Content Marketing Quickie

Content Marketing Quickie June 25 2019

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Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of June 25, 2019.

 

-Who runs content at your company? Somebody? Nobody? Half of a person? Well if you’re thinking about how to staff up so you’ll have at least a reasonable internal content capability, there are some essential roles you should be looking at. And these suggestions come from none other than Robert Rose at CMI, who’s certainly been around and seen what shortcuts shouldn’t be made when you’re trying to get content done. He says why should content get any less thought put into roles and responsibilities than other departments in the org? How you resource content pretty much reveals whether or not you get it, and how serious you are about it. Robert says this content team should be built around the purpose, creation, management, and flow of content that creates value for customers. And these pieces should certainly be there in some form or another. Chief content officer or Content Marketing Director. Doesn’t have to be c-suite but they’re the leader and champion for content and the audience. And they make sure everything in all the silos connects consistently to the brand story and makes sense. Of equal importance, a Content Strategy Director who lead the persona work and experience design. They can also make clear what technology needs to accomplish. But then another kind of Content Strategy Director might do backend stuff like content processes, taxonomies, governance, audits, and SEO strategy. Next you might have a Managing Editor running day to day editorial and production flow. Then there’s a Production Director or essentially a Creative Director that makes sure things look great/are great. Although Creative Directors always seem to come from design world, today they need to lead cross-functional specialists, so personally, I think the days of Creative Directors coming from design and rarely from video and editorial or over. Robert’s dream team is rounded off with an Audience development manager, an Influencer wrangler, and a technical content manager to run the CMS, the DAM, marketing automation platforms and what not. You can now look at your current approach to content staffing and get a stomachache.

https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/06/core-roles-content-team/

 

-B2B, that’s where one bee tells another bee where the honey is. It’s also business to business selling and Marketing Insider Group rounded up some info you B2B marketers are probably going to want to know. The current figure is 57%. That’s how much of the buying has been done by prospects before you even get contacted. Kinda makes you think the content you have out there representing you needs to be on point. 57% is also the number of B2B marketers who said their biggest challenge is getting target audiences to engage, that where you content geniuses can come into play. And you might find an open door, because 30% of B2B marketers think content syndication is their most successful lead gen tactic. 56% have upped their spending on content creation and 60% make at least one piece of content a day. It’s not always video of course, even though by the end of this year 80% of all web traffic will be video. Of course, every time we look at snapshots like this, we also find some things that makes us go yikes. Only 42% of marketers are talking to their customers to understand what kind of content they need. Stupid customers, what do they know? We’ll make what we think they should want! Only 25% of marketers are highly confident they can quantify ROI, even though they will regularly ask for it without even knowing what they’re asking for. 38% of B2B sales people are so disenfranchised with marketing, they source leads by themselves and don’t even bother with leads that come in from marketing. And here’s my favorite, this comes from HubSpot, 18% of B2B sales professionals don’t even know what a CRM is. I’m a little lightheaded, I’m not sure I can go on with the next story.

https://marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/30-sales-and-marketing-stats-you-need-to-know-for-2019/

 

-Nope, turns out I’m fine. I know you were worried about me. So let’s talk about video since it will be 80% of all web traffic. Those smarty pantses at Vidyard, very cool people when it comes to using video for business, put out their Business Benchmark Report on B2B orgs. And this info is pretty verifiable because they get it from first-party data from 324,000+ videos that were published over the course of a year. Here’s what we now know. Videos are getting shorter. The average went from 6.07 mins in 2017 to 4.07 mins in 2018. And maybe as a reward for that, audiences are watching longer. 52% watched all the way to the end, and that number goes up to 68% if your video’s under a minute. B2B video viewers are mostly watching in the middle of the week, Thursday seems to be the sweet spot. And they like mornings, between 9 and 11a. Now for all the talk about how mobile everyone and everything is, business videos are still overwhelmingly watched on desktop, 87%. Mobile is creeping up but dang, maybe those B2B videos shouldn’t be shot vertically. As for who’s making the most video, you’d think it’s the giant companies with over 5,000 employees and you’d be right. But coming in second are the little guys with 31-200 employees. What you mid-size companies are thinking, I have no idea.

More small and medium-sized companies are using a mix of internal and external production resources, because they know they need a lot of content, but they want to keep the quality high. More businesses are getting serious about video analytics too, they at least want intermediate info. Well swell, but what kind of videos should you be making? If you’re like most, you’re making webinars, demos, and social media videos. B2B companies are also doing explainer videos, product videos, and customer videos. And, increasingly, businesses are waking up to the fact that sales needs video content to power each part of the buyer journey. 

https://www.martechadvisor.com/news/interactive-marketing/vidyard-reports-increase-in-video-analytics-by-19-since-2018/

 

-Lastly, and quickly, there’s a whole new world of content marketing opening up and it’s apps for smart speakers. Jay Baer roles out some stats on just how big these Alexa’s of the world are being adopted. Edison says over 53M Americans now own a smart speaker. That’s an increase of 14M in one year, one of the fastest-adopted consumer technologies ever. Half of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. Look on your calendar app, that’s next freaking year! Beyond smart speakers, voice tech is getting embedded into…well, everything. Car, fridge, everything. Adobe found 91% of business decision makers are prepping big investments in voice, 44% will release a voice app this year. We will be talking more about this.

https://www.convinceandconvert.com/voice-activated-content/why-the-time-is-now-for-voice-activated-content/

 

That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. Okay, maybe you won’t share it without getting paid, but you can at least subscribe and mention it in passing as you’re talking to other marketing people. We’ll be back next week.