A modern, 7,500 square-foot home connects owner Elizabeth Grossman to the nature and ‘spiritual vortex’ that drew her to Lanikai, a neighborhood on Oahu. She gives us a tour, and explains why it’s time to sell. Photo: Adam Falk/The Wall Street Journal

Atum Welly, a former Congress minister in Arunachal Pradesh who switched to the BJP, alleges that a fraudulent move threw him out of the election process, as the Election Commission of India accepted a forged letter of withdrawal. What’s more, he is not alone! Ramesh Menon reports.

Must government regulate TV content? A Delhi-based TV channel's fraudulent sting operation has brought the recklessness of television journalism to the fore again. The government seems open to some self-regulation even as its own draft legislation sits on the back burner. But time is clearly running out for the broadcast industry, writes Ammu Joseph.

Even a badly made film becomes a learning experience for the viewers because it sheds light on issues not known widely otherwise, says Shoma Chatterji as she reviews the movie Saankal.

The Thanjavur region in TN is currently an economy in distress. Lalitha Sridhar captures the voices, concerns and the many questions.

The government proposes to permit truth as a valid defense in contempt-of-court cases, but prefers to leave it to judges to decide when it should be allowed.

It is impermissible under the law to 'scandalise the courts'. But is this vague restraint contrary to the guarantees of liberty given to citizens in the Constitution? Kannan Kasturi examines the notion of 'contempt of court'.

Aam Aadmi Party’s decision to not contest any of the four upcoming assembly elections in Maharashtra, Jammu & Kashmir, Haryana and Jharkhand is the wisest choice the party has made in the last six months.

After having raised the issue of whether the clubby and secretive collegiums system actually preserves the independence of the judiciary former Supreme Court judge, Justice Markandey Katju, has now trained his guns on India’s antiquated contempt of court law. He has made the valid point, in this newspaper, that judicial supremacy cannot be based on the law of kings in a democracy.

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Bigg Boss 13 fame contestant Shehnaaz Gill's hgrandmother was rushed to the hospital due to liver issues on Wednesday.

Actor-Director Neeraj Kabi says Irrfan Khan's death felt like a personal loss. The two worked together in the 2015 film Talvar.

Bigg Boss contestant, Shefali Bagga in a conversation with Shweta Rashmi, talks about her routine during the lockdown, her upcoming projects, and much more.

Facebook has introduced Covid-19 Information Center on the app in order to limit the spread of misinformation related to Covid-19.

The bowler also struggled with injury that saw him spend nearly a year on the sidelines, leading to weight gain. He said his family and friends helped him bounce back.

Though the channel has launched nothing but just the logo of the third season of Bigg Boss Telugu, the promo video is all about the show going on floors soon.

Vanitha Vijaykumar and Meera Mithun, contestants on the current season of Bigg Boss Tamil, have been accused in two separate cases, and the police might enter the Bigg Boss house to arrest them.

South actress actress Sreelakshmi Sreekumar tied the knot with Jijin Jahangir, a commercial pilot, in a grand ceremony in Kochi on Sunday.

The second season of the television reality show Bigg Boss Malayalam has 17 contestants from the film and TV industries.

The traditional Tamil wedding of Mahat and Prachi was attended by their close friends and family members.

Offering streaming services with prepaid and postpaid plans has become a new trend in the telecom industry. All private players have tied up with Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hotstar. Besides, the operators are offering content on their dedicated apps. Similarly, the

OTT platforms have become a major source of entertainment during the lockdown. The whole lifestyle has been changed as people are spending more time watching content on these platforms. Similarly, Airtel has announced that the consumption of its digital

According to the new research conducted by Mozilla, internet users in India tend to go for quality net content online instead to freebies. The research reveals that users are downloading the promoted apps and referring friends purely to earn monetary

Neeraj's film "Ship Of Theseus" earned international acclaim in 2013, and "The Lunchbox" starring Irrfan also released around that time.

Animation studio Cosmos Maya has recently produced three shows including Guddu, Bapu and Gadget Guru Ganesha

My marketing journey was born out of SEO roots, where the priority of content promotion has always been high in order to create the kind of accountable marketing performance that matters. In contrast, I see a lot of brands putting the majority or all of their investment towards content creation without qualitative or quantitative effort towards the promotion of that content.

An imbalance of content creation and promotion is not only frustrating potential marketing performance, but it's wasting the investment made in creating great content. What good is that great content if no one sees it?

