO. So if you only have a few minutes in a month, in a week to do some SEO, and I know many of you are professional SEOs, but you work with lots of folks, like content creators, clients, web developers, who have very, very limited time, what I want to try and do is provide a path for you of "do this if you have no other time in the week to do your SEO."

So let's say here's my calendar. It's February, so 28 days. Start of the month, you have an hour to give me, sometime in the first week of the month. It doesn't have to be, but that's a great way to go. At the start of each week, I'm going to ask for 10 minutes just to do a little bit of planning, and then each time you publish content, a very, very small amount of time, just 3 minutes.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but you can get a fair amount of solid SEO work. Especially if you're in an industry that is not hyper-competitive or if you're going after the right kinds of keywords, that aren't super competitive, you can really make a difference. If you're building up a lot of content over months and years, just following this simple protocol can really take your SEO to the next level.

Start of the month: 1 hour

So, all right, let's say we're at the start of our month. We have our hour. I want you to do one of two things, and this is going to be based on if you're technical SEO, meaning if your website is using WordPress and it's pretty much nicely crawlable, maybe you've signed up for Google Search Console, you don't see a lot of errors, there's not a lot of issues, you haven't created a bunch of technical data on your website in the past, great, fine, then you're going to be focused on keywords and content. A keyword to content map, which is something we've discussed here on Whiteboard Friday — I'd urge you to check that video out if you haven't yet — but I'm going to make an MVP version, a very, very small version that can help a little bit.

Keyword → content map MVP

Create a spreadsheet with valuable keywords...

That spreadsheet, I just want a spreadsheet with a few things in it, three things really. The most valuable keywords, so just the most valuable keywords that you know you're targeting or that you care about right now for your business. You think that people are searching for these keywords. Maybe you've done a little bit of keyword research. It could be for free, through Google's AdWords tool, or you could pay for something like Keyword Explorer for Moz, but, really, just 50 to 100 keywords in there.

...current rank and SERP features...

I want the current rank and whatever SERP features appear. You could even trim this down to just your current ranking and the top search SERP feature, so if it has a featured snippet, or if it has videos, or if it shows maps or news, whatever that is, tweets.

...and the URL targeting it (or a note to create content).

Then I want the URL that's targeting it. Or if you have no URL targeting it yet, you haven't yet created a piece of content that targets this keyword, put a little, "Okay, that's a 'needs to be created.' I need this before I can start targeting this keyword and trying to rank for it."

You're going to update this weekly. You can do that totally manually. Fifty keywords, you can look them up in an hour. You can check the rankings. You can see where you're going. That's fine. It's a little bit of a pain in the butt, but it can totally be done. Or you could use a tool, Moz Pro, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Searchmetrics. There are all sorts of tools out there that'll track rankings and show you which features appear and whether your URLs are in there or not.

Okay, this is our keyword to content map. If you have that hour, but you know you have technical issues on the site, I'm going to urge you, before you focus on keywords and content, to make sure your technical SEO, your crawl is set. That means, step one, just a basic, simple crawl analysis. So for free, you can use Google Search Console. It will show you, most of the time with relative accuracy, big important errors like 404s and 500s and things that Google thought we're duplicate content and that kind of stuff.

If you want to pay, you can get a little bit more advanced features and some better filters and sorting and more frequency and those kinds of things. Moz Pro is fine for that. Screaming Frog is good, OnPage.org. All of these are popular in the SEO field.

Crawl/technical SEO review

Step two, you don't need to worry about every single crawl issue. I just want you to worry about the most severe, most important ones with your one hour. Those are things like 404s and 500s, which can really cause a lot of problems, duplicate content, where you potentially need to use a rel=canonical or a 301 redirect, broken links, where you just go in and fix the broken link to something that's not broken, missing or bad titles, title elements that are particularly long or include misspellings or that just don't exist, bad, very bad to have a page on the web with no title, and thin content or no crawlable content. Those are really the worst of the bunch. There's a number more that you could take care of. But if you only have that limited time, take care of this. If you've already done this, then we can move on here.

Every time you publish a piece of content: 3 minutes

Finally, last thing, but not the least, every time you publish a piece of content, I'm going to ask for just three minutes of your time, and that is going to be around this minimum viable pre-publish checklist.

The minimum viable pre-publish checklist

So does the content have a keyword target? Yes, no, maybe? If it doesn't, you're going to need to go and refer over to your keyword content list and make sure that it does. So if you're publishing something, I'm assuming you're not publishing a tremendous amount of content, but a little bit. Make sure everyone has a keyword target. Make sure, if you can, that it's targeting two to three additional keywords, related keywords. So let's say I'm going after something like Faberge eggs. I probably also want to target Carl Faberge, or I want to target Faberge eggs museums, or I want to target Faberge eggs replicas, so these other terms and phrases that people are likely searching for that could have the same or similar keyword intent, that could live on the same page, that kind of thing.

Is that keyword in the title, the main one you're targeting? Do you have a compelling meta description? Is your content doing a good job of truly answering the searchers' queries? So if they've searched for this thing, are you serving up the content they need?

Then, have you used related topics? You can get those from places like the MozBar or MarketMuse or SEO Zone or Moz Pro. Related topics are essentially the words and phrases that you should also be using in addition to your keyword to indicate to the search engines, "Hey, this is really about this topic." We've seen some nice bumps from that.

You're doing this every time you publish content. It only takes three minutes.

Start of the week: 10 minutes

And the last thing, at the start of the week, I'm also asking you for these 10 minutes to do one or two actions. I just want you to plan one or two actions at the start of the week to bump your SEO. It could include some publication stuff. But let's assume you're just doing these three minutes every time you do that.

