Category: Content
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Why Your Content Marketing Isn’t Working
On any given day, a dozen or more articles pass by in my LinkedIn feed and blog reader, sharing the latest tips and tricks for content marketing success. The more lurid ones promise instant results or deep secrets of some kind that ostensibly will make your content marketing wildly successful. And yet almost none of…
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Solicited Review: Content Inc. Second Edition
The Second Edition of Content Inc. is a fascinating read. If you’re an experienced content marketer, the first five chapters are nothing new; everyone with 5 years or more of content marketing experience should already know and do most of the Content Inc. framework. For newer, more inexperienced marketers, the Content Inc. framework is a…
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Google Analytics: A Content Marketing Engagement Test
Here’s a content marketing question to start your thinking: what would you assume the relationship is between average time on page and word count? I would assume there would be a linear relationship, right? More words on a page means more time to read, so there should be a linear relationship between these two variables.…
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How to Think About Gating or Not Gating Content
There’s an endless debate in marketing – B2B marketing especially – about whether you should gate content or not. Let’s review some of the arguments for and against. In Favor of Gating Gating content, on the surface, makes logical sense. You as the marketer are providing a trade – information for information. It’s a barter.…
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Content Strategy and the Marketing Blog
Over the holidays, I looked at two things regarding my personal content strategy. First, I asked you, my community, what format content you’d like more of from me. Your answers were pretty clear: You want more content that’s text, that’s faster to consume. What you don’t want is more rich media to try digesting, and…
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You Ask, I Answer: Content Strategy and Marketing Funnel?
Oksana asks, “How important is it to build your content strategy around a marketing funnel? Why do you think so?” Recall that the marketing funnel is an operations-focused framework to delineate roles and responsibilities. It’s not the customer journey, not the customer experience. It is vital to have useful content all along the customer experience.…
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You Ask, I Answer: Driving Engagement with Content?
Erika asks, “What drives a reader to engage with a piece of content?” Engagement is all about one word: emotion. Something in the content has to trigger our emotions. Consider the content that engages you – and how algorithms learn from that engagement. If you want engagement, you have to decide what emotion you want…
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You Ask, I Answer: The ROI of Content Marketing?
Stephanie asks, “What would you say to a person who states that it’s impossible to measure the ROI of content marketing?” That person is bad at analytics? It’s true that it’s unlikely you’ll measure the ROI of content marketing down to the precise penny – but you also can’t measure anything else in marketing down…
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You Ask, I Answer: Attention Spans and Content Marketing?
Jen asks, “What is your take on the opinion that attention spans are getting shorter and people don’t read long-form content any more?” If that were true, Netflix would be out of business. Disney+ would not exist. Attention spans are longer than ever, by the very definition of binge watching. Attention for crap quality content,…
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You Ask, I Answer: Can AI Write as Well as a Human?
Deborah asks, “Can AI write as well as a human?” The answer depends on what the human is writing. If it’s complex, original works like novels, the answer is no. If it’s marketing swill, the answer is yes. If we examine some common readability metrics – which are decent proxies for content quality – we…