INBOUND 2015 HTT: Chad Pollitt "The Anatomy of Tomorrow's Content Promotion Strategy Today"

Key Takeaways

I'm not your typical speaker it's not that I'm not her or bad speak or anything like that I don't religiously study my slides each slide represents a thought and I'm going to share a story throughout this presentation and I hope that each and every one of you gets something out of this story and it's a powerful story it's a story of content promotion and it's an often-overlooked story and our business now I've been in this business a long time in some form or fashion since late two thousand one early two thousand two and I've seen things change and evolve over those years and this is a culmination of my thoughts around that evolution and how we as a company relevance has attacked the problems and the challenges that we face as marketers every day that's what we're going to talk about today but before I do that I have a few a few housekeeping things first off please everyone tweet to hubspot with the hashtag inbound 15 to put me in a bigger room next year please do that but before I jump in here I want to let you guys know a little bit about me if you don't know already I served over ten and a half years in the army the US Army I was a commander I have my own company of soldiers that I commanded that's where I got this every week sometimes twice a week I do a mastermind session with some of the top executives in our industry and we sit down on google+ on hangouts and we just talk about their challenges their wins and its interactive and I do this every week and it's my way of keeping my finger on the pulse of our industry and what's happening in real time I'm going to pass this out I'm going to pull five business cards out of here for my next mastermind session so if any of you want to be a part of that mastermind session please put your card in here and we will get a hold of you probably in the next week so I'm going to go ahead and start here sir by the way that's heavy imagine putting that thing on your head sucks anyways so quick announcement this is so funny to me two weeks ago I was asked by the Indiana University Kelley School of Business to be a professor for them I'm just an old soldier right I don't have a master's degree I'm just passionate about this business and I'm passionate about sharing what i've learned in this business so technically I guess I'm a college professor now anyways I encourage and challenge each and every one of you if you ever have the opportunity to shape the future of our industry and teach college kids digital marketing do it they need it the professor's I talked to our traditional old-school marketers and they don't get inbound at all those students need people like us and that's why I stepped up to the plate by the way being a professor an adjunct professor doesn't pay but the truth is I would have done it for free because I want to have a hand in the future of our industry and I feel like giving back in that way is a good way to do that so I encourage and challenge each and every one of you to do that in the future if you have that opportunity so this what I'm going to talk about I don't like bullets I will not read bullets I'm just going to share thoughts i'm going to tell stories okay but this is what i'm going to talk about on its surface it doesn't really make sense does it what's a content explosion that's a content explosion unless you've been hiding under a rock the last five years each and every one of you have seen the amount of content double triple quadruple on the internet it's crazy how much content is on the internet and it's only growing part of that tub spots fault it is guess what folks this the secrets been let out of the bag it's no secret anymore the inbound marketing works right so maybe you were an early adopter maybe you were the first in your vertical and your industry to do inbound marketing and you blew up it helped shape the growth of your company maybe well his Marcus sheridan in here you know his story look what it did to his company fast forward to today those competitors are doing content to because the secrets been let out of the bag what happens when you're in an industry where you have 500 other competitors all creating the same type of content you create what happens to your visibility it becomes crowded it becomes noisy this is how much content is produced every second excuse me information every second on the internet that's a ridiculous amount of content and information that's what you're competing against with inbound marketing with content marketing look at how many blog posts you're competing against that's how many blog posts are published and written every single day and it's only growing how many of you have slaved over some article for hours hit publish and nobody read it I've done it I've written over 800 articles in my career and the vast majority of every single one of them failed to meet my business objectives the vast majority of them barely got red but I kept creating content this is a fact if any of you work for an agency and you have a blog you know this story if you were to start a new marketing agency tomorrow from scratch and you started blogging how the hell are you going to stand out in the crowd there's tens of thousands of marketing blogs out there so I don't know if you've had a chance to read mark schaeffer's book the content code I read it it's a great book I recommend it by the way mark schaefer is a friend of mine this is one of the things that he discovered looking at data from the content marketing institute as well as I forget who else did this tell you with them but somebody else did it study with them there's going to be five times more content in 2020 than what there is today 5x so for you marketers out there that are struggling today to get the visibility