Media Library (63)

‘How Will We Know If This Is Successful?’ Choosing the Content and Marketing Metrics That Matter Most

by Media

Conversions is really “the metric that I think most organizations should aspire to from a content marketing standpoint,” Ann Gynn, managing editor of The Tilt, told us during our seventh (of nine) Editorial Training sessions. But be patient, she warned. Gennady Kolker, audience development editor at Crain Communications, wants to know where his audience is coming from because “it tells us a little bit about their behavior.”

Understanding where your audience originates, as highlighted by Gennady Kolker, provides valuable insights into consumer behavior and preferences. This knowledge allows marketing teams to tailor strategies more effectively, focusing efforts on channels and content that resonate most with their target demographics.

Incorporating influencer marketing chicago into these strategies can further enhance audience engagement and conversion rates. By partnering with influencers who have a strong local following and influence in specific niches, brands can tap into targeted audiences more effectively. Influencers not only amplify brand messages but also provide direct connections to their engaged communities, offering brands a deeper understanding of consumer behavior and preferences within local markets. This approach aligns with the broader goal of maximizing conversions and optimizing marketing efforts based on comprehensive audience insights.

When Kolker brought up their marketing funnel during our session on content benchmarks Thursday, he said: “We see a lot of talk about this on the marketing and content marketing side, but it also applies to editorial. It’s how we bring readers and customers into our product and get them to travel through, to bring them along for the ride.”

Kolker and Gynn spent a fast-moving 40 minutes talking about their most valuable metrics and the similarities and differences between their editorial and content marketing approaches. For Kolker, metrics stay pretty much the same on both sides. Gynn stressed that content marketing demands that you strive to go beyond if they’re reading it to initiating an action.

For their funnel, Kolker said that “surge and social are channels that we use to bring people in, to introduce people to our content, to our product. And we hook them. So you publish a tweet or you post something on Facebook, they click on the article, they land on your page, and then you have an opportunity to bring them down into the funnel.

“If you published an article, or if you’re selling a product, get them interested in it so they need it. What can you offer them? And that’s where we get to consideration and conversion is get them to take an action. When we get to loyalty and advocacy, how do we get them to come back? And how do we get them to talk about the product? How do we get them to post or share the product or the story in question?”

Here are more highlights from this excellent session:

Know your goals. The key thing, Gynn said, is to know how you’re measuring success before you create the content. “It may not change everything about your content, but it puts you in a direction to understand what success is. So later if somebody says, ‘Oh, you’re not meeting goals.’ ‘Well, great! What were our goals? How does the content I create relate to the organization’s business model, the business goal?’ And so, if you are the decision maker, figure out what those success metrics are, and tell your creators you are a creator. Be proactive, and ask, how will we know if this is successful?”

Size of audience matters. “We are now in the age where people are searching for information, whether they’re using a search engine like Google or whether they’re looking for stuff that’s related to what they want to know from that,” Gynn said. “And then we can throw in stuff they need to know that they may not know to look for. The big metric is still audience size. Even if you’re a small organization, your audience size still matters. It doesn’t mean you need to go to 500,000, but you need to think about of your niche, of your area of expertise, your industry topic. You want the audience to be as big as possible in that area.”

Metrics that matter. Kolker spoke about the importance of unique visitors, how long on average are people spending on your article or on your product site? “And then we get to loyalty things like recirculation, which again is a Chartbeat metric. It’s a fancy word for saying, what is the volume of people that are converting from one article on your site to another article on the site? It doesn’t even have to be another article. It can be your homepage. We care about that because that tells us a little bit about our audience as well.”

Are they watching our videos? P&I also looks at open and click-through rates, which are traditionally newsletter metrics. “Our newsletters are incredibly successful,” Kolker said. “They bring in a highly engaged audience. So we spend a lot of time looking at how often people are opening those emails, or those newsletters. We publish some videos, not a lot. But we do care that people are consuming videos, and especially if you’re on social. That’s an important metric.” It’s the same for whitepapers, he added. How many downloads are they getting?

