7 Retail Brands That Will Inspire You to Up Your Content Game

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89 The Content Strategist by Julia Lynn Rubin  /  29d  //  keep unread  //  hide  //  preview

In the world of content marketing, retailers are doing so much more than just advertising their products; they’re providing useful information, visibility, and helping brands build relationships with consumers.

Here are some of the most inspiring B2C retail content marketing campaigns that have managed to build brand loyalty by engaging new and old consumers with awesome branded content.

1. Patagonia

It’s safe to say that a lot of the people who trek through the wilderness in Patagonia gear care about the environment; with that in mind, the retailer released a campaign called “The Footprint Chronicles,” which tracks the company’s textile supply chain and how it affects the planet socially and environmentally.

Last year, the company also boldly released “Worn Wear,” a short film that focused on the love people have with the clothes and gear they’ve owned together. On Black Friday, they screened it inside their stores.

It inspired viewers to be conscious of their purchases and repurpose old clothes instead; alongside the screenings, Pantagonia had stations where experts patched up worn Pantagonia gear. It may sound like a counterintuitive message for a retailer, but it’s that kind of transparency and humility that consumers love.

2. ASOS

Clothing company ASOS capitalized on the phenomenon of unboxing (uploading a video of yourself opening a brand-new product straight from the box) by creating their own unboxing video for Vine along with the tag #ASOSUnbox. The retailer encouraged ASOS fans to upload and tag their own videos to share, and it proved to be a hit. Consumers were stoked to share the excitement of seeing their coveted clothes for the first time. It also helped that ASOS promised to reward some participants with a shiny new product to unbox.

3. BarkPost

Dogs lovers unite: Bark & Co. has created an online branded publication for everything pooches, from adorable photos of puppies to inspiring stories of love and friendship between canine companions. It’s pretty much BuzzFeed for pet lovers, which proves to be awfully addictive. BarkPost has found a much wider audience than just fans of Bark & Co.’s many doggie products and services; about two million people now read BarkPost. One of their posts involving a marriage proposal and 16 pugs even went viral, and was featured on every major site from TODAY to BuzzFeed, and even got its own segment on Good Morning America.

4. Frank & Oak

Luxury menswear retailer Frank & Oak not only has a seamless mobile app, but also their very own editorial hub, aptly titled The Hound. Digiday called them “the fashion brand with a publisher’s heart.” Featuring style tips, how-to fashion demos, and interviews with fabulous bloggers, Frank & Oak has capitalized on fashion-forward content; as Digiday notes, it’s a twist on the formula that turned GQ and Esquire into empires. They even put out a quarterly print magazine called The Edit. All of these efforts have helped fuel 80-plus percent growth year-over-year.

“We found that when it comes to men’s fashion, they care about looking good,” CEO Ethan Song told Digiday, “but they care more about the context: ‘What are those clothes used for?’”

5. Net-a-Porter

Net-a-Porter’s brilliant blend of digital content and commerce has been the gold standard for retail content marketing for over a decade, but they took it up a notch this year.

Luxury fashion retailer Net-a-Porter’s glossy, star-studded print magazine, Porter, is on its way to becoming the new Vogue, with an initial international circulation of 400,000 readers. Supermodel Gisele Bundchen graced the cover of its debut issue, which featured stars Uma Thurman and Angela Ahrendts inside. Net-a-Porter is not just a retail company, but a media company, as their founder said earlier this year, and they are intent on being the best of the best. Indeed, their glamorous publication is an impressive feat, but it doesn’t come cheap, retailing at $9.99—four dollars more than Vogue.

6. John Deere

Featuring stories about everything from reindeer revivals to why bats matter, agriculturally-minded The Furrow is a branded magazine by John Deere, and has become something of a legend in its own right. First printed in 1895, the mag still reaches around 2 million readers globally, and even in the digital age, the photo-driven print edition remains most popular. In fact, its back issues are fiercely fought over on eBay. Hear that, Farmers’ Almanac?

Earlier this year, Kate Gardiner revealed the fascinating story behind the 119-year-old magazine.

7. Apple

Riffing on Robin Williams’ famous speech in Dead Poets Society, Apple launched its recent “Your Verse” campaign. The almighty question, “What will your verse be?” challenges consumers to make their voices heard and create powerful works with the help of Apple products.

