Make Content Marketing Your Hits Business
I don’t know about you, but when I choose reading material I almost always gravitate toward books with topics that are completely different…
I don’t know about you, but when I choose reading material I almost always gravitate toward books with topics that are completely different from the digital marketing that I do all day. Work is intense, so I will take a break with anything from a comedian’s biography to historical fiction. But for some reason I can’t seem to escape taking insights and lessons from these divergent stories back into my day job.
Last week I finished off The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by New Yorker writer, John Seabrook. It’s a deep dive into the story of how pop music has always been dominated by a handful of teams of hit-makers who excel at dishing up the audio candy we crave in tidy 3 minute and 30 second bites.
Early on, The Song Machine tears down the assumption that technology will enable a Long Tail of micro-niche musicians. From Napster to Spotify, we keep craving the hits, and the hits are bigger than ever.
“Of 13 million songs available for purchase in 2008, only 52,000 made up 80% of the industry’s revenue, and 10 million songs didn’t sell a single copy.”
Amazingly, 77% of industry profit comes from only 1% of artists. So much for the Long Tail in the entertainment industry where it was predicted to make the first, biggest impact.
The Hits Pattern is Everywhere You Look
You might be surprised of this reality of the hits business, but our team at Ahalogy isn’t. We optimize content for Pinterest for a living, and are able to analyze over a million pieces of content that have been posted through our software. Earlier this year we studied the traffic from these pins to our thousand-plus high-quality user accounts. We found that 80% of click traffic came from just 6% of total pins placed.
I just did a similar analysis for my posts on LinkedIn since the beginning of 2015. These 36 posts have generated 107,383 total views, and 80% of these views were driven by just 5 posts. Last week I spoke with the CMO of a major financial services company who said that 90% of her content views are coming to 10% of their content.
This is the Pareto Principle at work. It seems that nearly everywhere you look, from content consumption, to product purchase volume, to the challenging customers at your office, 80% of the pleasure or pain is caused by around 20% of the total.
We’re Talking Real ROI Here
Have you run the analysis for your marketing content? If not, now would be a good time to put down the phone and go figure it out. That’s because in a world that is driven by a handful of winners, you can significantly boost your ROI by developing and promoting hits.
The difference in media cost for promoting winning content can be extreme. In our testing of Promoting Pins content for clients, we often see a 2x to 5x difference in CPM and CPC price results based on the content. That’s controlled for category and keyword bidding. It’s just a simple fact that some content resonates much better than others, but you’ve got to sift through a good amount of dirt to find the gold in them thar hills.
There is (Data) Science in Art
The musical hit factories don’t just wait for artists to walk in and use their guts to direct the million-dollar investment required to launch a new single. Instead, they use sophisticated tune analysis tools, test lower-cost demo versions, and bring together experts to optimize the beats, hooks, and riffs. Movie studios do screen tests to project audience interest and compare the results to historically similar movie results. They put promotional dollars behind opening night, and don’t spend a dime more until the first hours of ticket sales show it to be a hit or a dud.
This is the kind of thinking it takes to win in content marketing. Your team needs to build a model of testing content cheaply before you invest in making it your own. You should test as many content topics, images and titles as possible before putting real dollars behind what you are confident will work. And never forget to go back and re-release your “catalog” of content that worked in the past to an audience that is ready to discover it for the first time.
The bonus is that all of this work in testing and learning from content brings you closer to the habits and needs of your customer. The better you know them, the better your product development, customer service and business models will be.
Keep an Eye Out for the Outliers
Part of the formula for content success is keeping an eye out for the new creators and formats that break your proven models. We all crave the new to some extent, so you have to be a scout for what’s rising through the ranks.
We regularly use our data from Pinterest as an early indicator of what topics are starting to bubble up, literally. Whether it’s overnight oats or fringed purses, you can surf the wave of what’s next by using data and monitoring influencers.
Advertisers Must Rediscover Lost Skills
These habits shouldn’t feel new to seasoned marketers. After all, most rose through the ranks by perfecting advertising, which is a form of content after all. I started my career at Procter & Gamble working through 30 different edits of a Tide TV spot. Why? Because we knew that the quality of the commercial was critical. According to a 2010 Nielsen study, creative quality accounts for about three-quarters of variance when explaining differences in ad recall levels. And once your programmatic algorithms are maxed out, it’s the only thing left to improve.
I fear that too much of the craft of advertising has been lost. We are busy spreading our time, talents and budget across scores of tactics rather than going deep in the handful of areas where we can become the best in the world. We’ve got to apply some of the old lessons to the newer content that our customers demand. That means going back to research, pre-testing, benchmarks, and expertise.
Wither Personalization?
Some claim that the future is about an infinite amount of creative
/content that is perfectly targeted to individuals based on their myriad interests. Personalization continues to be the buzz, and ad-tech and social media companies tout their micro-targeting capabilities. But that takes us back to the Long Tail story that has yet to materialize.
The simple fact is that no matter the category, a handful of content rises to the top by resonating with a ton of people at once. We are a lot more alike than we like to admit, and a killer book, movie, recipe or blog post strikes many of our fancies in the same way. Instead of investing in personalization or spreading our efforts across so many marketing choices, we might be better off investing in building our own hit machines.
Bob Gilbreath is co-founder and president of Ahalogy, an official Pinterest Marketing Developer Partner, and author of The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. Follow him on Twitter.