Revealing his sources. Kolker said that sources of traffic is another important metric for them. “Where is your audience coming from?” he asked. “It’s important because it tells us a little bit about their behavior.” A person’s first entry point to your site or to your content is very important. What percentage of people are coming in from social? Referrals are what they call third-party traffic. What percentage is coming in from email? We have probably anywhere from 10-15 newsletter products, both thematic digests, and what we call our Daily Newsletter, and we care about how many people are coming in from all of those newsletters. It’s a huge audience, anywhere from 10,000-20,000 subscribers. We care about where those people are coming from.”

The after part. Gynn said that with their organic content, they “just want people to consume the content,” and they’re looking at the metrics that tell them that. “But in content marketing, we want them to do something after they consume the content, no matter how much of the content they consumed. We want them to do something. So when you’re looking at the metrics, that’s where we need to go as the asterisk. What beyond the audience size. That’s the difference from it, and that’s how you create your content. You need to be thinking about that call to action. There are both direct and indirect. But you need to be thinking in that realm.”

Won’t you stay, just a little bit longer? “You [content marketing] can also help drive them to stay on your site longer,” Gynn said. “While the call to action could be registered for our upcoming Webinar, you could also have an indirect call to action that the reader doesn’t really know and doesn’t see as a call to action. It may be on the bar on the side of your website that you have relevant content related to the piece that they’re looking for, and they click on that. That’s a metric that you would be interested in. It’s keeping them on longer. It’s giving them more valuable content. They’re going a little bit deeper, So that’s a measurement of success for your content. They are now seeing your organization, your brand as a valuable resource.”

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‘If 9-5 Had Never Been Invented’; Are Office Innovations Enough to Draw People Back in?

by Media

“Ultimately, I don’t believe that CEOs can dictate how people work. The market will. The employees will. Flexibility will be the most important benefit after compensation,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said in a recent interview. With dogs and cornhole and yoga and nature walks, the modern office is being retooled. Will that make a difference?

“In essence, we need to stop designing work around location and start designing work around human behavior,” Alexia Cambon, a research director of the human resources practice at research firm Gartner, wrote in The Guardian last year. “Employees will work better, stay at their organization longer and keep healthier if they are placed at the center of work design—trust me, we have the data that proves it.

“This is what we should be asking ourselves: if 9-5 had never been invented; if ‘office’ were a foreign term; if the concept of a meeting sounded like gibberish—in short, if today were day one of the history of work—how would you design how you work?”

That’s an interesting question. Here are some answers:

The first three are from an article in The Washington Post by Danielle Abril titled What Your Future Office Could Look Like — If You Even Need to Be There.

I’ll take 2 creams and a 2 pm Zoom meeting please. Twilio, a communication tools company based in San Francisco, envisions the idea of company-owned coffee shops. “The reason you would go in is the same reason you might say, ‘I’m going to go to a coffee shop today because I just need a change of scenery,’” Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson told the Post.

Breathe out and meet us by the hydrangea. Salesforce’s Trailblazer Ranch, located in the Redwoods of Scotts Valley, Calif., has been set up as a retreat and off-site space for employees offering guided nature walks, garden tours, group cooking classes, and yoga and meditation. “An essential part of our strategy is finding ways to empower our teams to come together and connect safely,” said Brent Hyder, Salesforce president and chief people officer.

Do you have a VP of real estate and workplace services? Google’s 1.1 million square feet Bay View campus based in Mountain View, Calif., sits on 42 acres and includes 240 short-term employee corporate housing units. (What’s the line from Hotel California? “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”) All desks have access to natural daylight and outside views with greenery scattered throughout. Automated window shades open and close throughout the day. “The process gave us the chance to rethink the very idea of an office,” said David Radcliffe, Google’s vice president of real estate and workplace services, said.

Leave it to beavering. “Workspaces aren’t about a cubicle farm full of desks with people beavering away on their computers anymore,” said Carolyn Trickett, head of business technology, property and asset management at global real estate services firm JLL, in an excellent report titled Workplaces Disrupted: The Office of the Future. “It’s not about having people in the office; it’s now about having people interacting in different ways, depending on the type of work that they’re doing.”

