White paper blizzard
Competing for Web eyeballs
Content for download
Competing for Web eyeballs
Content for download
Showing posts with label content marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label content marketing. Show all posts
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Interwebs White Paper Bombardment
The Internet's marketing gurus are on white paper production overdrive. I download a few guides every so often to stay current on how content marketers think. A few white papers aren't worth the digits it takes to publish them, but most are okay. The biggest unknown is estimating their shelf lives.
Internet marketing advances at light speed. Tactics that worked last year may be counterproductive today. A white paper describing old best practices may be a waste of time to execute now. Every marketer now rides the content marketing trend. Any think piece that doesn't address how content fills out every layer of the marketing funnel comes up short.
Marketing guidelines that depend too heavily on text are also suspect in an age when Pinterest and Instagram make images central to communication. White papers are fine for deep dives into topics that require step-by-step instructions. Marrying them to infographics that grab attention keeps them relevant.
I have plans for tons more white papers here at Alfidi Capital. The clean look of my main website's new design makes me want to put up a whole bunch more research publications. I challenge myself to write for an audience that I will never personally meet. White paper readers are global. They also exist in the far future. Whatever I write must translate into formats that someone has yet to invent. Publishing grants vicarious immortality.
Internet marketing advances at light speed. Tactics that worked last year may be counterproductive today. A white paper describing old best practices may be a waste of time to execute now. Every marketer now rides the content marketing trend. Any think piece that doesn't address how content fills out every layer of the marketing funnel comes up short.
Marketing guidelines that depend too heavily on text are also suspect in an age when Pinterest and Instagram make images central to communication. White papers are fine for deep dives into topics that require step-by-step instructions. Marrying them to infographics that grab attention keeps them relevant.
I have plans for tons more white papers here at Alfidi Capital. The clean look of my main website's new design makes me want to put up a whole bunch more research publications. I challenge myself to write for an audience that I will never personally meet. White paper readers are global. They also exist in the far future. Whatever I write must translate into formats that someone has yet to invent. Publishing grants vicarious immortality.
Saturday, October 03, 2015
API Monetization And Distribution At Integrate 2015
I scored a seat as a panelist at Integrate 2015, so I had to check out other parts of the conference to see what's new in API World. There's more to app ecosystems than hackathons and gamification. Apps need information fed from the remainder of the data supply chain: data warehouses, SDKs, and APIs.
Deep linking into the app ecosystem is the brand new way of getting content to searchers. I think "discovery service" will be an emerging buzzword for content marketers. App distribution has been one-to-many so far, unlike Web searches matching many-to-many. New app store indexing with knowledge graphs and search will bring apps into many-to-many distribution. The deep linking experts on hand at Integrate 2015 claimed that cheap and free discovery drives app downloads, but they had no examples of success. Paid social media promotion still seems to be a key to driving app downloads. Aspiring startups building APIs and apps must still budget for marketing and raise capital with promotional milestones in mind.
One speaker shared some pretty good insights on the API value chain. Adding details after basic data implies adding value. The API and app have different price points, so the "spread" between them is the added value. The speaker identified different business models based on who pays for distribution. Each model had several different permutations of pricing structures. The cool thing about the broader distribution models is that they allowed for multiple price points. Developers can get paid with affiliate revenue sharing, like the way Uber's API gets revenue when partners in travel and tourism use it to make their own apps. Subscription-based fees for units or tokens tracking API calls resemble the pricing plans we recognize in our smartphone data plans. The acceptance of subscription plans for API calls comes when API providers have large numbers of APIs addressing many segments. The biggest revelation for me was the high cost of hosting APIs in the cloud if they generate high data transaction rates. Hybrid cloud solutions may be best for Big Data providers, with high-volume transactions hosted on premise and other less intense data hosted in the cloud.
The developer experience (DX) is another term that belongs with UX and UI. Cool incentive promotions can generate developer buzz. Displaying an API with pleasing aesthetics means app developers will find it attractive and give it social proof. One piece of conventional wisdom floating around Integrate 2015 is that it's okay to raise prices until some portion of your customers complain, provided you understand your API's sales cycle. I think raising prices until 20% of your customers complain validates the Pareto principle. The other 80% won't notice the price increase because the API relationship isn't significant enough to them.
