Category Archives: Content Marketing

My Top 10 Takeaways from Digital Summit, Chicago

Last week I participated in the lively, educational and nerd-worthy fun Digital Summit in Chicago.   This was such a worthwhile, information-overloaded event for digital marketers.

I got many practical, cost-effective ideas from speakers who worked for familiar organizations including LinkedIn, Twitter, Spotify, Hubspot, Instagram, the Moth and other marketing firms, creative agencies, and marketing users.

Here are the Top 10 Takeaways I got from the event:

  1. “We can never get control of our marketing until we get control of our data”. My favorite line, from Matt Hertig of Alight Analytics
  2. On your email efforts, your FROM line should be from a trustworthy or recognizable person or brand. And make that SUBJECT line compelling, since 47% of people open their emails based on the subject line.
  3. Things that artists do well on social media that brands can learn from. 1—authenticity 2-frequency 3—engage 4—use video.
  4. Build your own known and owned audience for success in content marketing. Then amplify your content.
  5. Translate your company’s purpose into marketing messages with provocative content (like REI).
  6. You have about 8 seconds to engage with a subscriber on your email effort.
  7. Executive buy-in is key to implementing marketing strategy and implementaion.
  8. Brand activism is increasing with frequency and intensity.
  9. To build community, engage with other accounts in a meaningful way. Are you doing or just saying?
  10. On Twitter, most stories trend within the first 48 hours.

Bonus of #11. –Video, video, video! The use of video increases engagement, partially because visuals can be absorbed 60,000 times faster than text. Expect to see more growth in video in 2019 since many of the speakers talked about using it.

I hope that most of you will find at least 1 thing on this list that you can incorporate into your marketing efforts. Feel free to contact me if you want to have a deeper discussion about any of these.

The journey continues.  Cindy

P.S. . If you want to read more of the ideas I got from the conference, scroll through my Twitter feed (@CindyCardinal1) from the week of 9/27/18

 

Training–Back to Basics

How often do you think about the basics of doing your job?

Recently I had a college student with zero experience help create a series of landing pages and emails for a client. I had to explain publishing A-to-Z and the audience development process in far more detail than I usually think about it.

We get so entrenched in our daily responsibilities that we forget how intricate familiar tasks can be, when broken down to individual steps.   Taking the time to verbally explain  (or write down) a project allows you to see your work in a new light.

Things my intern learned from me:

–why media companies market a variety of products

–what white papers are

–what a landing page is

–how companies store and use collected data

–the intricacies involved in setting up an email, the response form, the landing page, the download, and follow up messaging

She said she never thought about the entire creative and business process of how and why and who sets up such efforts, yet she is online daily.

Training a novice also made me also think about the entire client on-boarding process. When I begin working with a new customer, I look at the assignment from others’ perspective. I gauge the goals, the knowledge level of other team members, learn their lingo, their communication style, their technologies.

Every project is varied, which is what I so enjoy about consulting. As the project progresses I try to balance handling on the daily responsibilities while keeping the client’s goals in mind.

I have been consulting for 20 years so am used to my crazy, varied days. I welcome new projects where I can challenge my knowledge level, learn new platforms and skills.

It’s probably too much for my intern to grasp now, since she was learning fundamentals.   But I think that practical experience was valuable to learn about the media industry, marketing responsibilities. And it allowed me to move ahead on more strategic work while she successfully completed the assignment.

The journey continues.

Cindy

GDPR is Coming–Are you Prepared? Part 1

Apologies in advance that this post is so long. There is a lot of information to cover…

GDPR is THE hot topic for many businesses right now—what is it? How will it impact US based marketers? And how can we prepare?

GDPR is the acronym for General Data Protection Regulation, the sweeping new privacy laws impacting companies that collect and use personal data from people residing in the EU. Customer privacy is the main reason these new regulations were created. They will impact the way that companies collect, use, and update data on current and new customers.

These new laws go into effect 25 May 2018 –Less than three months away!

The penalties for not complying are stiff– the greater of €20 million or 4% gross revenues.   That’s why it’s so critical to have an organizational plan for dealing with customers from the 27 states of the EU.

I have attended two webinars, talked to people, and done a lot of online research about GDPR in recent weeks to learn more about these new regulations. The legislation is long, wordy, complicated, and a little unclear with direction for exact requirements to avoid problems. Very convenient. The key to success will be to have an organizational plan for how to deal with these changes.

There are a plethora of checklists online that your organization can use to better understand GDPR and implement a compliance plan. I’ve synthesized a couple of them here into six key steps:

  1. Understand the law—the new regulations were basically created to ensure user privacy. There’s no differentiation between business and personal use. Both the companies collect the data and send out messages hold some responsibility for the data usage.
  2. Know which data is regulated—
  • Basic contact information (ie. Name, mailing address, etc)
  • Web data such as location and IP address
  • Health and genetic data
  • Biometric data
  • Racial or ethnic data
  • Sexual orientation

We are accountable for the data we hold

  • Why are we collecting certain data points?
  • How did we get the data?
  • How long will we retain the data?
  • How secure is the data?
  • Do we ever share this with a third party? How are their procedures?

Other privacy issues that the consumer have include the

  • Right to be forgotten
  • Right to opt out at ANY time
  • Right to review why/how data was collected
  • Right to access data
  • Right to data portability, meaning take it with them if they move/change jobs/etc
  1. Review current data collection, storage procedures, privacy policies.    
  2. Update current EU customers on your database, forms, and privacy policies.
  3. Run a gap analysis on website/data collection flow and implement additional changes as needed. In addition, educate other departments about the new rules.
  4. Reevaluate and revise as needed.

