Now it seems that the team at Start A Fire have researched the engagement levels of brand content on Outbrain and Facebook with interesting (and based on our ‘gut feel’ correct) results. The article is reproduced below ore can be read here.

Content is king, but who reigns supreme when it comes to getting real reader engagement?

Most of our time, whether on mobile or laptop, is spent consuming content. Brands understand that and leverage it by producing and publishing content. This helps increase their brand awareness, guide our opinions, and improves their own market position.

However, producing and publishing content isn’t enough, and brands must also distribute the content they have produced.This is where content marketing platforms such as Taboola, Outbrain, Facebook, Pinterest, RevContent, ZergNet and many more come into play.

Great brands get free content. You can see it in forms of rave product reviews, comparisons or stories about its great culture.Therefore, it’s logical for brands to put some effort in promoting positive stories, or in our terms “Earned Content”.

Brands are spending a significant amount of their marketing budgets to promote earned content stories, but they are blind to the actual performance of those campaigns. Since brands don’t “own” this content or have access to its analytics, the brands can’t know if people are actually reading its sponsored content or not. They are in the blind and can’t calculate campaign ROI.

However, that has recently changed with Start A Fire earned content analytics. In the past couple of months, Start A Fire handled hundreds of campaigns with multiple traffic sources and conducted the first research comparing campaign performance by traffic source over multiple campaigns, by different brands.

The first question was which content do people read more? Content that was promoted on Outbrain or Facebook?

The research compared thousands of articles from different brands that were promoted both on Facebook and Outbrain over the past few weeks and discovered that on average users spend 45% more time on promoted Outbrain articles compared to articles that were promoted on Facebook. The average difference of 45% is a significant gap. It can be the difference between reading the headline to reading the article. More time on page means that users are actually consuming more content, while for the brand it means more exposure. As a result, the data shows a direct correlation between time spent on the page to page scroll depth.

Adding the fact that on tested campaigns Outbrain’s cost per click was significantly lower than Facebook. The simple conclusion for these brands is to choose Outbrain’s solution over Facebook for promoting content. But as always it’s still worth evaluating each campaign before making a choice.

Facebook organic content performed better than its sponsored content, but Outbrain’s sponsored content still performed better with 23% on average more time on page. In comparison to other social media solutions, Facebook organic posts performed best. On average, when comparing the same article’s average time on page across different social media platforms, users who originated from Facebook spent 28% more time compared to Pinterest and 53% more time compared to Twitter, which showed the weakest performance.

The post Outbrain Verses Facebook Promoted Content – Which is more effective for brands? first appeared on Content Central | Content Marketing.

The not so vague one has to do with Google AdWords. This online marketing tool, as Google mentioned at its performance summit this year, has led to more than 1 billion store visits globally.

As a digital marketing agency, we have become used to vague Google speak and we, of course, make it our business to decipher what Google means.

So what can we deduce from this information?

Well, as far as the search figure is concerned, (and judging by the estimate that the number was 1 billion per year in 1999), we feel that it is safe to say that, despite the not so obvious threats like Amazon and slightly more obvious threats like Facebook, Google is nowhere close to being defeated just yet. To give some context in this regard: Amazon is Google’s biggest competitor in terms of product searches, and Facebook actually beats Google in terms of driving traffic to a site from a news cycle. (What we need to remember here is that Google does what it takes two of its competitors to do).

What does this mean from a practical perspective? For us, that it is still worthwhile to decipher vague Google speak, and that it is still important to invest in SEO to ensure that you remain Google optimised. By the look of things, the search engine giant is holding on to its title, and if Google is going anywhere, it is even further ahead of the pack.

As far as the AdWords figure is concerned: firstly, invest in AdWords. They work. Secondly, online advertising works and can actually lead to sales.

In closing, let us say that paid advertising and SEO are not the only things in which you should invest. If your online marketing strategy has any chance of succeeding, you’ll also need to invest in Content Marketing to generate a deeper interest in your brand or company and utilise all of your social channels (especially Facebook) and amplification platforms, like Outbrain, to get your content noticed and to drive traffic back to your site.

The post Latest Google Stats and What We Think They Mean first appeared on Content Central | Content Marketing.

This approach to marketing does work but it is not an easy concept to sell to the South African market. For a lot of clients, this approach seems a bit ‘airy-fairy’, and because most of them want a clearly laid out plan that shows how any and every digital effort will translate into a sale, content marketers have taken practices and procedures from the traditional marketing bible, most notably ‘buying personas’ and ‘buyer’s journey’, to make the content marketing pill easier to swallow. Needless to say, this has led to some Frankenstein hybrids that consisted of just enough traditional marketing to keep the client happy and just too little content marketing to yield any notable results.

Stop Focusing on Marketing

Don’t get me wrong, creating personas to discover who you are speaking to, and figuring out what kind of content these personas want and where they want it, can be useful, but as soon as you add words like ‘buying’ and ‘buyer’, the focus in the minds of all involved shifts to selling, the content becomes about selling and so we alienate our potential audience who are looking for information rich content without the sales pitch. Perhaps the industry shot itself in the foot when we called what we do content marketing.

Start Focusing on Content

Personally, I believe that we should stop worrying about personas, buying stages and client concerns about making sales. Instead, we should shift our focus back to the core of it all: creating great content and getting it out there. Great content transcends personas, is shared, talked about and remembered and even has the power to melt the heart of the toughest of bean counters. If it moves you, you’ll want to be associated with it. If it moves you greatly, you’ll want to own it.

What does this type of content look like? It is company/brand relevant, information rich content that is presented from an emotional angle. You have to score big on all three fronts, but especially the emotional front because that is what hooks both the client and the audience. You want them to abandon reason, fall in love with the content and then rationalize their love with the educational value which it provides. This is how you gather approval from the client, and likes and shares from your audience. Add a subtle company/brand reference, and the concept behind the content will be viewed as ‘clever’, which will get them talking about the brand or company.

So how do you convince clients to stop focusing on the bottom line and to buy into the idea of content marketing? By not walking into a meeting and selling the idea of content marketing. By walking in there and selling them a great idea.

The post Stop Selling Content Marketing and Start Selling Ideas first appeared on Content Central | Content Marketing.