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Posted on by Louis Gudema

When you create a great white paper, infographic, video, etc., the reach of your network through emails, social media, your website traffic, and so on may not be enough to take full advantage of it. That’s where content syndication comes in.

Content syndication is a method to get your content on other sites, such as as a guest blog post. But in my experience, based on having written guest blog posts for many leading business/marketing sites, only about 2% of the people who read your post there will click through to your site.

To get better results, and to generate useful leads, you may need to use a paid content syndication campaign.

The first step is to create the content that your target audience would be interested in. If you sell to an expert B2B market, you may need an advanced level white paper. To reach an entry level consumer, though, a basic guide or configurator may be more appropriate.

The sites and services that you use to syndicate your content will, of course, be totally different depending on your industry. But once you figure out which sites and services to use, you can investigate their services.

The worst is something like Outbrain (which I mistyped as “Outbrand”, but that may be more accurate) which shows links to those terrible, spammy articles at the end of many online news stories. But some of the best publishers in the world have their own content industry-specific syndication programs that you can use to reach an audience with your high value content. This may be done through online ads tied to appropriate site content, emails, or even teleprospecting.

For advanced programs, you can ask people a question before they’re allowed to download your content, making it even more likely that the downloads that you’re paying for are qualified leads.

Key to success is having a sales team ready to jump on these new leads as soon as you get them. A two-week old lead is dead; no one will remember downloading your content then. You must act quickly to be successful.

This may sound a bit general, but that’s only because how you execute a content syndication lead generation program can vary so much from company to company and industry to industry. Working out the specifics for your company is where your marketing team, agency, and/or consultant come in.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

I recently came across research that’s been done over the past decade in the UK on the effectiveness of branding versus direct response ad campaigns. The researchers at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising looked at about 1,000 award-winning campaigns. Some of what they concluded:

  • Direct response (DR) campaigns (like email, direct mail, search advertising, etc.) drive the best short-term results, but branding campaigns are more effective in the long run
  • The accumulation of multiple DR campaigns do not equal the impact of branding campaigns
  • Creative/award-winning branding campaigns have greater impact, not surprisingly, than less memorable ones
  • DR campaigns tend to increase volume of sales in the short run, but branding campaigns can impact the willingness of customers to pay more (higher profits)
  • DR campaigns that use price (10% off!) as their offer hurt the price elasticity of customers
  • The most effective DR campaigns are reason-based; the best branding campaigns are emotion-based.
  • Branding campaigns typically take more than 6-12 months to have their greatest impact. They can still be increasing their effectiveness after 2-3 years. (Progressive’s “Flo” campaign has been going since 2008. The Marlboro Man was launched in the 1950s and ran for decades.)
  • Optimal campaigns are branding with DR elements.

The recommendation of writers Les Binet and Peter Field is that in the long-run marketers should allocate roughly 60% of their budget to branding and 40% to DR efforts.

They did also say that it would be controversial that they found that advertising campaigns are far more effective, and cost effective, for new customer acquisition than getting more business from existing customers. That doesn’t entirely surprise me, though. It’s not the role of advertising to grow and build current accounts; customer experience is more important for that, and other tools like email updates and inside sales.

This graphic nicely illustrates their conclusion that the impact of branding efforts are cumulative and, ultimately, more effective.

Graphic illustrating the impact of branding versus direct response campaigns

Their balance of short- and long-term recommendations aligns very well with my Bullseye Marketing approach. This chart of theirs could have been a summary of my book.

targeting in each ad stage

By focusing on the Phase 1 and 2 programs of my Bullseye approach you’ll not only have quick wins that build buy-in, but you’ll also set the foundation for success with your long-term, Phase 3 branding efforts.

But if you started with just the branding programs, the likelihood is that you wouldn’t have many measurable results in the first 6-12 months, your leadership would lose confidence in marketing, and you wouldn’t have the budget or support for long-term success.

BTW, this work is based on B2C campaigns, which may be why they said that TV is especially impactful for emotion-driven branding campaigns. They are working on new research now that is specific to B2B.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

Last week I attended a panel on “The Future of Small, Private Colleges” at McLane Middleton, a New England law firm. One of the panelists was the current president of Montserrat College of Art, a 400-student school north of Boston, Dr. Kurt Steinberg. He had a lot of great insights into the crisis in higher ed which, to a significant degree, is a failure of marketing.

