Posts Tagged ‘Content’
CMI B2B Content marketing report review
December 6th, 2011
The B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Budgets, Benchmarks and Trends report, was published yesterday by the Content Marketing Institute in the U.S., led by its founder Joe Pulizzi.
We usually try to focus on UK/Euro stats on this blog, but I found the data in this piece to be particularly interesting. You can see the full findings here, and the sample of 1,092 marketers was taken in August 2011, and focused on how well B2B marketers are achieving their goals when it comes to content marketing, and how much has changed in the past year.
The 2011 study follows the 2010 piece of the same name and therefore allows for comparison between this year and last year.
In brief, the report shows:
Usage and effectiveness
• 9 out of 10 organisations market with content marketing
• On average, B2B marketers employ eight different content marketing tactics to achieve their goals. The most popular tactics are: (see graph below for full breakdown)
- Article posting (79%)
- Social media (excluding blogs) (74%)
- Blogs (65%)
- eNewsletters (63%)
- case studies (58%)
- in-person events (56%)
• Marketers are using content marketing to support multiple business goals, led by:
- brand awareness (69%)
- customer acquisition (68%)
- lead generation (67%)
- customer retention/loyalty (62%)
The least widely employed goal for content marketing is lead management/nurturing.
Measurement
• Web traffic is the most widely used success metric (58%). However, this year, sales lead
quality (49%) is the second-highest used metric (versus direct sales in the previous study).
Budget
• Marketers, on average, spend over a quarter of their marketing budget on content marketing
• 60% report that they plan to increase their spend on content marketing over the next 12 months.
Challenges
The greatest reported challenge is “producing the kind of content that engages prospects
and customers” (41% of respondents). And nearly the same percentage of respondents in 2011 as in 2010 reported that “producing enough content” (20%) and “budget to produce content” (18%) are their greatest challenges in content marketing.
While in-person events and webinars are still seen as the most effective tactics, on average, the following ranked notably higher in perceived effectiveness compared to the 2010 report:
• Blogs: 45% increase
• Case studies: 32% increase
• Videos: 36% increase
• Webinars/webcasts: 25% increase
The challenges section will resonate with many marketers, identifying points that will continue to test brands of all types, specifically: producing the kind of content that engages prospects and customers, producing enough content, and budgeting to produce content, which is difficult enough without considering those organisations that have little or no experience of the resource required to produce high quality and engaging content in a consistent way.
Of the tactics, it was a bit of a shock to see blogs coming out highest in terms of perceived effectiveness compared to 2010. The general trend has been away from blogs, but perhaps this is a reflection of quality beginning to tell over quantity, as those that have actually put the effort into B2B blogs are now seeing the return over the ‘me too’ blogs that see very little in either response or effort.
Measurement is always a prickly subject, and it was no surprise to see web traffic ranking as the most popular, although sales lead quality is beginning to show a little more relevance for those B2B businesses putting the time in to identify metrics and better understand opportunities and outcomes.
Quality content to be rewarded by Google algorithm change
April 15th, 2011
Content farms have long been the antithesis of quality content providers. In theory, those that develop relevant and quality content should find themselves higher in search engine results pages than the repetitive, keyword-heavy farmed content. However, that has not always been the case.
Google has consistently informed us that quality content combined with real customer engagement will be rewarded by an improvement on SERPs (assuming the website meets basic organic search optimisation), and this week a post titled: ‘High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback’ on the Google Webmaster Central blog by Amit Singhal seems to have taken a large step towards making this a reality.
He confirmed: “Over a month ago we introduced an algorithmic improvement designed to help people
find more high-quality sites in search. Since then we’ve gotten a lot of positive responses about the change: searchers are finding better results, and many great publishers are getting more traffic.
“Today we’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, and we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms. In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.”
Fundamentally, this should mean that offering quality content and customer engagement will be rewarded, and low quality websites, even those with high traffic, will not necessarily trump those that are trying to make the web a better place with useful content.
Obviously it will take some time for the algorithm to take effect, but this is a technical change to back up Google’s vision, and should be applauded, at least in theory.
As Singhal recently confirmed himself: “Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem.
“It is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”
I only hope this isn’t another false dawn in the clean-up of some of the Web’s less scrupulous sites, and that finally we see both reputation and relevancy, as well as traffic and SEO, worthy of ranking.
Singhal closed by saying: “Google’s quality guidelines provide helpful information about how to improve your site. As sites change, our algorithmic rankings will update to reflect that. In addition, you’re welcome to post in our Webmaster Help Forums. While we aren’t making any manual exceptions, we will consider this feedback as we continue to refine our algorithms.”
I think we should all take his advice, and if there isn’t an improvement we should also do our best to let Google know it isn’t good enough.
Google, News Corp and a bit of advice for restaurants
December 4th, 2009
The Google - News Corp debate has been raging this week, and while at first I made the decision not to add to the many, many, many opinions on this issue, after a debate with a colleague earlier today, I realised I couldn’t resist. So Tim, I blame you.