that you need what do you think it's going to be like in five years it's going to be like this it's going to be really really tough to stand out even more so than today so my question to you is how does this make you feel I got good news if you listen to me you don't have to panic there is a way and that's what we're going to talk about today so I talked about the waning visibility the truth is that we've been told by a lot of different people and a lot of different brands that if you build it they will come and search and social media is going to bring them to us they have been since their inception the gatekeepers of our visibility of our content however what channel on the internet commands more audience exposure than both search and social combined what channel email can yes but email you have to capture their email address unless you're going out by and listen please tell me you're not going out by and less okay so before you can get their email address they have to get to your site somewhere right I'll tell you that channel that channel is the combined audience of every blog and media outlet on the Internet today the company that figures out how to tap in at scale to those audiences is the next Google the next Google and guess what it's going to happen and it's happening right now we're going to talk about it again unless you've been under a rock the last few years you are all aware that Facebook has cranked down their visibility and guess what they're not the only ones doing it a year ago this month Twitter came out publicly i believe it was their CFO Twitter said we kind of like this thing Facebook's doing we're going to do it too why because it's a proven business model for social media social media starts and builds this audience these people that use their network and then they attract brands and the brands are interacting with all these people all these marketers and all these other folks and they build these large audiences and then the social media I'll have pulls the rug out from under me and says oh we're going to take your visibility pay us and we'll give it back to you that's what's happening it's happening right now and Twitter I promise you will not be the last social media website to do this it's a proven business model again if you listen to what I have to say today you don't have to panic I know it sounds bleak but I'm speaking truth to power this is the truth this is what's happening to us now do you have any beekeepers in the audience okay if we had one I tell them man you probably don't have to worry about this because there's not many beekeepers doing inbound marketing right but for the rest of us this matters so real quick let's talk about search I came up in search that came up in SEO that's how I started my career I'm very passionate about search to this very day but search is changing it's changed a lot in the last five years and there are only ten positions on the first page of Google in a world with five hundred percent more content than what we have today how the hell are we going to stand out with only ten positions in the first page of Google how this quote right here I used it last year edun bomb and two months later for some reason it ended up in entrepreneur magazine I don't know how that happened but it's true think about it if you've been in this business for over three years you know how much search has changed SEO today while there's still some technical aspects of it you want to make sure you know what your keywords are you want to have conventions for all your metadata and other things like that you want to track what's happening with search but if you want to do well in search what do you do you do great marketing you do great content marketing you do great inbound marketing you do great digital PR today so the fact of the matter is SEO is not something that you anymore it's what happens when you do everything else right that's SEO because there's only ten positions in the first page of Google I do believe that they will be there facing an inherent problem in a world with five hundred percent more content and this is the problem I don't believe they're built to handle this much content so it's going to be critical for us as marketers and his communications professionals to make sure that we're able to promote our content and get the visibility that we need and not necessarily have to rely on search in a world with five hundred percent more content than what we have today again don't panic because what I'm going to go over today is going to help you overcome this so what's filling the void that's where content promotion comes in now some of you sitting here think that content promotion is simply tweeting out your content or paying for a placement on Facebook or maybe doing display advertising might be content promotion yesterday's traditional digital paid channels that whole infrastructure is not built for the content that we produce today it's not built for top funnel content it's built for mid to bottom of the funnel content what do we know as marketers about our top funnel content the investment we make at the top of our funnel on content is not the end game we have to continue to invest to nurture those folks down to the middle down to the bottom of our funnel and mark closed one there's additional investment that needs to take place not just writing blog posts right so as a result the traditional channels of content promotion like display advertising and PPC are not built for our top funnel content what we pay for those both actually why would we pay to distribute blog posts on pay per click when we can promote a case study coupon it's much further down the funnel right why would we waste our money at the top of the funnel in those channels as marketers we're not wasting our money on those channels we're spending our