Proprietary API certification means little if it does not reference some independent computer sector standard. Do a Google search of "API certification" and see the links related to petroleum engineering, not coding. The data sector covering SDKs, APIs, and apps is still so young that it does not have a standards body. The elegant solution would be OASIS standards for API call testing, installation, configuration, documentation, escalation processes, and versioning triggers for re-certification.
API developers must find distribution channels. One successful developer insisted on using a universally accepted protocol. I suppose JSON fits the bill because a lot of developers at Integrate 2015 were enthusiastic about it. Partner networks matter, and so does saying "no" to the wrong partners who want distribution for the wrong business reasons.
I'll conclude with a brief overview of my own participation on one of the panels. I shared the stage with Nicole Bryan from Tasktop and Salil Deshpande from Bain Capital Ventures to discuss venture capitalists' perspectives on investing in API-centric startups. We explored the relationship between monetization and distribution, some changes in the economic landscape that make APIs viable as a core business model, the stories an API startup can tell to make outsiders care, and some standout aspects of an API business model that we would notice in a format like Integrate's startup challenge. The audience of developers and tech aficionados needed to hear the back-and-forth of both genders on a panel representing tech practitioners, venture investors, and the analyst community. I thought our panel was more well-attended than a couple of the main stage headliner talks. Our audience asked sharp questions relevant to launching an API startup. This is the kind of high-level attention developers can get when they attend conferences like Integrate 2015.
Deep linking into the app ecosystem is the brand new way of getting content to searchers. I think "discovery service" will be an emerging buzzword for content marketers. App distribution has been one-to-many so far, unlike Web searches matching many-to-many. New app store indexing with knowledge graphs and search will bring apps into many-to-many distribution. The deep linking experts on hand at Integrate 2015 claimed that cheap and free discovery drives app downloads, but they had no examples of success. Paid social media promotion still seems to be a key to driving app downloads. Aspiring startups building APIs and apps must still budget for marketing and raise capital with promotional milestones in mind.
One speaker shared some pretty good insights on the API value chain. Adding details after basic data implies adding value. The API and app have different price points, so the "spread" between them is the added value. The speaker identified different business models based on who pays for distribution. Each model had several different permutations of pricing structures. The cool thing about the broader distribution models is that they allowed for multiple price points. Developers can get paid with affiliate revenue sharing, like the way Uber's API gets revenue when partners in travel and tourism use it to make their own apps. Subscription-based fees for units or tokens tracking API calls resemble the pricing plans we recognize in our smartphone data plans. The acceptance of subscription plans for API calls comes when API providers have large numbers of APIs addressing many segments. The biggest revelation for me was the high cost of hosting APIs in the cloud if they generate high data transaction rates. Hybrid cloud solutions may be best for Big Data providers, with high-volume transactions hosted on premise and other less intense data hosted in the cloud.
The developer experience (DX) is another term that belongs with UX and UI. Cool incentive promotions can generate developer buzz. Displaying an API with pleasing aesthetics means app developers will find it attractive and give it social proof. One piece of conventional wisdom floating around Integrate 2015 is that it's okay to raise prices until some portion of your customers complain, provided you understand your API's sales cycle. I think raising prices until 20% of your customers complain validates the Pareto principle. The other 80% won't notice the price increase because the API relationship isn't significant enough to them.
Proprietary API certification means little if it does not reference some independent computer sector standard. Do a Google search of "API certification" and see the links related to petroleum engineering, not coding. The data sector covering SDKs, APIs, and apps is still so young that it does not have a standards body. The elegant solution would be OASIS standards for API call testing, installation, configuration, documentation, escalation processes, and versioning triggers for re-certification.
API developers must find distribution channels. One successful developer insisted on using a universally accepted protocol. I suppose JSON fits the bill because a lot of developers at Integrate 2015 were enthusiastic about it. Partner networks matter, and so does saying "no" to the wrong partners who want distribution for the wrong business reasons.
