Category: Resources

Where are you reading this right now?

While you may be sitting at a computer, chances are good that you are reading this on your phone.

Three out of every four Americans now has a smartphone. It doesn’t take a statistician to look around and see everyone on their phones, so your omnichannel content marketing strategy should already consider mobile phone technology.  

In our Digital Marketing is Interwoven series, we have been analyzing how a variety of digital trends impact content marketers. While we will focus on specific mobile trends here, we also wanted to take a step back to consider what overall mobile use means for content marketers today.

Good content starts with good writing.

Focus on Good Writing More Than Ever

Research by the Nielsen Norman Group found that readers understand short, simple text on mobile devices just as well as they do on computers; however, they slow down when reading difficult text on mobile.

This underscores perhaps the most important takeaway about all writing: Your content should be as easy to understand as possible, no matter whom or what channels you’re writing for.

As a result of their research findings, NN/g emphasizes the importance of brevity when it comes to writing website content. They do include a caveat that longer content is OK if it serves the purpose of entertaining or informing — which all content should do.

While NN/g is right that every word should count, content marketers should prioritize being comprehensive for two primary reasons:

1. Content shock is real. To stand out, yours has to be among the best of its kind — which often means telling your readers everything they might want to know about a given topic.
2. As search algorithms continue to evolve, they focus less on keywords and more on content value. Search engines consider longer content to be more valuable, presumably because it covers the topic in-depth.

Research by groups like UXMatters has shown that mobile users scroll to the end of articles just as much as desktop users, meaning brevity does not necessarily matter more on mobile devices.

Key takeaways:

• Write short, punchy copy. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Formula is a great way to measure the readability of your writing. This uses factors like word length and sentence length to determine a score as a US grade level (5th grade through college graduate). Higher grade levels mean the text is more difficult to read, so aim for 9th grade or lower. You can run your readability statistics in Microsoft Office or use the Hemingway App, which includes insights about where you can improve your writing.
• Write scannable copy. Content that is easy to read is also scannable. Lead with the most important information, and include signposts like headings and subheadings, bulleted lists, and bold text to help readers.
• Don’t be afraid of longform. A good rule of thumb for articles like this one is to aim for around 1,500 words. We have found that this strikes a good balance between informative and digestible. Consider even longer-form content like ultimate guides, as well.

For comparison, the article you’re reading now has 1,524 words and is written at the 9th grade level.

Consider Different Content Formats

We discussed creating content for different channels in a recent post about what social media trends mean for content marketers. You should also think about creating different content for the mobile and desktop experiences.

Video is becoming increasingly important, so it should be a factor in your content marketing strategies. Vidyard has an excellent guide to optimizing video for mobile devices.

Some older staples of content marketing, such as infographics or PDFs, don’t work well on mobile phones. Case in point:

"Read my EBook on MobileFirst development. It's a PDF designed for an 8.5×11 piece of paper."

— Bill Seitz (@BillSeitz) April 10, 2018

For this reason, Intel’s Luke Kintigh recommends converting infographic elements to a slideshow or a progressive scroll.

Until recently, many people saved longer-form content for desktop reading. It’s still difficult to find mobile-friendly whitepapers, though we predict you’ll see more of them. “The Future of VR and 360 Video,” by Thomas Baekdal at Baekdal.com, is a good one.

Key takeaways:

• Optimize your videos for mobile. There is no point in creating them otherwise.
• Consider reformatting infographics into something mobile-friendly like a slideshow. You can also slice and dice infographics into smaller pieces that are readable on smaller devices.
• Create mobile-friendly versions of PDFs. Here is a useful guide for this. You can also give users the option to email themselves a link to your content so they can view it later on their desktops.

Inform Your Strategy With Location-Based Data

Always meet your target audience where they are. With mobile technology, you can do that literally.

Location-based data presents one of the bigger marketing opportunities brought on by mobile technology, which has given rise to the term “micro-moments.” These happen when we reflexively turn to our phones to do, learn, find, watch or buy something.

