CMO Insights with Miko Levy – Content Marketing Strategy

The last “CMO Insights” article was full of practical knowledge about content marketing delivered by Daniel Glickman. Today we present you another dose of valuable information which will help you grow your business online.

Our guest, Miko Levy is Vice President of Customer Acquisition at Outbrain. Miko is responsible for the global growth and expansion of Outbrain’s self-serve business, overseeing online customer acquisition, retention and account management.

Trends in the online environment changes constantly. What is the best time span to plan a content strategy?

Think of your content strategy in the same way you think of your business strategy. It is core to all your marketing efforts, but always evolving. Your customer’s needs should define unchanging principles of your content strategy, but you should be in a regular cycle of planning, executing, learning, and optimizing. In short, you should think about your content strategy from the get go.

Social media offers a plethora of distinct platforms with huge potential. Is it better to be present on most of them or to focus on few the most crucial ones?

Success in social media is about two things; focus and authentic conversations. Assuming you’ve already done the research on which platforms your customers are actually on, you should only be present on as many social platforms as your team actually has bandwidth to engage in real conversations. In other words, if you only have time to converse with your customers on Facebook, then it’s ok to just be on Facebook.

What KPIs should be considered in a performance oriented content strategy?

In the practice of performance content marketing you need to have KPIs that drive measurable business results, but also have smaller KPIs that role up into the larger ones. The higher the customers are in your sales funnel, the “softer” the KPI is going to be. For example, a visitor’s scroll depth, how far down the blog article they move their mouse, is an excellent indication of whether or not your readers actually read the article, even if they are not entering their credit card number at the end of it. This KPI should lead to another KPI that is more down the funnel, which eventually leads to your business results KPI. For example, newsletter sign ups or “contact us” form submissions could eventually turn into paying customers or high value readers if you nurture them with valuable personalized content. While one KPI for your content strategy could be sales or revenue per thousand impressions (RPM), there are lots of actions that lead up to a that business KPI that must also be measured and optimized.

What type of content is more effective? Directly related to a company’s profession or rather involving trending topics? Or maybe something in between?

The content that answers a customer need and is created with a specific customer persona in mind often performs the best. Think about going to the Pampers website and getting tips from a professional about the development of your Toddler. It doesn’t talk about how great their products are but instead addresses a need of a parent whose Toddler just started walking. If Pampers keeps doing this over time, what do you think would be their audience’s brand of choice when the time comes to buy their next package of diapers?

What are the most effective tricks to attract wider audience with your content?

When it comes to any form of marketing, it’s not about getting anyone to click, just the right people. Your content’s headline is critical to how people engage with it. Whether you’re Tweeting, sharing, or Amplifying with Outbrain you should always have multiple headlines that you plan to test to see which one gains the best response. For example, from testing thousands of tests across our network of publishers we’ve learned that Headlines with bracketed clarifications (e.g., [PHOTOS], [INTERVIEW], [VIDEO], [SLIDESHOW], etc.) performs much better in terms of click-through-rate (CTR), as well as down the funnel cost-per-acquisition (CPA), while addressing the reader in the headline using “You”, “Your”, or “You’re” will actually decrease both of these metrics. Of course CTR and CPA are just a couple of metric of success and every marketer needs to follow the most relevant KPIs for them.

If you were to give three most important hints on content marketing, what would it be?

• Create content with a specific customer persona in mind
• Focus on creating content for that ONE persona at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
• Measure everything & look at your numbers regularly. You won’t know what’s working without using numbers to lead your way.

Have any question to us or our guest? Leave us a comment!