Break out your Alice Cooper vinyl collection, because school is out for summer. But just because kids across the country are taking a break from the classroom, that doesn’t mean you should let up on your own education. Keeping up with the latest content marketing developments is a year-round effort, but the Content Marketing Weekly has you covered.
This week we’re checking in on the content marketing news and updates that will have the biggest impact on your own strategies, from the growing interest in CDPs to the worst content marketing advice you’re likely to hear.
What’s a CDP? Does Your Company Need One?
It seems like the digital landscape gets more complicated every year, with new platforms to consider. A single person could have multiple connected devices they use on a regular basis – not to mention all of the various accounts they have stretched out across social media networks, mobile applications and branded websites. One person, almost limitless digital identities.
How can you keep track of it all? Well, the Digital Marketing Depot seems to think customer data platforms (CDPs) are the solution. CDPs purport to consolidate data from disparate sources, giving marketers a full picture of who their target audience is and what they’re doing across a wide variety of platforms.
Search Engine Land gives a (very) brief rundown on CDPs, but to really get the full scoop, you’ll need to download Digital Marketing Depot’s entire 48-page report.
Read all about it here.
38 Experts Share the Worst Content Marketing Advice
The beauty of the internet, at least from a professional marketer’s perspective, is that you can find expert insight from a wide variety of industry veterans and thought leaders. Valuable tips and tricks from luminaries like Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin are a mere click away. The sheer amount of knowledge that’s shared throughout the community helps level the playing field and makes it possible for the little guys to carve out a place for themselves online.
Of course, not all the info you’ll come across is helpful. In fact, some of it can be downright detrimental to your digital marketing efforts.
Don’t want to get led down the wrong path? Well, over at the Content Marketing Institute, Ann Gynn has compiled some of the worst content marketing advice you might hear from supposed “experts.”
Some of the examples Gynn lists should immediately raise a red flag (“Make it up as you go” is probably pretty bad advice, regardless of your industry). But other tips seem sensible at first glance, but are too rigid to really account for the nuances of content marketing.
“Fill up the funnel,” for instance, sure sounds like a good move if you want to create content to reach audiences at different phases of the buyer journey. If you focus too much on simply checking a box, however, you’ll miss out on opportunities to engage potential customers and build up a real relationship.
Mary Meeker: Social Media Usage is Flat Globally, Mobile Ad Spend Continues to Climb
No digital marketing strategy is complete without a plan of how to engage audiences over social media channels and effectively promote your brand. If you thought there were no limits to how big social media communities could get, Mary Meeker is here to hit you with a bit of a reality check.
As Marketing Land recently reported, Meeker’s latest internet trends report revealed that social media growth is slowing down across the world. While global social media usage has increased 1% in 2019, that’s a far cry from the aggressive growth rates seen as recently as 2017.
On top of that, several major social media platforms, including Facebook, WeChat and Snapchat, saw a drop in the percentage of users who sign in on a daily basis. Are people starting to mentally check out of those social media channels? It’s probably too early to tell, but it’s definitely a trend we’ll want to keep our eyes on.
Elsewhere, Meeker found that the total number of internet users continues to grow worldwide. More than half of the Earth’s entire population is now online. We’re so close to “Johnny Mnemonic” territory, it’s not even funny. Add in a couple of laser whips and a hyper-intelligent, cybernetically enhanced dolphin or two, and we’re basically already there.
So, what should we make of all this? Marketing Land suggests that the combination of stagnating social media engagement and increase in overall internet usage should encourage digital marketers to shift their attention away from social media networks and focus more on channels like email marketing.
Head on over to Marketing Land to read the full breakdown of Meeker’s report.
And with that, we close the book on another edition of the Content Marketing Weekly. Don’t worry, we’ll be here all summer long, dishing out all the most relevant digital marketing news, developments and insights.
