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The 2015 State of Search Industry Report from the SEMPRO Research Committee, Search Engine Land and Marketing Land is out and offers a nice look at where many search-based marketers' heads are when it comes to digital marketing focus, spend and more.

I say search-based marketers because the online survey of 500 professionals is primarily focused on readers of the two blogs, which tend to be search-oriented pros. That’s not to invalidate the data, but to simply establish some level of expectation of inherent bias in it. While certainly the survey takers likely include some broad-based marketers, CMOs and even integrated agency types, the core audience of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land are SEO pros. That’s neither good nor bad. It just is.

Knowing that, here are some takeaways from the report that I noted, keeping in mind my perspective is that of a broad-based, digital marketing strategy focus. Search, social, online media, email, apps … they’re all important in my tool box. While social may be my most robust area of focus, the others never fail to take some level of attention in what I typically recommend for clients.

Email is a Brand-Side Activity

When 86 percent of brand marketers, noted as “marketer/client” by the report, say they carry out email marketing and just 50 percent of agencies do, you can assume that brands are very protective of their email marketing programs. There are several reasons for this, but the fact that email marketing is still the most effective spend in the digital landscape (almost 2:1 in ROI according to the Direct Marketing Association) is likely chief among them.

 

Email Is A Brand-Side Activity

via SEMPO

 

Which leads to the question - As search or other digital avenues continue to prove their worth, will they, too, become more brand-side activities rather than agency led? Chances are good that will happen. Let’s see if the ROI value of Search and other areas continues to rise.

Yahoo! is Dead as a Search Engine

Yahoo! has transformed itself into a more broad-based web property under Marissa Mayer’s leadership and though it’s still heavily dependent upon search for revenue, search marketers have all but given up on it. Of those surveyed, when asked if they’re investing more or less in the various search engines, 60.2 percent said Yahoo! wasn’t relevant. And 44.9 percent said they’re investing less. I think it’s time to take the exclamation point off the logo, Yahoo.

 

Yahoo! in Search

via SEMPO

Agencies Are in Love With Facebook Advertising

When asked which social advertising platforms are marketers using most, 58 percent of agency-side marketers said Facebook ads, compared to just 30.5 percent of brand-side marketers. In fact, brand marketers were more likely to use every other ad platform than their agency counterparts. Is this because brand marketers are experimenting more or perhaps casting wider social nets? Are agencies blinded by the power of Facebook or do they know something brand marketers don’t?

 

Agencies Love Facebook Advetising

via SEMPO

 

We’ll likely see these numbers level out as Twitter, LinkedIn and platforms like Instagram become more tested and stable, but if agencies don’t figure out how to not hitch their cart to one horse, brands may lose faith in them.

The Way Brands Pay Doesn’t Jive

The survey asked what the typical fee structure was like for brands paying digital partners. The answers were broken own over verticals of email, display, social media, paid social, paid search and SEO. A big, fat portion of brands say they pay on a fee per click basis (22 percent for social media, 18 percent for paid social). Yet, the corresponding number of agencies reporting being paid that was 1.2 percent for social and 4.2 percent for paid social.

Certainly, the brand-agency sample wasn’t 1:1 so the data isn’t a perfect match, but with a sample size of over 500, something doesn’t jive. Agencies say they mostly get paid with flat agency fees with anywhere from 28 to 41 percent reporting that structure in the various verticals. But marketers report only paying 13 to 23 percent that way. So something doesn’t fit.

From the agency side, I can tell you that brands paying a fee per click are

A) Undermining an agency’s value, and

B) Exposing themselves to fraudulent billing, as clicks can always be gamed.

Most brands don’t like paying percentage of media spend because that motivates the agency to just recommend spending more money. The flat agency fee seems to be the fairest approach to billing, so it will be interesting to watch those numbers over time to see if that grows.

The Bottom Line

Annual State of the Whatever reports are useful when you look at the results over time. Not much is changing really in the digital marketing space. We still have problems figuring out ROI and arguing for budget (which the survey also covers). We are seeing more spend on social media, especially in social advertising. But Search is still the dominant digital channel in terms of spend, even if email has proven to be more effective from an ROI standpoint.

I don’t know that I would say there’s much to fault about the study. It seems to parallel my experiences talking with clients and brands about their digital efforts. But there are certainly some interesting nuggets in there to ponder on.

You can see the entirety of the report at the SEMPO website.

 

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We all know that lead nurturing is a marketing best practice, but what are your plans to step up your lead nurturing activities over the next year? Better segmentation? Check. More targeted content? Check. Interactive content? Check. Those are the standard answers.

How about taking your customer journey to a whole other level? Today, we’ll dive into a strategy that creates a true multichannel conversation to drive results—the integration of direct mail and physical gifting into your lead nurturing process.