money and other places on other channels to promote the top of the funnel content that each and every one of you produce on a daily basis and we're going to talk about those channels I have to bring this up when I talk about this the fact of the matter is that sixty percent of the people in this room think their content is not working it's a fact think about all that content that we produce as marketers and most of us think it doesn't work it's not driving the goals that we set out to achieve that's a problem in our industry so Ryan Skinner did this study he works for Forrester Ryan I've talked to him several times a major thought leader in this space in content promotion in general but he did a study back in I think late two thousand twelve or thirteen where he figured this out as marketers were all racing to produce the most content right what you figured out was if you cut back on how much content that you produce and actually spend time promoting it you can get better results he also figured out because you know the whole content quality versus quantity debate which is stupid by the way you figured this out as well if you focus your attention on promotion you're going to accelerate your feedback cycle hence making your content more excuse me higher quality so I'm really starting to run out of time so I'm going to speed this up folks I'm sorry I got a late start on this these are the channels of content promotion earned paid and owned now I know each and every one of you in here follows hub spots inbound methodology because that's why you're here hub spots methodology focuses on the own channel five years ago you could build it and they would come we're in a new world today and in five years is going to be five times more content the world of build it and they will come is over for most industries that's why it's critical that we understand his marketers that there are two other channels to promote your content earned and paid media so David Ogilvy the father of advertising he actually has a room at HubSpot named after him I believe he's a legend if you're not familiar with them but this is a quote from him and I believe it's from the 40s maybe it's old it's been around but what he did was he foresaw in this quote whether he knew it or not the problems that we face with banner advertising this is a heat map that shows how much visibility these banners are actually getting none and as a result I'm not done any Navy SEALs in here no anybody get into MIT in here somebody's ever raised their hand all right well then none of you clicked on banner at stood a so Google Trends cool tool i like to use it check this out the interest over time for banner advertising the interest over time for native advertising remember what i said earlier the company that figures out how to at scale tap in to the audiences of the media and blogs is going to be the next Google that's a top funnel content channel for us to use and this reflects the interest in that over time so when I talk about native advertising there's really two things I'm talking about so the IAB has these standards they defined what native advertising is in our world of top formal content these are the two channels that matter the most we've got your in feed units that's like you're promoted newsfeed article in facebook right it can also be an EP in feed unit can be the orange is the new black article that Netflix put in the new york times that's in feed right top funnel content and then your recommendation widgets we have probably all either experimented or checked out Outbrain tabouleh rep content add blade and on and on and on so this is what's happening as a result of the interest in native advertising all socials gone to it almost what else is happening hey search engines are buying native advertising companies this isn't generally known in our industry but since October google has had their own native network in private beta Google they under pound girl in the room their networks different they will have content recommendations just like tabula Outbrain a blade web content but they're going to do something else they're going to have sponsored articles at scale they are going after and partnering with premium publications media outlets and your run-of-the-mill blog mommy bloggers right runs the gamut as a marketer as a brand you're going to be able to go into Google system write an article and submit to the publications that you want to submit to and if they accept it you do the transaction through google 800-pound gorilla google gets they got their hand in the pot and you just got access to a huge audience right at scale tapping into other audiences so sponsored content is growing it's becoming very very very popular i'm sure you've seen many famous examples but this is how much brand marketers spent on sponsored content in the year 2013 and that number is growing it's a channel for us to use as marketers it is growing and this speaks to that publishers are seeing the value in it publishers online have been struggling for decades to figure out how to build a business online many have gone out of business mainstream media are closing that they're closing their foreign bureaus they're laying off the they're laying off journalists it's really sad actually what's happened to the of our media because they can't figure out their business model good news is new media is here now BuzzFeed right viral Nova Huffington Post so on and so on it's on they figured it out what are they doing doing this and marketers are starting to figure out that this is pretty cool and it works so this is what some mainstream media outlets are charging us to publish sponsored content there's money in sponsored content for these publishers and you know what marketers and brands are paying for access to their audience so I just talked about