For brands that are engaged in content marketing, there is little doubt about the importance of creating and sharing owned content, such as a blog hosted on the brand’s site. What remains a big question is how to best showcase links to blog content to customers on various digital platforms (i.e, search, social, content recommendations). With just a blog name, a post title, and perhaps a small image and brief text preview, how does a brand maximize engagement with that piece of content?

We conducted a study on approximately 6,000 links to blog articles that brands paid to distribute on Outbrain’s network between January and April of this year to begin to explore this question. In particular, we were interested in how the name of the content source impacts engagement.

When a link is recommended by Outbrain below an article on a publisher’s site, it is presented with a headline alongside a source name (i.e., the name of the site where the recommended piece of content resides) and in some cases with a thumbnail image depending on the style of the publisher’s recommendations widget. The example below shows Outbrain’s text recommendation widget installed on NBCNews.com.

Here we see a recommendation for a post on Allstate’s blog. While some brands choose to designate the content source as a blog, others choose to display their brand name alone. Since we are always on a mission to generate the highest level of interest for consumers and engagement for our customers, we decided take our sample of 6,000 blog posts and find out which of these two presentations performs better. The results were very surprising!

It turned out the click-through engagement was 71% higher on links that listed only the brand name than on links that had the “blog” qualifier!

This is quite an interesting finding that evokes bigger questions about consumers’ perceptions of blogs. For better or for worse, we do judge books by their covers and a better understanding of just how and why these judgments are formed in consumers’ minds will be crucial for successfully packaging branded content in the digital world.

Ben Peacock, Outbrain’s Director of Brands and Agencies in the UK led a lively debate during which our digital experts shared some of their most recent executions, insights and expert tips on content creation. After a series of quick-fire presentations, the panelists were handed to our audience who engaged in a diverse Q&A that addressed some of the challenges that they face as marketers in an ever-changing digital landscape.

“How do you keep your consumer loyal?”

According to travel and lifestyle expert Tremayne Carew Pole, the answer is “bribery, give them something they want!”

Content Marketing has been one of the top trends over the past few months. But still some brands are not ready to be part of this very demanding field. A big question that the panel were asked to address was, “how do marketers create interesting and meaningful content and still effectively deliver their brand messages?”  Also hotly debated was, “what does it take to generate an effective content marketing strategy?” Content Marketing expert, Tony Hallet, shared some tips for small businesses:

→Follow your instincts
→Make it as easy as possible to contribute
→Blog (consistently)

“There is a tier of people who have the right instincts and are embarking on this content marketing journey now and for many of them the issue is, how do we create content in the first place”, said Tony.

“I kind of controversially like to say to people, you should do as much as you can in-house.”

Another question from the audience raised the matter of how companies can keep their visitors coming back to them once they’ve discovered a site. “It’s about authenticity”, said Dan’l Hewitt.

“Understand the story that you want to tell, why you are telling it and don’t just create more derivatives of existing content.”

The panelists generally agreed that quality content is the winner of the “reader attention” game, especially when it’s available in the right places and at the right time. “Great content… don’t be afraid of re-purposing it over multiple platforms and formats”, said Carew Pole.

But what is the best way to creatively adapt your content through all screens?

“Not having a mobile-optimized site now, for me, is a crime”

Ross Sleigh, who is without doubt, the Professor of Mobile, explained the urge to embrace the multi-device space, especially now that 67% of mobile subscribers own a smartphone. “If you have a business that has a lot of one-off purchases, having a mobile-optimised site is absolutely crucial to your business, said Ross. “That said, we find that the majority of people who have regular engagement with a brand or publisher, will prefer an app environment.”

Tony Hallet, also emphasized the importance of mobile by saying that smartphone usage together with a second screen (TV, laptop, tablet…) will still be one of the hottest trends in 5 years time.

In spite of the unstoppable growth and the number and variety of different mobile devices that connect consumers with brands, it seems that this is not yet reflected in advertising spend.