Break Through the Clutter

Engaging consumers through email is essential to driving success. However, breaking through the clutter is sometimes next to impossible with email. Hundreds of emails fill the inbox. People go on vacation. Spam blockers filter out messages. Recipients unsubscribe.

Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. - DemandGen Report

Try adding automated direct mail into the mix, which adds a second dimension to your nurture efforts. If someone isn’t responding electronically, automated direct mail lets marketers reach them in another fashion. For example, if a target account is blocking your company’s emails or if the recipient receives 1,000 messages a day, automated direct mail gets the message through a lot more effectively.

On the other hand, if the recipient is engaging with your emails, automated direct mail reinforces the message to optimize the overall results of your campaign. The dual email and direct mail approach creates a true multi-channel process to your automated marketing campaigns.

How Does Automated Direct Mail Work?

Automated direct mail is the integration of direct mail and physical gifting into your marketing automation platform.

For example, five years ago, you would have had to painfully send your list to the direct mail company to deliver the gift in a batch-n-blast approach. Or, you would have your marketing intern collect names of important leads and ship out gifts from the tchotchke closet.

Today, the sending of physical gifts is as automated as the sending of an email—trackable, measurable and automated within your marketing automation platform. Information on the item also feeds into your CRM to provide additional intelligence to your sales team.

For the techie Marketo readers, this direct mail integration is performed via a webhook that triggers the direct mail and brings back delivery information when available.

Not Your Traditional Direct Mail

“Sixty-two percent of customers are more likely to do business with brands after receiving a promotional item.”
- The Advertising Specialty Institute

Although you can still use the traditional method, I am not talking about old school direct mail pieces like postcards. I’m talking about physical gifts that make an impact when sent in conjunction with your standard nurturing emails.

Let’s dive into a few examples:

The Account Igniter

How much is your top account worth? Whether you are looking for a door opener or a deeper penetration into an account, the Account Igniter is a high-value, low-risk, high-reward automated direct mail program. This campaign is ideal for any Account Based Marketing strategy.

In this program, identify the top 5-10 contacts in your top 100 accounts.

The Meeting Grabber

“How do we get more meetings?” is a common request in many organizations. If your organization is trying to boost meetings, The Meeting Grabber is a good template to start with.

The goal is to leverage automated direct mail along with email to generate a meeting for sales. The Meeting Grabber is an integral piece of the puzzle and allows for marketing to confidently hand-off qualified MQLs to Sales.

Offer example:

The Nurture Accelerator

Already have a lead nurturing campaign in place? Improve the conversion by seamlessly adding in automated direct mail. Build the direct mail right into existing nurture tracks to add a new dynamic to the conversation. The big benefit here is the automated direct mail is created in a “set-and-forget” process to deliver the right content at the right time.

The Funnel Driver

If your company has a lead lifecycle process, you are most likely measuring conversion rates between all of your major stages. If you find leads getting stuck at certain stages, try unclogging the funnel by sending automated direct mail.

Customer Advocacy Welcome Kits

When a prospect becomes a customer, it’s time to begin the process of turning that customer into an advocate.

Track ROI of Automated Direct Mail

Best practice organizations measure the effectiveness of their marketing programs, including automated direct mail. Ensure that every automated direct mail piece contains a call-to-action that drives the recipient to a website or phone number for further action. This will serve as your initial success metric.

Going one step further, track if that automated direct mail leads to a high-level lifecycle success. Answer questions like:

At the 2015 Marketo Summit, PrintingForLess.com won the The LaunchPoint Innovator award for its automated direct mail technology it calls Tactile Marketing™. PFL offers full integration with Marketo and Eloqua for marketers who wish to take the next step with automated direct mail.

At RevEngine Marketing, we are pretty excited about the next dimension in engagement marketing. If you have Marketo and are looking to get started with your campaign, give us a shout. As a PFL partner, we can help set you up for success.

This article originally appeared on RevEngine Insider.

 

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At one time, websites were created with desktop and laptop computers in mind. But consumers increasingly use mobile devices to read email, search the Internet and read content, making it more important than ever that businesses give prudent thought to mobile content marketing. When content is consumed on small touchscreens and while readers are surrounded by distractions, it’s essential that brands reconfigure their content marketing efforts to match.

There are several things to consider as you evaluate your current strategies for areas that need improvement. Here are a few mistakes businesses often make when optimizing content for mobile:

1. You’re Following "The Standard”

Marketers often cite examples of winning mobile content marketing strategies when advising businesses on their own content. However, what works for a big brand like Red Bull or Coca-Cola may not work for every business. CMOs tend to watch those big corporations closely as an example of what works, rather than reading content on their own devices to truly get a feel for the user experience.

