Dear Reader,
Hi from a hot and humid New York City!
Are you building sand castles or planning for the fall?
I’m finishing projects and getting organized for the post-Labor Day back to work mode.
At Staples, I watched a fifth grader carefully select a lavender 3 ring binder and other color coordinated supplies.
By contrast, I scanned every aisle for products to inspire my creativity. I left with the same boring products I always do: a package of graph paper, a composition notebook and 6 inch by 4 inch note cards.
Over the years, I’ve purchased numerous bound notebooks. But their beauty stifles me. They make me feel that every word I write must be perfect as it leaves my pen.
Instead, I prefer cheap graph paper composition notebooks for my morning journaling. They set my mind and handwriting free to get into the flow. So, my handwriting can be sloppy and the content can be crap. What matters is that my hands keep moving to get my writing in shape.
Table of Contents | Volume 10, Issue 35
- Marketing Lesson of The Week
- Content Communicates – How Do You Reuse Existing Content?
- Social Scene – TikTok Goes Local
- Marketing Reads – Fall Conference Season
- Mark Your Calendar
Marketing Lesson of The Week
► How Tracking Your Progress Helps To Build Better Habits
Last week, my husband and I watched Ken Burns’s two-part, four-hour documentary of Benjamin Franklin. It mentioned Franklin’s process for changing his habits.
Based on his reading, Franklin selected 13 virtues: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity and Humility.
To improve his habits, Franklin focused on one virtue per week for a total of 13 weeks and 4 cycles per year. He tracked his behavior daily using a simple worksheet he created and recorded his faults with a black mark.
Finding the exercise more difficult than he anticipated, Franklin wrote:
“I enter[e]d upon the execution of this plan for self-examination, and continu[e]d it with occasional intermissions for some time. I was surpris[e]d to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined; but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.” (Source: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (available for free through Project Gutenberg))
Recently I read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. Like Franklin, she created a year-long plan for change. Each month had a theme and focused on a set of small, related changes aimed to make Rubin feel happier.
Like Franklin, Rubin found that:
To achieve change requires tracking your progress towards your goals every day.
Actionable Marketing Lesson
Measure the results of each marketing campaign against its goals and past experience (where it exists). Without monitoring and quantifying your marketing, you won’t know if it succeeded or not.
Actionable Marketing Tips
- Include a relevant call-to-action (CTA) with tailored UTM tracking codes.
- Establish the process and tracking for each campaign before it goes live. Otherwise you’re left with whatever data exists. (Note: This often extends beyond the marketing department.)
► How Can You Change Your Personal Habits?
Before deciding what habits or behaviors you want to change, realize that most of us have a rosier view of ourselves than how others may see us. Franklin discovered this when he started tracking his behavior.
Don’t let this set you back!
Instead follow Warren Buffet’s advice to his personal pilot, Mike Flint:
- Write down your top 25 priorities.
- Circle your top 5 goals from this list.
- Ruthlessly focus on the top 5 goals and consider everything else your “Avoid-At-All-Cost-List.” While it’s not always possible, this is the “Just Say No” approach to activities that aren’t aligned with your goals.
Like Franklin and Rubin, the key to successfully achieving your goals is to limit the number of changes. Buffet focused on 5 goals.
For each of your goals:
- Decide what outcome you want to achieve. Make it as detailed and measurable as possible.
- Define the specific tasks needed to reach your goal. Also, determine the amount of time required to complete each one. If you’re not sure about the timing of each task, start with an estimate and refine it based on your tracking.
- Set up a spreadsheet like Franklin’s hand drawn version or download an app or other tracking tool to monitor your daily activity. Keep the format and task as simple and quick to do as possible or you won’t use it.
If you’re interested in reading more about habits, check these books:
- David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
- James Clear, Atomic Habits
- Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People
Content Communicates
How Do You Reuse Existing Content So People Actually Want To Consume It?
In a content saturated world where information bombards consumers from a variety of platforms, devices and environments, your audience doesn’t want another piece of me-too, poor quality content.
So, how can you reuse your best quality content to attract additional readers, viewers and/or listeners who actually want it while remaining consistent with your brand?
These 3 examples show you how to reuse your existing content. After examining them, decide how to apply these tactics to your content marketing.
► The Economist Offers Its Print Content As An Email Newsletter
When I was head of online marketing for The Economist, we sent 2 weekly newsletters every Thursday. The content came directly from the print edition’s summaries: The World This Week: Politics and The World This Week: Business.
The only difference:
The email newsletter format and digital advertising.
My bosses considered this content of no value since it had been published elsewhere. By contrast, our email subscribers loved and wanted the content. From their perspective, the newsletters contained free Economist quality content without the print edition expense.
Further, this reused Economist content generated measurable revenue:
- Newsletter advertising always sold out and
- List rental, acceptable at the time, yielded about $15,000 per year.
Actionable Marketing Tip
- Assess where and in what format you can distribute existing quality content to new segments based on their content consumption habits.
► The Economist Reuses Content For Its Summer Double Issue
This summer, The Economist introduced a Summer Double Issue (July 30th – August 12th 2022). It contained an incremental 64 pages of long-form, immersive features from their sister publication, 1843.
The Economist Editor-in-Chief, Zandy Minton Beddoes, wrote a short note to introduce the new double issue at the top of the Table of Contents.