Source: eMarketeer, Oct 2012

So, what will form the digital landscape in the near future? “5G, said Carew Pole, “This will change how people use technology on the move. Speed is going to be the key.”

To be notified of future events, email us at infouk@outbrain.com

Content is ideally suited for legacy marketing because it helps brands avoid a fine line when engaging consumers with this kind of branding – and that is the fine line of condescension.

When invited to celebrate a brand’s anniversary or accomplishments, it’s tempting to ask, “why?” as a consumer.  Even for some of the most respected brands in the world, it’s not a given that consumers will have the same emotional response to legacy marketing as intended.  It can be hard to convey the real meaning of a brand’s legacy with a 60 second TV spot.   A somber-voiced narrator or rogues’ gallery of actors foisted off as regular ‘ole employees proud to be part of such an inspiring enterprise is a delicate act to nail, and if bungled even slightly can produce benign indifference in an audience, or worse, turn them off entirely.

With content, brands can create experiences as deep or as wide as necessary to paint a clearer picture, and rather than define an “activation” or expiration date for their legacy campaign, consumers can discover the content when they’re most receptive to it — when a friend shares it or while they’re engaged with content on another site, a different approach than blunt force TV campaigns.

One of my favorite examples of this kind of marketing is IBM’s “100 Icons of Progress”, an ode to innovation launched for their centennial that, two years removed from its inception, is still a compelling experience.

By telling genuinely interesting stories about tech innovations and discoveries, IBM was able to demonstrate more comprehensively and impressively than a display ad could what their brand is about.  While ostensibly the semi-obscure pioneers and their stories chronicled in “100 icons” always relate back to IBM in some way, the overall experience is one of genuine reverence for tech discoveries and the ways in which many of them impact daily life, right down to Predictive Crime Fighting, the Tracking of Infections Disease, and the unlikely birth of Magnetic Stripe Technology.

These stories take the often-dry world of math and science and humanizes it for people like me who frankly hated math growing up and suffered unhealed anxiety in the lab during science class.  Doesn’t hurt that the stories are beautifully designed, multimedia creations either.

The variety of content is important here as well.  IBM is able to tell the story of Nanotechnology and the story of The Self Serve Kiosk on the same platform with cohesion, and with the latter, demonstrate traits not commonly associated with IBM, like quirkiness.

So, if you want to engage consumers with your legacy, consider the following:

→ Assume You’re Boring – Not everyone gets out of bed for the invention of Automated Test Scoring, but finding out the IBM 805 Test Scoring Machine was used in the days of the Depression to help the government process larger numbers of job applicants?  Now that’s a little more interesting.  It’s the little corners of your history, the obscure tidbits that can draw people in and then illuminate them.

→ Let People In – I always associated IBM with corporate boardrooms in black and white (thanks to years of their commercials), but some of the quirkier “Icons of Progress” content helped me embrace a side of the brand I hadn’t before – an endearing nerdy streak.  When you invest in content, you give yourself the flexibility to showcase less well-known attributes that can surprise consumers who thought they knew you better.

→ Choose “Inspired” Over “Inspiring” Content Every Time – If you try to “inspire” audiences, good luck not being trite.  Consumers have seen it all before, and the harder you tug on the heartstrings and strain for profundity, the flatter you can fall. Don’t over-think how much you really know about consumers.  Your best bet?  Whatever inspires you.  You’ll find it’s much easier to produce content on what genuinely turns you on then what you think consumers will find inspiring, and it’ll probably be more inspiring too.

→ Go Back to the Start – This is where your legacy was forged, so why not revisit the early days before everything became so complicated?  The fundamental problem your company solved might have seemed small at the time, or better yet, not even a problem at all, but if you’re marking a significant anniversary, chances are you did something right, and your solution still resonates.  Why not share the story of how it started?  Don’t worry if it was  a happy accident – most of the good ones usually are.  Telling consumers your brand is “making the world work better” is nice, but what does that mean?  Telling real stories populated with real people trying to solve real problems paints a clearer picture.