You must also pay close attention to the demographics of customers who interact with brands on mobile to make sure your content is geared directly toward your likely readers. Millennials between the ages of 18 and 24 are by far the largest users of smartphones and tablets, spending more than five hours a day on their smartphones on average.

The number of hours spent on a smartphone each day decreases with each generation group, with the upper half of millennials spending only 3.5 hours and 35- to 44-year-olds spending 3.4 hours each day on their phones. This is important to realize as you craft your own marketing strategy, especially if 18- to 24-year-olds are a target market for your products or services.

2. You Didn’t Design Content for Mobile

When mobile devices first grew in popularity, businesses scrambled to make their existing sites fit into smaller screens. Some marketers steered clients toward microsites, which satisfied the demand for mobile content while also letting businesses have control over what customers see. But today’s customers expect content to blend seamlessly between devices. Microsites can confuse customers and distract them from the message you’re trying hard to convey.

Instead of continuing to rework an existing site, throw out your current design and start over. Go through your site as though you were a customer on a smartphone, trying to locate specific information. Not only do people have increasingly shorter attention spans, but when they’re browsing on their smartphone they’re also subject to a number of distractions. Try to keep your content short, interesting and easy to navigate using a touchscreen.

3. You Designed a Dysfunctional App

Apps serve as the perfect alternative to mobile websites for some businesses. They can provide a way for customers to easily purchase products, schedule services, or just provide a fun game that builds your brand. With so many customers using Facebook to discover great apps, many businesses now opt for Facebook mobile apps instead of standalone apps that customers find through the app store.

That said, it’s far worse to create a poorly-functioning Facebook app than to have no app at all. Imagine a customer who is excited about downloading the app you’ve been promoting, only to find it doesn’t work. If that customer has paid for the app, the experience could easily turn into a customer service nightmare. Delay launching your app until you’ve ensured you’ve worked out all the glitches that are normally present with a new app.

4. You Don't Have an Engagement Plan

Many businesses get so excited about the fact that they’re developing an app, they neglect to spend time making sure the app is easy to use. Whether you’re crafting an app for Facebook, the iTunes Store or Google Play, user experience is essential for a successful app.

Look at the app through a customer’s eyes and try to remember at all times that a customer will be interacting with the app on a touchscreen. Long forms with multiple fields can be a nightmare for a customer on a mobile device, so it can be a big help to transfer those details over through a customer’s login.

Usability experts can be beneficial when it comes to ensuring the user experience is a good one. If you can’t afford a professional team to offer feedback, consider using a crowd-sourced approach, or ask friends and family members to try the app out. You may even be able to get local college students to help out in exchange for a small fee or free products.

For businesses to succeed in their content marketing efforts, they must make mobile an important part of their marketing strategy. When brands look at their websites and mobile apps through the eyes of the customers using them, they’re more likely to create an experience that keeps customers coming back.

 

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I love yoga. I practice several times a week and have experienced numerous physical and mental benefits as a result. In addition to flexibility and strength, it helps me better manage my stress level, enhances my ability to focus and has even improved my sleep. As much as I enjoy yoga, though, it’s not without its challenges. To enjoy the many benefits of the practice, you have to commit.

The other day, while rolling out my mat and preparing for some quality asana time, a thought occurred to me: Yoga really isn’t that much different from content marketing.

OK — it’s actually a lot different. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t several lessons businesses can gather from a little time on the mat.

Here are five things we can take away from the practice of yoga.

1. Focus is Essential

Whether you’re attempting a challenging new pose or simply striving to keep from toppling over, yoga requires a great deal of focus. From your breath and weight distribution to your spine alignment, you’re always running through a mental checklist to make the most of every moment.

Focus is also a must for creating great content. In fact, it’s the foundation of content development in general. Developing content without focus can leave you directionless and grasping at straws, because this is the step that will help you determine your purpose. Focus helps you determine the pain points you need to address most and keeps you from wavering into irrelevance.

2. Repetition is Key

You can’t simply jump into a perfect bakasana on your first day of yoga any more than you can expect 100 new leads the first time you publish an eBook or a new blog post. The key to deepening your yoga practice — and growing your audience — is repetition.

For an aspiring yogi, this may mean stretching just a little further each day until you achieve your desired form. In content marketing, though, it means staying the course and continuing to fill your arsenal with well-written, well-researched and highly relevant content. It means regularly publishing blog posts and developing a long-term marketing plan.

3. Mindfulness Over Matter

When you’re creating content, you’re always going to face moments when your brain is seemingly empty of ideas. Everything that can be written on the subject has already been written — or so it would seem. Mindfulness can help you kick the content block.

