8. Building Your Content Channel Strategy

“Tweetable Moment: Visual Storytelling is critical in how you communicate and tell your brand story but you can’t forget long-form content.”

—#nextmediaco

I don’t follow Whole Foods in any social network. I am just not that “type of guy,” so I decided to look them up on Facebook as I was writing this chapter. I began my search for “Whole Foods Market San ...” and before I finished typing my search query, a drop-down menu of several Whole Foods Market Facebook pages appeared. Santa Monica, Santa Fe, Santa Barbara, San Mateo, San Ramon, and San Antonio were the top six results. I didn’t actually find the store I was looking for given I live in Santa Clara (San Jose), but I was pleasantly surprised that each of the local pages had fresh, local, and relevant content.. That is certainly a best practice in my book.

From spending some time researching Whole Foods and what they do in social media, it’s clear they have a decentralized social channel strategy; meaning that they give autonomy to individual stores to create and manage specific channels. I can only assume that each store has assigned a manager or employee to be responsible for their local Facebook page. It’s a good strategy, and they obviously get it.

Like Whole Foods, after you decide on what your content narrative is going to be, you must then map out a strategy on how you want to execute your story across the digital ecosystem.

• 39 Twitter Accounts

• 32 Blogs

• 30 Facebook pages

• 29 LinkedIn Pages

• 23 Forums/Communities

• 6 Foursquare

• 5 Other

• 3.8 Flickr

• .3 Gowalla

There are certainly exceptions to this rule, one obviously being Whole Foods, but with 178 channels, it’s almost impossible to keep content fresh, alive, engaging, and locally relevant. Not to mention that 95% of these channels were most likely created from internal silos; and most likely have dying communities because they were created for a campaign or short-term promotion.

So if you are in the process of building out your channel strategy, consolidating your social media channels, or determining if you need additional ones, there are four things you must consider before making a decision. These can help prevent disjointed content, bad community behavior, and customer confusion, which plague so many brands today, unfortunately:

1. Identify the content narrative: Do you have a specific content strategy for a specific channel? Chapter 7, “Defining Your Brand Story and Content Narrative,” helps you determine your brand story by examining several internal and external factors. Too many marketers today still like to create brand new Facebook pages or Twitter accounts for product launches, events, or campaigns. In some cases, this may make sense but I would at least spend time weighing the pros and cons. I have seen this too many times in the past where several hundred thousand dollars are spent in paid media to drive traffic and build a community on a brand new channel. When the campaign is over, the community is abandoned and forgotten about.

It’s also important to note you should not repurpose the same exact content on one Facebook page to fuel another Facebook page or use tweets to feed content into a Google+ page. Each community is different. They each have different characteristics and functionality. Each channel should have its own content narrative, or at least a different style in how you tell the same story. Otherwise, what’s the point of creating something brand new if you already have an existing Facebook page?

2. Determine the community manager: With every new community or channel created, there must be a community manager, content marketing manager, or customer support person responsible for that channel. There are two ways to look at this. One is from a proactive perspective. The role of a community manager has certainly changed in the last several years. Today, community managers must posses the skills to create compelling content, analyze data, and even understand the basics of paid media in case certain posts need to be sponsored. Community managers today need to understand content marketing.

The other way to look at this is from a reactive perspective. Community managers must also monitor conversations that customers are having about the brand (whether a complaint, a potential crisis, or even customers giving the brand praise) and respond accordingly. In many cases, the community manager will be responsible for flagging customer issues and escalating them to a customer support person.

3. Build a moderation and escalation policy: There have been several reports published in the last several years that illustrate how customers are seeking customer support within a brand’s social media channel, specifically Facebook and Twitter. One study published in 2012 titled, “The State of Social Customer Service” by NM Incite (Joint venture between Nielsen and McKinsey & Company) found that 71% of customers who get a quick and effective response from customer support will recommend that brand to others. This is why it’s so important to ensure that your community manager has the power to solve customer problems quickly; or that workflows are in place to escalate customer complaints to someone on the customer support team quickly and efficiently.

Doing so not only keeps your current customers happy, but it also drives advocacy because they will tell others about their experiences with your brand.