native advertising this is a native advertisement we did a study we contacted over a thousand publishers and we asked them what do you charge for a sponsored content and they told us well 550 of them told us and we wrapped all that up into this study the study is filled with lots of nuggets about sponsored content that you can download off of that bitly link today for free and use in your future content promotion efforts so I highly encourage everyone to download this guy by the way if you don't get the URL now you can get the slides and the URL is in the slides so now I talked about paid media paid media is a powerful channel that we can use but guess what we don't all have massive budgets I get it I've been a poor market or my entire career almost okay I don't have a massive budget so I have to rely on earned media right I know people that write for Forbes I know people at ma's I know people at HubSpot I know people at inc com when I produce content I contact them and I say hey i just created this content i think it's cool check it out if you like it maybe you'll write a story about it and they do they do I once had 800 leads for my business over the course of two weeks from an article written on inc com about an e book that i wrote in ebook eight hundred leads two weeks boom that's the power of earned media what's hot right now influencer marketing is out right now everybody's talking about it influencer marketing SAS platforms are cropping up all over the place i know because they all get ahold to me and they want me to talk about the product right influencer marketing is media relations 2.0 the tried and true public relations tool that if you're a PR or communications professional in here you know exactly what I'm talking about Walmart as a whole team dedicated to reaching out to local media outlets trying to get them to run stories on Walmart what's the difference between walmart and what we're doing Walmart's pitching their brand their products and we're pitching our content we're pitching our content to influences we're pitching our content to the media to cover right that's where influencer marketing comes in this is huge I get three four five six pitches every week from companies wanting me to participate in some type of content creation or an interview or something why because influencer marketing is a hot thing right now and guess what it works it works if you can identify 12 influencers in your industry and you get them to participate and some of the content that you create guess what they have a vested interest in the success of that content and guess what else they have an audience they have an audience that they will promote that content to and it generally depending on your industry generally they won't charge to do some type of influencer collaboration I've never made anybody pay me they wouldn't know so this this is actually a really sad statistic some of you sitting in this audience are thinking to yourself wow we don't spend any time energy effort budget on content promotion ours is zero remember in the beginning I said thirty eight percent of all b2b marketers not believe their content is achieving the business objectives they created it for on average this is what they spend on content promotion this is a recipe for failure if you get one thing from this and one thing only today I want you to get this as inbound marketers is content marketers you need to invest forty to sixty percent of your time energy and effort and budget on promotion earned paid owned earned paid owned forty to sixty percent now relevance as an agency our clients generally spend about forty five percent of their budget and our time energy and effort on content promotion but for those of you in the agency world you know clients never spend what they should they should spend more right of course when I look at the numbers i see well they would have gone to fifty sixty percent this campaign would have been even more successful so that's why I say forty to sixty percent alright i'm really going to speed up now because I've hit my time and we started ten minutes late so why are companies and marketers investing in content promotion is to fill that void that void left by search in social by the only ten positions on the first page of google by the fact that the visibility in social media is rapidly declining is almost zero in some situations marketers are struggling to find that that solution and that solution is some of the things that we just talked about native advertising as well as influencer marketing oh by the way thanks for stopping by appreciate it now you're fine so real quick I'm going to talk about blurred lines that's Jimmy Kimmel by the way that's not as real video so there's some trends happening it's important that each and every one of you understand these trends because these trends are important these trends set this macro vision of what's happening on the internet and as marketers creating content we need to understand these trends this is happening the media are building real marketing agencies internally or they're buying them and here's a few examples and there's a lot more they're all doing it hubspot has its own program for publishers where they encourage publishers to build the ability to do full fledge and bound campaigns this is real it's happening what else is happening big news story sure Amazon didn't buy the Washington Post but Jeff Bezos did by the way there's a room over at HubSpot named Jeff Bezos they're not the only ones Adobe own CMO com you read that sure most of you have jopo let's see the content marketing institute has been talking about this for years why build your own content marketing program when you can just buy an audience right this is happening this is a real trend what else is happening agencies are becoming publishers now I didn't