Below are 10 content promotion tactics that have stood the test of time and go beyond email blasts, social ads and simple social sharing on brand channels. When promotion is included in the content planning and creation process, it becomes part of a content marketing system that drives the kind of relevant, useful and engaging content customers are looking for.

1. Make Content Worth Sharing - While this seems obvious, in practice, many marketers are creating content to satisfy an editorial plan assignment like X content assets about topic Y per month vs. tapping data sources that can reveal what will actually resonate. Those data sources can be front line staff like Customer Service or Sales as well as social, web analytics and industry news. Insights about frequently asked questions, trending topics and provocative ideas can go a long ways towards creating content people actually want to consume and share with others.

2. Master the Headline - Without question we live in a fast moving world of short attention spans, Many people will only skim headlines so it is essential to make the most out of content titles. Email marketers already know this with subject lines and content marketings publishing blogs, ebooks, articles, microsites, campaign assets and social content should ensure headlines are relevant, succinct, imply urgency, are meaningful and show action.  There's a world of difference between "10 Essential Promotion Tactics" and "10 Essential Promotion Tactics That Drive Results".

3. Optimize for Share - For those that do click through to view content, make sure what they find is easily shareable. Blogs do this with social share icons and easy to share click to tweet messages. Reports, ebooks and any other digital content can be formatted for easy sharing as well.

4. Co-Create to Activate Influencers - What better way to reach relevant audiences that are ignoring ads than through relevant industry experts? Collaborating on brand content with the right influencers can inspire creative promotion to audiences that trust individuals more than brands. With more people turning to online sources of information, influencers can add credibility and reach to digital brand content.

5. Repurpose for Exposure on New Channels - Modular content uses templates to make republishing parts of your content on different channels or in different formats much easier and effective. Doing so deconstructs more robust content to specific elements that can be published for exposure. For example, we've been experimenting with having blog posts converted to infographics and then posting them to industry websites.

6. Create Distribution Channels - Email subscribers, social network connections, groups, and communities are all opportunities to attract and engage an audience around your shared interests. Each becomes a distribution channel for your content where you can share useful information and also do the kind of community content crowdsourcing that inspires active sharing.

7. Optimize for Attraction - There is no substitute for being the best answer for your customers at the moment they need the information and solutions your brand offers. Search Engine Optimization is not always a robust part of the content marketing process beyond keyword research informing content topics. An ongoing effort to optimize new content and optimize existing content for better performance on search engines can provide highly productive exposure at the very moment of need.

8. Publicize - Whether you contribute editorial to various publications opportunistically or secure recurring contributions to one publication, earned media can be a great way to connect your content with audiences that are interested. PR and media relations come in many forms ranging from someone actively pitching for interviews or story ideas about your brand to creating newsworthy experiences and content that is most likely to be covered by industry publications.

9. Syndicate - Something as simple as cross posting blog posts to author LinkedIn profiles, to a Medium account or to industry association websites can help your brand's content reach new audiences. Just be sure to link back to the source to help Google understand which to rank.

10. Create Conversations - Whether on LinkedIn or Facebook, video livestreaming is a great way to tap an existing social audience and instigate conversation around topics connected to your content. Recorded video is another option to create conversations and cross publish as Josh Nite and Tiffanie Allen have done for several years with our news posts and video on YouTube.

It should go without saying that content should be promoted, but after so many years of observing what brands are doing with content marketing, the imbalance between creation and promotion continues, especially when you consider stats like blog posts get an average of 8 social shares (BuzzSumo).

The key is to make content promotion a priority by including it in the planning process, setting content promotion goals and identifying the corresponding KPIs and by getting help with creating and implementing balanced content creation and promotion that actually works.

Outside of online advertising, what content promotion tactics have you found to be most effective?

The post Where’s the Marketing in Content Marketing? 10 Essential Promotion Tactics That Drive Results appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Between stay-at-home orders and the manic Minnesota weather, I’ve found myself at home for the last four weeks looking for something, really anything, to occupy time. One can only take so many walks in a day. Naturally, I turn to YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and all of the other video streaming sites for entertainment.

As a marketer, this makes me wonder what those streaming sites are seeing in their analytics. Obviously, views must be up by an unbelievable amount. But, what about engagement? How many people are completing the videos they start? Are they watching more? Unless it’s Tiger King, the answer is unknown (it’s impossible to look away from Tiger King). But those streaming sites aren’t the only ones that might have some fascinating new data to look at.