Mindfulness is a yoga practice that asks you to embrace “purposeful awareness.” In other words, instead of allowing your mind wander to your mountainous to-do list, you bring your attention to the present moment. By taking stock of what’s going on in the here and now, you can find a new angle to approach your seemingly exhausted topic.

4. Always Set an Intention

Goals are crucial to success. That’s a given. But, an intention is slightly different from a goal. In the yoga world, to set an intention is to commit to whatever is most valuable right now. An intention is also a perpetual agreement with yourself — something you aspire to work toward every day. For example, “I choose to live a more peaceful existence” or “I choose to respect my body.”

To be prosperous in content marketing, you first need to set an inbound marketing intention. After all, content marketing is just one piece (albeit a critical one) in the overall inbound marketing puzzle. While you may set an independent goal for each new campaign, all efforts should tie back to the same original intention. For example, “I choose to educate and entertain my prospects and customers,” or “I choose to help my prospects and customers solve their concerns.”

5. Embrace the Personal Journey

Early in my yogic practice, I attended a free class near my apartment. It was so crowded, I could hardly see the instructor, so I followed my neighbor’s lead. However, as the rest of the class lowered into cobra pose, the man next to me rolled back into a shoulder stand. No one batted an eye.

The moral of this story is, while you may practice with others, yoga is an intensely personal journey. As one of my favorite yogis, Adriene Mishler, professes: we each have to “find what feels good.”

Don’t be afraid to take that shoulder stand when the rest of your competitors are striking the cobra pose. It’s a different journey and path for every business, so it’s OK (if not encouraged) to break away from the pack and just do “what feels good” for both you and your audience.

Commitment to the Practice = Success

Often, when businesses think of taking on content marketing, they envision lengthy projects outside the realm of their resources. At first, the idea of publishing even one or two blog posts each month sounds inconceivable, let alone maintaining a weekly blog. It’s overwhelming, it’s scary and, for many, it seems impossible. However, much like yoga, content marketing is a journey that begins with one small step: commitment.

By committing to the practice, you can begin laying the humble foundation upon which you’ll build a tower of powerful, irresistible content. So long as you stay focused, mindful and always seek to learn and grow, your personalized content marketing efforts will help you convert more prospects and help you foster long-term brand loyalty.

Namaste.

 

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Print is old fashioned. Print is expensive. Print is slow. There are many ways to articulate the decline and death of this paper-based medium, but don’t declare it down for the count just yet. The same programmatic forces that have revolutionized the digital advertising and marketing industries are making their way into a format that is often left for dead, or at least considered a challenge to iterate into the future.

That’s right; the bane of print’s existence—namely, its inability to let real-time analytics inform real-time production—is finally getting attention and remedy. As a result, cutting-edge, hyper-optimized reinventions of print—unrivaled in their impact—are emerging as distribution, advertising, and promotional channels and offering new opportunities for marketers.

Even so, why would anyone actually want to focus on print in an era when mobile ad spending will hit $42 billion by 2018, according to BI Intelligence? In a word, efficacy. Print still delivers a return on investment that blows its digital rivals out of the water.

Take direct mail, for example—a 70-year-old industry that has at some point sent everyone in the country a mail order catalog or credit card offer. According to research from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), 79 percent of consumers will act on direct physical mail right away, versus 45 percent for email. Meanwhile, the digital ad click-through rate is only 0.06 percent or less than one click per 1,000 impressions. Approximately $45.7 billion will be spent on direct mail in 2015, according to the Winterberry Group, versus just $2.2 billion for email. It’s no wonder that old school direct print mail is still a serious choice for marketers eager for results.

“Direct mail is the second largest ad spend next to television, and it’s the highest response rate next to telemarketing,” says Lewis Gersh, CEO of PebblePost, a new startup that takes the real-time analytics and optimization of programmatic digital formats and applies them to direct mail, an industry where a campaign traditionally can take 12 to 24 weeks to process, and which typically relies on static demographic data and mature house mailing lists. The two worlds could not be more different.

Until recently, joining these diametrically opposed segments of the marketing arena would have been challenging, but advancements in printing technology—the opening of APIs for printers and world class print quality that sometimes surpasses that of traditional offset machines—have helped bridge the gap.

As a result, PebblePost can offer real-time segmentation of users, tracking them before and after any mail goes out, then respond within 12 to 24 hours with a customized piece of collateral. It’s not an easy feat running dynamically rendered (or custom modified on the fly) wording, images, and layouts, but it’s now possible through printers that have been set up to receive an API from PebblePost. Immediately after printing, the final product is moved into carrier trays on the backs of mail trucks and into postal hubs in under 24 hours from a user’s tracked online activity.