Approach it purpose-designed. The ideal, according to Maja Paleka, a founder and director of Juggle Strategies, is “to create a place that is purpose-designed, where people are very careful and purposeful about how this space is going to serve us, what it is going to deliver, and what it is designed for…” she says in the AESC report. “Sometimes where organizations fumble is when the initial motivation is about cost-cutting, real estate consolidation and things like that.”

Will pickleball courts be next? (Could take the place of a mailroom.) I recently read about Wallace, a 2-year-old border collie, chasing ping pong balls in the office all day, as his dog mom worked. (Yes, ping pong tables are front and center in that office.) Half of the 500 top executives surveyed said they are planning to allow pets at the office, including Google, Amazon and Uber. The CEO of the American Institute of Architects recently said this about the design of their new space: “When you’re going to brainstorm, instead of talking around the watercooler, you play some AIA-branded cornhole while you’re debating what we need to do.”

Should we add laundry machines? “Resimercial” is how Courtney Cotrupe, president of Partners + Napier, a creative agency, describes the build-out of their new space, in the AESC report. “Think about how you work at home: you might wake up in the morning, grab a cup of coffee, start to do some emails in the kitchen, then maybe you grab your laptop and go to the dining room table, and maybe you get up and walk around while you have a conference call,” she said. “We really wanted to inspire that type of work, here.” She also left out the couch to nap on.

Media Library (61)

SIIA Applauds appointment of Doreen Bogdan-Martin as Secretary-General of the ITU

by PolicyPress Release

This statement can be attributed to Paul Lekas, Senior Vice President, Global Public Policy, Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).

“SIIA applauds the appointment of Doreen Bogdan-Martin to serve as the next Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). With her deep knowledge of the ITU along with her extensive experience in diplomacy and technology, Ms. Bogdan-Martin is extremely qualified to lead the ITU during these challenging times. She has the technical expertise and leadership skills that are essential for ensuring the future of the internet is safe, secure, open and accessible.”

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Giving Attention to Underserved Groups Is Just One Reason to Start a ‘Week’ – 2 EXCEL Winners Show How

by Media

We know about the success of many cities’ Restaurant Weeks. Here in Washington, D.C., our Theater Week is upon us with all kinds of discounts and special performances. These types of weeks also can be popular (and profitable) in the association world and even some B2B. Two such “weeks” won 2022 EXCEL Awards for their efforts. Here are some tips.

I’ve written before about the value of starting a special “Week” for your niche or brand. So it’s rewarding to see two 2022 EXCEL Award winners honored for their special weeks: the American Institute of Physics’ #BlackInPhysics Week 2021 essay series—a Gold winner for Diversity and Inclusion Initiative Microsite; and American Health Law Association’s Health Law Week—a Bronze winner for Best New Innovation.

The Black in Physics essays can be quite moving. Here’s the beginning of one from Brooke Russell on their Diversity and Inclusion site.

“This past May I earned my doctorate in physics, becoming the first Black woman to do so at Yale University. …Approximately 100 Black women have received a PhD in a physics-related field in the U.S. With such a dearth in numbers, at times I experience a sense of loneliness and isolation in physics. Some people are taken aback by my presence in research settings. On a number of occasions, I have been mistaken for janitorial staff in physics departments, in national laboratories and at conferences. This is a common experience among my Black physics colleagues.”

Their 2022 Week is coming up, Oct. 24-28. In 2021, they had Open Houses, sessions such as Managing Micro-aggressions and Grad to Pro, a Job Fair, a Poster Competition and a Speaking Up Workshop. The schedule for the 2022 Health Law Week, which took place June 6-10, also looked jam-packed, with multiple recorded sessions each day, plus Harassment Training, and a Virtual Networking Happy Hour on the last day.