4. Establish a measurement framework: Chapter 2 went into great detail about the need for your teams to collaborate, and Chapter 3, “Establishing a Centralized ‘Editorial’ Social Business Center of Excellence,” gives you a framework for building a Social Business Center of Excellence (CoE). As previously mentioned, the role of the CoE is to establish a common measurement framework so that the entire organization is measuring social media consistently. Circumstances will certainly arise, for example, when new platforms will need to be used and your measurement framework will need to be adapted. Or if a regional team wants to launch a program into a specific channel that only serves customers in that region, like South Korea’s microblogging platform Me2day, you will want to ensure that the team has KPIs that can determine success before launching.

Chuck Hemann, Group Director of Analytics for WCG and co-author of Digital Marketing Analytics describes three ways of looking at measurement. First and foremost is program measurement where you are tracking social channel health (community growth, engagement, reach, and so on). Second is measuring the performance of individual pieces of content, but not just tracking the engagement. It’s important to take the second and third steps of tagging content by key message and identifying whether it contained a link, photo, video, and so on. Lastly, it’s important for brands to be constantly analyzing the demographics and psychographics of its community. Ad campaigns, new types of content and the introduction of new messages all could change the composition of your community and therefore adversely impact overall performance.

In this figure, you see that there are five content themes labeled horizontally: Campaigns, Events, and Promotions; Customer Stories; Customer Support; Third-Party Curated Industry; and Real Time Content. Also notice percentages at the top of each of the content pillars. These are examples and meant to illustrate the frequency of distribution of each of these content themes. The percentages and themes will certainly vary, and may even be completely different, based on your brand’s priorities, business goals, the narrative, and the story you want to tell. Again, this is just an example.

Along the vertical axis are social media channels. This exercise isn’t meant to persuade or convince you that you need to use every social media channel to execute your content narrative. Unfortunately, many brands today have this mindset and then struggle because they run out of content ideas to keep the community engaged. You should only launch into these channels if you have the proper resources and capabilities in place, as mentioned in the previous section.

Building from Figure 8.1, let’s assume that you have decided to use all of these channels to execute your content narrative and tell your story. In this case, 15% of your content will be campaigns, events, and promotions focused; and this particular content will be spread across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube. You might also decide that you want to create customer support related content on Twitter, YouTube, and within a support blog of some sort. What this chart doesn’t reflect are the number of channels that you might use if you have more than one Twitter account. Many brands use one main account for general content (brand/community building) and another to manage support related content and questions. Large brands might have specific regional Twitter and Facebook pages.

Although this is just an example, the distribution percentages do reflect my overall thinking about content. But certainly every brand is different, and these ratios and content themes might or might not work for your brand:

• Campaigns, Events, Promotions: If a large percentage of your content is all about “you,” “your” brand, “your” campaigns, or “your” event, it will surely annoy your customers, resulting in a high community attrition percentage (number of un-Likes, un-Follows). It’s smart to limit this type of content. Remember, content needs to add value to your customers.

• Customer Stories: Generally, customers love to hear about other customer stories. This could be success stories, fan photos, or customer testimonials. Take for example a brand like Skype. Their community loves inspirational and emotional content, and it makes sense. The Skype product is all about “making connections” and connecting friends and families to each other, such as the soldier who is stationed overseas who uses the product to see his newly born son or the grandparents who sing happy birthday to their grandchild from across the world. The emotional elements of storytelling are far more effective than “Skype helps me save on my phone bill” type of messaging.

• Customer Support: Many believe that customer support is purely reactive. I believe that it’s both reactive and proactive. Assuming you have launched your command center, as discussed in Chapter 5, “Building Your Social Business Command Center,” and are monitoring conversations about your brand, you should already have an idea of your customers’ pain points. Why not take this opportunity to create proactive content to address the issues, specifically blog posts and YouTube videos? YouTube is the world’s number two search engine; and guess what the number one search term is in YouTube? The answer—how-to videos. By creating content that addresses customer issues, you are not only solving customer problems quickly and efficiently, but it could also decrease calls coming into the call center.

• Third-Party Curated, Licensed Content: Your content narrative must provide value to your customers. So, if that means sharing curated content that doesn’t necessarily mention your brand, you should be okay with that. I am certainly not saying you should share competitor content. That wouldn’t be smart. But let’s assume you work for a financial institution and the U.S. government just passed a law that affects international wire transfers. It would make sense that you share that content with your community and provide context or “expert commentary” about the report. That would be valuable to your fans.