Social sites and YouTube provide a host of different metrics and analytics options. While each data point serves a purpose, there are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) that are more important to track to better understand your audience and improve content performance.

Video Analytics and Content Benchmarks

A recent study from video streaming site Vidyard established some useful benchmarks for video content:

• 52% of viewers watch a video all the way through
• 68% will watch the entire video if it’s less than 60 seconds
• 25% will finish a video if it’s more than 20 minutes

The same study found that the most common business-created videos are webinars, demos and social media videos, and are most likely to be published on websites, social media and YouTube.

Of course, these benchmarks will vary by audience, by industry, by the light of the silvery moon — basically, take them as a starting point and customize from there. Here’s the process we recommend.

Using Video Analytics to Optimize Your Video Content

1 — Use Demographics to Understand Your Audience

The first step to increasing content engagement and effectiveness is to gain a better understanding of your audience. To do that, it’s critical to monitor demographic data in your video analytics platform. Most will give you basic demographic data, like location, age, language and device use. Some will give you user interest data, income estimates and even company data.

Knowing this information helps you create more relevant content. For example, if you find that your audience primarily speaks English, but there is a growing subset of French speakers accessing your videos on mobile devices, you might want to consider adding French caption options for mobile users.

If you see an increase in viewers from a specific geographic area, you will want to look at the analytics for that region to determine what content is attracting the new audience and how they are engaging while they’re watching and immediately afterward.

2 — Use Awareness and Engagement Metrics to Understand Audience Demand

Understanding your audience is important at a strategic level, but understanding audience demand is tactical gold. Of course, this data will drive your go-forward strategy, but it will also help you improve performance right away by adjusting promotion tactics and featured content.

For example, if you see an uptick in video views week over week for a particular video, that indicates that the topic is becoming increasingly popular. To prove that, you will want to look at engagement metrics like watch time, clicks on your call to action (CTA), and subscribers gained or lost. If you see an uptick in views and a corresponding uptick in engagement, you’re going to want to feature that video more prominently. If you see an increase in negative engagement —  a loss of subscribers — or if viewers are dropping off right away, that might indicate your video doesn’t quite match the intent for that topic.

This granular view of data can help you improve and optimize your existing content, create more strategic video content roadmaps, and provide viewers with content they want and need to make critical decisions later in the funnel.

[bctt tweet="“Understanding your audience is important at a strategic level, but understanding audience demand is tactical gold.” @Tiffani_Allen" username="toprank"]

3 — Audit Your Video Library for Optimization Opportunities

Following the best practices for whichever video hosting platform you’re using can result in increased video visibility and better user experience. A great first step is to optimize video titles, descriptions, and tags. Then you can organize  your videos into different sections, playlists, or even channels to help the right audience find your content faster.

To determine your next steps, audit your existing video channels. Do you know at a glance what the video is about? Does the thumbnail image inspire a click? Does your channel, landing page or resource center adequately convey the type, purpose and content of your videos in a way that compels action?

If the answer is yes, go take a break. I recommend a few hours of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It’s very soothing. But if the answer’s no, you’re not alone. And you do have the tools you need to create better video content. It’s all in your analytics.

As a quick disclaimer, if your videos are hosted on your website and you notice some odd user behavior patterns over the last month or so — increases in direct traffic, crazy long time on page — you might want to look into whether or not IPs are blocked for your team’s home IP addresses. Determine if the patterns are happening on a more global level, or if they’re localized to the geographic area surrounding your physical office.

If you want help with an audit, or just want to bounce some ideas around, we’re here to help. Tweet us @toprank or contact us to get started.

The post What B2B Marketers Need to Know about Optimizing Content with Video Analytics appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

One great thing about being a young Gen X’er: There was no social media during my junior high and high school years. 

Young millennials weren’t so lucky. They chronicled their adolescence in excruciating detail on Myspace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, every half-formed thought and laundry-detergent-eating stunt preserved forever.

So it’s no surprise that the youngest social media users leapt on Snapchat when it launched. Snapchat Stories provided the feeling of togetherness that social media’s good at, without the potential to embarrass your future self.

Other platforms were quick to buy into the idea of ephemeral content — content that expires and is deleted after a set period of time, usually 24 hours. Instagram’s creatively-named offering, Instagram Stories, boasts 500 million daily users. That’s more daily users for a single feature on Instagram than there are for the entirety of Twitter. 