With a who’s-who roster of tech companies in “Silicon Alley” participating like Google, TED, Foursquare, Fab, and tons more, we’re pretty psyched to join our fellow Silicon Alley-cats in hosting curious minds looking to find out more about what we do and why we do it.

Register for free and check out the schedule to pick out which sessions you want to go to.

We’re hosting our session at Outbrain HQ Thursday 2-3pm.

To learn more about the OpenCo, watch this short video with co-founders John Batelle and Brian Monahan.

You’ve seen and probably recognized these links and thumbnails before, sitting at the bottom of an article, assuring you “You May Also Like” them and warning of tell-tale signs of cancer and economic apocalypse. The fact that they often appear on well-known, trusted publisher sites can be more puzzling.

We know: we used to be partly responsible for these links at Outbrain, until we decided to move in the opposite direction and shed any marketers who tried to foist spam onto our publisher partners’ audiences. The truth is, the line between creating content to engage consumers and creating it to drive business is sometimes blurred. What we’ve learned at Outbrain is to err on the side of the users. If they stop trusting content recommendations, that trust won’t come back, and a viable business for publishers will go the way of the banner ad. Trying to extract value when promising to provide it is a sure-fire way to lose that trust.

For more on the importance of quality in content marketing, check out this Digiday feature by Jack Marshall.

The online marketing world is expanding – having the biggest bullhorn isn’t enough to dominate the conversation anymore. Instead, the most interesting voice prevails in attracting an engaged audience. Social media provides a low-cost, attainable channel for small business marketers to take advantage of in order to compete with the big brands in the content marketing sphere.

The Small Business Content Marketing Trends & Insights Report for 2013 found that SMB marketers use an average of five social media platforms, while enterprise peers use an average of four platforms. Many small business marketers have been early adopters in the social media game, leveraging this effective business and marketing tool in order to extend their reach. Social media has provided SMBs a level playing field to reach audiences and attract interest through focusing on content. By using an average of five platforms, SMBs are ensuring that their content isn’t caged into one insular group, lending more opportunity for it to spread to engaged audiences.

When managing social media channels, it is important to set a goal for your content. What do you want to achieve from with each post? Lead generation? Thought leadership? Brand awareness? Define your goal, adapt your writing and choose the social channel that will reach the right audience at the right time.

Creating content is the most labor-intensive task when executing a content strategy. Social media in particular burns up a lot of content quickly due to the quick pace of content published per minute. In order to stay top of mind (and top of news feed), repurposing content is key. It is important to keep in mind that “repurposing” and “reposting” mean two different things. While “reposting” allows a piece of content to appear on a news feed more often to increase impressions (that may not lead to consumption), “repurposing” adds a new value with a fresh perspective that can generate new appeal for new audiences. Schedule different posts to varying social networks of your repurposed content using social media management dashboards like Tweetdeck, HootSuite, and Sprout Social.

Before creating content, small business marketers should be aware of the types of content that draw in their most engaged target audience. Know who you are writing for, which channel they’d like to be reached through, and how they like their information represented. Written posts are great, but multimedia content can often be better. Get creative and produce an infographic, 6-second Vine, or podcast to allow your audience to consume your content in different ways.

As social media begins to take a larger role in the content strategy of small businesses, blogs still remain the most important social media channel, supported by others. SMBs now have access to thousands of people they were unable to reach before, sharing their voice, experience, and what they can offer.

Rather than extract value via traditional and costly marketing channels such as display and search, sharing great content creates value for consumers and is a more effective way for SMBs to engage their audience. We’re always looking to share ways in which SMBs can better engage their audience with interesting and great quality content.

To that end, we’re excited to announce the launch of our 2013 B2B Small Business Content Marketing report produced in partnership with the Content Marketing Institute.

The Content Marketing Institute’s recent North American survey revealed some surprising insights into the differences between B2B small business marketers and their enterprise peers. For example, small business marketers use more social media platforms than their enterprise peers and are planning to increase their content marketing budgets more than their larger, enterprise peers.