In fact, Apple was so inspired by what their customers were producing with iPads that the company decided to feature several of these stories in short films that explore everything from a composer’s app for sharing his love of classical music to mountaineers’s trips up the highest peaks in the world. It’s a case study in how the best aspirational marketing is often inspirational storytelling.

Does Your Brand Newsroom Need a Robot Writer?

Go to article 100+ The Content Strategist by Celine Roque  /  7d  //  keep unread  //  hide  //  preview If you’ve spent any time reading on the web the past week, odds are you’ve read something written by a robot—and you didn’t even realize it. Robot writers are algorithms that collect and analyze data and then turn them into readable narratives. Many news sites like the Los Angeles Times and Forbes are already using them. Even Wikipedia has articles that weren’t written by humans. Reception to robot journalists has been mixed: Some see how robots can be useful, while others take this as another sign that creative professionals are being devalued. To see for ourselves whether these robot writers can be useful or how they might impact creative work, we can start by getting to know one of them. Meet the robot journalist that writes for AP and Yahoo Created by Automated Insights, Wordsmith is a platform that can take any kind of structured data and generate a plain English narrative from it. Since it doesn’t need breaks, days off, or long research hours, it can produce 2,000 simple articles per second. It is on track to producing over 1 billion stories by the end of the year. What might be surprising to most is that Wordsmith’s “voice” isn’t completely robotic—it can adapt, depending on the context. For example, it’s written some objective, matter-of-fact pieces, such as this Radio Shack corporate earnings report for the Associated Press. But it can also generate more lively, conversational pieces, such as the personalized, trash-talking Fantasy Football recaps for Yahoo. However, there are significant limits to its powers. Can a robot be a storyteller and thought leader? Though robot journalists can construct certain types of narratives from data, it might have trouble with a key component of publishing: storytelling and thought leadership. “I am the person at the company who probably does most of our thought leadership pieces,” said James Kotecki, manager of media and public relations for Automated Insights. “It’s certainly not the case that a robot or algorithm has taken my job.” As an example, Kotecki cites the automated corporate earnings reports generated by Wordsmith for the Associated Press. These short reports provide details about a company’s gains and losses, how they fared compared to analyst predictions, and how the stock price is doing. As a result, their journalists no longer have to deal with mindless number crunching, data processing, and formulaic writing. “Then if you want to have any additional context or qualitative analysis, you need to have a human as part of that,” Kotecki said. “That means that the journalists involved are still going to go out there and get a quote from the CEO, they’re still going to put whatever happened in their earnings report into a broader context.” In that sense, a robot writer can serve as a useful editorial assistant. Putting data into a broader context is especially important for brands where humanitarian and environmental issues are a key aspect of their messaging. Such brands can range from nonprofits like charity:water to companies like Chipotle, whose branding revolves around ethical food production, as well as the restorative narratives depicted in “This Built America,” which was underwritten by Ford Trucks. These approaches need to be compelling and authentic to impact an audience. This is a significant limitation of robot writers, according to Dr. Noam Lemelshtrich Latar, founding dean of the Sammy Ofer School of Communications at IDC Herzliya. His research focuses on how artificial intelligence and robotics will impact the future of journalism. “Yes, we can write algorithms that will investigate issues important to human survival, but only the human can think of what should be investigated,” he said. “They cannot think out of the AI box. The AI algorithms will never be able to catch up from these respects. Definitely not to protect our human rights or catch up with changing human values.” The rise of hyper-scalable personalized content Earlier this year, we covered three content formats that are about to take off, and one of these formats is personalized content and experiences. Robot writers are a boon to personalized content, since they can automatically segment the content depending on reader data and preferences. Wordsmith, for example, will have created a quarter-billion personalized Fantasy Football recaps by the end of the year. “Not only are your customers getting really engaging, extremely personalized content about what you’re selling or offering to them, but you’ve also collected their data willingly,” Kotecki said. But the success of these personalized experiences is dependent on data, according to Dr. Lemelshtrich Latar. “Assuming the digital profiles are accurate, this could have a great effect on the ROI of these businesses, their promotions strategies and their product development and design,” Lemelshtrich Latar said. “Knowing the preferences of their customers will allow these businesses to run effective targeted media campaigns and most important—offer their customers products that will fit their interests even before these customers realize it that these products appeal to them.” R-O-I, Robot For brand publishers, robot writers can serve another function: analyzing and reporting marketing metrics. Wordsmith for Marketing, a smaller-scale version of the platform, integrates with Google Analytics and creates client reports for digital marketing agencies. “Marketing agencies have teams of people where their sole responsibility might be reporting,” said Kieran Wilson, digital marketing manager at Automated Insights. “So instead of having people spend hours and hours in Google Analytics and analyzing and looking at trends and patterns and correlations and producing that report for their clients, it fully automates the process.” More time for human journalists to “do human stuff” “Can Wordsmith write a novel?” most people ask Kotecki. The answer is that it’s theoretically possible—if you can figure out a way to structure the data needed to compose a compelling story. “The problem is that by the time you actually create that massive structured dataset about all the variables that would go into a fictional novel,” he said, “you would probably end up spending way more time creating the dataset and figuring out how to configure Wordsmith to write about it than you would’ve if you just wrote the novel the traditional way.” In other words, robot journalists can definitely be useful for analyzing data and generating reports on that data in a natural language—and they can do this at scale. But it has serious limitations, and as a result, storytelling is still a human’s game. “If we’re automating something, it’s going to be better and faster than what a human can do,” said Kotecki, “but that leaves more room actually for humans to do more exciting human stuff.”