While micro-moments aren’t new (location data company Tamoco has an interesting history on the evolution of location-based marketing technology, from IP addresses to augmented reality), advancements in location-based marketing technology continue to improve how brands can be there when they happen.

This data is not just relevant to advertisers who geotarget their ads or send push notifications to their apps. The biggest value may be in creating audiences and consumer path maps, says Yory Wurmser at eMarketer.

“The data/audience dimension is uniquely different with mobile vs. desktop,” says Ian Karnell at Phunware. “As users go about their daily lives with their smartphones, they leave a digital trail that tells brands who they are, where they have been, their preferences and where they will go next.”

Content marketers need to consider where their target audiences will be when they interact with the brand or need what it offers. The content someone needs from your website may vary whether they are on their phone or laptop. For example, a driver is more likely to search for “roadside assistance” on the mobile version of their insurance provider’s website.

These insights can also impact what content marketers create. For example, you might see that those who walk into your outdoors store often frequent local yoga studios, as well, and could benefit from content about yoga retreats.

Google tells us that more than 40 percent of mobile searches have local intent. In addition, more than 85 percent of engagement with brands is local, says Wesley Young at Local Search Association, so we should include local keywords in our content, as well.

Augmented reality (AR) is also part of the location-based marketing trend. While that is too much to touch on here, you can check out the ThinkMobiles guide to developing an AR app if you’re interested in more.

Key takeaways:

• Leverage your data. Use mobile data to identify insights about the content your audience is interested in and when/where they are when they need it.
• Make your content locally relevant. Consider local content in your keyword strategy and when determining what content should live on your desktop and mobile sites.
• Don’t own much user data? Get it elsewhere. We use Buzzsumo to validate general interest around a topic. Sites like Quora and Reddit are helpful as well.

Optimize Your Content for Voice Search

According to Google, 20 percent of all mobile searches are voice searches. With the introduction of products like Alexa, this trend isn’t only related to mobile’s Siri and Google Assistant, but that makes it all the more relevant.

Vivid Seats SEO Director Bryson Meunier says you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for voice if you already implement content marketing and SEO best practices — especially if you already optimize your content for mobile.  

The most notable impact of voice search on content marketers is the way we optimize our writing. Fewer searches follow the traditional “[location] + [vendor type]” search format. Rather, they’re phrased as more conversational, long-tail searches.

So, instead of saying “Atlanta tire shop” to Google Assistant, a user might say “Hey Google, I need new tires.” Your content can support these search results by focusing on the context and reasons people would search for your tire shop.

Some content marketers find this to be more difficult, but we believe writing should always be conversational while remaining professional.

In his study on voice search results, Brian Dean at Backlinko found that more than 40 percent of results came from Google’s “featured snippets, and that Google sources results from long-form content.” This is great news for content marketers and supports our recommendation to create longer, in-depth content.

Key takeaways:

• Keep doing what you’re doing. If you need a refresher on mobile optimization, there is always Google’s Mobile SEO Guidelines.
• Write more conversational, long-tail content. Don’t get hung up on individual keywords; phrase content as questions and focus on FAQs instead. Meunier recommends using Answer the Public (free), Question Samurai (signup required) and StoryBase (paid) to find popular questions among your audience members.
• Brush up on Google’s newest tech. Dean recommends creating Actions on Google. It’s also worth checking out Google’s reintroduction to featured snippets before writing your content.

There are many other trends to consider as mobile truly is at the center of our day-to-day interactions with brands, businesses and content. Stay tuned for our next article on how digital marketing trends impact content marketing.

Images by: ververidis/©123RF Stock Photo, everythingpossible/©123RF Stock Photo, seewhatmitchsee/©123RF Stock Photo

The various practices of digital marketing are deeply intertwined. SEO affects paid efforts, and content can make or break your social media campaign.

However, few digital marketing concepts are as closely connected as email marketing and content creation. When marketers grow concerned about their email efforts, they often turn to content.

The past two years have been hectic in the world of email marketing, and many industry professionals are changing how they strategize, bridging silos in order to run successful campaigns.