I'll conclude with a brief overview of my own participation on one of the panels. I shared the stage with Nicole Bryan from Tasktop and Salil Deshpande from Bain Capital Ventures to discuss venture capitalists' perspectives on investing in API-centric startups. We explored the relationship between monetization and distribution, some changes in the economic landscape that make APIs viable as a core business model, the stories an API startup can tell to make outsiders care, and some standout aspects of an API business model that we would notice in a format like Integrate's startup challenge. The audience of developers and tech aficionados needed to hear the back-and-forth of both genders on a panel representing tech practitioners, venture investors, and the analyst community. I thought our panel was more well-attended than a couple of the main stage headliner talks. Our audience asked sharp questions relevant to launching an API startup. This is the kind of high-level attention developers can get when they attend conferences like Integrate 2015.
Wednesday, September 02, 2015
Copywriting Language Zingers In Content Marketing
There's a whole bunch of conventional wisdom sloshing around the Interwebs about how to craft text that captures an audience's attention. Zinger phrases are the copywriting bridge from eyeball capture to audience commitment. Those of us who live and die by Web traffic need hard core facts to support our content marketing.
I did a Google search of "compelling subject lines" and came up with a lot of recycled blog posts saying the same things. Action words that promise life-changing benefits and force decisions are no-brainers that have been around forever. The new twist is in the delivery through social media. Linkbait farms are full of links saying "10 Best Ways To Do Something You Need Right Now" next to pictures of Grumpy Cat and Kim Kardashian. Grumpy and Kim are not doing something you need right now, so feel free to ignore them.
Any MOOC copywriting course would be a cool bag of tricks if it were co-branded with a reputable business school. Everyone would have access to that top material but only the A-grade students would use it effectively, just like they would in a traditional school. Leading with a title that starts with a number, like those "10 Best Ways" articles, is all the rage on social media sharing sites. Rather than link to copywriting how-to blogs that come and go, I would rather search Google for "copywriting academic research" to find the peer-reviewed proof of workable tactics.
The marketing community does not have a doctrinal definition of how long copy should be to get attention, or maybe I just couldn't find one because I don't have the marketer's secret decoder ring. Conventional wisdom now favors short-form copy that matches people's abbreviated attention spans. I cannot find research that determines whether short-form copy is truly more effective than long-form copy at getting either attention or compliance with a final pitch. It may not matter if the power words punch the reader out up front in the copy headline.
I searched the Harvard Business Review and Knowledge@Wharton for "copywriting" and found next to nothing that would validate any best practices. One Wharton article is "Marketers Turn to Metrics to Measure the Impact of Their Initiatives." It discusses the need for hard metrics but offers none. The market is thus wide open for the kind of unverifiable folk wisdom that ad agencies have always purveyed. Copywriting is still in the Mad Men era. Modern content marketers are welcome to dive into academic journals in search of proof that phrasing, word length, tone, and alphanumeric variation truly drive conversion rates.
Fear and greed still drive audience response in a highly evolved digital age. Pushing an elevator pitch like "How to make 10x more money, go 2x as fast, save 50% on your bills, and be 3x more attractive, all within 24 hours" would be a copywriter's dream. Yeah, people really believe that stuff. Delivering on that promise is the product developer's problem. Alfidi Capital offers no such promises. The zinger content you see here is in a class by itself.
I did a Google search of "compelling subject lines" and came up with a lot of recycled blog posts saying the same things. Action words that promise life-changing benefits and force decisions are no-brainers that have been around forever. The new twist is in the delivery through social media. Linkbait farms are full of links saying "10 Best Ways To Do Something You Need Right Now" next to pictures of Grumpy Cat and Kim Kardashian. Grumpy and Kim are not doing something you need right now, so feel free to ignore them.
Any MOOC copywriting course would be a cool bag of tricks if it were co-branded with a reputable business school. Everyone would have access to that top material but only the A-grade students would use it effectively, just like they would in a traditional school. Leading with a title that starts with a number, like those "10 Best Ways" articles, is all the rage on social media sharing sites. Rather than link to copywriting how-to blogs that come and go, I would rather search Google for "copywriting academic research" to find the peer-reviewed proof of workable tactics.
The marketing community does not have a doctrinal definition of how long copy should be to get attention, or maybe I just couldn't find one because I don't have the marketer's secret decoder ring. Conventional wisdom now favors short-form copy that matches people's abbreviated attention spans. I cannot find research that determines whether short-form copy is truly more effective than long-form copy at getting either attention or compliance with a final pitch. It may not matter if the power words punch the reader out up front in the copy headline.
