Content Marketing Quickie
Content Marketing Quickie July 9 2019
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Hey, it’s Stiles from Brand Content Studios and here’s your Content Marketing Quickie for the week of July 9, 2019.
-Your email list, love it, cherish it, nurture it and grow it. According to a McKinsey & Co study, it’s your best friend, and it’s 40x more effective at getting to your target audience than Twitter or Facebook. Yeah yeah, everybody, including all of us, complain about how much email we get, but it works doggone it. And Jason Aten gives us a few reasons why it works. First, gee only 3.8B use it, so it’s got reach to beat the band. And at least for now, email platforms don’t render you helpless against some algorithm that stops your message from going where you send it based on…I don’t know, some constantly changing who knows what? It can be customized, and those whiz bang marketing automation tools let you send things based on interactions far more than social media. And that’s good because email is also personal – it’s the home of direct one to one digital communication, especially where business is concerned. People might skip looking at their social channels for a few days, lord knows businesspeople don’t check LinkedIn or even get their LinkedIn messages, but people do check their email. Some studies say we check it up to 80 times a day. It’s permission based. Turns out liking a Facebook page means very, very little. It’s the lightest level of commitment someone can make to you other than completely ignoring you. But if someone gives you their email address, they’re serious about wanting to hear what you have to say. And finally, you get a level of analytics that’s far more useful to you than the assumptions and guesswork you have to engage in on other channels. You know who opened your emails, if they clicked on the links, what they did when they went to your site. That’s the kind of data that can really help you tweak things and get to closing faster. It’s also pretty easy to A/B test with email so the aforementioned tweaking can be accomplished. Now obviously there’s a right and wrong way to do email, and most of that revolves around the quality of the content you put on it and how you present it, but that content quality thing is kinda true of every channel now anyway.
-I’m a writer, I love writing, but from what I hear the robots and AI are going to replace me. I’m doomed and it’s right around the corner. But aside from putting super nice people like me out of work, this notion of AI creating blog posts and other text assets comes with a sort of dystopian risk. A risk that actually might render the whole endeavor pointless. Here’s the problem. Everyone’s worried about the manipulation of people politically with misinformation, but what about manipulating the entire search engine ecosystem with garbage content? These systems are actually getting pretty good at auto-creating something that looks relatively authentic. Now apply that capability to a system that relies on a high volume of content with grabby headlines and keyword manipulation. The machines can crank out vast amounts of that at scale and clutter up the Interwebs beyond anything you’ve ever imagined. Limitless sites and blogs and ads. They’ll look legit because AI can make posts look like what we’re used to, complete with quote outs and the author’s photo – which may or may not be a real person. But if you actually read these things, they’re of no real value to anyone actually seeking answers to something. In fact, they count on people like you and me to NOT read all the way through the articles we turn up through search. But Mike, you say, can’t Google tell the difference? Well they’ve always tried to stop people from gaming search, and you can bet they’re working on this issue, but as of today, AI’s limitless deluge might just be unstoppable. Fractl’s Kristin Tynski says there are “massive implications” for SEO and they’ve actually been using an AI tool called Grover, not for evil, but just to test how good AI is at inhuman content generation. Rowan Zellers is the one who made Grover, and he says for now, you can still tell an AI generated post from a real one. They themselves can spot them with 92% accuracy. But the abilities will get better and when that happens, SEO consultant Mike Blumenthal says it will attract spammers en masse, and as a sad side note, it could drive the cost of grinding oceans of worthless content way down. That’s when people who actually make worthwhile content will be expected to do it for 47 cents a month.
-Remember the classic scene from Seinfeld where he’s arguing with the lady at the rental car counter? He says, “You know how to take a reservation, you just don’t know how to hold the reservation. And really, that’s the most important part is the holding.” Well many businesses are that rental car company. They know how to get a customer; they just don’t know how to keep a customer. And considering how much it costs to get a new customer, the failure to keep happy customers is a truly epic and expensive fail. A Brightback study found 97% of large business leaders, from B2B, B2C and hybrid companies, say they’ve made customer retention a top priority. But some of those sectors are more serious than others. 68% of B2Bs are certain they prioritize retention appropriately, though 29% think they could be doing better. But only 44% of B2Cs feel like they’re doing a good enough job. But wow, check out small businesses. The Manifest found that 6%, only 6% are prioritizing keeping customers. Okay swell, well how do you keep a customer? Brightback found offering at-risk customers special deals is one of the top 3 most effective tactics in B2C. For B2B and hybrids, they like to test different discount offers when customers contact to cancel. They also like letting customers pause their subscription. But here’s where the real difference shows up. When it comes to customer retention objectives, most B2Cs said they want to improve satisfaction with better customer experiences and support. But only 14% of B2Bs are thinking that way. Instead they want to teach customers how to use the service and do better onboarding. Their baby’s not ugly, those stupid customers just have to learn to love it y’see.
https://www.marketingcharts.com/brand-related/brand-loyalty-109085
-Lastly, and quickly, Gavin O'Malley tells us that Forrester learned B2B marketers think their website is the most effective tool for early-stage demand-gen effectiveness. More than digital advertising, SEO, sales enablement, partner enablement or events. Okay, just one problem. After Forrester looked at 60 websites across 12 B2B industries, they found nearly every single one lacking. Laura Ramos said, “Most B2B marketers continue to fail miserably when it comes to creating content buyers find interesting, interactive, or compelling.” The number one offense, making prospects dig through a crowded maze of offerings and info to maybe find what they were looking for. B2B sites love big fat websites that are complicated and full of jargon. It’s makes them feel like bigshots and make site visitors, um, leave. But those same businesses will tell you they have no need for content strategists or creators. Forrester recommends “internalizing the customer mind-set” and adjusting content based on that. Crazy idea.
That’s the Content Marketing Quickie for this week. Big bump in downloads last week so thanks. You may have noticed by now I’m not really selling anything. It’s just news and some fun comments so maybe you’ll be cool with sharing it and telling people about it. Back next week.