Why go through all this effort? The ROI makes it worthwhile. Whereas previously a change from a three to 3.2 percent response rate was considered heroic in the mature direct mail space, PebblePost’s addition of real-time segmentation, analytics, optimization and physical world workflow management has led to dramatic growth. “We are producing, on average, ten times the response and conversion rates of typical direct mail, and 100 times the average of typical online targeting with display or email,” says Gersh.

Marrying real-time analytics to paper-based collateral has implications beyond direct mail, however, as evidenced by Time Inc’s recent and innovative foray into programmatic print advertising. The endeavor allows for the automated purchase of ads targeted to different audience segments in 18 of its U.S. print titles, including Sports Illustrated, InStyle, and People. Launched in February 2015, the initiative has taken off, with more than $1 million of inventory purchased as of the end of July 2015. Future iterations will allow for increased segmentation.

For at least the past decade, print-based industries with impressive traction have had to sit still as instantly quantifiable and actionable digital mediums from blogs, banner ads, mobile apps and online video have eaten their lunch, at least in terms of mindshare. But recent innovations are helping supercharge a tried and true medium, offering new opportunities not just for marketers, but content creators of all kinds.

 

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As the time we spend on the web increasingly shifts away from desktops and laptops to mobile devices, the need has grown for business owners, publishers and marketers to consider adopting a mobile-first strategy.

We’ve been hearing the term “mobile-first” a lot over the last couple of years, typically in the context of a plea to website owners to make mobile websites the primary focus of the web experience they create for users.

When executing a mobile-first strategy, designers and developers first create a mobile site that then becomes the baseline for the desktop and tablet versions of the site.

As the number of mobile devices in use continues to skyrocket at an astronomical rate, the shift towards a mobile-first strategy is also becoming more widespread.

Even legacy media companies like the New York Times are jumping on the mobile bandwagon in an attempt to reach new subscribers on their phones. And it’s not just publishers; top retailers are now generating almost 50 percent of their sales from mobile.

According to Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst with ZK Research, “A mobile-first strategy means always considering the unique capabilities of mobility and using those to create differentiated features.”

Here are five more reasons you should consider adopting a mobile-first web strategy for your business:

1. Better User Experience

As anyone who’s ever tried to view a responsive design website on their phone can tell you, websites designed for desktop platforms often carry a bit of baggage when they translate to mobile. Desktop sites are more expansive and often incorporate more elements.

When these added elements are carried over to mobile, they often just feel like clutter. In mobile-first design, these elements are minimized as content and design are stripped down to create a more streamlined, response-oriented experience.

2. 24/7 Availability to Users

These days, most of us keep our smartphones by our sides 24 hours a day. The time we spend on our laptop or desktop devices, on the other hand, is often more limited and regulated.

If you want to make it as easy as possible for users to access your web content any time of the day or night, from wherever they may be, then you should consider going mobile-first.

3. Mobile is the Future

Already a pretty big part of the present, mobile definitely represents the future of where the web experience is heading for users. If you’re not currently implementing, or at least developing a mobile plan, you run a serious risk of being left behind.

To put it another way, on an average day, about 317,124 babies are born all over the world. The number of smartphones that enter usage in the same time period? About 1.45 million.

4. Mobile Has Global Reach

In some markets, mobile has already effectively taken over. Take Korea, where 74 percent of users prefer to access the Internet using a mobile device. Or India, where 65 percent of users access the web via mobile and over half of all internet searches originate from mobile devices.

5. Mobile Search Tops Desktop Search

In October of 2015, Google’s search technology chief, Amit Singhal announced that the search giant had indexed over 100 billion links found in mobile apps and made them searchable. This effectively means that on a global basis, mobile searches now top desktop ones.

It’s also been estimated that 40 percent of users will move on to another site if they feel the one they’re on isn’t optimized for mobile. While responsive design has its advantages too, the arguments in favor of switching to a mobile-first web strategy are growing ever more compelling.

This article originally appeared on Salted Stone.

 

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It’s no secret that many consumers are fed up with banner advertising. That’s one reason why ad blocking software adoption is gaining in popularity worldwide. It’s not just consumers, either. Many marketers complain about their effectiveness, too. Publishers are stuck in between both party’s complaints and many of them are reacting to this pressure.

It may sound cliché, but according to Solve Media, you’re more likely to:

I wouldn’t suggest sounding the death knell for display advertising just quite yet, however. While many of the signs and trends point to its waning, it will likely be around for a very long time.

Even with these predictions of doom and gloom from some marketers the investment in display advertising continues to grow. Ad blocking software isn’t slowing that down. One of the reasons why is simple – targeting, retargeting, machine learning and programmatic approaches to serving up ad units is creating a much more efficient system. This helps increase brands’ return on investment.