But don’t count Twitter out just yet — they’re testing their own ephemeral content, called, unfortunately, “Fleets.” Even the level-headed folks at LinkedIn* are testing LinkedIn Stories with a handful of users.

For B2B content marketers, ephemeral content seems like the opposite of everything we try to do. DISPOSABLE content? No SEO value, no repurposing potential… what’s the point?

Should B2B marketers go ephemeral? It depends. Here’s what you need to know.

Ephemeral Content for B2B Marketers

Before we get into specifics, you should first consider ephemeral content the same way you would any content. I’d recommend asking the following four questions.

Four Questions B2B Marketers Should Ask about Ephemeral Content

These questions aren’t unique to ephemeral content, of course. They’re questions worth asking for any new marketing channel or tactic. They are:

• Is my audience on this channel?
• Is my audience consuming content on this channel?
• Can we produce high-quality content for this channel?
• Does this channel offer a logical next step for our audience?

For most B2b marketers, the answers to all these questions is “yes.” If your audience includes millennials or young Gen Xers, they’re likely on Instagram Stories at least. They’re used to the format and will likely be open to ephemeral content on LinkedIn and Twitter as it rolls out.

Can your brand produce high-quality ephemeral content? That’s one of the chief selling points of Stories — they’re easy and cheap to produce. There are robust tools for creating them built into the platforms that host them. And audiences expect a more informal, less-produced content experience.

As far as next steps go, Instagram Stories are actually more marketer-friendly than Instagram posts. Users can swipe up in a story to go directly to another piece of content, a lead gen form, or any other hyperlink. There’s no “Please visit the link in our bio” for Stories — it’s an immediate pass-through.

Now, if your offering skews more to the Boomer demographic, or you’re courting people too hip — or technology-averse — to be on social media, you might hold off. But it’s safe to say the majority of B2B marketers can get some juice out of ephemeral content.

How to Make the Most of Ephemeral Content for B2B

You don’t get the opportunity to build a content library with ephemeral content. By its nature, it should serve a different purpose than blog posts or eBooks. Think about building an audience and engaging them on a regular basis, rather than creating a library people wander in and out of.

Focus on Your People, Not Your Product

There are plenty of outlets for you to serve up product information and sales brochures. Ephemeral content is better suited for highlighting the people who work for your company. Focus on what makes them unique, what makes them relatable, and what makes them excellent at serving your customers. 

Mailchimp is great at this type of story. Their “Day in the Life” series highlights and celebrates individual employees.

[bctt tweet="“Ephemeral content is better suited for highlighting the people who work for your company. Focus on what makes them unique, what makes them relatable, and what makes them excellent at serving your customers.” @NiteWrites" username="toprank"]

Be Passionate about Purpose

For a growing majority of consumers, what a brand sells is less important than what the brand stands for. We’re looking to buy from businesses that share our values, and B2B buyers are no exception. Ephemeral content is a good way to get the message out about your brand’s larger purpose in the world, to highlight your vision for the future and your progress towards those goals. 

Lush is great at blending their purpose with their more product-centered ephemeral content. It only takes a few Instagram Stories to see exactly where they stand and what they value. 

Show Your Personality

If your organization is still looking for permission to loosen up a little, ephemeral content is your permission slip. It’s a format with lower audience expectations, one that’s focused on short-form, entertaining content, and one that won’t linger to haunt you until the end of time. 

So it’s well worth experimenting with your brand’s voice and personality. You may find that B2B buyers are just as starved for entertainment as the rest of us.

Cisco is absolutely killing it with their Stories right now. The playful, energetic tone isn’t what you would expect from a staid titan of industry, but it’s delightful to watch.

[bctt tweet="“If your organization is still looking for permission to loosen up a little, ephemeral content is your permission slip.” @NiteWrites" username="toprank"]

Serialize Your Content

Ephemeral content is all about building an audience that will make your feed appointment viewing. Serialized content can help establish that habit. There are a few easy ways to serialize:

• Establish regular features, like Mantra Monday, Thoughtful Thursday, or Whiskey Wednesday (okay, maybe not the last one)
• Chop up a long-form video into segments and air them sequentially
• Focus on a different department every week to explore your organization

For longer-form serialized content, it’s worth creating an IGTV Series. Series come with tools to help you create and promote new episodes to bring in subscribers. Check out General Electric’s Taking the World to Work series for inspiration.

