THE SCIENCE OF BRANDED CONTENT

BY DEMAND MEDIA

The Science of Branded Content / Demand Media

2OF B2C MARKETERS said they would produce more content in 2016 versus 2015, according to a recent Content Marketing Institute survey. Marketers are not only spending more money on content marketing, they also have more robust tools available than ever before, allowing them to make smarter, more educated decisions in their content marketing strategies.

As opportunities abound to reach customers via digital channels throughout their journey on the path to purchase, content marketers must be properly equipped to take a more refined, holistic and data-driven approach towards their content marketing programs. And as the current digital landscape evolves to turn brands into publishers,

brands have more opportunities to bring their voices to the masses in a more authentic way than ever before. Using a data-driven, audience-centric approach, brands can evolve their content

marketing strategies to build branded content solutions that resonate with consumers.

In order to maximize content marketing ROI, brands and publishers alike must harness the power of data and trends when creating branded content and distributing it to their intended

audiences. The long-held mantra “Content is King” is evolving faster than ever as marketers are tasked with evaluating how to achieve and measure their goals.

1 IT ALL BEGINS WITH YOUR DMP

Marketers need data and technology to accurately assess their customers’ multi-channel, path-to-buy journey, and this all begins with a data management platform, or DMP. The vast digital landscape has created a complex, multi-channel customer journey that informs the entire content lifecycle; from creating content to distributing it, marketers can no longer rely on legacy attribution methods and single-channel distribution.

Simply put, a DMP provides the ability to gather and analyze relevant customer behavior and information. In order to get a holistic view of the customer journey, successful content marketing programs today incorporate layers of multiple data types.

FIRST-PARTY DATA refers to information that is collected by your organization, about your audience and their behavior. This data can be anything from website visits to social media activity within your brand’s properties. First-party

77%

“ To get maximum value from the algorithmic attribution-based insights, marketers must extend their technology toolkit and leverage data management platforms (DMPs)… to help identify the right audience to target.”

— Bring Algorithmic Attribution Up to Speed (Aug 2016), Forrester Data, Decoded

“ Consider first-party data as the closest version of the truth related to what is happening on your Website.

— Jay Marwaha, president and CEO of Syntasa via CMO by Adobe”

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data is arguably the most important to any entity, as it provides insight unique to your organization.

SECOND-PARTY DATA refers to information that comes from another organization, about that organization. For example, if you were to collect first-party data and share it with other brands, your first-party data would become their second-party data.

THIRD-PARTY DATA is information that comes from an outside source. Third-party data is often aggregated by market research or data firms, like Forrester or Nielsen, and comes from a multitude of sources, whereas first and second-party data come from a single organization and its entities.

First-party data is paramount to your business and your approach to content marketing, as it provides information about your existing customers and audience and their interactions with your brand and its properties. Second and third-party data provide insights about similar entities or much larger sets of users, allowing you to get a comprehensive view of a particular landscape, industry or group of people.

THE ROLE OF DMPsData management platforms provide the ability to not only capture relevant data, but to analyze how that data is meaningful to your brand and marketing. Krux, for example, is the DMP used by Demand Media to identify intent-driven audiences within its owned and operated properties.

Krux helps companies put people data to work to orchestrate breakthrough brand experiences, deepen consumer engagement and drive business results. Having evolved well beyond its DMP roots, Krux now provides an Intelligent Marketing Hub, a data decision system that helps marketers, media companies, and agencies drive more relevant, more valuable media, content and commerce experiences.

81%

82%

of marketers reported that they obtain the highest ROI from their data-driven initiatives when using first-party data.

of marketers planned to increase their use of first-party data, while one in four marketers plan to decrease their use of third-party data.

Data points via the Promise of First Party Data by Signal

FIRST PARTY DATA MATTERS TO MARKETERS

The Science of Branded Content / Demand Media

The Krux platform captures people data from multiple screens and sources, unifies the data to identify and understand individual preferences and expectations, and activates the data across every channel in ‘right time’ and ‘real time’. This allows Krux to help companies create and reinforce consumer relationships through a virtuous cycle of valuable interactions and experiences.