With its own cover and Table of Contents the Summer Reading section appeared inside the magazine between pages 38 and 39. This allowed them to layout the two sections separately.
The Summer Reading issue provides The Economist readers with quality in-depth content on other topics of interest. The content feels more relaxed by The Economist standards. Laid out more like consumer magazines, the stories have beautiful, story-specific photos and bold pull quotes.
From a business point of view, the Summer Issue yields measurable benefits:
- Provides Economist quality content with no incremental cost;
- Eliminates an issue of the magazine saving money on creation, printing and distribution; and
- Offers advertising opportunities to a different set of brands.
Actionable Marketing Tip
- Assess if content exists that can be reused to attract new audiences, provide new sales opportunities, and/or save costs.
► The New Yorker Curates Its Extensive Archive Of Content
The August 29, 2022 edition of The New Yorker Magazine is entitled, “Celebrity: An Archival Issue.” Unified by its topic, the articles come from its deep archives.
While each article clearly states the original publication date, the editorial team changed the article title.
For comparison, here’s how the original article appears on The New Yorker’s website:
Actionable Content Marketing Tips
- Extend the longevity of your content archive by curating existing content around a specific topic to provide a new context for the information.
- Audit existing content on a regular basis to ensure it remains up-to-date and continues to yield optimal results.
- Extend consumption of existing content by adding other content formats. The New Yorker did this on its website version by including an audio version of the text.
- Add appropriate metadata to existing content to ensure it remains findable. Include content formats such as images, video and audio. For example, NPR hired librarians to add relevant metadata to their existing archives to extend future use.
Social Scene
TikTok is testing a “Nearby” video feed on the For You page in Southeast Asia. This feature shows videos made in your area and allows users to tag content with location. (Insider Intelligence August 25, 2022)
By comparison:
- Snapchat added “Snap Maps” in 2017. It provides a heatmap of users and public stories by specific location and has search functionality.
- Instagram let users see a map of an area when they tapped on a photo’s location tag earlier this year. Then, they can filter the map by content or businesses.
Adding the “Nearby” feature enables TikTok to tap into:
- Local advertising opportunities,
- Social commerce, and
- In-app purchasing.
Beyond the impact on YouTube, Google is concerned about TikTok’s “Nearby” functionality. Based on an unreleased internal Google survey of US users from 18 to 24 (and confirmed by TechCrunch,) Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Google’s Knowledge and Information organization, made these points:
- Almost 40% of young people turn to TikTok or Instagram for local information instead of Google Maps or Search and
- Younger people prefer more immersive and visually rich forms of search and discovery.
In addition, TikTok is expanding its Connected TV (aka: CTV) presence. It has apps for Samsung, Fire TV, Vizio and Google TV.
To support this new CTV effort, TikTok posted a job opening for a Product Manager of User Growth in Los Angeles. The job will focus on driving TikTok’s Connected TV product strategy, value proposition and growth.
Why is TikTok expanding to CTV?
CTV ad spending is projected to total $18.89 billion in 2022 and to grow to $38.83 billion by 2026 but attribution issues could reduce these forecasts. (eMarketer – August 26, 2022)
Furthermore, CTV helps TikTok competitively since YouTube viewership is migrating to CTV from mobile. In 2022, YouTube mobile viewership will drop below 50% while CTV will account for 36.4% of its viewership.
TikTok’s biggest challenge going forward:
Political scandals related to user privacy and Chinese ownership (ByteDance.)
Actionable Social Media Marketing Tip
- Understand how your audience uses social media and other digital platforms including Google and Amazon. Specifically pay attention to how different age groups use these platforms and devices to find information they deem trustworthy. Since this can have a major impact on your marketing.
Marketing Reads
With fall conferences around the corner, read these articles to get the most value from them.
Reads For Fall Conference Season
Content Marketing World Speaker Party 2019
What do you do if you don’t have any budget for attending a conference IRL? Instead of pouting, check these tips. (BTW–I learned them through experience!)
► Content Marketing Writing Secrets: Better, Stronger, Faster
Download this free eBook from Content Marketing Institute to sharpen your storytelling, speed your writing process, and strengthen the impact of every word.
Also receive a $100 discount to attend Content Marketing World 2022, September 13-16 in Cleveland.
Plan Ahead: Mark Your Calendar
► Accelerating Your CX Transformation Workshop Led by Kane Simms
September 1, 2022 9:00am ET (Virtual – Free Registration Required)
► Content Marketing World
September 13-16th in Cleveland, OH.
► Adrian Hon speaks at Betaworks
September 21, 2022 6:30 pm – Live event
Author of You’ve Been Played! How Institutions Use Games to Control Us.
Registration and vaccination proof required.
► VOICE22
October 10-13th, 2022 in Arlington, VA.
Join me and the top people working to transform the user experience. Use code: Cohen20 for 20% off of any ticket.
► MarketingProfs B2B Forum
October 12-14th, 2022 in Boston.
Ann Handley brings B2B back to Boston with 49 Sessions. 4 Keynotes and shenanigans!
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Happy Marketing,
Heidi
P.S.: Want Heidi Cohen to contribute a quote or other commentary to your next article, presentation, video, research and/or book? Then hit reply to this email and ask.
P.P.S: Did you miss last week’s AMG Newsletter? Previous newsletters can be found in the AMG Newsletter Archive.