Sixty to seventy percent of marketing content goes completely unused (Sirius Decisions). Companies are regularly creating pieces of content with the idea of interesting consumers, generating leads, and progressing people down the funnel, but then their efforts fall flat when they launch.
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How To Crush Content Marketing Through Newsletters, Nurturing, And Retargeting
1. Liam Moroney
Demand Generation Manager
NewsCred
@liamdmoroney
Gregory Kennedy
Director of Content Marketing
AdRoll
@IAmGKennedy
How To Crush Content
Marketing Through
Newsletters, Nurturing, and
Retargeting
+
3. About Me
Director, Content Marketing, AdRoll
A former designer and creative director.
Gregoryâs writing has been published in a
number of publications including: The
BBC, VentureBeat, YahooFinance and
Entrepreneur.com.
4. Content Marketing is Now Everywhere in B2C
Kraftrecipes.com
1 Billion Views a Year
Pepsi.com
Powered by Newscred Globally
5. Content Marketing is Now Everywhere in B2B
Adobeâs CMO.com
2 Editors / $1 Million Annual Budget
Nanagins
Big Investment in Data and Reports
6. But What Really Gets me ExcitedAbout Content Marketing
Digital content marketing is the most scalable approach to marketing, ever.
Traditional Media at Scale
Largest circulation magazine:
The Watchtower, 52 M Monthly Circulation
Largest televised event:
Superbowl, Seahawks vs. Patriots, 114 M Viewers
Largest radio program:
Tom Kent, 23 M Weekly Listeners
US Digital Media at Scale
Facebook: 1.4 B
WhatsApp: 700 M
LinkedIn: 468 M
Instagram: 300 M
Twitter: 280 M
Tumblr: 230 M
7. This is Driven by a Shift in Media Consumption Habits
We live in a digital first world:
â Time spent on digital is now greater than TV.
â This only happened in the last three years.
Marketers canât rely on TV like they have in the past:
â 57% of Millennials time spent watching television is
on computers, tablets, or smartphones.
â 28% of Millennials time spent is watching live TV.
Source http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/technology-media-
telecommunications/us-tmt-DDS_Executive_Summary_Report_Final_2015-04-20.pdf
8. And Consumers Like It
90% of consumers find custom content useful and 78% believe that organizations providing custom
content are interested in building good relationships with them.
68% of consumers spend time reading content from a brand they are interested in.
70% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles over ads.
From (NewsCred - 50 Stats You Need to Know About Content Marketing)
9. It Can Hard for Marketers to Execute
Itâs not interruption-driven, high production value, television style advertising online.
Content
People Like
Content Your
Company Likes
Shift to the left
10. Execution Matters More than Ever
Today, the best organizations donât just have great ideas and great people.
They are great at execution.
11. The Five Ways of
Content Marketing Kung Fu
1. Repurpose Your Best Ideas
2. Timing Matters
3. Always Focus on Scalability
4. Original Content is Most Effective
5. Educate Your Audience, Not Yourself
12. Thank You
âOf course fact is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.â
Mark Twain
Gregory Kennedy
Director, Content Marketing, AdRoll
gregory.kennedy@adroll.com
18. Great content
delivers ROI.
Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as
traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less.
Source: Hubspot 2014
19. How can we stand apart in a
crowded landscape?
26. of âbest-in-classâ B2B marketers rate blogs as
the most effective customer acquisition tactic.
78%
Source: Hubspot 2014
27. Fueling Our Newsletter
Custom Content
Share on-brand stories which are
created specifically for your brand.
Licensed Content
Boost credibility, publishing
cadence, and direct traffic with a
high-volume of fully-licensed,
compliant content.
28. People donât always remember what
you say or even what you do, but they
remember how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
â
â
31. What did we test?
1 Large Hero Image for 1st Article
2 2nd and 3rd Articles diminished
3 Not Designed with Mobile in
Mind
32. 1 Single Column Layout
2 2nd and 3rd Articles Equal Billing
3 Designed with Mobile in Mind
Version B:
33. A/B Test Results
⢠All links received an increased
number of clicks
⢠The 2nd article gained a 46%
increase in clicks.
⢠The footer link achieved a 175%
increase in clicks
34. ⢠Digestible content: Top 2 posts are infographics.
⢠The BuzzFeed effect: 4 of top 10 articles had headlines with words like: "top," "best," "most.â
⢠Know your audience: 35% of top 20 articles have the mention of "content marketing" or "content marketers.â
⢠Stats matter: 70% of top 10 articles have numbers in the headline.