There are several tools in the marketplace today that can help you curate and distribute third-party content: PublishThis, Curata, and Percolate all provide this service to large and small brands. NewsCred can provide you with a selection of content to license, syndicate, curate, and publish from high-quality, premium publishers, such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Economist, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, and many others.

• Real-Time Content: The Oreo Super Bowl example mentioned in Chapter 5 certainly made real-time marketing a household topic. I actually missed the tweet because I was depressed, yelling and throwing things during half time. I am a 49ers fan. But the truth is, real-time marketing has been around for quite some time. And though many brands and agencies are jumping on the “real-time marketing” bandwagon, it should not be the focal point of your entire content strategy. You and your brand cannot sit idle and wait for the news cycle before you create compelling pieces of content. You should be doing this day in and day out.

That said, as you brand becomes a media company, you will naturally have the right infrastructure in place (editorial roles/responsibilities, team structure, and content workflows) to create real-time, valuable content that your customers will find relevant and love.

• Lifestyle Content: Although real-time content is making headlines everywhere, some brands, including yours, might not be quite ready or equipped to take it on. If that’s the case, perhaps building a content theme that is focused on lifestyle might be appropriate. As mentioned in Chapter 7, there are tools today like the Wisdom application, Demographics Pro, Simply Measured, and Keyhole.co that can help you determine other topics that your fans are passionate about. For example, using one of these platforms, you could get valuable insight that a high percentage of your fans are interested in music, so it would make sense to build that content theme into your narrative. It may even justify your brand creating a new channel (Tumblr or YouTube channel, for example) that would be all about “music.” You will just have to ensure that there is a relevant connection to the content theme and what your brand stands for.

After you have determined what your content themes will be and where you are going to share and create that content, you can then build out a specific editorial calendar that illustrates what you will share on a given day within a specific channel. Here is one example of how you can do this on a Facebook page.

• Mondays (music Monday): You can execute this numerous ways. You can curate articles from MTV.com or Billboard.com and provide your own context about the story. You can create a weekly Spotify playlist or identify cool mixes on Mixcrate.com and share something clever. Or, if your brand has ever sponsored a band/artist, rapper, or DJ, you can share one of their tracks from YouTube. You should always insert some context into what you are sharing.

• Tuesdays (fan of the week): This can certainly be any day of the week, but perhaps one approach to take is to determine which of your fans is the most engaged with your content and thank him for his participation. Another idea would be to share any videos/photos from fans who have uploaded content to your timeline. In some cases, you can ask them directly to do this, or you can use a tool such as Napkin Labs (discussed in Chapter 4, “Empowering Employees, Customers, and Partners to Feed the Content Engine”) and do this dynamically.

• Wednesday (product tip day): In this case, you can share product-specific updates, video tutorials, or quick tips and tricks. It’s always good practice to speak in a tone that your fans will appreciate and not just copy and paste the content from your corporate website or an FAQ document. Again, social media is conversational, and your tone can determine how well (or not) your content is received by your fans.

• Thursday (third-party, industry): This could be content about your industry or a mention about your brand from a third-party source. If you work for a start-up, you can easily source third-party content from Techcrunch or AllThingsD about other start-ups and share it on Facebook. Also, there are tools that can easily help you curate content that might not necessarily mention your brand but could be extremely valuable to your community, as just mentioned.

• Friday (Friday fun day): This could be just about anything. It can be focused on various community interests or be completely random. It could be memes about cats or dogs, quotes, or polls—whatever matches up nicely with what your brand stands for. It could even be fun games, tongue twisters, or riddles. Intel just recently shared a post asking the community how many words they could make with “Intel”; and then showed a photo from a scrabble game with the brand name spelled out on the tiles. Pretty clever if you ask me.

Building a plan like this helps establish a cadence of content and lets your fans know what to expect on any given day. It also helps you prepare internally so that you can line up your resources well ahead of time and not the night before a piece of content is supposed to be published. And it’s certainly acceptable if you change up this cadence every quarter or even monthly. It really depends on what your business and marketing goals are. Plus, your community will let you know what they want and expect and may even tell you directly. Another indicator is simply looking at the content performance metrics.