I searched the Harvard Business Review and Knowledge@Wharton for "copywriting" and found next to nothing that would validate any best practices. One Wharton article is "Marketers Turn to Metrics to Measure the Impact of Their Initiatives." It discusses the need for hard metrics but offers none. The market is thus wide open for the kind of unverifiable folk wisdom that ad agencies have always purveyed. Copywriting is still in the Mad Men era. Modern content marketers are welcome to dive into academic journals in search of proof that phrasing, word length, tone, and alphanumeric variation truly drive conversion rates.
Fear and greed still drive audience response in a highly evolved digital age. Pushing an elevator pitch like "How to make 10x more money, go 2x as fast, save 50% on your bills, and be 3x more attractive, all within 24 hours" would be a copywriter's dream. Yeah, people really believe that stuff. Delivering on that promise is the product developer's problem. Alfidi Capital offers no such promises. The zinger content you see here is in a class by itself.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Financial Sarcasm Roundup for 06/22/15
The markets are on edge about Greece's fate, and my sarcasm is far edgier. Investors can pull all the money they like from bond funds, because my sarcasm will always be there to fill the hole.
Greece throws some new proposals at Europe. Only the dumbest journalists and analysts believe anything Athens says these days. The Greek leadership goes through the motions and Europe's leaders act like they've earned another few billion euros. Neither party believes in the process but they're both too terrified of what may happen in the markets if they don't keep up pretenses. Anything Greece does to fulfill its austerity commitment will force a snap election that brings real radicals into power, and then the world watches an instant default.
Caterpillar plans another round of layoffs. I'm glad I don't own that stock. Bad times in the mining sector will hurt more than heavy equipment. A whole bunch of truck stops and flophouses in Idaho, Montana, and Nevada will go under at some point. Guess how much more the heavy equipment sector will hurt once the next housing market downturn comes along.
Amazon has incentives for vanity press authors. Wow, now there's a reason to accelerate my pipe dream of self-publishing my financial tomes through Amazon's Kindle. Content marketers are increasingly measuring user engagement in smaller increments. Every instance counts. It pays to change the metric from broad downloads to something like a la carte pricing.
I have to blast out a sarcastic missive at one loser who claims to operate in the tech sector. I won't embarrass him by name. This dude wouldn't listen to me a few years ago when I told him what he needed to do to make a minimum viable product (MVP). He also demanded that I pretty much write his business plan for him and do a whole bunch of things he was too lazy to do himself. I recently noticed that this guy is back in startup mode, running through the same accelerator program he's done before. He has never succeeded in commercializing any of his claimed inventions. Dude, sometimes you just need to know when to quit, so quit already. I'm so glad he's not cramping my style anymore.
Greece throws some new proposals at Europe. Only the dumbest journalists and analysts believe anything Athens says these days. The Greek leadership goes through the motions and Europe's leaders act like they've earned another few billion euros. Neither party believes in the process but they're both too terrified of what may happen in the markets if they don't keep up pretenses. Anything Greece does to fulfill its austerity commitment will force a snap election that brings real radicals into power, and then the world watches an instant default.
Caterpillar plans another round of layoffs. I'm glad I don't own that stock. Bad times in the mining sector will hurt more than heavy equipment. A whole bunch of truck stops and flophouses in Idaho, Montana, and Nevada will go under at some point. Guess how much more the heavy equipment sector will hurt once the next housing market downturn comes along.
Amazon has incentives for vanity press authors. Wow, now there's a reason to accelerate my pipe dream of self-publishing my financial tomes through Amazon's Kindle. Content marketers are increasingly measuring user engagement in smaller increments. Every instance counts. It pays to change the metric from broad downloads to something like a la carte pricing.
I have to blast out a sarcastic missive at one loser who claims to operate in the tech sector. I won't embarrass him by name. This dude wouldn't listen to me a few years ago when I told him what he needed to do to make a minimum viable product (MVP). He also demanded that I pretty much write his business plan for him and do a whole bunch of things he was too lazy to do himself. I recently noticed that this guy is back in startup mode, running through the same accelerator program he's done before. He has never succeeded in commercializing any of his claimed inventions. Dude, sometimes you just need to know when to quit, so quit already. I'm so glad he's not cramping my style anymore.