⢠Stay familiar: 25% of top 20 articles have a brand name mentioned in the headline
- Ello, Vice, BuzzFeed, Nike, and Red Bull.
What NewsCred Learned from its Newsletters
ARTICLE SUBJECT OPEN RATE CLICK/OPEN RATE BRAND NAME? LISTICLE? INFOGRAPHIC? STATISTIC?
What Works Best for Digital Marketing in 2015? (Infographic) 25% 20% NO NO YES NO
Tumblr Starts Internal Creative Studio Tapping Its Own Users 18% 19% YES NO NO NO
10 Types of Content That Will Increase Your Website Traffic 21% 18% NO YES NO NO
BuzzFeed Traffic Grew 157% This Year + Their Latest
ReportâŚ
28% 20% YES NO NO YES
35. What can you test?
Subject Lines
Email Cadence
Personalization
Image Sizes
Time of Day
Content Lifespan
Text vs Image
Order of articles
# of Articles
Title Length
Link vs Button
Truncated length
38. What is Lead Nurturing?
1 Builds relationships with potential customers.
Buyers donât become buyers overnight. They need to self-educate, and
build trust with our brand.
2 Be there when theyâre READY to talk.
Not all leads are ready to purchase, so lead nurturing helps keep communication
going through the buying cycle until they are ready.
39. How do you measure success?
INCREASED MQLS MORE ACTIONSENGAGEMENT RATE
42. Nurturing Analysis
Low Friction Consumables
Based on analysis of our existing programs,
emails with the highest CTO (Click to Open)
ratio are low friction items such as
â SlideShare
â PDF
â Infographics
No guided path for visitors
Our Nurturing Streams provide leads with
quality content, and a relevant messaging
based on their level of activity, but does not
provide them with opportunities for hand
raising.
43.
44. Old Flow Layout
New Flow Layout
Intro
White
Paper
Product
Email
White
Paper
White
Paper
Product
Email
White
Paper
White
Paper
White
Paper
Product
Email
Intro
Blog
Informati
on
Content
You May
Like
PDF
Blog
Article
White
Paper
Talk to us
Blog
Article
Content You
May Like
Talk to us
49. Treat Your Readers Like VIPs Be Useful Keep it ShortShow Some Personality
Best Practices for Email Newsletter Distribution
50. Steps to Creating an Email Marketing Plan
Who will manage? What content will you
include?
Determine sending
frequency and goals
Make a schedule
Hinweis der Redaktion
Thanks Gregory. I wanted to start with a statistic that we continually fret over as marketers â according to Sirius Decisions, 60-70% of content developed by B2B marketers goes completely unused.
Itâs more important than ever to make sure that the content we are producing is done so in an intelligent, and effective way. This is something we keep top of mind when we develop our content marketing strategy.
In fact, in our quest to learn about our effectiveness, NewsCred did a case study of our own content marketing efforts, and proved that our marketing content directly influenced over $72 million dollars in customer lifetime value.
More so, we found that 90% of our deals touched at least 1 piece of content.
Today I want to go through some of the things we do everyday to influence sales with Content Marketing.
Iâm going to start by giving a brief outline of how we approach the content that we fill our pipeline with,
and then Iâll go a bit deeper by looking at some actual examples and findings from our own newsletters and nurturing program.
Then to wrap it up, Iâll go through some best practices.
So letâs jump right into our approach. It wonât surprise you to learn that at NewsCred â we think that quality content is king.
Content Marketing is not just another headcount in the social media department.
In fact - content is the connective thread of all marketing.
And it requires that brands and marketers fundamentally change their mindset.
Itâs not just all talk either â Content Marketing Generates 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less.
So, knowing this, how do we leverage our content marketing when it comes to newsletters and nurturing?
When we think about the challenges that we face as a company, the first thing that stands out is that, like many others companies, we exist in a very crowded ecosystem.
In fact, there are 1,700 marketing technology companies out there according to the latest Lumascape. So how do we stand out?
Well, when we look at the current state of the email landscape - most of the companies look, feel and talk the same.
When you work in the marketing tech ecosystem, the differences are clear. But as a consumer or as a buyer⌠thereâs no real differentiation.
We we have to do better.
And this meant that to really succeed, we canât just push our products and services at people. We canât just talk about WHAT we do and HOW we do it.
We needed to think different.
To succeed in this new world, marketers need to take a new approach.
Not just pushing products and services out, but using marketing as a way to provide value to peopleâs lives.
Not just investing in multi-million dollar, annual ad campaigns, but instead, providing an always on content approach.
And lastly, not just thinking about reaching a target demographic, but instead, thinking about how you will truly connect with individual people.