September 22nd, 2014

The Answers to Your 18 Biggest Content Marketing Questions

Here at Contently, we geek out harder on content marketing than a Batman nut at ComicCon. For us, the only thing better than content marketing is talking about content marketing. In that spirit, earlier this month we asked our Twitter followers if they had any pressing questions, and they responded in droves. Here are our answers, with some added context, examples, and love.

1. WHAT IS “NATIVE” AND WHAT IS “OWNED”? WHICH ONE IS BETTER?

2. WHY WOULD WE CREATE OWNED CONTENT RATHER THAN BUY SPONSORED CONTENT?

These two questions are so similar that it makes sense to answer them together.

Let’s start with the basic definitions. Shane Snow, CCO of Contently, covered the definitions in our “State of Content Marketing 2014” report:

It’s hard to say which one (native or owned) is better in an absolute sense; they simply serve different purposes, and in an ideal world, they work in concert. In an article earlier this month, Contently VP of Content Sam Slaughter detailed how brands should use native advertising to build an audience that they own:

One could make (and many have made) the case that brands communicating directly with their own audience is bad news for publishers who depend on being the audience gatekeepers. I don’t buy that.

For one, building an audience is hard. And more importantly, even a brand with their own audience will want to reach other audiences with their message. Whether they use sponsored stories, paid distribution, or social advertising to get there is dependent on the circumstances—but the need to reach additional eyeballs efficiently and effectively is constant.

Case in point: Here at Contently, we have a huge audience for our industry pub, The Content Strategist. And yet we still pay through the nose to place sponsored content on publisher sites like Adweek. Why would we do that when we could put it in front of our own audience for free? Simple: Adweek readers are people we want to reach.

Shane also tackled this question in an article for Ad Age, noting that having direct access to an audience is every brand’s goal, but it takes time, patience, and editorial leadership to make that happen. In the meantime, sponsored content is a way to align a brand with an already recognized and trusted platform.

3. WHAT IS THE VALUE OF A LONG-TERM CONTENT STRATEGY VS. A CAMPAIGN-BY-CAMPAIGN APPROACH?

As we noted last month, the cliché is true: Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. You need time to develop an effective editorial strategy through trial and error and to build trust with readers. That’s why some agencies and custom-content studios run by publishers are requiring brands to commit to a content push of at least four months, if not a year or longer. In an ideal world, they’d be signing on for 5-plus-year commitments.

4. WHO SHOULD WE BE TARGETING, I.E., WHO SHOULD OUR AUDIENCE BE?

Determining your target audience is content strategy 101. Who wants your service or product? Who shares similar values? What do they want but aren’t getting enough of? These are easy questions to ask, but difficult questions to answer—and those answers are different for each and every business. If you don’t have someone on your team who has built an audience before, you likely need to find the right help.

5. HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT DEVELOPING A BRAND VOICE?

This is a crucial aspect of brand publishing, and it was one of the main topics Shane covered in the first-ever Contently e-book, “The Beginner’s Guide to Blogging and Content Strategy.” Though three years old, the advice still holds strong.

