According to Carat’s Ad spend report the forecast for 2016 for Digital, states a significant increase in Mobile and online video with Programmatic being a key media technique. By the end of 2015 US market Programmatic transactions will account for 52 percent of non-search digital advertising spend, with predicted growth of 20 percent to continue for the next few years. Overall, Mobile is experiencing the greatest spend growth across all media and Carat predicts year-on-year growth in Mobile spend at +51.2 percent in 2015 and +44.5 percent in 2016.

Plan Your Mobile First Play

With Mobile emerging as the key channel for online sales, reaching mobile first consumers requires knowing the users content influence eco-system. According to GlobalWebIndex, 80 percent of Internet users own a smartphone and 71 percent of marketers believe mobile marketing is core to their business. 

Your Mobile first Play could mean leveraging the publisher influence or choosing the right social media partners for reaching your campaign engagement goals. According to Shareablee, Social Media posts on Facebook and Twitter for Top Five brands on Twitter and Facebook, generated monumental buzz during Q3 2015, whereas social media actions on Instagram for National Geographic was nearly double the Total Facebook Actions for Top Five Brands.

Mobile Search marketing is likely to get more personalized in 2016, moving beyond search engines, to incorporate signals from location aware, predictive intelligence powered search tools. Designing a content experience for mobile audience where the content journey is planned around the intent of search will require brands to take the stress out of the mobile audience’s life by presenting the right type of content that matches the searchers’ intent with Brand offers.

Miracle Move

Planning your mobile-first play requires you to attribute the content creation and publishing effort on the channel your audiences are most engaged on. Explore content partnerships that extend beyond content publishing. Analyze feasibility of content partnerships that allow you to source content for your customers with media partnerships that can be showcased in featured branded properties.

Another example could be a partnership where brands can give a Behind the scenes story with an exclusive feature as can be seen from Nat Geo’s Tweet below.

 

Co-brand With Publishers For Content Discovery and Content Amplification

Identify Content Publishers that can get your content seen. Co-branding Content with publishers increases engagement by nearly 8X. According to Contently, In a survey of 745 marketers, a quarter of respondents are devoting more than 50 percent of their budgets to content. 

Miracle Move

Planning your Co-branding content strategy requires you to identify publishing partners that are likely to give a lift  to your campaigns for brand performance goals i.e. favorability, affinity and advocacy. At a campaign level the metrics could vary for campaign objective from awareness, engagement and conversion.

Use Location and Mobile To Engage Audiences

Store Locators and Omni-channel capabilities are some of the must have to engage Mobile audiences. What content publishing and publishers do for your audience engagement, location aware channel and mobile capabilities do for your conversion and sales. With more referrals arising from Social Media and customers preferring campaigns that are personalized, location awareness takes center stage with audiences requiring brands to make offers taking their location into account. Some of the location aware sites customize offers for audiences in the area the customers are located in. Store locators are being increasingly used by brands for personalized offers based on location. Brands also use store locations to gain insights and build offers based on what customers prefer. Louis Vuitton’s updated app that is location aware uses adaptive mobile design to serve city specific content for global audiences.

As important as it is to build location-awareness for engaging mobile user, it is equally important to define the omni-channel customer journey for allowing maximum retail touch-points.

Miracle Move

Start with mapping gaps in your buyer journey. Identify any gaps that exist and plan to change processes that can create a seamless experience across retail touch-points.

Take The Always-On Approach For Content Marketing

75 percent of content marketers release new content at least monthly, and 16.52 percent put new content out daily. Publishers and Brands that are winning the Content game are the ones that have successfully driven traffic to their sites and video content with Search Engine Optimization and InBound Marketing. Creating effective email marketing campaigns to build subscriber lists, blog posts and social media posts can help you up your content marketing game. Content Amplification with Shares on Social media has grown by 27 percent in 2015 over 2014, making audience engagement with shareable content a priority for publishers and brands. Likes and comments make for 86 percent of the overall social media actions.  Social Media posts sharing grew by  27 percent as compared to likes and comments that grew by 14 percent YOY, making shareable campaign content as a lead engagement tactic for Holiday season. Brands that are active with festive themed campaigns evoke emotions from consumers that is viewed as one of the key motivators for content sharing according to a study by Shareablee.