He divided small, private colleges into two major categories: specialty schools and general, liberal arts schools. Specialty schools, such as those focusing on art, engineering, or business, are actually growing. It’s the small liberal arts colleges that are shrinking and dying.

Dr. Steinberg understands that they need to market Montserrat as a small, non-urban arts college. Students who want to go there wouldn’t like Pratt with 4,500 students in New York City, and vice versa.

In general specialization is a good business strategy. Saying that you’re good at everything is rarely a convincing or compelling proposition, but saying that you’re an expert at one thing can be. Who wants to hire the proverbial “jack of all trades, and master of none”?

Jay McBain, from Forrester, made a similar point in my interview with him on my podcast, “Ten years ago we used to build these partner programs that try to get you to go after one of the 27 verticals. ‘Go read healthcare, high tech, HIPAA, and become a health care expert.’ Today it’s a sub-industry play. There’s 297 sub-industries below those 27 majors. And instead of just being a health care expert, be a midsize clinic with 50 doctors specialist.”

I think that this was one of the reasons that Newbury College in Brookline, MA, closed last month. They had both a strong culinary arts program and a liberal arts division. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says, “Employment of chefs and head cooks is projected to grow 10 percent from 2016 to 2026, faster than the average for all occupations.” Newbury could have doubled down on being a culinary arts school, but instead they presented a vague message (their website is still online): “Newbury College provides a meaningful education inside and outside of the classroom. Founded in 1962, Newbury has always sought to provide students with a career-oriented, experiential education. Beyond academics, Newbury’s mission is to encourage lifelong-learning and engaged, socially-responsible citizenship.” It didn’t work.

bar chart of higher ed inflation

Another problem for liberal arts colleges, which Dr. Steinberg didn’t touch on, is that for many families these liberal arts colleges have priced themselves out of the market. College tuition has risen twice as fast as inflation in general. Many parents and students want to now know that there’s a paying job at the other side of that quarter million dollar investment.

And the customer is changing. A growing proportion of students are first generation in their family to attend, or black or Hispanic; many may be looking for a different experience, or different services, than fourth generation white students.

And the competition is changing. Dr. Steinberg also noted that larger universities are getting better at creating and promoting specializations within their large and diverse offerings. With honors colleges and special dorms, they can cater to the needs of students looking for more focus. I still remember touring the University of Maryland (40,500 students) with my daughter; the excellent student guide at one point said, “You’ll find your small college in a large university, but you won’t find a large university at small college.” Some students are attending online programs, too, although that’s still a small number at the undergraduate level.

In my opinion, all of these are marketing issues. The colleges that understand their rapidly changing market, adjust their product, and promote it well, can survive and even thrive.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

When you boil it down, (I am not the first to say that) marketing consists of getting the right message to the right person at the right time. And that message has to prompt them to change their behavior. (If you think it’s easy to change someone else’s behavior, just think of how hard it can be to change your own…)

If you’re selling professional services, or software, or clothing, or anything else, that simple task can be complex enough. But it’s even more complex if you’re trying to change the behavior of an addict, or the attitudes towards addicts.

“The Power of Marketing in Public Health Crises” is going to be the subject of the Boston Sales and Marketing Innovators (SAMI) meeting on June 20th. Judi Haber, whose agency has been working on issues related to public health, including opioids and vaping, will be leading the session.

So if you work outside of public health, and you think this doesn’t relate to you, you couldn’t be more wrong. People attending are going to hear about such matters as:

– The role of social media in reaching hyper-targeted audiences.
– How message testing can get to the “truth of the matter.”
– Tips for changing negative or harmful human behavior and attitudes

Those first two at least should be useful for any marketer.

Marketers sometimes narrow their thinking too much, feeling that if you haven’t worked in their industry then you have nothing to offer. Personally some of my best work has been the first time that I worked in an industry because I didn’t come in with any pre-conceptions.

So I hope that Boston-area people will join us on the 20th, and that people reading these tips everywhere will broaden their thinking and be open to new ideas on how to get the right message to the right person at the right time.