Category: ideas

Predictive content marketing, anyone?

computer-shopper-crystal-ballContent marketing as we know it is inefficient, subjective and ineffective.

That’s according to “research” conducted by an inbound-marketing company and written about in Forbes last fall.

(A caveat here: Always be suspicious of research conducted by a company with a self-interest in the topic and with a solution to the problem it uncovers. Such is the case with this report. But still, the thought it raises is intriguing, so please stick with me.)

According to the CEO of the inbound-marketing company that conduced the study, most content marketers don’t know what they’re doing. They’re taking the old-fashioned “spray and pray” or shotgun approach to sending stories out into the ether and hoping something sticks. These content marketers, according to the CEO, take a “subjective ‘hit or miss’ approach is a ‘miss’ 80 to 90 percent of the time.”

Furthermore, writes Forbes’ Mikal E. Belicove: “Only 10 to 20 percent of a company’s website content drives 90 percent of its web traffic, and only half a percent of a website’s content drives more than 50 percent of its traffic.”

Those numbers don’t sound very impressive, do they?

Predictive analytics to the rescue

The solution? Something called predictive analytics, a method of data-mining to determine what consumers will like, based on their purchasing history, reading preferences and myriad other data variables. It’s akin to predictive personalization, which as anyone who’s ever purchased from Amazon knows, has been around for a while.

But the idea of predicting what types of marketing content will connect with people is apparently still a young and unproven discipline. (Update: After publishing this post, I learned via @KarineJoly of a 14-week Higher Ed Experts course on this very subject coming up this fall.)  The aforementioned CEO was hyping a new predictive analytics tool for content marketing, but a quick check of the company’s website shows no sign of the tool, just a request to “check back soon.”

So we aren’t in the marketing world version of Minority Report just yet, and no brand (to my knowledge, at least) has developed a pre-cog to perfectly predict what you will read or watch.

Gaining traction

No one yet knows just how well predictive analytics will work. Will we buy 100 percent of the stuff marketed to us 100 percent of the time? Will marketers be able to accurately predict our needs, wants and desires so accurately by using sophisticated data-mining and -analytics techniques?

Who knows? But the idea is gaining traction.

In Advertising Analytics 2.0, an article in the March 2013 Harvard Business Review, Wes Nichols suggests a shift toward more sophisticated, data-driven approaches to content marketing. “Seismic shifts in both technology and consumer behavior during the past decade have produced a granular, virtually infinite record of every action consumers take online,” he writes. “Add to that the oceans of data from DVRs and digital set-top boxes, retail checkout, credit card transactions, call center logs, and myriad other sources, and you find that marketers now have access to a previously unimaginable trove of information about what consumers see and do.”

In this new world, marketers who stick with traditional analytics 1.0 measurement approaches do so at their peril. Those methods, which look backward a few times a year to correlate sales with a few dozen variables, are dangerously outdated. Many of the world’s biggest multinationals are now deploying analytics 2.0, a set of capabilities that can chew through terabytes of data and hundreds of variables in real time. It allows these companies to create an ultra-high-definition picture of their marketing performance, run scenarios, and change ad strategies on the fly. Enabled by recent exponential leaps in computing power, cloud-based analytics, and cheap data storage, these predictive tools measure the interaction of advertising across media and sales channels, and they identify precisely how exogenous variables (including the broader economy, competitive offerings, and even the weather) affect ad performance. The resulting analyses, put simply, reveal what really works. With these data-driven insights, companies can often maintain their existing budgets yet achieve improvements of 10% to 30% (sometimes more) in marketing performance.

College and university marketing budgets, which are non-existent by multinational conglomerate standards, have little capacity for the kind of computing horsepower needed to “chew through terabytes of data.” But maybe we could partner with our computer science departments and develop a way to leverage the educational experience of our students with the practical needs of data mining for marketing.

A recent post by Mars Cyrillo, product and marketing director at CI&T, notes that even the most sophisticated approaches to what he calls “adaptive” marketing remain primitive and run on rule-based algorithms. (Think of Amazon’s “People who bought [the product you just purchased] also bough [a list of products Amazon would love for you to purchase],” and you get the idea.) But as you know from your own online purchases, the approach doesn’t always work. “Humans.” he writes, “are just too complex to fit basic rules.”

Planning for the predictive future

So not even Amazon has perfected predictive marketing.

Over the next five years or so, Cyrillo predicts, “Building applications that close the gap in a seamless way is where the greatest Digital Marketing opportunities lie.” He suggests we start planning for the predictive content marketing future now by “building experiments now on how to close this gap in some of your landing pages, built with responsive design in order to fit nearly ‘any screen.'”

Also: “Give more flexibility to your users so that they can interact more, and consider bringing your social posts to your website so that they are blended with your other content, and then collect more data. Then look at what you are getting with a different lens, or prism.”

This white paper (PDF) from Ricoh — the copy machine company — also offers seven steps for using predictive modeling in your content marketing strategy. (I discovered this white paper in my online quest for more information about predictive content marketing. But I’m not in the market for a new photocopier, Ricoh, so if there was some sort of predictive algorithm at work to make your white paper findable to your target market, it didn’t pay off this time. I guess we’re still in the hit-or-miss phase of content marketing.)

The enchanting yes; the essential no

yes_manJust over a year ago, I was riding a conference high. You know the kind; that afterglow that comes following a terrific professional development opportunity. In this instance, I had just returned from the 2013 CASE Summit with a head full of ideas and a spirit lifted by thought-provoking sessions and inspiring keynote speeches.