There’s no set agenda for these weeks—you can truly make them your own. But the excitement, focused learning and networking all make it an occasion, and something that members/subscribers/community will look forward to each year.

Here are more benefits from these types of weeks.

Highlight a group that has been ignored. What I like about the Black in Physics tagline is not only does it say they are celebrating Black physicists and their “contributions to the scientific community, but also to reveal a more complete picture of what a physicist looks like.” (my emphasis) Access Intelligence’s Event Marketer had a successful Women in Events Week for a few years. Prior to that, Event Marketer had been profiling 10-15 outstanding female event marketers. Then one year the editorial team transformed the franchise into a week-long series of experiences across 15 cities that engaged more than 1,000 industry women and generated thousands of dollars in sponsorship revenue. Editors traveled to four target markets to host full- and half-day conferences featuring panel discussions with the women featured in the articles.

Amplify engagement. The Association of Clinical Documentation Improvement Specialists (ACDIS) just wrapped up their 12th annual Clinical Documentation Integrity Week. ACDIS conducted a series of interviews with CDI professionals on a variety of emerging industry topics. I also see crossword puzzles and quizzes, member Q&As, a state of the industry live report, and an official poster and recipe book. Business Management Daily’s Admin Pro Week in April offers five days of free gifts for their registrants.

Build your membership. AHLA’s many Health Law Week sessions and events are “open to the entire health law community and are free of charge. Additional events may be added leading up to Health Law Week. We look forward to seeing you at a virtual session or in-person reception!” Black in Physics Week gives AIP a terrific opportunity to add new members, finding physicists who may not have been known to them in the past, not to mention scientists from other diverse groups looking for more coverage.

Add sponsorships. AHLA offers $500, $1,000 and $2,000 sponsorships for Health Law Week—a sponsorship page lists seven sponsors for 2022. On the Black in Physics Week site, the Heising-Simons Foundation is prominently displayed. Several other sponsors are listed on another page including the American Association of Physics Teachers and the Cornell Department of Astronomy. Ads also appear on the pages with the essays.

Get started. How do you get started? For CDI, their web page says that a work group organized and supported by ACDIS convened over several months to plan and organize the event and develop resources and promotional events. They provide an electronic toolkit to members for downloading and getting ready for the big week. The kit includes PowerPoint training tools for CDI specialists, a poster, a downloadable logo, a special video clip, and celebration ideas. They also sell other branded items that week.

 

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The Three Neal Winners in Best Article Exude Flair, Tell Stories and Diversify Sources

by Media

“There’s a phrase for the uneasiness many of us feel when confronted with humanlike machines—the Uncanny Valley. Coined in the 1970s by Tokyo robotics professor Masahiro Mori, the phrase describes how as machines appear more humanlike, they become more appealing to humans—but only up to a point. After that, as they appear more humanlike but not quite, they inspire revulsion in the observer. ¶ In the accounting profession, there is a similar uneasiness when dealing with the idea of AI, though it has nothing to do with how the software looks…”

Thus begins Ranica Arrowsmith’s 2022 Neal Award-winning, exceptional story for Best Single Article, titled AI, Applied: Opening the Black Box in Arizent’s Accounting Today. She goes on to provide ways that AI can assist people in accounts receivable, accounts payable, audits and other transactions. And that lo and behold, AI is not that scary and not after people’s jobs.

The other winners in this category, based on company revenues, were:

Alexia Smokler of REALTOR Magazine for her story, Repairers of the Breach—which looked at “America’s history of racist housing policies and how realtors “are playing a vital role in community efforts to acknowledge and repair the harm.”

Holly Barker of Bloomberg Law for her hard-hitting article titled ‘A Preventable Mess’: How Dementia Takes Toll on Aging Lawyers.

Let’s look at some of the right stuff that these three women did so well in crafting these award-winning stories.

Diversify your sources. A key source for Arrowsmith (pictured) is Samantha Bowling, who lists herself on LinkedIn as an: “AI Innovator, Mentor, Business Owner, Auditing Standards Board Member, Speaker and I LOVE what I do.” She also quotes the co-founders of an AI-driven accounts receivable platform, and Youngseung Kuk who manages business outsourcing services for Top 100 Firm Armanino in Boise, Idaho.