Sunday, March 22, 2015
The Limerick of Finance for 03/22/15
Creating content is a breeze
New portals collect it with ease
They don't pay a cent
That's no way to meet rent
Curators will fall for such sleaze
New portals collect it with ease
They don't pay a cent
That's no way to meet rent
Curators will fall for such sleaze
Saturday, March 07, 2015
Alfidi Capital Checks Out SMX West 2015
I attended SMX West 2015 this week, aka Search Marketing Expo. I got a free Expo Plus pass, which means I got to attend all of the major sponsored talks and score free snacks throughout the day. I am all over free deals, folks. My original genius is in bold text because that is how I add value after these conferences.
Yahoo's Ad Lab kept me occupied on the first morning. The Yahoo presenters and staffers all wore some purple clothing item and the free pens they handed out had purple ink. Yahoo is all about purple. I use Yahoo Finance a lot and their top menu bar is purple. Maybe these people wear purple underwear too. Yahoo no longer has a personals section but I used it briefly in 2004, and I don't recall seeing any purple people there. Anyway, the common theme among the Yahoo presentations was the importance of storytelling in advertising. The channels in online marketing are obvious; everyone differentiates between native and search.
Yahoo's research revealed some curious things. Using trademark designations for a brand enhances an ad's click-through rate (CTR). Some people must like the simplest possible stimuli. Constructing a "power of three" language rhythm means telling a story of how "this, this, and then THIS" describes a brand. I saw that rhythm when I worked at UBS a decade ago, when their internal communications people put out some really confusing nonsense about the corporate logo. The people at UBS were stupid in 2005-06.
People remember ads that connect emotionally. Yahoo advocates connecting in three realms: consumer, product, and copy. Connecting with the consumer means placing the brand logo in the upper right corner of an online ad's image. There's more to it than that, but that was a big take-away. Using less than 20% text overlay in an image is how the ad copy connects without distracting from the image.
I have never worked in marketing so I will oversimplify the obvious winning formula for an effective ad campaign. The marketing pros first need to tie CTR to conversion rates to see whether their ads are driving behavior. The ad campaign's spend divided by the number of unique conversions is the customer acquisition cost (CAC). Comparing the CAC to the net income generated from the observed conversions reveals whether the campaign was worthwhile. See folks, this marketing stuff is really simple.
I caught a couple of expo theater talks before the afternoon's headliners. Disguised pitches are sometimes a chore but usually fun. Presenters don't always grok that their talk should be mostly actionable practices and only just enough brand mention to establish a value proposition. The few tips I picked up on the first day are coming at you right now. Google's advanced search can reveal reading comprehension levels, and one presenter claimed the insurance industry is required to write documents with reading levels no higher than 10th grade. I have not found confirmation of that anywhere, so naturally I am skeptical. Online ads are mainly images and short text phrases, so writing something for the Gunning fog index or Flesch-Kincaid test would just be a waste of time.
Another theater talk mentioned the "digital marketing funnel" concept. Link building is a marketing tactic now in decline but one presenter mentioned it as a brand awareness tactic at the top of the funnel. Content generation, tactics, formats, channels, and metrics are different for each level of the funnel. You can satisfy all of your funnel urges with the Content Marketing Institute's articles.
Google's constant algorithm changes have not deterred dedicated link builders from pitching their services. I don't think it's dawned on many link builders that they can use Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to pitch journalists. Doing media outreach the old-fashioned way takes a lot more time and gets more rejections than a response to a HARO query. I asked these link builders afterwards about the effectiveness of link building by making comments on blogs and forums. The lead dude said moderators have gotten a lot savvier in the last three years about deleting blatant link promoters and enabling a no-follow for web domain links. He said it still works if the comment and link posted are relevant to the blog or forum. I'm pretty sure link building as a third-party marketing service has almost reached the end of its useful life in the digital economy.
Another presenter had tips about building content that would resonate with search results. There's an audience out there for everything and keywords show us want they want. Experts in every vertical watch content their peers distribute. Think through high-traffic keywords that work well as anchor text so potential back-linkers will like it. Any amount of ad spend will drive some traffic but only quality content will make people stick around. I am not a fan of any paid social media presence because it has the potential for abuse if marketers pay for artificial likes and follows. The major social media channels now encourage marketers to think hard about spending on pay par click (PPC) campaigns after listening to complaints about its shortcomings.