Check out some of the latest email trends below to learn how content marketers are serving as a valuable support system for their profitable strategy.  

Let’s Bury the Myth That Email as a Platform is Ineffective

The first step to understanding the value of email and content marketing is dispelling the idea that either tactics are dying. Over the past few years, marketing professionals have fervently defended email marketing from seemingly unseen forces claiming its demise.

According to research by eMarketer, email marketing has an average ROI of 122 percent, four times higher than social media (28 percent), direct mail (27 percent), and paid search (25 percent). Even though marketers only invest 16 percent of their budget on average, it makes up 23 percent of average total sales.  

Sarah Peterson from Unsettle.org defends email marketing by explaining it’s one of the only things marketers can control. Google algorithms change each year, meaning sites can gain or lose SERPs on a whim. Facebook recently changed its algorithm, throwing the marketing world through a loop.

However, you will always have your email contacts and will always be able to reach them.  

The idea that email is dying has gained such a ferver in the past few years that Jordie van Rijn even created the website Emailisnotdead.com with monthly updated statistics proving exactly how not-dead email is. Check back for use statistics and links to supporting articles any time someone tries to tell you email is dying.  

If email marketing is alive and well, then why are so many people concerned about it? Why are people convinced that the tool is on its way out?

Where Email Marketing Typically Goes Wrong

While email marketing isn’t dying, it does have its problems — like every other marketing tactic. Of course, just because email marketing has it’s problems doesn’t mean it needs to be completely rejected. Dismissing email marketing for its flaws is a waste of potential resources.

Understanding these flaws and where they come from can help your brand overcome systematic problems.

Marketers Lack the Resources to Grow

Some companies take the high ROI that comes with email marketing for granted. They don’t see the need to improve on their email strategy because they’re focused on other channels that are struggling more. They focus in on putting out fires instead of growing what works.

However, just because something works well doesn’t mean it couldn’t use help to improve. Chad S. White, research director for Litmus, polled hundreds of email marketers to determine their biggest email challenges for 2018. Among this responses include:

• Poor coordination between other departments (16.4%)
• Insufficient staffing (14.4%)
• Bad strategy or leadership (12.8%)
• Lack of quality data and integration (12.2%)

This shows that departments want to grow their email efforts and provide valuable resources to readers, but struggle to prove the value of their work. Without the support they need (in the form of co-workers, leadership, staff and tools), email efforts are bound to flounder — giving the impression of a dying strategy.

Customers Are Wary About What They Subscribe To

Another issue that email managers highlight is list growth. It’s harder in 2018 to grow an email list than ever, and even harder to get people to pay attention.

Gary Vaynerchuk says consumers are more careful with email in the same way that they’re careful when liking brands on Facebook. People used to like and subscribe to anything. Now that they know what they’re signing up for, they’re more cautious.

“Once you understand that marketers have ruined it, you’re a little bit more careful with that like button and email sign up,” he writes.

However, consumers are still willing to sign up for email newsletters if they feel like they know what they’re getting.

Email Fatigue Means Customers Are Tuning Out

An additional problem that marketing managers contend with is email fatigue. The team at Precision Dialogue recently explored this concept and why it is driving customers away from email. While your customers might unsubscribe because they feel overwhelmed by email as a whole, it’s more common that they don’t like what you’re sending out or how often you’re sending content.

Essentially, blaming your customers for the death of email as a whole will only hinder your email marketing strategy. You’re better off looking inward to see what ails your email content.

How Content Marketing Can Help Email Marketing Grow

Your email marketing can’t be successful on its own. No amount of curated lists and strategic sending can make email marketing succeed without great content.

In an article for Content Marketing Institute, Jodi Harris shared an infographic highlighting how content and email work together. Both B2B and B2C companies stand to benefit from these tools. In fact, 93 percent of all marketers use email to distribute content, and 74 percent of marketers say it’s the most important content distribution channel in their arsenal.