Smokler interviews Shakeima Chatman, broker-associate with Carolina Elite Real Estate and owner of the Chatman Realty Group in Charleston, S.C. She has worked with buyers and sellers to confront heirs’ property problems. In the first part of her story, Barker interviews someone who counsels clients on legal ethics, a forensic psychologist, the executive director of the Illinois Lawyers’ Assistance Program, and the chair of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs.

Tell stories. I wrote about the importance of this yesterday. Barker has an engaging style of starting each section with a person: “Frederick Emery Jr., an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Maine, was within a year of retirement when his colleagues started to notice something wrong.” “Robert Fritzshall had to be pushing 80, Bethany McLean thought, so she was a little surprised to hear him talk about expanding his law practice.” It quickly grabs us. Smokler tells the story of Evanston, Ill., which in 2019 became the first city in the U.S. to commit public funds to reparations for Black citizens. “It’s not by accident that Martin Luther King Jr. came here three times to address housing issues,” says Morris ‘Dino’ Robinson, founder of the Shorefront Legacy Center, which documents the African American experience in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs.

Stories have a way of connecting us to real experiences, giving life to what might otherwise seem like abstract ideas. Take, for instance, the journey of Margaret Swanson, a widow who had lived in her Upstate New York home for nearly four decades. Her children grown and her husband gone, she started feeling the weight of maintaining a large house on her own. She wanted something simpler, but the thought of repairing and updating her aging home for the market felt like an overwhelming challenge.

People like Margaret find themselves at a crossroads, searching for an option that respects their history while offering a smooth transition into a new chapter. Here, real-life stories bring a familiar empathy and resonance to each step of their decision-making journey.

In cases like Margaret’s, the practical solution often comes through a streamlined, buyer-friendly approach. We Buy Houses in New York State offers homeowners a way to pass their properties on without the burden of repairs, inspections, or time-consuming listings. Consider Paul Martinez, a teacher from Rochester, who inherited a family property and felt a duty to make the right choice for his family’s legacy. Handling the estate while balancing his teaching responsibilities was exhausting, and he wanted a way to simplify the process.

Working with a cash buyer can allow him to fulfill that commitment without the drawn-out stress of a traditional sale. By connecting with trusted buyers, homeowners like Paul and Margaret can find reassurance and dignity in the process, opening doors to future opportunities without leaving their memories and hard work behind.

Use charts and photos. Barker’s story begins with a large, penetrating photo of McLean, who is now an assistant public defender in Kane County, Ill. Charts that follow include the ages of American lawyers and the prevalence of Alzheimer’s by age. The REALTOR Magazine story starts with a chart of the 17 states that have adopted a law to address heirs’ property problems. Then there’s a black and white photo of a 1964 civil rights march in Evanston.

Add audio to your story and a podcast around it. Barker also reads her article, giving Bloomberg Law’s audience another way to interact with them. In addition, they started a new podcast titled On the Merits with David Schultz talking with Barker about the story. Recent subjects for the podcast include gun violence, the gender gap in law firms, and Tesla’s legal problems. Most of the episodes are around 10-14 minutes, though the one on the gender gap is a “special episode” and 30 minutes long. Schultz shared hosting duties for that episode with a younger colleague Ayanna Alexander. She was great, and I expect we’ll hear more from her.

Add the author’s bio and picture. I like what REALTOR Magazine does at the end of its story, running a nice bio and photo of Smokler—she’s actually NAR’s senior policy representative for fair housing. Amazing that she won a Neal Award for the article and is not even a main content person—quite impressive! They also start the article with “Key Takeaways”; it’s an effective way of getting readers the gist of the story early.

Congratulations to these three deserving winners! Arrowsmith has since moved on to a short stint as a technical writer for the National Football League and now the lead external relations manager for the American Institute of CPAs. I hope she’s still writing!