The first day's cocktail reception is one of those conference traditions that has survived into the digital age. The cocktail with soda, Hennessy cognac, and Grand Marnier cognac liqueur fueled my survey of the hot babes wandering around the expo floor. Some of these gals had amazing hips, thighs, and calves, so they must get lots of exercise taking the stairs wherever they work. The #WeaselPecker photo meme was also working its way around the expo floor but I did not let it distract me from my search for hot babes. The concentration of woman in digital media seems to be higher than in other tech fields. We need stats to confirm this phenomenon.
I attended all of Google's sponsored talks the next day. Their big glass enclosure had all kinds of free candy and notepads. I swear I should have started my career with tech startups in Silicon Valley. The tech culture does free stuff right. The Google people showed us how return on ad spend (ROAS) measures "lift." Pure content people like bloggers may be able to ignore ROAS in favor of eCPC if their business model does not rely upon conversions, unless of course they have proof that ad spending to publicize a blog will drive their own ad revenue. I practice what I just preached by not spending a penny on ads. Google had plenty of cool things to say that I don't need to repeat because Google Best Practices has it all. They even figured out multiscreen optimization. Once you Learn With Google, you are welcome to Think With Google. I would rather eat and drink with Google, which is precisely what I did at the reception they hosted for those of us who attended their talks. All of the Google team leads who presented looked like they're in their late 20s or early 30s. It's no company for older people.
I had little time for the second day's theater talks. One of them really turned me off by playing very loud introductory music and disregarding the published topic. Dude, if you're going to pull a half-dozen stunts in twenty minutes while dressed in a running outfit, please go find another job. I couldn't find the dude on the expo floor to complain even after he said he would be in his booth. Good riddance.
The disparities between the search engines sponsoring most of these talks are growing. I think Yahoo and Bing will have trouble creating analytics suites to match Google no matter how good they make their algos. Google simply has way more data to aggregate because it dominate search. Mobile is turning into the same story. App aggregation captures more traffic than search on mobile. The dominant app stores will have the data for analytics. Apple and Google lead the app store presence. They will own the in-app advertising channels forever. The network effects are simply too large to overcome.
Bill Tancer gave the keynote talk recapping his research from several books on consumer behavior. I like the guy's "1/9/90 rule," where 1% of an online population generates content, another 9% interact with it, and the final 90% passively consume it. Like everything else in human history, a tiny fraction of a population drives civilization forward and everyone else is just along for the ride. I am going to try out the "People Hate Us On Yelp" meme and use negativity to drive more Web traffic to Alfidi Capital. Bill predicts a disruptive entrepreneurial opportunity in searches for "perspective" on consumer review sites because different age groups and demographics will perceive the same service quality differently. IMHO solving this opportunity simply means review sites can sort review listings by preferences for speed, cost, and quality. The DevOps people at the biggest sites can solve it within a few weeks.
I have never purchased advertising so I can't use some of material at this conference. Google Analytics and other services increasingly cater to ad agencies and other large media buyers who can generate multiple sales packages. SMX was still worth my time for the many free tips I got on SEO sources.
Yahoo's Ad Lab kept me occupied on the first morning. The Yahoo presenters and staffers all wore some purple clothing item and the free pens they handed out had purple ink. Yahoo is all about purple. I use Yahoo Finance a lot and their top menu bar is purple. Maybe these people wear purple underwear too. Yahoo no longer has a personals section but I used it briefly in 2004, and I don't recall seeing any purple people there. Anyway, the common theme among the Yahoo presentations was the importance of storytelling in advertising. The channels in online marketing are obvious; everyone differentiates between native and search.
Yahoo's research revealed some curious things. Using trademark designations for a brand enhances an ad's click-through rate (CTR). Some people must like the simplest possible stimuli. Constructing a "power of three" language rhythm means telling a story of how "this, this, and then THIS" describes a brand. I saw that rhythm when I worked at UBS a decade ago, when their internal communications people put out some really confusing nonsense about the corporate logo. The people at UBS were stupid in 2005-06.