Take a few actions to boost your SEO

Link outreach and targeting keywords with content

At the start of the week, the last thing you're doing is just choosing one of these, maybe two. I don't need more. I want you to do something like link outreach. Reach out to a couple of high-potential targets. Maybe you use like a LinkedIn or SecTool to figure out people who are linking to two of your competitors. Or reach out to partners, to friends, do some content contributions, just a little thing to get one or two links. Or maybe create some content that's targeting a missed keyword. When you do that, of course, you go through your pre-publish checklist.

Upgrade ranking content

Maybe you are upgrading some content that's already ranking, like number 5 through 20. That's where there's a lot of opportunity for a high-value keyword to get bumped up. You could just do little things, like make sure that it's serving all of these items, try and get it a featured snippet, identify content that might be old, that needs a refresh, that's not serving the searcher intent as well because the information in there is old.

Contribute off-site content

Or you could try contributing some offsite content. That could be to places like YouTube, maybe you've seen videos show up for something, guest posts, a forum where you contribute, answers some questions on Quora, contribute something to LinkedIn or Medium, just something to get your brand, your content, and hopefully a link out there to a different audience than what's already coming to your site.

You do these things, right, you start the month with an hour. Every time you publish content, you put in 3 minutes, and at the start of the week, you put in 10 minutes to do a couple pieces of planning, this will take you a long way. Look, SEO professionals are going to do a lot more than this, for sure. But this can be a great start, a great way to get that SEO kicked off, to have a minimum viable SEO plan.

I look forward to your thoughts. And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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#Minimum Viable SEO: If You Only Have a Few Minutes Each Week... Do This! - Whiteboard Friday

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kraussoutenew-blog · 7 years

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Who Should Own Paid Distribution in Content Marketing?

More and more, brands are realizing that the promise of last decade—”build it and they will come content marketing”—doesn’t work. There are only 10 positions on the first page of Google, and social media channels have long figured out how to get brands to pay them: squash their organic visibility.

This problem is further exacerbated by the sheer volume of content being created and published every day. Most surveys show that marketers are planning to create even more content year over year, too. Thus, content promotion and distribution are more important than ever.

Creation-to-Distribution Ratio

Ben Young is the CEO of Nudge, a native content platform built to manage, measure and optimize campaigns. He shares, “Television executives spend five dollars on distribution for every one dollar spent on creation.” Based on my own research, content marketers have this reversed, spending one dollar on distribution for every five dollars spent on creation.

Distribution Budgets

Attitudes have got to change, or brands will continue to struggle with visibility for their content. For some brands, attitudes are changing. However, legacy silos are making it increasingly difficult for marketers to access the budgets they need to do native advertising (long-form, social, and programmatic) for content distribution. So, the question is, who should own content distribution budgets?

Should it be the PPC and display team, social, content marketing, PR, marcom, agencies, or the media buyer/paid media department? Last year at Content Marketing World, I had half a dozen folks tell me that they get what I’m saying, but they (the content team) don’t have access to the budgets needed for paid distribution. It’s controlled by another department. The more people in content marketing I speak to, the more I hear this same sentiment.

Native Ad Tech Is Partly to Blame

While the onus for this problem primarily resides in the silos brands have internally, native ad tech is partially to blame, too. Why? Simply put, their technology was created with the PPC and display teams and media buyers in mind. They adopted and integrated the same acronym-happy language PPC and display people know and love. They adopted their KPIs, too.

For the most part, native ad tech was not built with content marketers in mind—the very people that need these tools the most. Stick a creative in a dashboard filled with display language, and they’ll likely not have a clue on what to do.

AdYouLike estimates that global spending on native advertising will be $59 billion in 2018. I estimate that the majority of future growth will be from content marketers adopting native advertising. Exactly how much of this growth will be determined by a change in attitudes, broken-down silos, and the propensity for native ad tech to cater to content marketers.

Visit any of these native ad tech vendors’ websites, and you’ll see the clear majority of them do not cater to content marketers.

Click image to access a full screen, high resolution .JPG and .PDF, plus research methodology and definitions.

The above infographic displays 272 native ad tech companies that can help content marketers distribute their content and get the visibility they need to hit their KPIs. Since the publication of this infographic, another 21 companies have identified themselves as belonging on the graphic.

These are the vendors content marketers need to get familiar with. A small minority of these companies do specifically cater to content marketers and not so much the media buyers. Until we start having more conversations with these companies, the five-to-one creation to distribution ratio will remain, and the budgets we need will be stuck in a silo we’re not in.

So Who Should Own Paid Distribution?

One forward-thinking brand I recently spoke with busted up their silos and put owned, earned, and paid media all on the same team, working side by side. In a perfect world, that’s the machine to optimize content marketing results. Unfortunately, we don’t all live in a perfect world.

Historically, brands have concentrated their distribution budgets around mid- to bottom-funnel content. Digitally, that means PPC, display, and various sponsorships. This is how the silos were created in the first place. It was okay for creative to be far removed from distribution.

However, content marketers are mostly dealing with top-funnel content, where creative is highly important. In this case, distribution needs to reside as close to creative as possible. If your social media team has its own creative department, then native advertising on social media needs to be in that department. However, if PR owns top-funnel creative, then distribution budgets should reside there. If content marketing is its own department, then they need their own distribution budget.

The bottom line for brand executives is this: Move distribution budgets as close to creative as possible for content marketing success, and start thinking like TV ad executives. For native ad tech companies, start catering to the needs of content marketers. They need your help but don’t care about CPMs and clicks. They want engagement.

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#Who Should Own Paid Distribution in Content Marketing?

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