PostRelease

The number of niche media sites — whether mommy blogs or car discussion forums — is growing at a staggering rate. Until recently, a brand wanting to reach one of these communities had two choices: work with an ad network for immediate reach or individually with blogs using "sponsored-content" posts.

Two technology start-ups are aiming to make the connection easier.

PostRelease - While ad networks offer brands and bloggers the benefit of instant scale, brands are relegated to small, peripheral ad widgets. PostRelease gives brands the scale and ease of an ad network, with the relevancy and positioning of content.

Content marketers spend lots of time and money creating just the right content to engage their customers and prospects, but much of it goes unheeded by the most coveted of audiences — the C-suite. Executives are a challenging audience, but because of their clout and buying power, it is well worth cracking the code on executive content.

Here's how.

The social media channel with the vast majority of conversations about brands, products and services isn't Facebook. It's not LinkedIn or Twitter, either. Forums and message boards -- old school social media -- are still one of, if not the most popular place to ask and answer questions about brands and products.

Forums and message boards can be found everywhere. Some are stand-alone websites such as KarateForums.com. Others are tacked on to media or corporate sites such including Dell's support forums or Southern Living magazine's community message boards.

My company's research on social media and the banking industry revealed that an astonishing number -- 90 percent -- of all online conversations about banks and their products occurred on forums and message boards.

While content marketing itself isn't necessarily something new, the concept of content marketing has experienced explosive growth. In my content marketing timeline post, I share an image of the Google Trend for the term "content marketing." It is almost nonexistent until it takes off like a rocket in the year 2011.

The wonderful people at BlueGrass Interactive contacted me to share their latest infographic depicting content marketing and it's growth in popularity.

Check it out…

Small businesses looking to improve their web presence should consider news content marketing in favor of costly display advertising campaigns, according to a report from AYTM Market Research.

The study suggests that an overwhelming majority of web users do not pay attention to ads on the web. However, 66 percent of respondents said they read news content regularly, and another 51 percent report that blog content is part of their usual web browsing experience.

Well this is something that we quite honestly expected to see a whole lot earlier even though they seemed to be holding off integration for quite some time. Tumblr CEO David Karp said that sponsored posts would be coming to Tumblr at the Ad Age Digital Conference. Even though Karp had stated that Tumblr was previously against advertising telling the LA Times that "We're pretty against advertising."

We are glad to see sponsored posts continuing to become a part of the digital marketing landscape and hope that brands really begin to embrace content marketing as a go to way to genuinely engage with consumers. Tumblr is known for the great UGC on its site and it is exciting to know that brands will have a new way to interact with its users.

If you've been blogging for a while, you may already have tried a range of methods to monetize your blog. Some will have worked better than others, of course, but most mid- to long-term bloggers are continuously looking for new ways to meet our readers' needs through products or services we can sell.

Blog products have come a long way since I started out, and that's partially due to technology and market trends, and partially because of the creativity of bloggers themselves. We now have an endless stream of external product offerings to choose from (such as advertising and affiliate programs)...

A report from ContentWise and the Custom Content Council found that businesses of all sizes have increased their spending on content marketing. The greater focus on creating original articles, blog posts and other kinds of content led to more than $40 billion investments in 2011...

Forums and message boards are where most consumer conversations happen for many industries. Why are marketers not focusing on these channels?

The answer for most marketers is, "they're not." This is likely because marketers don't realize how much of the online conversation takes place in the consumers-gone-wild world of threaded conversations. But it could also be because marketers are petrified of them. Why? Because marketers typically aren't welcome there. Most forum administrators are quick to thwart link droppers and promotional banner wavers. You can't blame them. The users come there for … wait for it … conversations.

We sing the praises of brands that appear to effortlessly lead the social conversation--Tom's Shoes, Virgin America, Chipotle--while simultaneously hitting "refresh" on our Facebook likes, completely missing the point.

The numbers game (fans, followers, traffic, sign-ups, sales) will always fail as long as we fail to connect to what the customer cares about: footwear that makes a difference, a travel experience that makes flying fun, fresh food and great music. Marketing strategies will maintain their mediocre successes as long as we keep expecting engagement and loyalty from our customers without giving them the same consideration. However, by investing time and resources to develop great gobs of gorgeous content with compelling, interesting messages worth sharing, the scales will tip, the pendulum will swing.

Although it's still early in 2012, the importance of visual storytelling is clearly one of the year's breakout trends.Facebook Timeline, Pinterest, and Instagram are forcing brands to think and act more visually. Couple that with the impact of mobile browsing, and these emerging trends give new meaning to the phrase "show, don't tell."

In other words, the "beautification of the web" era is upon us. How does this shift toward visual storytelling impact your content marketing plan? Let's explore some trends that illustrate where we are and where we're going.

This is something that we are seeing more of recently. The display industry is starting to redefine what some of the metrics are that it will continue to be held to as measurements of success.

Continuing to lose face among marketers, new research shows that clicks and total impressions are far from the best way to measure online conversions. The results showed that ad hover/interaction and viewable impressions had the highest correlation with conversion.

While we are somewhat biased since we are in the content marketing world, we do hope that something changes and the click itself can start to lose the power it holds when it comes to consumer engagement.

Brandpoint and the Content Marketing Institute recently queried 389 marketing decision-makers and found some interesting content marketing trends, including a shift toward outsourcing in content creation. Take a look at some of the key takeaways from the survey.

Last year, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs published a popular study on B2B content marketing and repeated the research survey this year to see how the field is changing. Here is B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Budgets, Benchmarks and Trends. It was no surprise to us that content marketing remains a top priority for marketers in 2012. Many of the statistics and results are consistent with what we saw last year:

We already know that click-through rates on online display ads are abysmal. Now a study from the startup Pretarget and ComScore revealed that even when a user clicks on an ad, the correlation between that click and a conversion is virtually nonexistent.

As content marketing continues to gain in popularity, more business owners are dedicating part of the marketing budget to the creation, distribution and monitoring of custom content. According to the Custom Content Council, in 2012, 68% of CMO's will be increasing their budget for content marketing. Smaller companies with less than 10 employees are spending about 34% of the company budget in content marketing, approximately $56,000 annually.

Companies with over 1000 employees are spending about 26% of the company budget in content marketing, approximately $1M annually. The B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report from MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute shows similar numbers. According to the report, businesses overall are spending about 25% of their marketing budget on content marketing. In the 2011 State of Content Marketing Survey from Techvalidate the majority of respondents reported that 20% or more of their marketing budget was devoted to producing ... (Read Full Article)

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PostRelease to attend IMA Awards - Las Vegas, NV. Sept. 22, 2011

PostRelease proud to sponsor ForumCon, Chicago 2011 (Discount Code Inside)

Content Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing: What's the Difference?

PostRelease Sponsors SoCal WordPress Meet-Up