People remember ads that connect emotionally. Yahoo advocates connecting in three realms: consumer, product, and copy. Connecting with the consumer means placing the brand logo in the upper right corner of an online ad's image. There's more to it than that, but that was a big take-away. Using less than 20% text overlay in an image is how the ad copy connects without distracting from the image.
I have never worked in marketing so I will oversimplify the obvious winning formula for an effective ad campaign. The marketing pros first need to tie CTR to conversion rates to see whether their ads are driving behavior. The ad campaign's spend divided by the number of unique conversions is the customer acquisition cost (CAC). Comparing the CAC to the net income generated from the observed conversions reveals whether the campaign was worthwhile. See folks, this marketing stuff is really simple.
I caught a couple of expo theater talks before the afternoon's headliners. Disguised pitches are sometimes a chore but usually fun. Presenters don't always grok that their talk should be mostly actionable practices and only just enough brand mention to establish a value proposition. The few tips I picked up on the first day are coming at you right now. Google's advanced search can reveal reading comprehension levels, and one presenter claimed the insurance industry is required to write documents with reading levels no higher than 10th grade. I have not found confirmation of that anywhere, so naturally I am skeptical. Online ads are mainly images and short text phrases, so writing something for the Gunning fog index or Flesch-Kincaid test would just be a waste of time.
Another theater talk mentioned the "digital marketing funnel" concept. Link building is a marketing tactic now in decline but one presenter mentioned it as a brand awareness tactic at the top of the funnel. Content generation, tactics, formats, channels, and metrics are different for each level of the funnel. You can satisfy all of your funnel urges with the Content Marketing Institute's articles.
Google's constant algorithm changes have not deterred dedicated link builders from pitching their services. I don't think it's dawned on many link builders that they can use Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to pitch journalists. Doing media outreach the old-fashioned way takes a lot more time and gets more rejections than a response to a HARO query. I asked these link builders afterwards about the effectiveness of link building by making comments on blogs and forums. The lead dude said moderators have gotten a lot savvier in the last three years about deleting blatant link promoters and enabling a no-follow for web domain links. He said it still works if the comment and link posted are relevant to the blog or forum. I'm pretty sure link building as a third-party marketing service has almost reached the end of its useful life in the digital economy.
Another presenter had tips about building content that would resonate with search results. There's an audience out there for everything and keywords show us want they want. Experts in every vertical watch content their peers distribute. Think through high-traffic keywords that work well as anchor text so potential back-linkers will like it. Any amount of ad spend will drive some traffic but only quality content will make people stick around. I am not a fan of any paid social media presence because it has the potential for abuse if marketers pay for artificial likes and follows. The major social media channels now encourage marketers to think hard about spending on pay par click (PPC) campaigns after listening to complaints about its shortcomings.
The first day's cocktail reception is one of those conference traditions that has survived into the digital age. The cocktail with soda, Hennessy cognac, and Grand Marnier cognac liqueur fueled my survey of the hot babes wandering around the expo floor. Some of these gals had amazing hips, thighs, and calves, so they must get lots of exercise taking the stairs wherever they work. The #WeaselPecker photo meme was also working its way around the expo floor but I did not let it distract me from my search for hot babes. The concentration of woman in digital media seems to be higher than in other tech fields. We need stats to confirm this phenomenon.
I attended all of Google's sponsored talks the next day. Their big glass enclosure had all kinds of free candy and notepads. I swear I should have started my career with tech startups in Silicon Valley. The tech culture does free stuff right. The Google people showed us how return on ad spend (ROAS) measures "lift." Pure content people like bloggers may be able to ignore ROAS in favor of eCPC if their business model does not rely upon conversions, unless of course they have proof that ad spending to publicize a blog will drive their own ad revenue. I practice what I just preached by not spending a penny on ads. Google had plenty of cool things to say that I don't need to repeat because Google Best Practices has it all. They even figured out multiscreen optimization. Once you Learn With Google, you are welcome to Think With Google. I would rather eat and drink with Google, which is precisely what I did at the reception they hosted for those of us who attended their talks. All of the Google team leads who presented looked like they're in their late 20s or early 30s. It's no company for older people.
I had little time for the second day's theater talks. One of them really turned me off by playing very loud introductory music and disregarding the published topic. Dude, if you're going to pull a half-dozen stunts in twenty minutes while dressed in a running outfit, please go find another job. I couldn't find the dude on the expo floor to complain even after he said he would be in his booth. Good riddance.