Let’s Get Ephemeral!

Ephemeral content is one of the primary ways people are using social media — which means it’s relevant for any B2B business with an audience on social platforms. Adding ephemeral content to your content marketing strategy will exercise a different set of muscles than your regular content creation, but it’s a form that rewards continued experimentation.

Need help with ephemeral or evergreen content? Our content marketing team is ready.

* Note: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing client.

The post Should B2B Marketers Embrace Ephemeral Content? appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

There has been no greater disruption to business in the modern era than the COVID-19 pandemic. For many, it seems as though the world has stopped turning. For marketers, it seems as though now is the worst time to try to promote anything.

But as our CEO, Lee Odden, said, “While there will be a period of adjustment, these changes do not mean the work stops. It doesn’t mean companies don’t need information, solutions, support, products and services.”

And he couldn’t be more right. Your audience may even have a greater need now for your solutions or expertise. They’re trying to navigate through this uncertain time, too. And they’re looking for help now more than ever before.

To help you answer those calls for help and know what types of content are successful in times of crisis, I’ve gathered five examples of effective B2B content marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

#1 - HealthcareSource

Healthcare workers have always been essential. And with a pandemic afoot, they’ve become the most essential. As a result, hospitals and healthcare providers need to ensure they’re fully staffed, but that’s easier said than done. Declining revenues have led to job cuts. Doctors catching the virus has led to job growth. Hiring for healthcare is undergoing constant fluctuations.

As a proven talent management software for healthcare providers, HealthcareSource saw that they were in a unique position to help. Through a long, thoughtful blog post, loaded with examples from healthcare systems around the world, HealthcareSource created a great resource to help healthcare organizations manage their hiring, onboarding, and talent acquisition strategies. They also created an on-demand webinar with in-depth tactics on how to manage these constant fluctuations in job demand and supply.

#2 - Zoom

Zoom, a favorite video conferencing tool for any organization, has seen their number of daily active users jump from only 10 million to over 200 million in just three months. They’ve grown from hosting business meetings to hosting virtual classes, happy hours among friends, family game nights, and more for hundreds of millions of people. COVID-19 and social distancing have invariably helped grow their user base. However, that comes with its own set of challenges.

They now have to train hundreds of millions of people on how to use Zoom, how to adjust their mic settings, how to ensure their Zoom is secure and private. They’re users needed support, fast. So they created an in-depth COVID-19 resource with every relevant training users could need. But what makes this resource even more helpful is that they segmented it based on use-cases. Need help while working remotely? You have your own section. Need help teaching your class? You have your own section, too. It’s a great example of how tailoring content for each audience segment creates a better experience; help is easier to find and the experience feels more personalized.

[bctt tweet="“Tailoring content for each audience segment creates a better experience.” — Anne Leuman @annieleuman" username="toprank"]

#3 - monday.com*

Lockdown. Quarantine. Social distancing. Between those three mandates, it’s clear to see why the number of people working remotely is reaching unprecedented heights. For monday.com, a work operating system provider, this presented an interesting opportunity. They saw that teams needed help transitioning to a remote work environment with the least amount of friction. They needed help ensuring they had the right technology, process, and structures to make remote work successful. They needed help knowing how to best use monday.com remotely instead of in a physical office.

To ease the remote work transition, monday.com created a new page on their website educating others on how to use their software for remote work. This new page helps existing clients and potential prospects on how monday.com can help ease the challenges of working remotely. They also made the smart decision of adding this page to their main site navigation, making it extremely easy for visitors to access. In addition to this new product page, the team at monday.com also created a custom video and content hub to ensure their users can get answers to all of their questions.

*monday.com is a TopRank Marketing client.

#4 - Slack

Slack was already a popular piece of software for any business, helping streamline team communications and collaboration. With more workers at home, I’m sure businesses — including our own — have become even more reliant on Slack to carry the burden of all text communication between teams. And while they could have taken a page from Zoom or monday.com and created dedicated resources to help train new users or customers who may be relying on Slack a bit more during this time, they didn’t. They saw a different opportunity to help their audience.