Not all brands plan out their content this way, and that’s okay. You will have to see what works for you, test it, and the change up your content approach if you need to.

You will have to repeat this exercise for each channel you manage or for new channels that you launch in the future. In some cases, you might use one specific channel for storytelling, similar to what Burberry has done using Tumblr, which you read about in the next section.

Burberry’s Tumblr page is all about one storyline—trench coats. Figure 8.3 is a screen shot of their Tumblr page, “Art of the Trench” (http://burberry.tumblr.com/). The site is described as a “living document of the trench coat and the people who wear it” and that the project is a collaboration among you, Burberry, and some of the world’s leading image makers. They even give their Tumblr followers the option to upload their trench coat photos as well.

Certainly, Burberry could have just shared trench coat related content on their Facebook page as a part of a broader content theme. Instead, they made a strategic decision to create a Tumblr page specifically to tell the “trench coat” story, and they are doing so very effectively.

Sharpie (yes, that Sharpie), manufacturer of writing instruments (mainly marker pens), is dominating Instagram. Their approach hasn’t been about sharing marketing messages or tips and tricks. Instead, they use their own product to tell the brand story—yes, their actual product, the Sharpie. Their in-house team of staff and interns create original sharpie artwork, sketches, and doodles that they post daily to engage their audience. The majority of these images are drawn and posted by Whitney Kelly, Associate Manager of Social Media and Public Relations with Sharpie. Who says that you just have to use a Sharpie to label moving boxes?

According to an interview in 2012 with analytics firm, Simply Measured, Kelly said that they wanted to do something different with Instagram to keep their teen audience interested and engaged, so they designed their own sort of Sharpie comic strip (“Sharpie Capitalizing on Instagram”). She went on to say that the fans love the unique, hand-drawn nature of the content (a change from the mostly photo images on Instagram). As a result of this unique approach to storytelling, they have over 100,000 Instagram followers. Figure 8.4 is an Instagram photo from April 2013 titled “April showers! #sharpie” that garnered 5,000 Likes and 55 comments.

Their fans aren’t passive about their interest in Sharpie’s content either. Sharpie averages over 4,000 Likes per photo and over 31 comments. Although their engagement has grown quickly, it didn’t grow without careful consideration and strategic thought. According to Kelly, Nielsen lists Instagram as the top photography site among teens ages 12 to 17.

Other brands such as Comcast (@ComcastCares), Nike (@NikeSupport), and Skype (@SkypeSupport) have decided to tell the “customer support” story or at least respond to customers using specific Twitter accounts. This is becoming a norm for most small and large brands. Creating specific support accounts allows your brand to use its main channels for creating compelling content and engaging the community.

But the reason content diversity is important to your overall narrative is mainly because consumers learn and consume content differently, just like students in a classroom environment. When I was in college, I excelled in classes like Debate because much of the learning involved me debating others about various topics. I had to learn the content if I wanted to win the debate. On the other hand, I usually fell asleep in History because 90% of the class was just a lecture and the occasional reading assignment.

Chinese philosopher Confucius said, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” And although this quote was said well over 2,000 years ago, it’s an important lesson on how you should look at content.

This concept is related to neuroscience, also known as neural science. Neuroscience is the study of how the nervous system develops its structure and how it learns. Neuroscientists focus on the brain, its impact on behavior, and cognitive functions such as learning and understanding. Not only is neuroscience concerned with the normal functioning of the nervous system, but also what happens to the nervous system when people have neurological, psychiatric, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

From a marketing perspective, the study of neuroscience sheds some light on how to assist customers to interact with your content in multiple ways so they can “learn” about you and your brand. Some scholars also refer to this as the concept of multimodal learning, which argues that people are more likely to learn and retain information when it is presented in multiple modalities such as written (visual) and aural (auditory) at the same time. At the end of the day, your content will get more attention if you offer people multiple formats by which they can consume it.

Dominic W. Massaro, professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz has defined multimodal learning as an embodied learning situation, which engages multiple sensory systems and action systems of the learner. This type of learning is traditionally emphasized for children with learning challenges and can include a variety of visual inputs in addition to text. Some examples include pictures, art, film, video, and graphic organizers.