Some of the comments made this week by both Murdoch and Google have been quite telling in my opinion, and it’s much more than just the two big boys of media jousting for position. The Guardian has provided excellent commentary all week.
To recap, Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation addressed the US media regulators’ workshop in Washington this week, where he made a speech punctuated by his comment that internet users will pay for content, saying they would be happy to shell out for “information they need to rise in society”, before going on to attack internet news aggregation as “theft”, claiming that advertising-only business models were dead.
“From the beginning on, newspapers have prospered for one reason: giving readers the news that they want…If we fail, we fail like a restaurant that makes meals that no one wants to eat.”
Murdoch offered some points that made absolute sense, i.e. the restaurant example, and a few that didn’t, such as the ‘theft’, and ‘rise in society’ points above.
I think that simply suggesting Murdoch is blaming Google for the demise of national media is a bit of an over-simplification, although I don’t think he would be too upset if that was the general assumption. However, I think he has missed one key point, which is that Newspapers are so late to the content revolution that it’s nearly destroyed them, and that now they are realising the scale of the issue, their only response is to place traditional media monetisation rules on a medium which not only doesn’t accept these rules, but has also been enjoying their content free for years.
Why would you pay for a service that hasn’t changed or evolved at all from the service that you’ve been getting for free for years? Is news from newspaper sources more valuable to the user than news from other sources? Are people that loyal to a newspaper brand to pay for online content that has no added value and is no more useful than news form other sources? Not in my opinion.
So what about Google’s response to this? Well, both Matt Brittin, the director of Google UK, and Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive have made interesting comments in return. Schmidt’s was in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, which many will point to as a success in terms of paid-for content.
But I was especially interested in Brittin’s comments, who was speaking in UK Parliament to the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, as he worked as director of strategy and digital at Daily Mirror publisher Trinity Mirror before joining Google in 2007, so he should understand the issue.
My favourite quotes from Brittin were:
“We do not steal content. If you look at Google search and Google News what you will find is snippets, a little line that will take you through to the original websites…
“That’s accepted as in line with copyright law worldwide, seen as like a newspaper article quoting lines from a book in a book review. We defend copyright owners’ rights and it’s wrong to paint us as stealing content. We are like a virtual newsagent…
“Publishers have control, they choose to make content available for free online. They have control now and have always had control to allow them to opt out. They can say, ‘I don’t want to appear in Google search or in Google News or in one and not the other.
“They choose to stay and have content discoverable because they find it helpful to have huge numbers of people coming through to their content.”
That pretty much says it all in my opinion. Google and other search engines are driving many thousands of readers to these websites, if the publishers wish to opt out they can do, and this is something Murdoch has threatened and I believe would do if pushed.
However, as we all now know, this week Google has also made a concession by allowing publishers of paid for content to limit the amount of free access users have to their websites from Google News.
This means publishers can limit Google News users to no more than five pages of content a day without registering or subscribing. In affect, Google is still driving traffic to the content, but the publishers get their fee if the user wishes to continue looking or get more content.
I think this is Google’s way of settling the publishers down. Google has the upper hand in the long term, and whether this decision was affected by political forces I guess we’ll never know, but by giving a little Google gets a lot in the long term, and I feel the outcome will still be the same.
In reality most users will look at other sources for their news once the free clicks have gone from major publishers, or learn that it becomes a nuisance navigating away from publisher’s sites after the free clicks, so stop visiting them in the first place. That is unless, you’ve guessed it, there is more useful and relevant content on offer to warrant a charge.
In many ways this is similar to a restaurant that makes meals that no one wants to eat, as Murdoch said, or more precisely a restaurant that charges today for exactly the same meal that it offered free yesterday.
June 19th, 2008
So who caught Mike Butcher commenting on the AP content issue on Sky News last night? Mike has linked to a recording on his post this morning. Well done Mike!
When digital content issues reach the broadcast media you know it’s either big, or has been going on for a while, and in this case it’s both.
To recap, Associated Press has announced that it doesn’t want anyone quoting more than four words from its articles without payment.
I’m sorry, before we go any further, have I just entered a time warp? Have we shot back a few years to the early days of blogging when all these arguments were vaguely relevant? Don’t get me wrong, I fully support everyone who is fighting AP on this, but why do it? Why now? What’s the deal? Surely this can only end one way?
Even if AP is successful in stopping everyone that uses more than four words without payment, which let’s face it is financially and practically impossible, what do they stand to gain? Hold back the movement of content? Freeze the evolution of open communications? Become the new hate figure for digital media?
Help me out here.
I’m not going to bang on about the ‘why’ this is so ridiculous - many high profile bloggers have already put the argument across very clearly and eloquently , such as Arrington and Jarvis and as Mike Butcher said last night on Sky news: “It’s absolutely pointless!” Oh and: “Bananas”.
The one good thing to come out of this situation is to see some of the highest-profile bloggers united in a shared cause. Just watch them go now! AP, i almost feel sorry for you!