Witty, smart, sarcastic, optimistic, skeptical— whatever the tone, be consistent. Early on, figure out what your brand’s message is and how you want to say it. Choose a tone or angle, and then consistently apply it to your content. If you want to be instructional and serious, stick with that. As Shane writes in “Beginner’s Guide,” it’s not so much what you say—it’s how you say it.

6. HOW MUCH CONTENT SHOULD I BE CREATING?

The short answer: a lot. A brand needs to pump out quality content in order to establish trust in their readership. The perfect mix is different for each brand, but when starting out, look at key engagement metrics (like engaged time, average finish time, shares, and return visits) to see which pieces of content are compelling your audience to come back. Then, double down on what works while constantly testing and iterating new approaches. That’s the approach the brand newsroom of the future will take.

7. HOW DOES A BRAND SET UP A NEWSROOM?

Brand newsrooms are all the rage right now. When TCS sat down with content strategist Neil Chase, he had some key advice for setting up a brand newsroom internally:

The brand newsroom must embrace and follow the company’s culture, but it also needs the ability to change that culture. To make a closed company more open. To make a company that’s nervous about publicity more comfortable with it. To help a company that operates in a regulatory environment able to do more than it thought possible before. To try new things, use new technology and break bad old habits. More here.

Brands have the opportunity to reimagine the traditional newsroom structure to best serve their needs. This means establishing specific responsibilities for each department. And as Shane explains in the talk below, most every decision should be driven by data and the quest for an exponentially increasing return on investment:

And for a visual guide to brand newsrooms, check out our interactive e-book, “The CMO’s Guide to Building a Brand Newsroom.”

8. WHAT’S A GOOD STRATEGY FOR GETTING MORE PEOPLE TO FIND YOUR CONTENT IN THE FIRST PLACE?

One of the most important principles for building an audience is the “superconnector.” This is a person or platform that has an established audience you can borrow. If there are people in your brand’s network with whom you can connect, do it.

But how? You need to offer unique and valuable content. Produce content that their audience is interested in and then give it away. This way you make the superconnector happy, and you get exposed to a broader audience. Offering value leads to trust, and the audience will be more likely to follow you to your own platform.

It’s a similar idea to finding influencers. Connecting to 500 people through one person is much more efficient than trying to reach people individually. In addition, don’t be afraid to pay to jumpstart your traffic. Creating good content is only effective if people read it. Here’s the TCS breakdown of the top distribution platforms.

For more, check out Shane’s webinar, “Superconnecting Massive Audiences,” below:

9. WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF OUTSOURCING CONTENT CREATION?

Don’t think outsourcing, think in-sourcing, as jargony as that sounds. (Forgive us.) Bringing in freelancers adds a fresh twist to a brand’s voice. For instance, General Mills brought in outside writers, photographers, and infographic experts to write and design their successful recipe site, Tablespoon. While the perspectives of freelance brand journalists are often at odds with traditional marketers, that’s actually a good thing, breathing fresh life into a content campaign. Their ability to connect with audiences and tell a great story in unorthodox ways can be invaluable.

10. IS IT REALLY WORTH THE INVESTMENT TO HIRE TRAINED JOURNALISTS FOR BRANDED CONTENT OVER CHEAPER WRITERS AND COPYWRITERS?

Definitely. With the saturation of Internet content, brands are not only competing with one another for attention, but also with established media powerhouses. Brands need the talent to compete, and that makes writers who are talented, experienced, and passionate about a brand’s mission invaluable. There is truth to the warning “You get what you pay for,” and when it comes to content, quality is king. Click here for more.

11. WHAT IS A GOOD STRATEGY FOR GETTING PEOPLE TO NOTICE YOUR CONTENT WHEN THEY MAINLY GO TO YOUR SITE TO BUY STUFF?

Depends on what you’re selling, but a smart strategy is to integrate editorial with the products themselves. You want a balance of boosting the appeal of your product with providing value through your content. The story cannot only be about the product. Contently uses the “Content Funnel” as a framework for creating content for varying levels of engagement.

The first step is to attract your audience by offering them stories that speak to their values and are either timely, seasonal, or evergreen—meaning always relevant. The second level of the funnel is for stories about the company and the customer. This gets a bit more personal and moves the audience closer to the product. The third tier is the stories concerning your product. The people who make it to this level of the funnel are the ones who will become patrons of your brand.