US Digital Ad Spending by Format

Why are Some Marketers Complaining About Display Advertising?

Some marketers not only loath display advertising as a consumer, but swear up and down it doesn’t work as well as other channels. That’s true in some cases, but ultimately it boils down to what the banner is promoting and how well it’s targeted. These complaints from marketers have largely grown with the adoption and deployment of content marketing.

Most content marketers produce and promote mainly top funnel content – articles, ebooks, guides, how-to’s, etc. However, historically, display advertising success has come from the promotion of mid to bottom funnel content – case studies, free trials, coupons, catalogs, products, etc.

This is problematic, because getting someone to visit top funnel content still requires additional investment to move them to the middle, and ultimately, the bottom of the funnel. In the B2B world this process can take months and sometimes over a year or more.

So those marketers attempting to use display advertising to distribute top funnel content are correct. It doesn’t always work for them because they’re paying the same cost at the top of the funnel that other brands are paying at the bottom of the funnel.

Generally, the B2C buyer’s journey is much quicker – days and even minutes in some cases. B2C brands with funnels that look like this don’t necessarily have much additional investment to drive revenue using display advertising like B2B brands. That’s precisely why the vast majority of investment in this form of advertising comes from B2C industries.

How Does This Affect the Digital Advertising Landscape for Publishers?

According to HubSpot’s "Digital Publishing Benchmarks Report", the majority of publishers expect the value of display advertising (from a revenue perspective) to increase in the next six months. There are two other important trends to note, too. Sponsored content and native advertising are widely predicted to increase in value alongside display in the next six months.

Digital Publishing Benchmarks ReportThis is not a surprise. With predictions of continued investment in display advertising, largely driven by B2C brands, publishers’ thoughts around future revenue mirror the reality of the marketplace. Display is what most publishers know and can scale, thus cementing it as a revenue driver in their minds for the foreseeable future.

Native Advertising & Sponsored Content

As mentioned above, display advertising is primarily built to deliver ROI on mid-to-bottom funnel content distribution. This makes it a tough channel for top funnel content marketers to scale distribution because of the additional investment required to move that traffic from the top to the bottom of the funnel over time.

This leaves a giant distribution gap for content marketers. Display advertising is too expensive for top funnel content, generally. What’s filling this gap? Sponsored content and native advertising does for B2B publishers what display advertising can do for B2C brands – drive ROI-producing traffic at scale. Cost per clicks or cost per thousand impressions are generally much less for native advertising.

David Ogilvy, the “father of advertising,” once said, “It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look and read.”

This is precisely what native advertising and sponsored content does for top funnel content marketers. It’s ideal, too, because it’s exactly what these marketers want from their content – to be read.

Bob Gilbreath, Co-Founder and President of Ahalogy, claims that publishers can gain 100-times more revenue per visitor compared to display advertising. He also points out that brands and publishers can tell stories together that are 100-times deeper than what a banner ad can do. Hence, native advertising and sponsored content can be a better experience for the consumer.

According to Relevance’s "Media Buyer’s Guide to Sponsored Content", this filling of the gap is reflected by adoption rates from brands and publishers alike.

Percent of Publishers Embracing Sponsored ArticlesJuxtaposing predicted social display advertising versus social native advertising spend gives us a good view of the growth and evolution of both channels, comparatively, over time. Again, this just reflects the reality of the marketplace – display and native advertising is on the up and up.

social display vs native ad spendAnother reason why publishers are increasingly developing sponsored content programs is simple – it’s relatively cheap to execute and can have great profit margins. Below are just a few examples of what some big name publishers charge for sponsored content.

what publishers charge for sponsored contentHere’s the actual price distribution for sponsored content in premium publications outlined in our study.

sponsored content price distributionThe sponsored content insights above were developed from the first ever pricing study done on this channel. We contacted over 1,000 publishers and collected over 550 data points to create a sponsored content pricing formula that is available for download here.

Is Display Advertising Really in Trouble?

The answer to that question is simple – No. Despite some consumers’ complaints and the loathing of some marketers, display advertising is here to stay for a long time. However, display advertising must be paired with the right content.

For some brands native advertising and sponsored content are alternative viable channels to consider for driving profitable content visibility over time. Publishers, brands and even consumers tell us directly or indirectly to keep investing in these forms of advertising and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

This article originally appeared on Hubspot.

Are you planning to start participating in global eCommerce? Congratulations! Doing international business is an ambitious and potentially very profitable endeavor — but get ready for some long hours and hard work.

Technology makes it possible for even businesses of modest means to develop a customer base in a foreign country, but you have to take steps to lay the foundation on which you will base your success. Follow this guide to marketing your eCommerce website overseas.