During a crisis, the value of information skyrockets. Business leaders want to know; what’s happening to the economy? Will their market be impacted? How is this affecting their workforce? Slack created a report to help answer those questions, especially as it relates to remote workers and the challenges they face. They recognized that key decision makers in their target audience desired more information to help them solve top challenges like transitioning to remote work, improving their employee experience, and more. With this report, they were able to provide those insights, helping their audience optimize how they work together during a pandemic.

#5 - Dropbox

Do you know what distributed work is? I didn’t know what it was, either. And this is where Dropbox’s latest content marketing really shines.

Dropbox saw that while most of the world was focusing on transitioning to remote work, they really needed to focus on distributed work. Organizations sorely needed to be educated on the difference between the two and how they require different strategies. As Dropbox points out, “remote work is a discipline for the individual worker, but distributed work is a discipline for the entire organization.” That’s a very important distinction to make as organizations attempt to navigate social distancing and still get the work done.

Their thought leadership content around distributed work is truly eye-opening. Positioned high up on their blog and given its own content hub, their distributed work content is a must-read for any organization operating remotely during this time. And it all happened because they recognized a key, relevant term that not many were focusing on.

Be Helpful. Be Successful.

The true key to success in B2B content marketing is to always come from a place of empathy. The more you’re able to understand and empathize with your target audience, the more likely you are to surface content opportunities that help them overcome their pain points and challenges. And helping them = success.

That doesn’t change even in times of crisis. In fact, it becomes all the more important. Use the B2B content marketing examples above as a guide when creating your own content and remember to be empathetic to their needs.

If you want to help your audience during this time, learn how to build trust with your audience through authentic content.

The post 5 Examples of Effective B2B Content Marketing in Times of Crisis appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

While their importance pales in comparison to many other things taken away by our society’s ongoing lockdown, I do find myself missing sports. Going without them during a difficult time causes me to appreciate the comfortable routine and reliable distraction they provide all the more.

Those who know me will not be surprised to learn that I’m longing for baseball especially — everything from strikeouts and singles to slides and steals. But there is no part of the game I miss more than home runs.

Home runs are among the most satisfying individual achievements in sports. When a batter goes deep, he takes care of everything, going from home plate to home plate and putting a run — or more — on the board single-handedly. It is the literal representation of “covering all your bases.”

via GIPHY

With baseball and many other cherished forms of entertainment amiss, content marketers can help fill the void by focusing on experiential content, which is characterized by its ability to pull in a user through immersive, interactive, impactful elements. These kinds of deeper digital experiences are also more valuable from an engagement and awareness standpoint, at a time where in-person events are off the table.

“Because people are figuring out how to thrive in an almost entirely online world, their expectations towards a brand's digital experience [are] also changing. It's no longer about clicks, downloads, and impressions,” writes Diginomica’s Barb Mosher Zinck in recapping Mark Bornstein’s chat from the Discover Martech Virtual Event last month. “It's about engagement. It's about experiential marketing.”

With this context in mind, how can marketers hit a home run with experiential content, covering all the bases for both their audience and their business?

Covering Every Base with Experiential Content

Reflecting the baseball diamond, I see four key aspects of knocking it out of the park with experiential content, at a time where doing so might be especially beneficial for marketers.

Base 1: Entertaining and Effective

The proverbial square one (or first base, in this case) is that experiential content needs to be compelling and engaging. If you aren’t getting someone’s attention and piquing their interest quickly with the content, you’re out before you’ve left the batter’s box.

Technology is always offering new ways to increase the allure of experiential content, including tools like virtual reality, augmented reality, feature integration, and interactive functionality. Small touches like the animations and clickable elements in TopRank Marketing’s Break Free of Boring B2B infographic, for example, can go a long way. The more you bring the user into the experience and make them feel like part of the story, the more successful your content will be.

It’s not just about the entertainment factor. That second word — effective — is equally important, if not more so. Your content should effect the person consuming it, be it emotionally or attitudinally. Ideally, the person consuming this experience will feel something, and come away thinking differently about its subject.

Once you accomplish this, you’re rounding first base and heading into second.

[bctt tweet="“If you aren’t getting someone’s attention and piquing their interest quickly with the content, you’re out before you’ve left the batter’s box.” @NickNelsonMN" username="toprank"]

Base 2: Educational and Informative

Most marketing content is designed to inform in some way, satisfying the curiosities of its audience while intertwining a distinct point of view. The experiential dynamic is particularly valuable for this purpose. As the old saying goes: “Show me and I’ll forget. Teach me and I may remember. Involve me and I’ll learn.”