give you a spiel about relevance I hope many of you have been familiarized with relevance calm that's our website relevance is an agency we're an enterprise serving agency that does content marketing research promotion we're also a real digital magazine a real digital magazine we don't have a blog we have real sponsors this is happening this is real companies are doing this right now this is a trend this is a trend this is real it's happening why am I telling you about these trends because i'm going to explain to you something that you probably haven't heard before and some of you are going to tweet this and i'm going to get some people that yell at me on twitter i guarantee it but i've been thinking about these trends a lot in the last six months and what they've told me is that content isn't king anymore we've all been told content is king by the way a buddy of mine took this picture at Disney World and he gave it to me he said you have where you put this picture in your presentation I said yeah I'll put this picture of my presentation that's a badass picture so he's just he's not a professional photographer but he took this picture and um he's actually featured in the walt disney world coffee table picture book which is awesome so if you want to see more of his stuff go to Judd hell Helms com so native advertising so content is no longer King if you really stop and think about the transit I just described it didn't really talk much about content did it audiences King audience and access to that audience and being able capable of persuading that audiences King audiences can not content that's why those trends are happening the media the media are building agencies not because they need more content and not because they need to grow their audience they're doing it to persuade their audience they're doing it to give brands access to their audience and the ability to persuade them so I'm four minutes over and I'm going to really fly through this one I told you briefly about relevance and the fact that we built a digital magazine now I'm going to explain to you how we built that magazine and the steps and the tactics that we took to go from zero subscribers to over sixty thousand subscribers in an oversaturated content marketplace over the course of 14 months so without further ado this is the landscape for marketing content this is noise what i'm about to share with you will make you stand out like that red these are the things that we did so our agency started off in 2006 @ slingshot SEO an ad slingshot SEO we saw a lot of success we worked with a lot of Awesome brands but as we all know SEO has changed it's fundamentally changed in so many ways since 2006 and as a result we've evolved as a brand so in 2012 I was brought on to be a change agent in the company and I've rebranded the company to digital relevance now we did the rebrand but one of our founders had a vision he came into my office and he sat down and he said Chad why should we buy and earn media when we can be the media take that coupled with all those trends I just shared with you and the light bulb went off you're right because the fact of the matter is the blogs that we produce content on a publish on a regular basis are indirect channels of revenue for us as marketers in his brands their indirect they drive leads that we still have to work and check the closed one box right well we wanted to fundamentally change that we said no no we can we've got audience we can we can get sponsors they can pay us I mean this is really sick if you think about it um other companies pay us to produce content for us for leads that's crazy but it works we're doing it so just a few months ago we actually took the brand digital relevance and relevance the digital magazine and we squashed them together under one brand relevance and this is it and you can see over the course of two thousand six still today we've won multiple many awards this is our latest this is the one I'm most proud of the content marketing institute awarded us a strategy award the high subscriber growth this year we beat craft and news crit and composed big big big names because we went from zero subscribers over sixty thousand subscribers in 14 months using the content promotion that I just talked to you guys about as a matter of fact in 10 months we were named the 19th most most influential brand in content marketing in an oversaturated content market where there's marketing content everywhere every freaking agency on this planet is pushing out content like crazy and we were able to accomplish this we did it using over 200 contributors danielle is our content coordinator Daniel look over here which by the way every single one of you is in a book is invited to write for relevance if you'd like just hit me up on Twitter or Danielle and we'll set you up with your own byline that's your own earned media you can share your thought leadership you can link to your case studies guides ebooks so on and so forth so you all have an invitation we've been able to get people like New York Times bestselling author Jay Baer to write for us Jason falls who's speaking here writes for us Pam dinner the former global head of content marketing for Intel rights for us Jeannie Dietrich is speaking here Eden bound she writes for us this is influencer marketing folks and each and every one of these over 200 unique contributors have their own audience and they have a vested interest and their content doing well so what do they do they promote our content for free the content that they produce oh and we don't pay them again I told you it's kind of sick to think about it people pay us to create this content for us to drive leads for our agency it's insane so I promise you I give you some nine tactics or I give you some tactics here's nine tactical tots I love this movie research