Krux allows Demand Media to capture, control and segment its first-party data from its intent-driven audiences across its owned and operated properties. Second- and third-party data then help create more robust segmentation layers and fill gaps in first-party data.

“Krux serves as the brain for the modern marketing hub, capturing signals from all sources and devices, translating them into a unified view

Krux is driven by a relentless focus on people: who they are, what they want and what they expect:

› Krux’s solution enables businesses to understand individuals and deliver experiences tuned to their needs and preferences.

› Data signals are captured from all screens and sources and used to improve experiences across all consumer touch points.

› Krux learns iteratively, continuously responding to new data signals and data sources, to enable smarter interactions, deeper engagement and improved revenue performance.

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of the individual, and orchestrating valuable brand experiences across all channels and touch-points,” said Jon Suarez-Davis, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Krux.

In addition to applying proprietary data, Demand Media employs additional segmentation modeling methods. For example, Demand Media uses look-a-like modeling to profile advertisers’ audiences first-hand and reach similar personas in order to increase campaign performance, scale and value.

2 ACTIVATION AND DISTRIBUTION

Data-informed content is only half the battle; activating and distributing content is just as crucial to driving performance.

“The leading priorities of social strategists indicate that their focus … is on integrating with broader digital initiatives (particularly content strategy) and increasing the use of social data to inform decision making.”

- The 2015 State of Social Business, Altimeter

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) continues to reign as the dominant distribution method for internet-based content, but as audiences spend more time on social media, these social platforms play an increasingly integral role in the content marketing lifecycle.

Client goals inform how Demand Media utilizes its client’s data to determine:

› What content to create

› What formats to create it in

› When to create / publish it

› How to distribute it

66%of B2C marketers rated Facebook the most effective social media platform.

— B2C Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America, Content Marketing Institute

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To select the right distribution platforms for your branded content, start with your target audience. The characteristics of your target audience — such as age, sex, income and profession — should inform which platforms you distribute your content on. Wherever your audience is, your content should be too.

When it comes to distribution platforms, content formats are tantamount to audience demographics. Each social platform has its own unique differentiators when it comes to content.

For example, Instagram enables its users to share visual content in the form of static images or videos between three and 60 seconds. This content can be created and uploaded to the platform at anytime, whereas Snapchat, a similarly visual platform, approaches content from more of an “in-the-moment” mentality with video typically shot in the platform as it’s happening and then immediately posted. Though both platforms share an appeal to a younger demographic, Snapchat positions itself as a less “staged” platform.

SOCIAL PLATFORM GROWTHAudiences of all ages are using social media. Though certain platforms, such as Google+ and Vine, have suffered declining traffic, many of today’s top platforms continue to see growth.

YOUTUBE HAS OVER

1 BILLION

FAST FACTS:

USERS (almost one-third of all people on the internet)

More than 1 BILLION PEOPLE use

FACEBOOK DAILY

TWITTER

23% of all internet users and 20% of the entire U.S. adult population use

MORE THAN

MILLIONARTICLES ARE PINNED • DAILY •

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STATS FOR CHART via https://blog.hootsuite.com/top-social-media-sites-matter-to-marketers

9,000 Snaps ARE SHARED PER SECOND

OVER 40BILLION PHOTOS have been shared on

Instagram

“ Millennials, a demographic marketers are spending 500% more to reach than all others combined, account for more than seven out of 10 Snapchat users.”

— The Snapchat Statistics Every Marketer Needs to Know, Mediakix, citing Turn Research and eMarketer

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INFLUENCER MARKETING In an effort to reach even more of their target audience, brands have been employing influencer marketing as a growing distribution strategy. Influencer marketing engages an influential individual (i.e. blogger, YouTuber, etc.) in order to get a brand’s message to a target audience. Influencer marketing helps brands reach their audience through an individual with credibility in that space. With the rise of ad blocking technology, influencer marketing has become even more important.

3 USING PROPRIETARY INSIGHTS

In order to create content based on a data-driven approach, you need awareness not only of your audience’s behavior as it relates to your brand’s properties, but also the market and current trends as they apply to digital content.

