Content Not Getting Enough Love? Try These 5 Easy Fixes

Posted: 10 Aug 2016 06:17 AM PDT

It’s no secret that marketers are attention seekers, at least when it comes to content. We see it all the time; a company produces an interesting piece of content, and then it just sits there waiting for some love before getting lost in a sea of sameness as other content marketers produce similar material.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 72% of marketers list creating engaging content as their top priority for 2016. However, many are falling short. In fact, 60% of B2B marketers say that producing engaging content is their top challenge. If you’re one of those marketers feeling as if your content isn’t getting the attention it deserves, here are five surefire ways to garner more clicks, shares, and buzz around your content.

1. Have Fun!

A recent AdWeek infographic stated that 18% of consumers who engaged with branded content did so because it was entertaining. But entertaining content doesn’t have to be all fun and games. If you’re in an industry where it’s often difficult to explain different products, such as insurance, adding a product wizard or a calculator can not only make product selection more fun, it can give users useful information in a personalized way. A sales sheet is definitely informative, but clicking through a short list of questions pertaining to needs and interests can actually show a new customer how your product can work for them without coming off as an impersonal sales pitch.

2. Get Specific

Aside from providing entertainment, 16% of consumers engage with content that provides specific information. And while it can be tempting to take that figure and assume it means to churn out more white papers to give audiences the specific information they crave, the overabundance of these materials could actually be the problem. The Content Marketing Institute reports that 71% of B2B marketers use white papers in their marketing strategies with an average of 13 per company. That’s a lot of specific information, so it’s much easier for even really great stuff to get lost in the shuffle.

The secret to standing out lies in interactivity. While marketers may be churning out one white paper a month, most aren’t including sharable quizzes or product calculators. Because consumers don’t just want details; they want to know exactly how information relates to them.

3. Name Names

If you’re not addressing customers by name, you could be keeping them at arm’s length. By now it’s no secret that including customer names in email subject lines increases open rates. What’s more, adding company names to landing pages and microsites can also be a boon for account-based marketers looking to break the ice with an entire organization rather than an individual.

More than ever before, customers expect brands to know what they like and remember their preferences. Generalized content is unlikely to get engagement from digital natives who are used to interacting with content created just for them. Adding short quizzes and assessments to gather data can not only get audiences interacting with and sharing your content, but can also give you valuable data about customer goals, challenges, and even their place in the purchase funnel, so future content can be even more relevant, which means it will be even more engaging.

4. A Picture’s Worth…Well, You Know

Pictures aren’t kid stuff. Even the greatest content can suffer if there’s no visual intrigue. Studies show 40% of people respond more favorably to content that includes visual information rather than plain text, which means content containing images is much more likely to be shared across social media. And not only is visual content extremely sharable, it’s also much more educational than static text. Relevant visual content, such as an interactive infographic, means that 95% of your audience is likely to understand your research, as opposed to 70% who will understand based on text alone.

5. Don’t Create Content—Create an Experience

By 2020, the customer experience will be more important than the product, according to some studies. That makes sense, since so many brands are producing content at a breakneck pace. However, content for content’s sake is probably not the best way to provide a stellar customer experience. Instead, engaging, interactive details, like assessments and quizzes, are a surefire way to glean valuable information about a customer’s likes, dislikes, preferences, and pain points, all while providing an engaging experience that will leave users excited to learn more about products.

Now more than ever, it’s important to make sure content doesn’t fall flat, since customers expect to be not just educated, but engaged. To keep your customers on their toes and ensure that you're meeting their needs and providing an engaging experience, download The Future of Content Marketing.

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Have You Heard About the New Marketing and Agency Model?

Posted: 09 Aug 2016 10:00 AM PDT

A recent study by Forbes Insights and sponsored by Oracle Marketing Cloud revealed 60% of brand and agency executives say their roles and responsibilities have changed significantly over the past two years. As a result, both groups are reengineering their internal organizations and forging new ways of working with their respective agency or brand counterparts.

At the same time, the research found that technology is ingrained in marketing operations and, perhaps most significantly of all, agency and brand stakeholders are challenging themselves to analyze and apply consumer data in more sophisticated ways. Some are even hiring data scientists and others outside of the traditional marketing discipline to help in these efforts.

And just how much data is created every day? Every single day nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. Let’s put that into perspective. In 1992, 100GB of data was created every day. By 1997, it was 100GB of data every hour, and by the year 2002, it was every second.

Working Together Is Success

Henry Ford once said: “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” When he said those words he of course had no idea that one day planet Earth would have more than 7 billion people or that it is expected to hit over 11 billion by the year 2100, according to the United Nations.

That’s a whole lot of people generating a whole lot of data.

As the changing nature of marketing impacts product development, sales and company culture, closer collaboration between brands and agencies is becoming more important than ever. The result: forward-thinking agencies are ready to serve a higher purpose than just being “idea factories” for individual campaigns, in the words of one executive in Asia.

This Year’s Model

Serving that higher purpose is precisely one of the goals of the newly-formed DigitasLBi’s OSG (Oracle Solutions Group).

DigitasLBi, a global marketing and technology agency, and Oracle have joined forces to launch a dedicated Oracle Digital practice within the agency that provides a one-stop shop for creative and technology consultancy and implementation.

OSG clients can benefit from having access to the expertise of DigitasLBi, Oracle and Spindrift, DigitasLBi’s implementation experts for Oracle technology, through a single team in one of the first collaborations of its kind between leaders in cloud technology and a digital creative consultancy. This unified approach can significantly simplify digital transformation and enable brands to create innovative, data-driven digital experiences for their customers.

Data Collaboration Leads to Better Customer Engagement

It used to be that a brand’s marketing teams did their thing and agencies did theirs. Oh sure there was some collaboration—there had to be. But the lines were pretty clear as to who did what. Those days are gone. Forever.

Download We Are Gathered Here Together Brands & Agencies Working Together to learn more.