You may also be surprised to know B2B small business marketers use an average of five social media platforms, whereas their enterprise peers use four; and more than half create their own in-house content despite the challenges faced with constantly producing enough content.

These insights as well as the answers to

- What goals do B2B small business marketers have for content marketing?

- How do they measure content marketing success?

- How are they tailoring their content?

- What notable characteristics of a best-in-class B2B smal business content marketer?

can all be found in our  2013 B2B Small Business Content Marketing report.

DOWNLOAD IT NOW to take a closer look at what content marketing means to SMBs and what you could be doing too!

If you ask 10 marketers for a definition of “native advertising,” you are likely to get 10 different answers. While the concept is as old as advertising itself, what’s old is new again online and it seems everyone is rushing to redefine what it means to be native. As the river of venture capital dollars increasingly flows toward this buzzy new category, marketing platforms of all shapes and sizes are reaching out hoping to claim their seat on the raft. In many ways, the weeding-out process has already begun, and we’re seeing the offerings that facilitate real reader engagement rise to the top. Still, it’s worth looking at what makes them successful, and, ultimately, what it really takes to be native.

Our friends at Solve Media wrote a thoughtful white paper on this topic, and I’ve combined some of their thinking with my own ideas in order to come up with a holistic definition of native advertising. Here are the five criteria any true native ad should meet:

→Non-interruptive — Doesn’t interrupt the user flow and fits seamlessly into the experience

→In Stream and Contextual — Complements, rather than competes with, the content around it

→Preserves Trust — Engenders trust by delivering value as opposed to employing deceptive marketing tricks

→Maintains Brand Integrity — Takes the long view to craft and communicate a brand’s story authentically

→Adds Value — Supplements the experience by either entertaining, informing or engaging

The reality is that very few online marketing platforms — including many that stake a claim to being native — pass even the first test of the gauntlet by delivering a message without interrupting the user. Dan Greenberg of Sharethrough has written frequently as one of the leading proponents of native advertising. He alludes to “strategies built upon twin pillars of content and choice versus banners and interruption,” citing Sponsored Stories on Facebook and Promoted Tweets on Twitter as innovative in this regard. I disagree. The sponsored stories that appear in my Facebook News Feed usually don’t qualify as content, are rarely useful and frequently interrupt.

Promoted tweets aren’t much better — almost always promotional, thick with branding and rarely appearing as if they belong in my stream. And neither product offers “choice,” a key ingredient in establishing trust. Sponsored stories cannot be hidden like other stories that appear in the News Feed, and nothing can be edited out of your Twitter stream. Neither platform offers much choice, and in Facebook’s case, there’s less choice than users are otherwise accustomed to having.

When considering all five criteria, it turns out that content as a medium for delivering a brand’s message may be the only pure-play way to achieve them all. Good content doesn’t interrupt. In fact, it does the opposite, drawing you into a plot. It delivers value through entertainment, education, or some combination of both. Working our way down the list into the more nuanced characteristics, content can organically appear in places where it feels natural to discover. By entertaining or educating the reader and avoiding being overly promotional, it’s easy to engender reader trust. And it’s a natural way to tell a story.

There are several platforms innovating around delivering native advertising through content today, but they vary in purity based on the above criteria:

Publishers

The Atlantic produces some of the highest quality content of any publisher in business today. While they received their fair share of criticism for the Church of Scientology debacle, they have an enormous opportunity if they can retain their high standard of quality across their sponsored stories. This will be their challenge.

Combining branded sponsorship with viral content as well as anyone, BuzzFeed is setting a new standard for content marketing. Context of sponsorships and brand adjacency questions may pose longer-term challenges.

Forbes’ Brand Voices is innovative and shows enormous potential as a content marketing platform for brands to communicate directly with customers. Worth mentioning, their use of frequent homepage takeovers and uninitiated pre-rolls feels disingenuous with native aspirations.