you have to do research research is inherently important in the activity that you do this is a presentation all unto itself so I'm not going to do a deep dive these are the four buckets of research make sure you get this when you do your research you need to understand that these are the areas you need to focus on and where they inner intersect is where you're going to get all the important information in the data that you need to make data-driven decisions research is key research is critical well many of you don't do and I never would do this in the past was research the media what is my audience reading what's popular very important so the first one is pop-up check boxes and recommendations we ask every single visitor to our website to become a subscriber I know there's Pierce in here that say oh no I hate pop-ups I never use pop-ups and you probably don't but guess what folks it works do a search on Google read the first 10 results they all say hey this stuff works because it does influencer marketing here's some folks that have written for us that we reached out to and develop the real relationships with influencer marketing works it's powerful it's a huge content promotion channel well most people don't know this actually write more for other websites than I do for our own website here's just a handful of them and we've been featured in in all of these big media outlets we pursue these we hit up journalists and we talked to them and we encourage them to cover us and to write about us into link to our content and they do so if you're not trying to do influencer marketing or trying to do media relations to promote your content you need to start doing it it works folks native advertising now I've worked with every single one of these companies and promoting our content at scale through native Tyson now we are actually partnered with a company called zemanta that's featured there and Samantha they're not a sponsor by the way they don't pay us we pay them and they are a third-party connected to 25 native ad networks we averaged seven cents a click is what we're paying and at scale we drive over 35,000 unique visitors to our website with the same bounce rate as organic traffic at seven cents a click that's dirt cheap right we also use social media but what we discovered was that the cost per click on social media if you do a deep dive into these numbers is ridiculously high compared to other channels so we don't do a lot of paid social media anymore we did the experiments now the founders the brand and myself we've got access to over a hundred thousand people on social media that we're connected to so we do broadcast our content organically in social media and it does drive traffic and results that's another way we do content promotion as anybody in here heard of list rental we've got a few hands this is the most under-rated channel for content promotion that exists on the planet list rental is not buying a list list rental is me going to you and saying you got a pretty large audience they're interested in content promotion and content strategy I'll tell you what I'll give you five thousand dollars pretend lately okay if you take this ebook I row and promote it to your email list tell them it's a good book and you like it and then you send that off check out what what that did from one email one email actually we only spent twelve hundred dollars on that email and a lot of times I just do a barter I trade I'm like hey man i'll email about your ebook if you email about mine and this happens so this is the first thing I learned in sales in 1999 when i graduated from Indiana University and that's fake it till you make it I'm sure many of you have heard it essentially what we did was we said what better way to look like an established online media outlet then to actually look like an established online media outlet so we looked at TechCrunch and we said hey TechCrunch looks cool let's copy TechCrunch this is their wireframe what else do we do we bought relevance calm relevance calm is an asset that sits on our balance sheet it was expensive we had to hire a broker to buy it for us right what better way to fake it to you make it relevance calm that's a cool domain right what else do we do we bought based on the social media terms and conditions you can't buy social media accounts or we bought relevance the twitter handle and several other social accounts with established audiences right fake it till you make it and the most important thing that we did was we focused on a niche Joe policies been talking about this for at least two years maybe more but in an industry that's oversaturated with content if you do not focus on a niche you will be unsuccessful this is the most important thing that we did as a brand we focused on content promotion as our topic it separated us from all the other agencies websites out there because we had an itch focus this is the second most important thing you can take away from this I like this movie actually the first time I ever watched this movie was in Iraq actually and we used to buy movies for like five bucks off the locals it was great they were all pirated anyways so here's some takeaways I'm not going to go through them because I'm over time but these are the things i want you to understand are happening in our industry I knew they'd give me a lapel so I wanted to drop the mic so i used this one to drop the mic alright so the last thing first of all i want to thank everybody for coming to my session this is my latest book that I've written it's almost a hundred pages of pure content promotion goodness you see the URL please feel free to download it it is free these are all my thoughts that go into very very very detailed positions around content promotion it gets very tactical as well so you will get lots of good takeaway folks thank you