Marco Marini, CEO at ClickMail, shares some of his own company’s statistics on email marketing relevance. Of email marketers surveyed who consider themselves very successful, 55 percent named content creation the most important key to success. This was followed by email personalizations at 17 percent.

One of the main reasons successful marketers are denying the death of email is because they have taken steps to improve the email experience with content. By improving your content marketing and intertwining it with your email strategy, your overall traffic and lead generation efforts can grow.

You Should Focus Primarily on Content

Email marketing has plenty of moving parts. There are segments, layouts and other factors that managers worry about. This often makes content a forgotten element, as marketers become so worried about how they will send it that what they send takes a back seat.

“Most marketers will tell you that [content] is the most time-consuming part of their strategy, but it’s also the most important,” the team at PostUp writes. “If your content doesn’t compel your reader to keep clicking, email’s revenue potential is wasted.”

The first step toward improving your email marketing is making sure what you have to say is important and relevant.

Your Content Needs to Align With What You Promised

The team at AWeber Communications says marketers have a habit of saying what they want to get people to sign up for their emails, only to bombard them with irrelevant messages. If you have ever signed up to “receive industry news and insights” from a blog only to get a sales consultant pitching you the next day, you understand this.

Brands that struggle to maintain subscribers often aren’t giving readers what they want. This is one big reason why subscribers churn.

Your Email Content Needs to be Unique

The team at IZEA highlights a few ways people make mistakes with email marketing. Too often, they send the same content in their email bodies as their social media campaigns. This burns people out: Your email is irrelevant to people who already saw the content on Facebook.

Additionally, no one likes to be on the receiving end of a “spray and pray” approach to content marketing, where brands share their content everywhere and to everyone and hope it gets picked up somehow.

Email marketing is ideal for honing existing customers and building customer loyalty. The team at Apsis points out that a 5-percent increase in customer retention can grow an online business by 25 to 95 percent. Email provides a medium for growing loyalty. While social content might target new customers, email is the home base for your existing customers. You can be different and more loyalty-focused.   

Your Email Content Should be Highly Personalized

Along with creating targeted content for loyal audiences, your email campaigns should be highly personalized. It’s unlikely that every piece of content you create will be relevant to everyone on your list. That’s what segmentation and personalization are for.

“The best content marketers who are also great email marketers are now starting to think about email and content as connective tissue for the broader digital journey,” writes Damian Borichevsky, SVP of customer success and business development at OneSpot.

In particular, using data to determine which content will have the highest success rates in email can help marketers improve their efficiency.

“In order to create personalized experiences, you need information about your subscribers,” Tori Johnson writes for Campaign Monitor. “You need to know their preferences, interests, location, gender, age, and other attributes in order to send compelling campaigns.”

These factors actually play off of each other. Not only will you know what content to share with your email clients, but your email clients can determine what content you create.

You Need to Anticipate Customer Changes

One of the biggest mistakes in email marketing is placing a customer in one segment and never changing them. As customer behaviors change, their needs change and they might not be right for certain segments anymore.

“Subscriber expectations change as they move through your process,” the team at GetResponse writes. “To provide value, recognize various needs across the email marketing funnel.”

If you’re not analyzing customers to understand what segments they fit into or where they fall in your sales funnel, then you’re bound to share irrelevant content and turn off anyone who signs up for your email list.

The people who are most likely to say email marketing is dying are also the ones who aren’t doing it well. They’re also likely the same people who aren’t focusing on the content they share in their email bodies. By combining content marketing and email marketing, brands can reap the high ROI that email marketing is known for while ignoring others panicking around them.

Images by: RachelScottYoga, kantver/©123RF Stock Photo, Pexels

A baboon pushes a laptop off the table. You sense its frustration.

Without saying a word, the sender of the baboon GIF has expressed how they feel about the situation and has made you agree. Maybe the ape is reacting to a broken laptop or bad news sent via email. It doesn’t matter. It fully encapsulates the feelings of the situation.