1. Create Subdirectories for Each Target Country

In order to pick up traffic for searches generated in the language of your target country, create a subdirectory of your US-based website. If the target language is Spanish, an example subdirectory would look like this: http://YourBusinessWebsite.com/es. Link the subdirectory pages to new product pages that are translated into Spanish, or whatever the target language.

2. Hire a Human Translator

Google punishes mechanical translation from services such as Google Translate. Perhaps more importantly, mechanical translation misses the nuances and subtleties associated with every language and culture such as slang, necessary formality, and racial or cultural sensitivity. Use a service like Upwork to hire a freelance translator who lives or has lived in the target country.

3. Set Up a P.O. Box

Contact information is critical to both Google rankings and brand credibility. A physical local address will go a long way to convincing both the search engines and your customers that you are credible, relevant and trustworthy. Set up a P.O. box with instructions to forward any incoming mail to your offices back home.

4. Establish a Local Number

Like a physical address, a local phone number is part of the critical contact information that Google considers when ranking websites. It also lends credibility to your company and gives your customers a way to reach you without calling complicated, unfamiliar country codes. By establishing a virtual number, you don't have to maintain an actual phone line in a foreign country.

Virtual numbers are local international numbers that are linked to a forwarding service. Your customers call a number they saw on your ad, and the call is routed to your offices back home — without the caller ever knowing that the call left the country.

5. Customize Forwarding Options

Once you establish a local virtual number in the target country, it is critical to set the options to meet your standards.

For example, you can use simultaneous dialing to ring several different numbers at the same time. As soon as the call is answered on one line, it stops ringing on the others.

Sequential dialing rings numbers in a predetermined sequence. If the primary number doesn't answer, the call is transferred to a secondary number, a third, and so on.

Time-of-day routing lets you determine which line incoming calls are routed to depending on the time of day or day of the week the call was placed. This is an excellent way to get around difficulties that come with doing business in different time zones.

6. Create a Bill of Lading

Bills of lading are documents that make international shipping easier for you, your customers and customs officials by transferring titles to the recipient. Create a bill of lading template with a service like Shopify, and use it to extend your branding by including your logo or other brand imagery.

7. Target the Right International Social Media

Facebook dominates the social media landscape — in the United States and much of Europe. QZone and Sina Weibo, however, dominate China. Are you selling in Russia? You'll have to create a presence on Orkut. Don't assume your domestic social media strategy will translate to your new audience. Instead, get to know the international social media landscape and tailor your strategy accordingly.

8. Learn International Laws and Regulations

Aside from language barriers, the hardest part of doing business overseas is navigating the web of international laws and regulations, which vary from country to country. Countries like Germany, France, and Belgium, for example, are strict when it comes to language in advertising. The United States, on the other hand, is comparatively lax in allowing advertisers to use words and phrases like "best" or "number one." International business law can be complicated, and you may need to hire professional legal help.

It has never been easier for companies of all sizes to do business overseas, but don't assume you can simply translate your eCommerce site and wait for the sales to roll in. Everything from translation to shipping to social media becomes more complicated when you do business on a global level — but if you do it right, it also becomes more profitable.

The end goal for most brands during the content creation process is to create content that will be shared by both their customers and audience to their respective social networks. Most brands, however, struggle with this.

Consumers are actually more willing than you might imagine to share content they see online. Huffington Post found that nine out of ten consumers want brands to share content online and those same consumers actually trust content from brands nearly as much as they do from established media sources. So how does a brand go about building trust within their content?

Most brands will simply slap their logo or their branding in the corner of their content and expect it to be trusted by their audience. This is wrong. Let’s examine the guidelines that brands should follow in order to build trustworthy content that is also shareable.

Reflect Your Brand

The first step to making shareable and trustworthy content is to make sure the content is an accurate representation of your brand. Not only should you stay true to your brand’s design guidelines, you also need to make sure your content addresses your customers’ interests in an authentic and believable way. Consumers want to do business with companies that share similar values as their own.

Make it Educational

People tend to seek out content that is educational in nature. The more someone can learn and take away from a content piece, the more likely they are to want to share it with their audience. Seventy-four percent of consumers trust editorial content when it comes across as educational and not promotional. This holds true even if it comes from a business.

Originality Counts

With so much content being published and shared on a daily basis, you have to take the extra step to ensure that your content stands out from the crowd. Over 30 percent of content readership will fall off if you try to take shortcuts like using stock photography in your content. Your consumers want to know your opinion on the subject matter as opposed to someone else’s. Original content means an original idea with original visual content. Take the extra step to make something truly unique and you will reap the benefits.

Cite Information Sources

One of the quickest ways for your content to lose trust in the minds of your readers is by not properly showing your sources. In fact, almost half of all consumers believe a brand’s credibility is lost when the information in the content cannot be verified by outside sources. On top of this, most media outlets will not reference content if there is not proper sourcing.