So enough with the broad strokes -
Lets take this into the weeds and look at how it works with our email programs.
Email is important to us.
To date in 2015, 41% of our website traffic came from email, and Iâll bet this statistic is similar for your company.
Itâs a vital channel for us and as a result we work hard to maintain a high standard. So how do we continuously fuel our newsletter programs with valuable engaging content? We look no further than our greatest content resource â our blog.
In fact - according to a 2014 Hubspot statistic,
78% of B2B marketers rated blogs as the most effective customer acquisition tool.
Just like our blog, our newsletter content is a mix of Custom Content and Licensed Content.
Custom content, such as User Generated Content, or content generated specifically for your brand allows you to share stores that are on brand.
Licensed content, such as the kind provided by NewsCredâs software platform allows you to boost your credibility by leveraging the content of respected publishers, and also allows you to boost your cadence by keeping your content pipeline filled with high quality material.
We split our blog, and consequently our newsletter, with a 50% split of Custom and Licenced content, but no matter what split you go for â making sure that your newsletter is driven by quality content is key.
I think this point is important enough to reiterate - your newsletter is powerful driver of traffic, but only if you provide your subscribers with consistently high quality content thatâs of value to them.
Youâve got to make sure you never take them for granted, or assume it gives you the the ability to push sales messaging at them at will. Your newsletter subscribers have given you permission to send them valuable content information, so always strive to honor that trust.
So now that weâve covered the fuel for our newsletters, how do we make deliver results from it?
Filling your marketing pipeline with quality content is only half the battle. You have to make sure that your emails are as effective as possible, and that youâre always improving.
A/B testing is a fundamental part of this process.
At NewsCred weâre obsessed with data, and we make sure that all of our programs are subject to extensive testing and optimizing. So how to you build out a framework of A/B testing?
Iâm going to go through one specific example of an A/B test we ran earlier this year.
This is an example of a typical newsletter template that we use. As youâll see, the lead article gets a hero shot, while the 2nd and 3rd articles are placed in smaller columns. Finally, thereâs a text based footer section.
When approaching this A/B test, we wanted to see if creating a single column system with equal billing would improve the performance of the newsletter. Our theory was two fold:
By giving the top article prominent billing, we were lowering the chances of the 2nd and 3rd article being seen
Also, this format was not created with mobile in mind, which is undoubtedly something we should be giving priority. Just for reference, in this current layout, the first article gets over 50% off all clicks.
So hereâs what we came up with for an A/B test.
As you can see, our contender follows the single column format, giving equal billing to each of the articles, and is not a much more mobile friendly format. So what were the results?
Interestingly, all of the articles received an increased number of clicks. We had worried that the 1st article would lose prominence because of the layout but it actually also benefitted form our new format.
The real meat of the test though, was that the second article received a 46% increase in clicks, showing how much it was losing in the first format.
One thing thatâs worth noting when you run an A/B test, is that you have to look at all the statistics. Sometimes youâll find that a change has an effect you didnât anticipate. We found that the footer of our email â a space where we passively promote upcoming events like this webinar â received 175% more clicks than the control.
A/B Testing has been a vital component in understanding how our subscribers interact with our content, and the more data we gather, the more we can shape a newsletter that will really resonate.
You donât need to read through this slide in detail, but itâs an example of a scorecard that helps us shape content. By categorizing our content into buckets, we can see what works best and change the mix.
Some takeaways in our case were our top posts were infographics, stats are important to our audience, and words like top, best, and most performed strongest in headlines. Youâll have your own set of criteria, but itâs important to keep score.
Iâve just gone through an example of a test that we ran, but what can you test, and how frequently should you test?
There really are no limits to what you can test, but to give you some ideas, here are some weâve worked with:
When we talk about testing, and optimization, nowhere is this more important than in Nurturing.
NewsCred runs a comprehensive nurturing stream, and we are always optimizing it to improve performance. Before we go into details though, itâs worth taking a step back -
This might seem like a simple question, but many companies approach it wrong. Nurturing is not a way to keep pummeling leads with sales material until youâve worn them down, but itâs a much more interactive process than that.
So what is lead nurturing? At itâs most fundamental, itâs a tool to help build relationships with your customers. When a lead enters your system, particularly when you have a complex offering, theyâre not ready to buy from you. In this age, buyers need to self educate, and they need to build trust with your brand. This is where nurturing plays a key role. You need to give them the information that they need to learn about your offering, and about you.