Consider Edgar Dale’s Cone of Learning as you think about how you tell you brand story. Edgar Dale was an American educationist who developed the Cone of Learning. He made several contributions to audio and visual instruction, including a methodology for analyzing the content of motion pictures. Figure 8.5 is an illustration of Edgar Dale’s Cone of Learning.

In this model, Dale builds a hierarchy of various learning experiences. The percentages given relate to how much of the content that people retain. Essentially, the model shows the progression of experiences from the most concrete (at the bottom of the cone) to the most abstract (at the top of the cone). It is important to note that Dale never intended the Cone to depict the way consumers interact with content. It was developed for the classroom environment. Nonetheless, the model clearly illustrates that after two weeks most people tend to remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, 50% of they see and hear, 70% of what they say, and 90% of what they do.

So the question is, how we can take the Cone of Learning and apply it to the content you create for your audiences? Table 8.1 breaks down how you can apply the Cone model to diversify your content.

If you spend any time on your Facebook news feed, you’ll probably agree. Even your Facebook friends are catching on that photos and videos drive more engagement and “Likes.” It’s the only thing we notice as we scroll through our feeds.

If you look closely at the Cone of Learning, the importance of visual content plays a significant role in content retention. I am sure you can remember a funny photo that one of your friends posted on Facebook, but can you remember the last post that didn’t have a photo or some type of visual element? Unless it was a relationship status change, which there are a lot of, you probably don’t.

In a 2012 CNET article, Jay Parikh, Facebook’s Vice-President of Infrastructure Engineering, said that there are 300 million photos posted to Facebook every single day. The number of photos on Instagram aren’t quite as high, but 40 million uploads per day isn’t all that bad. And, of course, visual sites such as Tumblr and Pinterest have surged in usage, with 23 million unique visitors per month. And that number will surely grow, especially with Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr in May 2013.

Consumers aren’t just visiting visual sites like Pinterest and Instagram, they are interacting more with its content. Isn’t that how it is in your own personal network too? According to analytics and measurement vendor Simply Measured, visual content generates five times more engagement than non-visual content on Facebook. Since the launch of the Timeline in 2012, engagement with visual content has increased 52%.

And certainly brands are taking note. According to a white paper written by Monte Lutz, Executive President at Edelman Digital, when Johnnie Walker launched on Instagram, they handed the reins of their new channel to three established Instagram influencers who posted their own Johnnie Walker inspired photos for the first month.

Simultaneously, Johnnie Walker evolved its Facebook presence to tell a more visual story; featuring fan-generated Instagram photos in its cover photo and posts. Interactions on Facebook surged, and fans flocked to Instagram. Recognizing the innovative campaign, Instagram featured Johnnie Walker in its own feed and on the Instagram blog, too.

Visual storytelling is also driving a surge in consumption of mobile video, with significant increases in mobile video views. According to the U.S. Digital Video Benchmark 2012 Review from Adobe, over the last two years, the audience for mobile video in the U.S. jumped 300% in 2012, accounting for 10.4% of video starts, up from just 3% in 2011. This will continue to increase as the smartphones and tablet sales explode.

It’s clear today that your brand must learn to master the art of short-form and visual storytelling. Technology today enables it, and consumer attention spans demand it. Whether it be a 6–15 second video, a photo, or 140 characters, you must learn how to tell your brand story quickly and efficiently.

And I can almost guarantee that you’ll never see a Facebook status update or Instagram photo/video in the search results for obvious reasons. Facebook purposely blocks Google from indexing all their content. We can only assume that they are building their own search engine.

The truth is that we use search daily, and when we do, we are on a mission. We are looking for information that’s important to us at that specific moment in time. It’s not like Twitter or Facebook where we scroll through our feeds casually; check our @replies, messages, and follower counts; and then mosey on over to LinkedIn to see who’s been stalking our profiles.

When we use search, it’s because we want something and want it now. It could be movie tickets, information about a vacation destination, or research in the latest data center technology.

With short-from storytelling and social media in general, we are trying to interrupt customers with our brand message, and the question you have to ask yourself is whether or not your content is actually surfacing in the search results when customers are looking for you or something you can offer to them.