Quick-Start Tips For Content Marketing

Quickstart Tip 1 – Making Your Posts Go Viral

According to BuzzSumo, that analyzed the posts that go viral, some of the elements that are observed often engage audiences evoking an emotion with engaging content that is relatable in a preferred content format. An example of Viral Post is  51 Beautiful Sentences in Literature (1.4m shares), on Buzzfeed.

Visual Content with Images have the power of a thousand words and have the highest impact in content sharing. According to BuzzSumo, “Image posts on Facebook get 179 percent more interactions than the average Facebook post. Twitter posts with an image and summary are 78 percent more likely to be shared”.

Consumers look at an average of 11.4 pieces of Content before making a purchase decision. For consumers to discover content, one of the key metrics chased by Content Marketers is Shares and Referral Traffic. According to the BuzzSumo and Moz Study, the shares and referral links are positively correlated for only a few publishers and limited to certain content formats, showing an upward trend in both shares and domain referring links. The study was based on a sample of  1 Million posts with 750,000 well shared posts, however at an overall basis there was no correlation in shares and links. However, the sweet-spot for Content Marketing as found by the study was Opinion forming and research based content. According to BuzzSumo, the posts that received higher shares and links are  “research backed posts, opinion pieces, and authoritative, opinion forming journalism“. Thus as a publisher or a brand content marketer one cannot assume that the content which is shared will also get the requisite referral traffic with other domains linking to your site. According to BuzzSumo, “Shares are also much easier to acquire than links. Link building is hard work that requires appropriate authoritative, evergreen and intrinsically valuable content”.

Quick Start Tip 2 – Choose The Right Content Format

Content Format that is most shared and referred to is list Posts and Video posts. The correlation for List Posts referrals and shares is highest. However, other post types such as “Why” and “How To” posts obtain high Average Referring Domain links than other content formats.

QuickStart Tip 3 – Focus on Long-Form Content for Shares and Referring Domain Links

Long-Form Content is likely to garner higher shares and referring domain links as can be seen from the data shared by BuzzSumo.

QuickStart Tip 4 – Choose the Content Format For Your Campaign Objective

Depending on your campaign objective, Content Marketing effort for you campaign can make use of different elements as can be seen from BuzzSumo’s recommendation. For awareness building campaigns, brands can choose to combine the  entertaining and educating approach. For different stages of Consumer Life Cycle, Content Marketing objective may differ right from acquisition to retention.

 

QuickStart Tip 5 – Influencers are Important for Content Distribution and Amplification

Start your Influencer campaign, with campaign goals and how the influencer fits with your campaign structure and who the most important influencers are likely to be. Some of the metrics that can be used for measuring your campaign performance.

• Number of conversations on the campaign or subject of interest.
• Comments on the content created by the influencer.
• Total number of influencers we interact with / Total number of influencers who publish about our brand.
• Referred traffic from influencer content. (*This can be seen on Google Analytics, observing the source of traffic. Referred traffic is traffic that lands on our page directly from a link on another page. Referred traffic from social media is in the Social section).
• Conversions (purchases, registrations) attributed to the influencer’s posts.

Miracle Move

Plan your Content with a view to engage your audiences through the Content Influence Eco-system. Making posts go viral with the content that has the right buzz value increases the chances of your content being discovered.  For content amplification, identify the right influencers that amplify content and increase engagement for your brands  leading to more conversions.

Use Video For Brand Affinity

Brands need to  create Excess Affinity for ongoing engagement. Millward Brown recommends brands supercharge the emotional connect with their audiences by humanizing brands and strengthening the emotional bond. For Brands, to create an excess affinity bond, consumer experiences will play a strong role. “Research conducted by Millward Brown for BRANDsense confirmed that the more positive and distinctive sensory impressions come to mind the more loyal people are to a brand. People are not one-dimensional beings, and the better brands engage with all five of our senses the stronger the impression they’ll make”.

According to Unruly Study Sharing of brand content fosters Brand Affinity. As shared by Ebiquity,  people who watched a video following a recommendation or because a friend shared a link were far more likely to enjoy it than those who had discovered it by browsing or were forced to view it as they landed on a website.Viewers who enjoyed the video they watched and shared a videodemonstrated a much higher brand affinity, purchase intent, and brand favorability than their counterparts who did not share the video.

 

Miracle Move

Video Engagement has increased at the fastest rate and shares make for 38 percent of all actions on Video posts making it the most effective content marketing tactic. Plan a minimum number of video posts in your content marketing plan to ensure content amplification.

For Brand Affinity go with creative treatment and emotions that are likely to  work for your category.