Secondly, nurturing is how you are ready when they are. Your leads will by in various stages of the buying cycle, and sometimes they may even want to purchase but are working through budgeting issues. By keeping top of mind, nurturing allows you to be there when theyâre ready to talk.
So how do you measure success in nurturing?
Typically with email marketing, you focus on open rate as a key metric, but I find when it comes to nurturing this doesnât give you a good feel for how itâs performing.
The right subject line may get your leads to open an email, but if they donât interact with it, then you havenât succeeded. What matters is how much they engage with your content. For this metric â I use Click to Open rate â the percentage of people who click through out of those who open. Aim to increase this metric and youâll be providing content your leads want to see.
The second point may depend on how you rate and score Marketing Qualified Leads, but if you use behavior as a scoring metric, then higher engagement rate will push more highly qualified leads through to sales. Recording changes in behavioral score, and using triggers in your marketing automation software to notify sales can be a great way to identify leads who are interested.
The third sounds simple, but itâs an easily measurable metric that has real meaning. By looking at leads in your nurturing stream, youâll be able to see if they are performing more actions than previously â downloading white papers, reading blog posts, attending webinars.
So what do you fill your nurturing streams with? While thereâs no magic bullet, there are many things you can test to get the mix thatâs right for you. We did an audit of our own nurturing stream, and found some very interesting information.
When we looked at the engagement rate our own leads, we found those in our earliest streams â the freshest leads â were engaging much more with lower friction pieces of content such as slideshares, pdfs, infographics than they were with high commitment pieces like white papers.
This is not to say that white papers are a vehicle you should disregard. Quite the opposite in fact. White papers are often the most effective tactic in leads nurturing, but if you rely solely on them, you could find your overall engagement rate suffer.
This makes sense if you think about it too. While a lead may have entered your nurturing stream through a white paper download, that doesnât mean they will always be in a place to read another one when you deliver it to their inbox. Giving them low friction options will keep them engaged and keep them opening your emails.
One other thing that we found when doing our own audit was that we were not providing our leads with adequate opportunity to raise their hands. Not every lead needs to run the full course of a stream before they are ready, nor do they have to hit a certain score before they graduate. Sometimes you have to give them the change to request more information.
To give you a better visual idea of how we rebuilt our nuturing stream, Iâll show you some very simplified models.
The first is a very typical nurturing stream, which promotes the best performing white papers with occasional product offerings in between. Problem is, this doesnât give leads a variety to choose from, and thereâs no indication that theyâre ready to begin looking at product emails.
In our case, we changed the model to a more value rich stream, providing a much more varied collection of articles, pdfs, and of course hand raising opportunities.
This stream may not be right for you, and it depends on many factors such as how mature your industry is, how complex the product, but what you should do it look at it from a value add point of view. Nurturing is about building trust through valuable content â not bombarding them with sales material until they give in.
We knew we had to do better.
HAVE A TESTING PLAN
When youâre A/B Testing, itâs important that you have a schedule that you stick to. Itâs important to make sure that you are testing with intention â and not just for the sake of it. Come up with a hypothesis and test against that. Itâs possible to run multuple tests at the same time, but limiting your tests allows you to think about them more carefully.
MAKE SPECIFIC AND MEASURABLE CHANGES
We knew we had to do better.
Treat your readers like VIPs
People who subscribe to your email list have given you permission to their inboxes. Honor this privilege by letting them be the first to know about new products or sales. Give them access to special benefits as subscribers.
Keep it useful
Think about which emails you open and which you delete right away. You donât open an email that doesnât benefit you in some way. Make sure your newsletters are giving your subscribers something they donât already have.
Show some personality
No one wants to read a dry, boring newsletter that drones on and on⌠Inject some personality. Try to write the same way youâd speak to one of your customers.
Keep it short
Get to the point. Make it easy for your readers to scan quickly, if they want or need to.
Who will manage
Sounds simple, but make sure you can maintain the cadence and continuously test. It doesnât take too much time, but itâs important that you never miss a newsletter, especially when your readers grow to expect them. You may not get a second chance.
Determine your content
Think about why this audience signed up for your emails in the first place, then focus on delivering that to them. It can be helpful to outline general content types that you might include in each email campaign. Later, as you're putting together your newsletter, you can refer to this outline to make sure you're staying on track.
Determine sending frequency and goals
Not all sending frequencies are created equal. Decide what works best for you and your subscribers. Remember to look ahead and plan accordingly for holidays or special events.
From there, decide what youâd like to get out of your email marketing. Are you looking to direct readers to your website? Help promote sales? Increase traffic at events?
Make a schedule
Your email marketing schedule will depend on your industry, type of content, sending frequency, and so on.