The growth of influencer marketing is demonstrated by:

› Influencer marketing is both the fastest growing and most cost-effective channel. (Tomoson via Forbes)

› 2x the sales: Marketing-induced consumer-to-consumer word of mouth generates twice the sales of paid advertising. (McKinsey)

› 59% of marketers planned to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2016. (Social Media Today)

› 81% of marketers who have used influencer marketing judged it to be effective. (eMarketer)

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One method to accomplish this is to categorize content by topics, and understand the relevance of how topics are connected to each other.

To assess current content trends for the creation of new content, a number of tools are available that can analyze past performance in a variety of areas.

SEO AND SEARCH TREND INSIGHTSA mature set of traditional SEO tools does a solid job collecting and analyzing search keywords, which can then be used for keyword targeting in SEO. Google Adwords, SEMRush and Moz provide insight and information around the keywords people search for, search volume, competition, cost-per-click and difficulty. Google Trends similarly provides information about search trends over the last ten years.

PULSE BY DEMAND MEDIA: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHERTo harness the power behind the immense amount of available data on digital content trends, Demand Media has developed a proprietary tool it calls Pulse that puts first, second and third-party data together and makes relevant topic recommendations. With one in five Americans viewing its intent-driven content every month, Demand Media applies this valuable data to better serve its customers and their goals.

The Pulse tool ties in data from all sources mentioned above and then some, layers in customer goals, and performs complex competitor research to create a list of topics that maximizes the opportunity for the customer.

Within each topic, Pulse filters out keywords that do not match the customer’s goals. The Demand Media team then goes out and collects search, social and trend signals around the keywords that remain relevant to the customer. They calculate social scores for each keyword for various social networks, and use the search

trend information to predict future search trends for that keyword.

Armed with this data, Demand Media then layers in the customer’s goals, its own domain authority, the difficulty of keywords and topics, relevant Google knowledge graph data, paid advertising data and other activity on the search

engine results page. This helps to calculate an opportunity score for each client. Thus, clients get an ordered list of topics that they can use to create data-driven content.

Keyword Difficulty, Page Authority and Domain Authority work together to help a page and its content rank. For example, the top results for

Metrics using Demand Media’s proprietary data that inform branded content creation.

› Domain Authority is a score between zero and 100 that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. First developed by Moz, Domain Authority is used for comparing one site to another, or tracking the “strength” of your website over time.

› Page Authority also uses a 100-point scale to predict how well an individual page will rank on search engines. It uses a machine learning model to predictively find an algorithm that best correlates with rankings across the thousands of search results that Demand Media predicts against.

› Keyword Difficulty is also a score between zero and 100 that reflects how difficult it is for a search term to rank. It takes the type of keyword, the domain and page authority of the sites that currently rank for the keyword into consideration.

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the phrase “1040 form” contain URLs to the IRS website. Given that the IRS is the official authority on the topic, it’s very difficult for any other entity to move up in the search results. This is an example of high Domain Authority. Similarly, the link to the actual form is the first result, meaning that that URL has the highest Page Authority for that topic. Given the high Page Authority and Domain Authority, it would be very difficult for any site to rank higher than the IRS for “1040 form,” thus informing the Keyword Difficulty.

CONCLUSIONIn order for branded content to be effective in a multi-channel environment, brands and publishers must be able to collect and analyze relevant data and then disseminate it through their content marketing programs.

The value of data in the increasingly complex customer journey begins with a technology stack

that allows for a brand to capture invaluable first-party data. The role of the DMP is crucial to content marketing today in order to inform brands not only on the type of content that resonates with their audience, but where their audience is engaging with content and when.

When layered with first-party proprietary insights, additional forms of data provide marketers with a holistic view of the digital content landscape, and allow them to apply both customer insights and industry trends to their strategies to create highly optimized content with exponential reach.

As the digital realm continues to evolve and grow, so must content marketing strategies and practices, beginning first with data and then all the way through to distribution. Brands that can effectively harness the power of data will rise above the noise and create impactful, long-lasting customer loyalty and relationships.