If your focus and financial investment is purely on short-form storytelling, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to reach new people, sell additional products, and demonstrate thought leadership.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, “Understanding the Social Customer and the Chaotic World We Live In,” data tells us from the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer that when it comes to trust and credibility, “people like yourself,” “subject matter experts,” and “employees of a company” always rank high when people are seeking information about a company.

But isn’t it possible to demonstrate thought leadership in a tweet? By using a series of tweets or videos, yes. But that’s assuming that you have an audience and that they are actually paying attention to you. But what about the CIO of a company that’s interested in investing in new data center technology? Yeah, they might go to Twitter and browse their feed. But I guarantee you this: They will go to a search engine because they know, just like you know, that Google knows best. They want information and they want it now.

Short-form storytelling is important. It’s your attempt at breaking through the clutter with compelling, creative, and visual content.

But I ask you this: Why not try to make their lives easier by allowing them to reach you? You can do so by spending a little more of your time and resources telling a complete story that’s more than just 140 characters long.

Two brands in the B2B space do this extremely well. Visage, an enterprise mobility management software company, uses long-form storytelling to reach their customers. Their blog Chief Mobility Officer (http://visagemobile.com/mobilityblog/) uses creative titles and quality content to add value to the “enterprise mobility” conversation. Very rarely do they even talk about their products.

The American Express Open Forum (https://www.openforum.com/) is a small business community that uses third party influencers and contributors to create content about a variety of topics including leadership, marketing, and technology. All that rich content and thought leadership is finding its way into the search engines, driving traffic back to Open Forum, and maybe even influencing people to sign up for an American Express credit card for their small business.

Outbrain, a content discovery platform, can give your brand the ability to reach a highly engaged audience with your content. Outbrain uses personalized links to recommend content across a network of more than 200 premium publishers, including CNN, Fox News, Hearst, Rolling Stone, US Weekly, and MSNBC. I go into greater detail about Outbrain’s capabilities in Chapter 9, “The Role of Converged Media in Your Content Strategy.”

In 2012, Outbrain analyzed their data stack to uncover insights about effective title writing for blogs. They did this by looking at click-through rates (CTR) gathered from 65,000 paid link titles that ran on Outbrain’s content discovery platform between April and July of 2012. Although this content was distributed within their network of advertisers, the report provides excellent insights because your content might also be distributed in their network at some point (if that’s what you choose). And hopefully your long-form content will also be distributed, shared, and retweeted in social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

Outbrain’s white paper gives specific examples on what kinds of blog titles attract people based on the number of clicks to that specific piece of content:

Titles that contain negative extremes (“worst” or “never”) performed 30% better than titles that did not contain either of these words. Likewise, titles that contain the word “lie(s)” outperformed titles without this word by 10%.

Titles that contain the word “don’t” generated a 15% higher CTR than titles without this word. It appears that accentuating what the audience does not know or should not do in your headlines is an effective way of enticing readers.

Titles that contain the word “surprise(s)” generated a 35% higher CTR than titles without this word. The human urge to satisfy feelings of curiosity is incredibly powerful. We see countless attempts by marketers to evoke curiosity among consumers for this very reason. This result suggests that the word “surprise” is effective in activating such feelings and getting readers to click through.

Titles containing a dollar sign performed 20% better than titles without dollar signs. Research has shown that the human brain perceives the reward value of money to be on par with that of primary resources like food and sex. It certainly seems wise for content marketers to capitalize on this with dollar signs in headlines.

Titles that contain the word “hot” achieved a 25% higher CTR than titles that do not contain this word. The word “cool,” however, had no significant effect on CTR. When it comes to attracting readers, it appears that “hot” is the way to go.

Titles that contain the word “photo(s)” performed 15% better than titles without this word. This is consistent with our previous finding that paid links perform better in Outbrain’s thumbnail image widgets than in our text only widgets.

Titles that include the word “who” generated a 35% higher CTR than titles that do not contain the word “who.” The words “why,” “where,” and “which” did not have any effect on performance, implying that the “w” in “who” is the “w” that counts when it comes to intriguing readers with your titles.

Titles that contain a hyphen performed 10% better than titles without a hyphen, suggesting readers tend to be attracted to titles that are broken up by a hyphen (for example, headlines with subtitles).

Outbrain also gives us insight on the titles that actually repel consumers.