GIFs like the famous baboon pushing a laptop have taken over the Internet. They’re found on social media, in blog posts and in professional email correspondence. But are these GIFs really professional? Should they be a part of your daily content communications strategy?

The only way to know is by exploring the psychology behind GIF use and their context from a marketing perspective.  

GIFs are Ubiquitous in the Marketing Universe

Early last year, Aleksej Durdevic at Digital Doughnut said the GIF would be the Biggest Digital Marketing Trend For 2017. He wasn’t wrong. Their rapid growth and use in both personal and professional environments led to their rise to power. Brands that had never considered using GIFs in marketing before now actively create them.  

Even without context, the numbers are staggering. In 2015, Giphy boasted 50 million monthly unique users. In 2017, that number reached 100 million daily active users.

According to Alex Konrad at Forbes, Giphy has two-thirds as many users as Snapchat, and serves more than 1 billion GIFs on a daily basis. Without realizing it, you likely interact with Giphy-hosted images several times per day.

While Giphy might be one of the largest GIF creation and hosting sites, it’s not the only one, proving that this form of visual content has quietly taken over the Internet.
  

The Psychology Behind GIF Use

GIFs are a key medium of communication on the Internet that help audiences connect with each other. To overlook them as frivolous mini-videos for BuzzFeed articles means ignoring the power of storytelling in your marketing.  

Pop Culture Creates a Shared Common Among Between Audiences

Pop culture certainly plays a role in why people are so quick to share GIFs. It’s not uncommon for the latest meme to flood the Internet with GIFs that inevitably work their way into professional communication. However, this pop culture tie actually builds social ties between audiences.  

“When connected to pop culture, GIFs also serve as a way to build off of a common baseline and create a sense of community,” startup consultant Andie Katschthaler writes. “The use of a GIF can add meaning to the words in a tweet and connect like-minded people, creating rapport.”

When used well, your entire audience doesn’t necessarily need to have seen the pop culture reference to still appreciate the GIF. It’s OK if they never watched an episode of The Office to understand the sentiment. However, audiences who have seen The Office can feel like they’re in on the joke.   

GIFs Add Body Language and Facial Expressions to the Internet

As a whole, humans are used to identifying visual cues in communication. Between facial expressions and body language, words themselves don’t mean as much as how they are said.

Dr. Carol Morgan points out that 80 to 90 percent of communication is nonverbal. These gestures are often cultural, bringing a society together to help them communicate. Unfortunately, the Internet tends to block a lot tonal cues, which often lead to misunderstandings.   

“The limits of language still chafe in an era when so much casual, conversational communication happens via screens rather than face-to-face,” says Claire Fallon, culture writer for HuffPost Arts. “The GIF allows a sort of proxy face-to-face encounter, conveying a visual cue of your emotional state directly across the web.”

GIFs are tools to add emotional context for better understanding.

GIFs Provide More Context Than Pictures

GIFs also provide more context for the events and emotions of the news than a picture or text otherwise could. For example, Olivier Laurent and Giphy founder Alex Chung dissected a GIF of Hillary Clinton during an October 2015 Benghazi hearing to share just how communicative these small, repeating images can be.

Within a few seconds, you see Clinton sigh, casually brush some lint off of her shoulder, and then return her focus to the committee with a mixture of boredom and confidence.

Through the image, you can clearly see how she feels about the 11-hour interrogation, where a still image might not have conveyed all of that information, or, worse, might have told a completely different story.

A GIF wasn’t necessary to report on the committee meeting, but it certainly captured the feelings of everyone involved.   

Can Reaction GIFs Serve as Professional Communication?

PR strategist Stuart Bruce argues that GIF sharing isn’t just for startups using Slack anymore. Microsoft’s partnership with Giphy has brought these dancing images to corporate environments, with employees sharing GIFs on Skype and the company’s other commercial tools.

With GIF use going corporate, its perception as a professional medium of communication could increase over the next few years.   

However, most audiences might not be ready for GIF use in professional communication — either for internal emails or external marketing efforts.

