The Future of Digital Media

With any opinion piece on the ever-popular topic of ‘The Future of Media’, the author has the luxury of knowing that readers will have read so many other future-gazing opinion pieces  that he or she will most likely not be held to account for their own contribution to the morass.

As such, not much more needs to be said about the disaggregation of media, the challenges of building sustainable models in publishing, the struggle of media publishers and creators of every variety to find commercial value of their content, etc. Similarly, no-one really needs another piece on the history of media or the current state of media.

That said, with a ‘Future of Digital Media’ breakfast event happening later this month, we thought it would be no bad thing to float three starting-point thoughts which we believe will significantly influence the consumption and purchase of media in the near-future. Read more →

How CMOs can use Content Analytics

We are seeing a shift in the role of a CMO: from creative to analyst, from ideas person to metrics person. Not that CMOs will lose their creative edge – that is vital –  but given the rise of digital, and therefore automation, an ability to take a measurement-based approach is fundamental to understanding customer behaviour and building successful marketing activity.

Content – an oft-used and rarely defined term – is of prime importance to the modern marketer. It is the means by which customers find your proposition online (search or social recommendation). Quality and relevant content engages the audience, because it is interesting, useful, or entertaining. It also helps retain customers. Whether you are blogging, tweeting, writing white papers, or shooting viral videos, you are in the process of content marketing: publishing content in order to fulfil a commercial objective.

When you are creating high volumes of content, or curating content, or just listening to social media content, it is vital to understand, structure and measure. (For a later post, we will look at Content Marketing ROI)

What is Content Analytics?

Content analytics is the process of structuring previously unstructured content, by extracting new information.  It is the process of measuring content.  The output – the measurements – is in the form of metadata that describes that content. This can include the topics, people, places, companies and concepts in the content, sentiment towards aspects of the content, and the language of that content.

How is Content Analytics useful for marketers?

Content analytics brings a whole raft of benefits to your marketing strategy:

• Understand your customer on a granular level

Thanks to semantic and sentiment analysis, no longer are you limited to simply aggregate level ‘page views’ and ‘bounce rates’.  Now that you know what each page ‘says’ – i.e. the places, the topics and the sentiments within it – you can build tag-clouds of preferences around each customer as they read that page. This in turn enables you to determine the tastes and even begin to predict the intent of the customer.

• Extract more value from your social media community

Data-mining your social media communities for the topics, sentiments and locations of their conversations mean you can build a richer profile of each person on your customer database. This might include their interests, their most shared links and indeed the details of others in their extended network.  As a result, you can begin to identify brand advocates and influencers very quickly and much more effectively than just crudely going after those with the largest ‘follower count’.

• Quickly identify trends amongst your customer base

When you are subject to thousands of in-bound communications from your customers – be it online reviews or email correspondence – content analytics help immeasurably in filtering and giving structure to the information you receive.  If certain words are being used or a particular sentiment is articulated frequently, you can identify these trends and react accordingly, be it in a customer support capacity or for PR purposes.

• Reuse and curate content

Every business should be authoring in-house content as part of their content marketing efforts. However, high-quality, original editorial really costs – even more so if part of a long-term strategy. One way to reduce cost per article is through analysing and curating content from partner organisations (or other external sources) which are pertinent to your target market. If done effectively, content curation can establish you as an authoritative source of information in your particular niche and be used as a tool for industry and market insight.

• Customer-centric marketing

Once you can know what a piece of content is about and are able to determine the interests of individual customers and prospects in your audience – you are now in a position to offer each person the piece of content that is most relevant to them.  This ability to segment your audience and deliver personalised propositions is a powerful marketing asset.

Where now…

The need for content analytics to be a part of a marketer’s arsenal is more important than ever now that marketing channels are becoming increasingly digitised and the volume of content a company deals with on a daily basis grows.

By adding metadata to content, it becomes better optimised for search engines, content delivery and analytics systems. This, in turn, means it can be measured.  As a result, you can formulate a content marketing strategy that is structured, scalable and with demonstrable ROI.

In the long run, it is this move towards a more data-focused treatment of content that will revolutionize your digital strategy, deliver actionable customer intelligence and create long-term customer relationships.

NewsCred gets $15m investment: Content Marketing gets serious.

I was really pleased to read this morning that NewsCred have landed $15m in Series B funding, and have announced the New York Times as a new partner. NewsCred are definitely one of the good guys in this newly emerging world of content marketing, with revenue split agreements with publishers that give decent chunks of money back to content originators. For those who don’t know NewsCred’s model, basically they have signed up 2,500 top publications (newspapers, magazines, websites etc) to content syndication agreements, and then resell this content to their clients across the world. They have built a nice dashboard that enables clients to slice and dice content from multiple content partners really easily (based on topics and other facets), and although every content partner needs to confirm agreement with each client (ie you can’t just rock up, pay, and use the content instantly), the process is pretty much as pain-free as syndication license agreements can be (groan…). We recommend them to lots of people that we speak to.

NewsCred recently acquired the once-darling Daylife (Michael Arrington was an investor), in a move that seems to have been largely about integrating their image licensing platform to complement the text content service that NewsCred delivers. That was a super smart move, as it was probably Daylife’s key asset, and will allow NewsCred clients to really easily incorporate images in their marketing. (Anyone who has dealt with a newspaper’s syndication team regarding image licensing will know the fog of gloom that can rapidly descend…)

This investment is a bet that content marketing is going to eat a decent portion of traditional ad budgets. Greycroft Partners, one of the VCs that are funding NewsCred say:

“more than 30% of marketers’ budgets will be devoted to content marketing this year.”

