Did you know that Australia has the 2nd highest smartphone penetration in the world after South Korea (yes, really, little old Australia!)? And that Messenger has 11.4m users in Australia, mostly women under 45?
After spending a day listening to the who’s who of the publishing industry talk trends, platforms, technologies and business models, here is what I took away for content marketers.
- Strategy first – What is your purpose? What are your objectives? Yes it’s obvious, but a reminder never hurts.
- Know your audience – Start with audience/reader needs. Know your customer and put them at the centre of all that you do. Again obvious, but now it’s all about customer data that’s at your fingertips. Have you used Google Trends to get to know your customers or your competitors better? There is also stacks of vital customer information within every organisation that only you have access to, use it to drive your content strategy in the right direction.
- Create engaging content – High quality content, content that informs and entertains is still valued by consumers. The knack of storytelling is the value of a good communicator or agency. Find the story and it will connect. It will get people talking about your brand and inspire customers. The human factor is still critical when crafting content – without it there is no news judgement, no fact checking and trust erodes in your brand, your product or your publication. Buzzfeed told Mumbrella Publish that niche content that is tailored, meaningful and relevant to its audience is the key. Content is also now a two-way medium. People want the chance to engage to like, share, comment and get a response.
- Use video – Facebook prioritises video in the newsfeed above all else. Did you know that Time Magazine, which everyone thought had disappeared, currently has 50k videos in circulation and gets 1 billion views a month? Who knew? Amazing!
- Measurement is still a challenge, but here are some insights from the day. The Queen of theAsianParent, Roshni Mahtani , encouraged us to move on from Cost per Click (CPC) and Cost per thousand impressions (CPM), the key is Average Revenue per User (ARPU). There was the usual stuff of click through, purchases, conversions and website traffic. Then there was the more important (I think) strategic lesson, not to forget the long term impact on brand awareness and brand attitude. It’s a reminder that there are lots of reasons that we ‘do’ marketing and not all of them have a direct and immediate connection to sales or conversions, sometimes is a long windy dotted line connection between our activities and revenue results.
Some of this sounds really basic, but these were people that really know their stuff, like CEOs from The Australian, HuffPost Australia, leaders from FairFax Media and Buzzfeed Australia, and my two personal favourites Flip Prior (Social Media Strategist, ABC) and Roshni Mahtani (Founder of Tickled Media, and theAsianparent website among a host of others).
Paul Dovas from Mumbrella summed up the day, “Trusted content is king”.