For example, the team at Fundera asked 1,000 workers to rate the appropriateness of their email content, with one being the lowest and five being the highest. GIFs received an average score of 1.8, making them the second-least professional form for communication (only behind talking in all caps).

The use of acronyms, emojis and memes all ranked higher as more professional than GIFs, but not by much. Acronyms, the leading result, only had a score of 2.1 for professionalism.
 

Case Study: Google Makes a GIF its Official Statement

There’s no better example of a GIF fail in marketing communication than Google sending a GIF as its response to a reporter.

In 2015, Richard Lewis at the Daily Dot reached out to YouTube’s spokespeople about their plan to relaunch a live streaming service. Instead of a formal statement, the team at YouTube (owned by Google) replied with a GIF of a little girl shaking her head in shock. Lewis assumed the response was YouTube’s way of saying “no comment,” but the spokesperson corrected him, saying that it was their comment.

“The GIF really was our official response,” the YouTube spokesperson wrote.

Whether the GIF was a joke done poorly or an attempt to be witty, the response fell on its face and became the story.

Evan LePage, former content manager at HootSuite, says confusion is one of the main risks of communicating with GIFs. He says there’s nothing worse than marketers trying to be too cool by using GIFs inappropriately. It’s just as bad as responding with a movie quote from a film no one has seen (or remembers).

Marketers Should Use GIFs in Their Content Strategy

Most companies and industry stand to benefit from testing GIF use in their content. While a poorly used GIF can lead to disaster (at least if you’re Google), there are significant benefits to tapping into these visual tools.  

GIFs Reinforce Your Brand Messaging

Vilma Núñez, founder of Convierte Más, believes GIFs reinforce your brand messaging and enhance your text to help customers remember what you’re trying to say. Furthermore, they also reinforce your call to action.

Instead of adding a lengthy CTA encouraging customers to sign up for a newsletter or click on a link, you can use a GIF that adds an element of fun to the content while drawing attention to and reinforcing the action needed.

Audiences Process Visual Content Faster

If you need to catch your audience’s attention or quickly set the tone for your brand messaging, a video GIF can bring readers in and make them curious about what you have to say.

“You brain processes what it’s seeing on video 60,000 times faster than it processes text,” the team at Contactually writes. “The quick GIF you included in your email is more likely to elicit an understood response from your contact than had you included a bad joke in written form.”

GIFs can also help discuss complex subjects by providing light breaks in between thoughts.

They Enhance Your Storytelling

GIFs can be tools for wordy bloggers who feel stuck moving audiences through their content. With the right placement, they can convey emotions and bring audiences to a new point in the story without paragraphs of descriptions.

“Don’t use a GIF if it doesn’t enhance the story you’re telling or if your message would remain unchanged without it,” Jillean Kearney writes at ScribbleLive. “If a GIF doesn’t serve a purpose, then it’s just moving clutter.”

You might realize an emotional reaction was what your content needed all along. David Frenay at Emolytics says that humans are trained to react first and think second. Many of our decisions, then, are completely irrational because we’re trained to react.

With the right GIF, you can elicit a reaction and make your audiences feel a certain way about your brand before they even begin your story.

If you struggle to elicit reactions from your customers, a well-placed GIF can get them on board with your content messaging.   

Can Brands Afford to Ignore GIFs in their Content Marketing?

If your company hasn’t embraced GIF use in its content strategy, then you likely have two choices: Jump on the bandwagon to create compelling content, or hope the trend blows over.

Marketer Pritha Bose warns marketers against the second choice, though.

She says that as more consumers switch to mobile and engage with GIFs, more developers will work to create GIF-friendly email templates and communication tools. This makes it easier for marketers to naturally add GIFs to their communication strategy to join the conversation instead of railing against it.  

GIFs aren’t going anywhere in 2018. Those who adapt to modern communication are more likely to succeed. Even if you just test a few internally developed GIFs that showcase your products, your content strategy is better off than if you stuck to static visuals, or no visuals at all.   

Images by: Ahmad Odeh, chajamp/©123RF Stock Photo, Oliver Shou