Platforms

Aiming to build a native ad network, Sharethrough is setting a super high standard for ad quality, and it shows. The line between content and advertising can be easily blurred, though, and both interruptive-ness and context are open questions with their offering.

While Solve Media’s captcha replacements are a big improvement from the status quo and an attractive opportunity for brands, prompting a user to engage in a type-in exercise is almost always interruptive from any activity in which they were previously engaged.

Outbrain drives discovery of article and video content through personalized recommendations that appear in the footer of online article pages. Maintaining quality has been a challenge as marketers have tried to use it as a platform to distribute spammy content.

Committing to native is a tricky business, and there are more than a few traps and temptations lurking around the bend. Several content recommendation “imitators” have arrived on the scene over the past year, perhaps underestimating the importance of efficient targeting and high quality content to engender the reader trust that differentiates these offerings. Without that trust, these lookalikes will eventually revert to the least common denominator and become just another ad network, albeit one disguised as content.

“The natives are getting restless” are words originally uttered by Dr. Moreau in the 1933 sci-fi horror film, “The Island of Lost Souls.” However, the “natives” in question weren’t natives at all, but rather the human/animal hybrid results of Dr. Moreau’s experiments. Similarly, most online advertising platforms claiming inclusion in the native family today aren’t native at all, bearing only one or two elements of the full scope, therefore being hybrid experiments. Those platforms that do meet the full standard are in prime position to capture mindshare by delivering authentic experiences and offering brands new and unique ways to reach their audiences.

Josh Guttman is a Senior Vice President at Outbrain, a content discovery platform. Follow him on Twitter at @JGut.

While the data Chartbeat showcases is incredibly useful, the conclusion they are drawing from it is misplaced. User engagement is not a fixed asset that designers and marketers can plan around. In fact it’s the reverse: the design and structure of the page, and especially the decision of where to feature content versus where to feature ads, dictates user engagement and has the potential to change the heatmap Chartbeat has created

I’ll provide an anecdote to help illustrate this point. When we started working with publishers at Outbrain about five years ago, the article footer area beneath the fold was basically a superfund site. Publishers were using that real estate to dump as many sponsored links and direct response offers as they could (“Lose 30 lbs with Acai Berry Diet!”, “Billionaire Predicts Financial Ruin!”, etc.) to monetize below the fold.

We came to them with a different proposition; the end of an article was the perfect place to feature additional content and help users “turn the page” to another great story. When we first launched in 2008, the click-through rate we recorded on links to additional content was about 1 percent. But over time, we saw this engagement metric rise dramatically, on some sites over 5-10 x its initial baseline.

While much of this progress was due to algorithmic advances we made in selecting what content to feature, another more subtle shift was also apparent: we were retraining users to look at that part of the page, to trust it again as an area to discover something worthwhile and interesting. We were reclaiming the land for users and making it vibrant again.

We saw evidence of this in our data. We saw that 30-40 percent of people who clicked on our content recommendations would scroll to the end of the subsequent article and then click another one, building trust in the experience and using this part of the page repeatedly for serendipitous navigation.

The lesson we learned was that the tie between user engagement and page position is not fixed – it can be molded and changed by the publisher. Publishers can breathe life into any area of their page by consistently using it for the one reason people come to their site in the first place – for reading, watching and finding great content. The opposite is of course also true. Cordoning off parts of a page for material that users find irrelevant—or worse, false and untrustworthy—is a sure way to create a barren desert that will take time to resuscitate down the road.

There is a very positive message in this learning for advertisers, too, in that they can actively participate in the ecosystem that drives and molds user behavior. The rise of digital content marketing, including brands’ growing sophistication in creating, curating and aggregating world class content, allows them to work side by side with publishers to produce value for both parties in the right way– by producing value for the end user. At the end of the day, the opportunity for marketers is much larger than simply locating user engagement on a heatmap and placing a banner there – it’s the ability to create that user engagement themselves, through the production and amplification of content those users will love.