So, content marketing is here, and budgets are shifting fast. But my key point is that as marketeers become more aware and comfortable with the principles of content marketing, the ominous ROI discussion will follow rapidly. It’s great to understand and believe in the tenets of marketing through relevant, interesting and genuinely useful content, rather than constant bombardment of product offers, but how do you tell your boss it is going to move the bottom line?

At idio, we love partnering with companies like NewsCred, because they believe in the value of quality content to attract, engage and retain customers. idio provides a perfect follow-on to this investment, delivering two key value propositions for companies that use content marketing:

1. Building real-time contextual intelligence about every single person that engages with that content, across multiple channels. By analysing what people read, create and share, idio learns about their needs and preferences, and predicts what they might need next. This customer intelligence is synched back to the client CRM for use in various insight projects and ongoing campaign management.
2. Delivering personalised content recommendations, across multiple channels. idio uses the contextual intelligence it is building about every person, to predict which content items are most likely to interest and engage each individual. This content is then delivered through whichever channel the client requires – web, social, email, or mobile. idio doesn’t need to own or control those channels, but simply integrates with existing web content management systems, email service providers and social management tools. And then, of course, idio reports on the increases in engagement and conversion that result from delivering the right content at the right time, to the right person, on the right channel.

The Future of Telco Marketing

On Weds 23rd, thirty intrepid telco markeeters braved the inclement weather to meet in Westminster to hear Peter Crayfourd (Head of Customer Lifecycle Strategy, Orange Group) and Aly Richards (idio, CXO and former Head of CRM, O2) discuss the revolutions that are happening with the world of telco.

Drawing upon nearly two decades in the telco world – working across ntl, 3 and Orange – Peter Crayfourd explained in ‘Always Engaged’ the organisation and technological shifts needed to put the customer at the heart of telco operations, and in particular the necessity to move from business-centric goals (e.g. increase revenue, shift product) to CRM thinking (sustain engagement, increase positive sentiment). Key to this, Peter maintained, was tracking customer interactions over a longer period of time, over as many channels as possible – not just the activities within customer contact centres.

Customer Experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services over the duration of their relationship with that supplier

The problem is telco companies aren’t tracking every customer interaction, let alone over  a sustained period. Rather, telco insight and operational strategies are calculated from ‘snap shots’ of a particular sample of customers, usually taken every 15mins over very narrow criteria (such as, how strong network signals are, how many products have sold, how many calls made) . Whereas, Peter was at pains to explain the need to track customers on an individual level for as long as they are a customer. This required a shift, not just in corporate culture, but also systems that can handle the vast amounts of interaction data that comes from tracking telco customers; in call-centres, on websites, across email and in the social cloud.

Aly Richards carried on the theme of continual engagement, examining how the efficacy of the Next-Best-Action technology installed in every telco organisation – which suggest on-the-fly scripts to call centre agents based on known customer data which suggest the best proposition to make, and how a US wireless telco called C-Spire (client) were using ‘Next-Best-Content’ to build on the limitations of NBA.

Telcos have run out of things to say

Aly explained that although Next-Best-Action had been a boon to telcos in the last decade, the initial successes of the technology would eventually stall as NBA is completely reliant on a limited product range to offer each customer.

There are only so many mobile packages or services a call operator can offer you, before you have heard them all. This explains the drop in conversions and accepted propositions for most telcos who run extended campaigns using NBA.

As C-Spire found, using content in digital comms extends the conversation with their customer base and prospects beyond simply trumpeting on about a particular product offering. This made recipients of their emails more likely to engage with C-Spire on favourable terms and not just engage when there was a problem.

Content allows telcos to continue to ‘talk’ to customers about lifestyle interests without necessarily being limited to a small product pool. Futhermore, through content curation, telcos are able to have enough content to have an ongoing conversation with customers, whatever their interests.

Content as a service

C-Spire pride themselves on their brand promise of ‘Personalised Wireless’.

The next extension of the their personalised service brand was to make content a service. Not just publishing content, but actually using personalisation as value proposition to encourage customers to continually engage with C-Spire.

Through using idio’s platform, C-Spire were able to curate and publish content around a wide variety of topics a typical C-Spire customer would be interested in. This in turn was personalised on the web and in emails based on what each customer was reading on-site and sharing on social media. As such, the content was providing utility to each customer by providing them with content which was personalised to their particular interests such as ‘politics’, ‘sport’ and ‘faith’.

Data And Insight from content

The result from having engaged readers on multiple channels is that you can learn a huge amount about your market.

By understanding what each piece of content is talking about by using content analytics, C-Spire can build very detailed customer profiles (insight graphs) of every individual user based on what content they are consuming online.

This in turn was useful for segmentation and campaigns as it allows C-Spire to bracket customers beyond the usual data such as product bought, age, geography and begin to target those with similar or very specific interests.

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For those interested in learning more, Aly Richards will be running a ‘Future of Telco Marketing’ webinar on Thurs 14th February at 10AM. If you would like to sign-up, please go here

SEO and Content Marketing: A marriage made in Heaven

Perfect partners

The professional separation between SEOs and Content Marketers in some organisations never fails to stop intriguing me.

At one prestigious agency I was at last month, I learnt that there was next to no dialogue between their SEO core and their Content division.

I found this incredible. Hopefully, as content marketing continues to mature as a practice, agencies and in-house marketing teams will begin to see the value of co-operating and co-labouring with their SEO and content teams, for both strategic and commercial imperatives.

This is particularly important as creative, marketing and PR agencies shift to becoming the much-vaunted, all-conquering ‘Customer Engagement Agency’.

Marrying the disciplines of content marketing and SEO shouldn’t be a big ask, indeed it should be a natural partnership: Read more →