A few brands doing an awesome job of weaving amazing content into their commerce platforms are Mr. Porter, Birchbox, and Apple.

Groupon is one more great example of combining content and commerce. It made stories an integral part of each deal, and rode unprecedented conversion rates all the way to an IPO. People could connect with the company on multiple levels and kept coming back for more.

12. WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO DEFINE YOUR CONTENT?

The best content is mission-driven: For us, that mission is building a better media world. That’s why we cover the media and marketing world here on The Content Strategist, give freelancers the tools and knowledge they need to succeed on The Freelancer, and fund independent investigative journalism over at Contently.org. If you want a definition, start with a question: What’s my mission?

13. WHAT METRICS CAN HELP YOU IMPROVE YOUR WRITING AND PERFORMANCE?

14. HOW DOES A BRAND CALCULATE THEIR ROI? NOT JUST A FORMULA BUT THE PROCESS AND TOOLS?

Most metrics focus on developing the brand, not the creator. The natural progression in smart content strategy is Stories > Engagement > Relationships > ROI. Each level of the brand newsroom should focus on one or more of those pieces. For creative people, the story metrics are the most important. For editors, engagement and relationships should take priority.

Story metrics that matter most: engaged time, finish percentage, and return engagement. These three metrics lead to relationships, which then directly translate to ROI when the conversion pathway is tracked correctly. For more, check out our “4 Keys to Calculating ROI for Content Marketers” (process) and our e-book, “The New World of Content Measurement” (tools).

15. WHICH SOCIAL PLATFORM SHOULD I USE TO BUILD A FOLLOWING OF WEALTHY INVESTORS USING LONGFORM CONTENT?

As we detailed in our “Banking on Content” e-book, LinkedIn is a finance content marketer’s best friend. LinkedIn has the audience you want, and their targeting capabilities are unmatched. If you’re publishing directly on LinkedIn, they have great engagement metrics built into the platform, and they also recently rolled out a redesign of their longform pages. If you can build an audience on LinkedIn, you can attract a following that will transfer over to your owned media platform.

For more finance content marketing tips, check out our “State of Finance Content Marketing” e-book.

16. AS FAR AS FORMATTING AND PLACEMENT ARE CONCERNED, WHAT IS THE SWEET SPOT FOR LINKING TO EXTERNAL RESOURCES IN ARTICLES?

If you’re giving a load of resources, do so at the end of the story, not as a distraction midway through. If links to external resources are important for context, definitely include them in-text (like in this piece). If you’re not concerned about content engagement, then split test it the same way you’d split test a landing page.

Also, whenever you reference a brand name in your article—yours or otherwise —always link it within the text. This can amp up your SEO ranking.

17. WHAT IS “THOUGHT LEADERSHIP” AND IS THERE VALUE TO BEING CONSIDERED A THOUGHT LEADER?

A brand that is a thought leader assumes expertise in a field. People rely on them as a resource. Thought leadership is the number one goal Contently clients list. Really, thought leadership is about branding. If your brand is intelligent, that’s exactly how you want to self-style. If your brand sells Doritos-shell tacos, who cares about thought leadership? You might care about entertaining teens and twenty-somethings.

And yes, thought leadership has become a buzz phrase, but it’s here to stay. Here are some tips to make it work for you.

18. WHAT TRENDS WILL BE IMPACTING CONTENT CREATION IN THE NEAR FUTURE?

What if Coca-Cola took you inside of a can or Corona could actually find you your beach? Immersive virtual reality is going to hit marketers by surprise. Strapping on goggles and transporting instantly to a virtual hangout will be a huge opportunity for bigger and better storytelling.

The main answer is that we’ll see more players: media companies, media agencies, creative agencies, PR firms, small shops—everyone’s selling content right now. We’ll also see an explosion in multimedia and branded web series, leveraging YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and other emerging platforms and talent to reach millennials.

There will also be a greater merging between digital and social media, and traditional media. HP’s recent commercial featuring a montage of Vines is a great example. Finally, a select few brands will finally figure out how to structure their organizations like a media company.

THERE YOU HAVE IT.

Thank you to everyone who submitted your questions. As always, when others pop up, feel free to reach out @Contently.