Earn Media Mentions

Content that is shared organically comes across as trusted content. Word-of-mouth recommendations and media mentions go a long way in building trust in both your content and your brand. When unaffiliated, third parties share your content, it comes across as authentic and, as a result, builds trust in your content. Indeed, content marketing comes across as more authentic than ads in the eyes of most consumers.

Make it Easy to Share

Making your content as easy to share as possible via social sharing buttons is an easy start to the conversation over your content. It is worth noting that most people prefer to share good news over bad news. And make sure that your content does not come across as a sales pitch for your product or brand, as brand or service mentions within the content can turn off consumers.

To help ensure that your audience and consumers share your content, it has to be both trustworthy and easily shareable. If you incorporate these various trust signals, you’re on your way to making content that’s both endorsed and shared.

 

How to Create Trustworthy Content That Gets Shared

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Do you remember that post you wrote back in 2010 proclaiming that the iPad was a joke and tablets would never catch on? This is a good example of what I would call obsolete content.

Generally, content marketers strive for content that’s “evergreen,” which could theoretically remain relevant forever. But because we often write about news and emerging technologies, this isn’t always possible. We’re often stuck with obsolete posts that can do no good for anybody, buried at the bottom of our content feeds, but still there for the world to see.

There are a number of kinds of “obsolete” content beyond just news-based posts, too. For example, old real estate listings and job ads become irrelevant quickly, and old products on e-commerce platforms can disappoint people more than anything else.

What can we do with these obsolete posts? I have seven suggestions:

1. Delete It Without a Trace

Your first option is the easiest, but it’s not without its drawbacks. With this option, you’ll simply delete the content and pretend it never existed. You won’t acknowledge it publicly or draw any attention to it. Instead, you’ll remove it altogether and set up a 301 redirect page so that any external links pointing to the page aren’t completely discredited (and inbound users aren’t totally alienated).

This option is good for content you aren’t proud of. But remember: Deleting pages altogether takes away from the total amount of real estate you occupy on the web, and might negatively affect your domain authority.

2. Delete It & Let Users Know About It

If you need to delete something, but you want to let users know why you’re deleting it, this is the best option. For example, if you have a post or a dedicated page that details a popular item that you simply don’t sell anymore, you’ll want to acknowledge and inform your interested visitors without giving them direct access to that old content.

You can do this by either setting up a custom redirect message that lets users know what’s going on, or by leaving part of the page intact with a message that informs people that the item is no longer available.

3. Update It

This is one of the least disruptive options on this list because the original page won’t disappear for either search bots or human visitors, and you won’t be calling any extra attention to your changes in any other format.

Here, your job is to update the obsolete portions of your content to be relevant for the modern era. For example, if you have an infographic with population data that was relevant back in 2011, you could easily update it with statistics from 2015 to make it relevant today. You could even move it to the top of your rotation to get some new visibility.

4. Create a Follow-Up

If you made a bold prediction about the future back in 2011 and it didn’t exactly come true, you can write a follow-up piece explaining why it didn’t come true (or why your line of thinking was flawed). Doing so calls back to the original piece, allowing it to continue existing, while simultaneously giving your readers something new to consume. As an extra measure, update the original piece with a link pointing to the new follow-up.

5. Make Fun of Yourself

If your original content is extremely old or if the information in it is laughable, you can easily make fun of yourself to your current readers and followers. Re-submit the piece with some commentary, pointing out the flaws in your thinking and the obsolescence of your information.

This is perfect for a podcast or a video where you take some of your old content and reexamine it. It shows that you’re willing (and human enough) to laugh at yourself and that you’re present enough to realize when your content hasn’t aged well.

6. Archive It

Some brands have implemented an archive system, which allows them to keep some of their older, less relevant posts without making them easily accessible to new users. Doing so can keep fresh eyes away from your stale, old content, but still preserve the writing and structural presence of the original material.

For this purpose, it’s helpful to have a running banner on all your posts that informs readers that the post is a part of an archive—otherwise, rogue followers of old external links could mistakenly think it’s still relevant.

7. Leave It Alone

Of course, you could choose to leave your old content alone entirely. Chances are, not many people are finding it on their own (unless you’re actively syndicating it), and you’ll still get the authoritative credit for having it. As long as your content isn’t too destructive or misleading, you generally don’t have to panic about leaving it up.

No matter what you choose to do with your obsolete posts, you should choose to do something. This was once-valuable material that could theoretically be recycled (or at least peeled away like dead skin). There’s no way to prevent all your content from one day becoming obsolete, but you can mitigate these effects by striving to make your content as evergreen as possible.

 

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