Apple’s recent announcement that it will be adding content blocking extensions for the latest version of its Safari browser may have been greeted with almighty cheers by some web consumers, even if digital marketers were less overwhelmed. If you’re into statistics, recent research from both Adobe and PageFair suggests that 144 million users used ad-blocking tools in 2014, up 70 percent on the previous year. Other numbers suggest it could be closer to 200m, but either way, we are seeing an upward trend from consumers seeking an online ad apocalypse.
Handing developers "a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content," is yet another dagger in the heart of web advertising, and raises more questions about how brands will ‘earn eyeballs’ and build momentum for their brand in the online world. With this in mind, content marketing is increasingly being deployed as a potential alternative, helping businesses engage with potential and existing customers via informative written, video and audio content that defies the overt and aggressive nature of advertising. Entertainment and education trump the hard sell and marketers globally are jumping on the bandwagon in their droves.
That’s not to suggest that ads are completely dead, but the emergence of content marketing does signal a significant change, powered by consumer choice and control. Brands, previously dependant on advertising to drive traffic to their product pages are now testing how-to guides, hands-on tutorials and other content which creates a potentially deeper engagement with the customer. Get a visitor excited by your content and there is a very good chance they will share it with their social media networks – it’s the premise of the new sales funnel that we will be looking at in more detail in subsequent articles.
Like it or not, technology is going to give the consumer what they want and that is ultimately going to be fewer ads. It’s new and, quite frankly, scary territory for some marketers. Advertising online has been viewed as a safe bet, enabling brands to find and serve up ads to mostly relevant consumers. Now, with content marketing, brands will have to work even harder to understand their audience in order to produce relevant content that will excite and engage, as well as win brand advocates.
As digital marketers explore content versus web advertising, we’ve developed a four point plan in order to ease the transition into content marketing for the multiscreen world.
- Who are my visitors?
The first stage of any content marketing plan should be to understand your visitors and we don’t mean names and addresses. Build up a picture of the devices being used on your website and how that impacts behaviour and engagement. Knowing that 90% of your traffic is on desktop rather than mobile, for example, means you can think about richer content, such as video that be less effective on mobile devices. At the same time, it is important to understand device data against other demographic data from your visitor base to make sense of purchasing behaviours and why users act the way they do.
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- How do they engage?
Digging deeper, we can check how device types perform on different attributes such as bandwidth speeds and connection type. Do iPhone visitors bounce from video on slow connections? How does time of day impact how visitors behave? Multi screen web analytics can unlock these insights at the click of a button, but is crucial to understand that these are often not fixed and can change based on the context the visitor may be in, the time of day, connection speed and other factors. Being able to understand the user’s journey across your content and website is key here.
- Is content leading to conversion?
Content marketing isn’t cheap, well a lot of the time anyway. You will want to make sure that every asset you produce has a tangible return. Nobody wants to create a £3,000 video which returns 3 sales when a £250 article brought about the same result. Being able to understand the visitor journey and flow from page-to-page can help digital marketers identify where content is working and leading people to conversion.
See our short video for more on understanding high performing content.
4. How am I going to measure success?
Moving into the world of content marketing also means a new way of thinking about measurement. Knowing that a visitor viewed your page is useful, but if we have a 3-minute video we really want to know how long they spent watching it. What did they do after that? Did they share it? Did they go to our product page to find out more? Content Marketing ROI is about more than traffic; it has flipped measurement on its head and we have to go deeper to really understand if we’re being effective. Learn more about measurement in this article.
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