Video creators helped put YouTube on the map, but social properties want a slice of that success, too. New moves by Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and others show that the creator landscape is morphing. That’s putting pressure on YouTube and creating more opportunities for marketers to work with these valuable content providers.
What makes a successful business-to-business (B2B) content marketing strategy different from marketing directly to consumers? At its core, every content marketing strategy includes the same elements of defining goals and establishing key performance indicators (KPIs), but a B2B strategy comes with its own unique set of challenges.
In this week’s Technically Speaking, Microsoft’s Mixer presents a challenge to Amazon’s Twitch—using a real-life ninja.
If you have happy customers and a good product, you might think that’s enough to have an effective marketing campaign. However, in order to be truly effective, you also need to have customers reviewing and recommending your products or services.
How should you feel about those little hearts on Instagram? Would you like Instagram better without them? Instagram is currently testing a like-free environment in seven countries.
The early 2000s brought about the beginning of the “mommy blogging” trend, a time when online conversation between new mothers provided much-needed support and advice. Before I founded my agency, I had my own blog, as did the women who eventually went on to become my business partners. We relied on this relatively new platform to share our daily ups and downs and forge important relationships that, in many cases, have lasted to this day.
The stats don’t lie – 95% of consumers favor credible content from industry influencers over material from brands, while 82% of consumers are ‘very likely’ to follow the recommendation of an influencer they follow. And brands have taken note – 65% of marketers are planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets this year.
If there’s a topic that attracts nearly as much buzz as influencer marketing, it’s user-generated content (UGC). Wikipedia defines UGC as “any form of content, such as images, videos, text and audio, that have been posted by users on online platforms.” But when we’re viewing this topic through a marketing lens, we can think of UGC as any content related to a brand that is voluntarily produced by its customers.
According to a recent study by Hubspot, when it comes to getting information from and about the companies they’re interested in, consumers prefer videos over every other type of content. In addition to its popularity with consumers, video offers flexibility: Companies can choose scripted videos or livestreaming, can post to multiple channels, and can repurpose video content depending on the venue or target audience.
A study has shown that significantly more than half of consumers will patronize—or avoid—businesses that share their social and political viewpoints. In addition to wanting to attract “values-based” consumers, many business leaders want to join the conversations around causes they believe in.
Between Unilever’s call to action against influencer fraud, headline-grabbing PR disasters like the Fyre Festival and the recent college cheating scandal that put the spotlight on the social media star daughter of actress Lori Loughlin, it’s no wonder some are questioning whether influencer marketing is in a bubble—one they’re speculating is on the verge of bursting.
“Content marketing” is a buzzword-sounding term that unfortunately is being used interchangeably with influencer marketing, native advertising and audience-centric marketing. At my agency, we often hear from clients who are confused about what content marketing is all about.