The disparities between the search engines sponsoring most of these talks are growing. I think Yahoo and Bing will have trouble creating analytics suites to match Google no matter how good they make their algos. Google simply has way more data to aggregate because it dominate search. Mobile is turning into the same story. App aggregation captures more traffic than search on mobile. The dominant app stores will have the data for analytics. Apple and Google lead the app store presence. They will own the in-app advertising channels forever. The network effects are simply too large to overcome.
Bill Tancer gave the keynote talk recapping his research from several books on consumer behavior. I like the guy's "1/9/90 rule," where 1% of an online population generates content, another 9% interact with it, and the final 90% passively consume it. Like everything else in human history, a tiny fraction of a population drives civilization forward and everyone else is just along for the ride. I am going to try out the "People Hate Us On Yelp" meme and use negativity to drive more Web traffic to Alfidi Capital. Bill predicts a disruptive entrepreneurial opportunity in searches for "perspective" on consumer review sites because different age groups and demographics will perceive the same service quality differently. IMHO solving this opportunity simply means review sites can sort review listings by preferences for speed, cost, and quality. The DevOps people at the biggest sites can solve it within a few weeks.
I have never purchased advertising so I can't use some of material at this conference. Google Analytics and other services increasingly cater to ad agencies and other large media buyers who can generate multiple sales packages. SMX was still worth my time for the many free tips I got on SEO sources.
Monday, May 26, 2014
World Bank Needs Content Marketing
The recent news that nobody reads most of the World Bank's published content made me wonder what the world is missing. I also wonder how much money the World Bank is wasting on knowledge content that fails to generate traction. The World Bank's own report on its downloads states that a quarter of its budget for country services goes to knowledge products, and 31% of these are never downloaded. That's about a 7% drag on the country services annual budget. Simply cutting the product budget by 31% may yield an immediate ROI if the remainder is allocated to more of the multi-sector reports that are most frequently downloaded.
Generating more external research citations via Google Scholar will help validate the World Bank's mission of informing policy debates. If 87% of the Bank's work goes uncited, Google's tracking tools can reveal which ones are cited by correlating language, page count, subject matter, and other metrics. Publishing in PDF should not be a limiting factor. I have seen plenty of academic material circulate in PDF copy because it successfully finds and audience.
The World Bank's social media and knowledge management people need to talk about content marketing. Google searches for marketing PDF content in social media reveal plenty of free guides from Marketo, Adobe, and other sources that want marketers to succeed. Has the World Bank ever cross-published its conference presentations to SlideShare? They should try it. It works. Have they ever completed a market analysis of the demographics that attend their conferences and request reports? Their depressing analysis of download stats may the first step.
I suspect the World Bank's problem lies in its inability to meet a market need for solutions. It acts like a bureaucracy that expects its captive customers to walk right in to its Open Knowledge Repository. The audience won't come if they don't know how the portal's products will benefit them. Private sector marketers know they must push media to a target market. The World Bank's content can solve the world's problems if it can push relevant content to an audience that needs it.
Generating more external research citations via Google Scholar will help validate the World Bank's mission of informing policy debates. If 87% of the Bank's work goes uncited, Google's tracking tools can reveal which ones are cited by correlating language, page count, subject matter, and other metrics. Publishing in PDF should not be a limiting factor. I have seen plenty of academic material circulate in PDF copy because it successfully finds and audience.
The World Bank's social media and knowledge management people need to talk about content marketing. Google searches for marketing PDF content in social media reveal plenty of free guides from Marketo, Adobe, and other sources that want marketers to succeed. Has the World Bank ever cross-published its conference presentations to SlideShare? They should try it. It works. Have they ever completed a market analysis of the demographics that attend their conferences and request reports? Their depressing analysis of download stats may the first step.
I suspect the World Bank's problem lies in its inability to meet a market need for solutions. It acts like a bureaucracy that expects its captive customers to walk right in to its Open Knowledge Repository. The audience won't come if they don't know how the portal's products will benefit them. Private sector marketers know they must push media to a target market. The World Bank's content can solve the world's problems if it can push relevant content to an audience that needs it.
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