Other terms and changes we need to be aware of:

  • The GDPR considers three types of roles within organizations:
    • Controller—who determines the purpose and means of data collections (the “how” and “why”)
    • Processor—who processes the data on behalf of the controller.
    • There will be cases where publishers can be both a controller and a processor, in the case where we send out an email for a client.
  • Appoint a data protection officer (DPO), to oversee and manage GDPR program. Technically only certain organizations need a DPO, but pretty much everything I’ve heard says that for good business practices most organizations will appoint a DPO.
  • Prepare for data breach. Any data breach should be reported within 72 hours. The webinars I listened to say that’s almost impossible– but that’s the guideline. An interesting fact that that I heard is that 75% of data breaches are caused by internal personnel. So any staff that sends out emails needs to be educated on the new laws.

Part 2 of this post will offer some steps to  properly vet current names on your database and update your websites.  It is now posted and can now be found here.

One of my favorite more detailed checklists online can be found here.

DISCLAIMER THAT I am not an attorney so this should for sure not to be construed as legal advice. This post is MY interpretation of what I have learned about GDPR so far, as a marketer who tries to stay on top of audience development and marketing issues. Any legal instructions should come from an attorney with knowledge of GDPR regulations.

The journey continues.  Cindy

The Case for Audience Development Professionals as Content Marketers

Experienced magazine audience development professionals should be perfectly poised to be online content deliverers. Every day we communicate with customers and gather or update their demographics; we build, maintain and update databases; we deliver a brand to a targeted audience; we analyze our customer profiles and find new audiences; we test new technologies and channels; and we deal with customer service issues.

However, I deal with media/information companies who still keep the magazine audience development experts in distinct silos from online content.–often with a very firm wall between these groups. I don’t understand this.

With the skills we have and our knowledge of the audience database, we should be able to help you push electronic content/offers in many forms: e-newsletters, white papers, research, event attendees, video, etc. The final form of the offering is what has changed, not necessarily the methods of reaching your targeted audience.

There are certainly areas of the online marketers expertise that might be different, including technical knowledge of the online platforms that are used to promote your brands.  Combining the competence of these two areas can create a powerhouse marketing area that helps deliver your content to reach advertiser goals and get more awareness for your brands and visitors to your sites.

The journey continues.

Cindy

Importance of Gearing Marketing Content to the Buying Process

Who are your marketing messages created for?  Do you have materials for people in every stage of the buying process? Especially on your website, you should provide content to potential and current customers involved in each stage of the buying process.

A very simple flow of the buying process is:

  1. Awareness—where the buyer identifies the need or problem
  2. Consideration—research options
  3. Conversion—make purchase
  4. Post-purchase behavior—is the buyer happy? Will they purchase again?

Think about how you make purchases, both professionally and personally. If you find value in a company and are HAPPY with your experiences, you will hopefully think of them first as a resource the next time you buy a product or service that they offer.

Become the trusted vendor/partner who customers want to learn from, engage with, purchase from, brag about. Create evangelists who will share their stories in person, on social media, and even in comments on your website.

According to the Harvard Business Review, it costs 5 to 25 times to acquire new customers than maintain new ones. It also takes TIME to find new customers. So, once someone becomes a customer, with your content and outreach you should encourage them to stay engaged and make future purchases from you.

Future posts will walk through each step of the buying purchase.

C

White Papers & Lead Generation-Part 2

Promoting white paper downloads helps media companies offer targeted leads to advertisers, increase their web traffic, and improve their own database. The first part of this 2-part blog post discussed what white papers are, how they are used, and why they are so popular today.

In doing research for that post, I visited many media web sites. I saw a huge disparity in the amount and types of data that firms are collecting for a free white paper download. Brands are asking a range of collecting no data (why? unless you are just looking for distribution quantity, but no ability to follow up) to asking for complete contact information and detailed demographic questions.

What information you require for download will depend on 1—what will help you identify an existing customer or capture a new one 2—what information you need to give back to an advertiser and 3—what demographics you deem imperative to capture for your database, for improved marketing.

One of the quickest registration starters is to ask for just an email address on screen 1.

FR reg p 1 2016-05-23 at 3.57.39 PM

CRN email only at 3.46.02 PM

If a customer is in your system, then the link where a customer completes contact information can be pre-populated. (ie. their name, company already typed in the boxes). If it is a new customer, then that person completes the contact information form. Below are the page 2 links for the previous screens:
FP contact demos 2016-05-23 at 3.57.29 PM

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notice that above they are collecting some demographic information with the registration questions.  The form still looks short, since the demo questions have drop down options.

CRN addr 2016-05-23 at 3.46.24 PM

The quicker the process for your customer, the higher the chance they may visit your site again when they have an informational need.

Other questions to consider as you set up your forms:

What other information do you need to capture on the reg form, to make the lead usable for both you and the advertiser? This CFO form is very simple.

CFO simple reg 2016-05-23 at 4.08.43 PM

This one includes phone numbers, which I saw required on very few forms.  I wonder if they tested the form to see if that requirement impacted download rates.

CFO detail reg

Do you need a mailing address now? Or can a sales person ask for that data later, once the lead is captured?  That might improve response rates.

For existing customers, are there some demographics missing from their profile? Can you ask for one piece of it when they make a download?

Can you test the questions asked on reg forms? Testing often shows there is a balance of the amount of information collected and the value of the “free” download.

I think that you are limited in your form creation by your front end and back end systems, time to create and manage them, and your imagination.  This process is changing dramatically, driven by both user whims and advertiser demands. The fluctuations may decrease with in a year, but right now I think it’s a bit of the Wild West.  Testing, tracking, changing, test again.

The journey continues.

C