AT&T is one example of a company that’s using emerging experiential technologies for employee training purposes, taking advantage of the heightened ability to make information stick. As you plan a content marketing initiative, think not just about ways to entertain your audience, but also ways to memorably imprint the messages and revelations you want them to take away.

By this point, you’re already halfway home.

Base 3: Collaborative and Orchestrated

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a solo home run. But the feat is far more exciting when there are runners on base to drive in. Teamwork comes into play in multiple ways when it comes to maximizing the value of experiential content.

via GIPHY

First and foremost, your efforts should be strategically orchestrated throughout the organization. While marketing drives the bus, plenty of others ought to be riding along. By nature, experiential content is intended to address a nonlinear customer journey in which B2B buyers average 17 meaningful interactions on the way to completing a purchase (per SiriusDecisions). How do all those interactions come together around your experience in a consistent, unified, personalized way? How will you ensure that every customer-facing function is aligned?

Secondly, there is the importance of collaboration within the marketing department itself. Generally speaking, a great piece of experiential content is shaped by many different talents and skills: writers and strategists shaping the content, designers and artists bringing it to life visually, search and social specialists making it easily discoverable, etc.

And finally, there is the influencer aspect. While not always a fit, influencers can usually power up experiential content in profound ways:

• Adding unique insight and perspective from their expert point of view
• Bringing built-in credibility and trust with their own established audiences
• Amplifying promotion of the content through their own networks

One example of interactive influencer content in action can be found in the self-guided experience around AI and finance that TopRank Marketing put together with Prophix. The asset beat engagement benchmarks by 642%.

[bctt tweet="“Great experiential content is shaped by many different talents: writers and strategists shaping the content, designers and artists bringing it to life visually, search and social specialists making it easily discoverable.” @NickNelsonMN" username="toprank"]

Bringing It Home: Impactful for the Business

The three components above all focus on making experiential content valuable to the audience. This is a worthy point of emphasis, since strengthening relationships and building trust are essential objectives for modern brands, especially in our current climate.

But of course, investing the time and resources into creating a high-caliber content experience also needs to be justified by bottom-line business impact. The good news is that bringing users into the experience lends itself to driving action; for example, statistics show that interactive content generates twice the conversions of passive content.

At all comes back to the overarching strategy. What specific business results are you hoping to achieve? How will you facilitate them in a user-friendly way that nurtures trust and builds momentum in the customer journey? Which other tactics will support these goals?

It’s important to think about setting up positive outcomes beyond the direct conversion. A person interacting with your content may not be inclined to fill out a form at that moment, but if they remember the experience, and the way it altered their thinking, and it brings them into your marketing funnel weeks or months later, that’s a win. This reinforces the value of getting it right with items one and two on this list — effect and educate.

Make Your Experiential Content Campaign a Round-Tripper

We may not have sports, but we still have sports metaphors. I’ll keep seeing to that. And the home run serves as a perfectly fitting allegory for experiential content, which can produce so much value for a brand on its own, with one swing of the proverbial bat.

When you combine immersive entertainment with memorable learnings, collaborative clout, and measurable business impact, you’ve got yourself a marketing moonshot. All that’s left at that point is the bat flip.

via GIPHY

For more practical tips and guidance on this subject, I encourage you to check out Joshua Nite’s recap of the B2B Marketer’s Journey To Experiential Content presentation from B2B Marketing Exchange in February.

The post How to Hit a Marketing Home Run with Experiential Content appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Facebook's new content oversight board will include a former prime minister, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and several constitutional law experts and rights advocates in its first 20 members.

Facebook's new content oversight board will include a former prime minister, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and several constitutional law experts and rights advocates in its first 20 members.

We’ve got an exciting one for you today, Night Shade website readers: the cover and table of contents for The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction, edited by eight-time Hugo Award winner Ellen Datlow! If you’re a fan of short horror fiction, you need to have this […]

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Welcome, Night Shade website fans! Today, we want to share with you the cover and table of contents for The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume Four, edited by Neil Clarke. We’ve worked with Neil before both on standalone themed anthologies and previous entries in the Best Science Fiction series, but this is the first time one of […]

Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, [2019]

Singapore : Springer, [2019]

Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Cham : Springer, c2019.

Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, [2019]

[S.l.] : PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2019.

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019.

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019.

Cham : Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019.

Cham : Palgrave Macmillan, c2019.

Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, [2019]

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