Titles that make references to the reader by including the word, “you,” “your,” or “you’re” performed 24% worse than titles that did not contain any of these words. The attempt to make readers feel as though they’re being spoken to directly appears to do more harm than good. Readers are aware that they are part of a vast audience and may be showing reactance by avoiding these headlines.

Titles containing an imperative (“must” or “need”) generated a 20% lower CTR than titles that did not contain either of these words. Readers appear to be resistant to words that demand action or attention. It may be that these words are more reminiscent of advertorial calls to action than editorial language or that their overuse in headlines over time has weakened their ability to convey a true sense of urgency.

Titles that contained positive extremes (“always” or “best”) performed 29% worse than titles that did not contain either of these words. Contrary to popular belief and their widespread use in headlines, these words do not appear to be compelling to readers. In fact, our data shows just the opposite. This may simply be a product of overuse, or it could be because readers are skeptical of sources’ motives for endorsement. On the flip side, sources of negative information may be more likely to be perceived as impartial and authentic.

Titles that contain the word “watch” performed 35% worse than titles that do not contain this word. “Watch” is often used in titles to designate video content. The negative impact of this word suggests that there may be constraints (for example, time, environmental, device-specific) on readiness to consume video content that are not factors (or less of a factor) for article consumption.

Titles containing the phrase “how to” performed 43% worse than titles without this phrase. This finding is consistent with the distinction between search mode and content consumption mode that we’ve long emphasized in our definition of “content discovery.” How-to’s can be highly desirable to consumers entering their present goal into a search engine, but they may be less timely and appealing to readers in content consumption mode.

Titles that contain the word “easy” generated a 45% lower CTR than titles without this word. Readers are constantly bombarded with “easy ways” and “easy steps” to an end and our results suggest that they are not convinced. Or, following from the above finding, readers in content consumption mode may be less likely to be pursuing a specific goal at that moment.

Titles that include a colon performed 10% worse than titles without a colon. It seems that marketers would be better off turning to hyphens than colons when looking to break up headlines or create subtitles.

Remember that this data is only analyzing titles and click-through rates. Not only should you create compelling titles that tell your story effectively and encourage sharing, but the content itself must be game-changing and add value. And as difficult as this may sound, you brand must strive to create long-form content consistently. As I mentioned in Chapter 4, you can leverage your employees as brand journalists and customers as advocates to help if you don’t have the resources to do it yourself (you should be leveraging these two groups regardless). You may also consider platforms like eByline, Skyword, or Contently that have large networks of journalists, writers, and bloggers that can also help supplement your content efforts.

Native advertising is a web advertising method in which the advertiser attempts to gain attention by providing valuable content in the context of the user’s experience; it is similar in concept to an advertorial, which is a paid placement attempting to look like an article. A native ad tends to be more obviously an ad than most advertorials while still providing interesting or useful information. The advertiser’s intent is to make the paid advertising feel less intrusive and thus increase the likelihood users will click on it.

It’s clear that your brand must create engaging content that tells a specific story across the entire digital ecosystem. And unfortunately, you might lack the resources needed internally to deliver such content day in and day out. The Contently platform can connect your brand to a network of journalists, writers, and bloggers and provides the technology needed to quickly and seamlessly manage the complicated workflow from content ideation to creation and all the way to distribution.

Contently’s Storytelling Platform (see Figure 8.6) allows you to quickly and seamlessly manage both staff and freelance contributors and their work. You can build custom teams of contributors (writers, photographers, editors, and so on) and communicate with groups, source story ideas from teams, create assignments, manage permissions for individual team members, and more.

The platform allows all deliverables and approval workflows to live in the cloud, and you can drag and drop an editorial calendar, which is customizable to the scale and frequency of any size of branded content campaign.

Contently’s platform can also help you streamline the tedious process of legal signoff and internal content approvals. Instead of passing content back and forth via email, Contently allows you to create custom approval chains, so when an assignment is ready for review by your team of lawyers, managers, or clients, the appropriate parties get emails with special links to review and approve the work (or sent back for revision). When stories are complete, they can be easily published to an existing CMS, such as Wordpress.

The platform also includes content marketing analytics, which measures the reach, engagement, and influence of every individual story your brand publishes (whether it’s on your owned properties or published elsewhere). Additionally, you can break down their metrics by topic, author, and channel.