One particularly inspiring keynote was Guy Kawasaki‘s talk on the topic of “enchantment.”

Enchantment is also the title of one of Guy’s recent books, which I purchased to read on the flight home. It’s a great little book. It’s a quick read and one that I ought to re-read on occasion.

But there’s one part of Enchantment, and Guy’s talk, the left me disenchanted — and that is the idea he espouses about making “yes” the default response to requests. “Defaulting to yes” is one of the keys to becoming more likable — and that, according to Kawasaki, opens the door to greater success.

“A yes buys time, enables you to see more options, and builds rapport,” Kawasaki writes in Enchantment. “By contrast, a no response stops everything. There’s no place to go, nothing to build on, and no further options are available.”

There’s some truth to this. And being on that conference high, I decided to default to yes more often in my work and life affairs. I didn’t go so far as Jim Carrey’s character in Yes Man. But I went far enough to cause myself a great degree of discomfort.

Just say ‘no’?

Still, I think there’s something to be said for “no.”

Here’s the thing: I’ve never been much of a “yes” person. And that’s gotten me into trouble more than a few times with internal clients, bosses, my family, my wife (God bless her), what few friends I have and the general public.

But I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea to uncritically say “yes” to every request that comes down the pike. (To his credit, Kawasaki suggests that people like me could default to “not yet” instead of “yes.” So there might be some middle ground.) Saying yes too often will lead to dilution, lack of focus and exhaustion.

In my opinion, it’s important for people in our business to take a critical view when it comes to certain requests for assistance from internal clients.

Our job as marketers within higher ed organizations is twofold: We provide expertise in the areas of branding, marketing, public relations, graphic design, online communication and so forth. But we also serve as internal marketing and communications consultants.

We provide the most value to our organizations when we apply our expertise to a situation — that is, our understanding of the principles of good communication, branding, PR and marketing — and help our clients find the right solutions to their marketing and communications challenges.

Too often, however, clients come to us with their idea of a solution already developed. They want us to execute their ill-formed visions — produce a brochure, write a press release or speech, slap up a website — no questions asked. They prefer we not serve them and the institution by consulting — by helping them bring more clarity to their thoughts about whatever problem they think they need to solve.

After all, our clients aren’t marketing experts. We are. And we owe it to them to offer that expertise — even if they aren’t coming to us for our expertise, but to merely fulfill a request. (For more on this philosophy, see this post from way back in 2009: 3 simple questions for communicators.)

There’s another problem with saying yes too often if you’re a manager. When you commit yourself to “yes,” you’re really committing your team. That’s unfair and forces further trade-offs down the line where the really brilliant, creative work happens — or could happen, if managers would say “yes” to non-essential projects more often.

Essentialist angst

Anyway, I have tried to follow, more or less, Kawasaki’s advice and default to yes during the past year. I’m not sure I’ve been as successful as others who might have more of an inclination toward people-pleasing. But I’ve tried. Really, I have.

And then I started reading this other book: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown.

McKeown is a big fan of the “no.” Not “no for no’s sake,” though. He’s really more of a fan about deciding what is absolutely essential for us to say “yes” to. McKeown believes that saying yes to less is the key to success.

(For more about McKeown’s book, I recommend you read these reviews by Karine Joly — who recommended I read Essentialism — and Donna Talarico, who has also chronicled her struggles with a default-to-yes approach.)

In many ways, McKeown’s approach is a 180 to Kawasaki’s. And for me, it’s more attractive.

Because the business we are in — branding and marketing — should be about saying no more.

We live in a world of clutter and over-communication. Higher ed brands are especially guilty of wanting to communicate every little feature of every degree program. Have you sat in on a university administrator’s PowerPoint presentation lately? Slides are jam-packed with cluttered, disorganized, unfocused information. Presenters and their presentations meander. Brochures runneth over with fatuous verbiage. A good 90 percent of that shit needs to go. (McKeown has a 90 percent rule that is worth thinking about.)

And yet, the world pulls us toward “yes.” Yes to more. Yes to dilution and bloat. Away from clarity and specificity and the essential.

When you say “no” to requests — or ways to do things that are unessential, that don’t add value — you can be seen as uncooperative and disagreeable. You’re not a team player. In fact, you’re more of a team player than those who want to pile on unnecessary, non-essential stuff.

A middle way?

So here’s the conundrum: The enchanting yes vs. the essential no.

It seems to me that the right path is a combination of the two approaches.

First, follow McKeown’s advice and winnow our choices down to only the best options for us. This is where McKeown’s 90 percent rule kicks in. It works something like this:

  • List all of the opportunities for you to say “yes” to something — a project, an event, a purchase, a speaking opportunity, a new social media channel, a short term commitment, long term commitment, whatever. List it all.
  • Score the value of each opportunity to you and your mission on a scale of 0 to 10.
  • Eliminate everything that doesn’t score a 9 or 10.

Then and only then should we apply Kawasaki’s advice to say yes.

This follows a path Michael Fienen discusses in a 2012 .eduGuru post about Pinterest. That post is not really about Pinterest. It’s really a platform for Fienen to preach his mantra to “do less better.” That sums up the point of Essentialism quite well, I think.

It’s my tendency to default to McKeown’s approach. But in a world that continuously demands us to say “yes,” it’s tough to be a no man.