Content discovery will grow as marketers learn to market the marketing

The marketing game used to be so simple. Brands had money, a message, and a product to sell. Publishers had audiences. Many long lunches ensued, and nobody could quite agree which 50 per cent of the budget was being wasted.

The development of sophisticated digital marketing platforms in recent years has delivered transparency over performance, making it easier to determine genuine ROI. But digital platforms have done something even more powerful: they have shifted control into the hands of the brands.

Marketers still crave the value of the environment publishers can provide, but increasingly they are building their own content strategies. Sitting in the middle of this change is an emerging field of digital marketing: content discovery, a fast-growing market place dominated by companies like Outbrain and Taboola, which run powerful algorithms to provide serendipity for consumers.

They are fulfilling a new need: brands must now market their marketing. It’s a process Gartner calls amplification and Forrester simply calls distribution. Whatever the description, it is about being heard above the noise.

Content marketing

Last year, in its Digital Dashboard report, Adobe found that 77 per cent of marketers identified content marketers as a priority, according to Paula Parkes, Adobe head of marketing, APAC digital marketing.

Indeed, content marketing is surging in the region as companies come to appreciate the power of the brand as a publisher. According to Mark Jones, chief storyteller & founder of content marketing specialist Filtered Media, that’s because content helps brands build new bridges to engage clients directly.

(Mark Jones, Filtered Media)

“A brand’s customers are looking for authentic storytelling, not product pitches. Provide what they want and they’ll love you for it,” says Jones. “People are more likely to share stories than marketing messages.”

And the ecosystem is developing rapidly for one simple reason: content marketing works. Compared to traditional online brand activities — like display advertising, with its parsimonious click through rates — brands have discovered that most elusive of qualities: engagement.

Consider these stats:

• 72 per cent of marketers think branded content is more effective than advertising in a magazine; 69 per cent think it is superior to direct mail and PR (*Custom Content Council);
• Companies that blog 15+ times per month get 5x more traffic than companies that don’t blog (*Hubspot);
• Companies with an active blog report 97 per cent more leads (*Content+);
• 90 per cent of consumers find custom content useful and 78 per cent believe that organisations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships with them (*Custom Content Council);
• 68 per cent of consumers spend time reading content from a brand they are interested in (*Content Marketing Association).

Last year Liz Miller, senior VP marketing for the CMO Council, told Which-50 “People are out there researching all day long, whether they realise it or not. People are looking for the most relevant content they can find that helps them to make their decision faster.”

Or as Jillian Bowen, the content and social media manager at CPA Australia, asks “Why do we go and look at those feeds? It’s curiosity. It is not really just about looking for news. You actually want to check out what is happening across your network. It taps into the most honest human emotion: we like to know what is going on around us.”

For an organisation like the CPA, content marketing is a vital part of the tool kit. “We have a number of different audiences,” she says. “Our members are our audience and, yes, that’s a very important audience to us, but we are also policy influencers. We talk a lot to people in government.

“And we are looking at broadening our audience through acquisition. Basically we are talking to people anywhere in the world who want to learn and to think about business and their career.”

Brands as publishers.

The CPA’s approach is one that is familiar to Jones.

“We’re obviously witnessing the early days of a shift in corporate behaviour, as companies start acting like publishers. At the same time, they’re also thinking like brands — and that of course means any publishing activity must strategically support and grow the brand.”

It’s a delicate balance, but not an impossible one, he says.

Indeed the media business (from where Jones heralds) has a long history of balancing the needs of readers, and journalistic ethics, with the commercial realities of publishing. “So what’s encouraging for me to see is how brands are wrestling with this dynamic. Content marketing, or brand storytelling, is an opportunity to engage with customers, members and the community at large.”

Brands have moved beyond simple notions of using social media and online publishing as a vehicle for “two way” communications, he says. “Our clients want to foster a sense of shared meaning.”

The goal for the brands is to be better understood and to participate meaningfully in conversations that matter. “Clearly there are commercial benefits for being part of these conversations and influencing the way customers think about a brand.

“The exciting thing for me is seeing a genuine desire to get it right. Brands only want to publish interesting content that people actually want to read. And people only want to read interesting content, not blatant marketing messages. So it’s a win-win.”

First, however, there is the small matter of getting the story in front of the eyeballs — a point more and more marketers are starting to understand.

There may be a million stories in the naked city, but there still only 24 hours in the day. And as content marketing extends, and brands produce ever more content, competition for eyeballs will intensify.

“If you’re a brand, you need to be across all of the channels that help people find your stories. There’s no point spending your time, energy and money writing great stories, producing awesome videos, or recording a compelling podcast if no one gives them any attention,” he says.

And into the funnel we go.

In the simplest terms, you can view the digital marketing world as divided into two familiar camps: direct response and brand, says Ryan Skinner, senior analyst — content marketing at Forrester Research in London.

“The DM people are usually targeting a very low position into the funnel. They are looking for someone who is about to buy, has an interest in buying, or is in the shopping cart. These are basically people who can buy something today.”

Content marketers, however, are looking higher in the funnel, Skinner says. “You are just trying to engage people and get their interest. You might drive just as many clicks, but it’s not necessarily going to lead to a direct sale.”

The goal of content marketing is to take that initial interest and, if it’s a good fit with the right person, to hold on to them. “If your content sticks, you will be able to maintain a relationship through that content until you can build it up to a commercial transaction.”

And this is where the subtleties become important, says Skinner. “It is a different proposition fundamentally from a direct response, but it is also a different idea to just a pure brand proposition of pushing a message at people. This is something a little bit in between those two approaches,” he says. “It provides a little bit more measurability and direction toward a target than the straight brand awareness plays but it is a longer play than the direct response approach.”

There is another important difference: both the direct response and the brand strategies have well-developed, mature and well-understood processes and solutions already in the market. But the platforms to help marketers help consumers discover new content are only now emerging.

These companies bring multiple tools to the table. At their core they are analytics businesses — with powerful algorithms to help determine what is interesting to readers as opposed to simply what content might be related to what they are watching or reading (a typical current experience).

But they are also networks in their own right — aggregating publishing audiences and feeding content natively into the publishers’ environment.

Early days

The sector itself is still small. Both Outbrain and Taboola are private companies and, as best Which-50 can determine, their combined revenues are probably still under $US100 million.

However, each sees an opportunity as rich as search beyond the horizon.

The trick for both is to broaden the conversation beyond the tactics like SEO, where marketers comfortably hunt. And the first challenge is to help those marketers appreciate the different mind modes that search and discovery hope to fulfill.

That matters because, currently, search is the clear preference.

According to Adobe’s Parkes, “It’s interesting to talk about whether people are in content-discovery mode or search mode. From a B2B perspective by channel, we know that 80 per cent of people begin their research with a search, that tends to lead to other networks like LinkedIn for instance.”

(Paula Parkes, Adobe)

According to Nadav Rosenberg, General Manager (Europe) at Taboola, “When you think about search, you are targeting a person with intent. When you talk about marketers and you talk about the conversation funnel, intent is a very specific state. You have someone in the funnel who is aware and has made his decision. He has intent and wants to buy.

“Search is almost an inbound lead. In marketing, the easiest work is someone saying I want to do something. All you have to do is convert them.

“With content marketing you can approach people all over the funnel. You can prompt them for awareness. You can help push them into decision-making. You can point content at people with intent and then you can send content to people to help retain them.”

According to Ayal Steiner, GM, Outbrain ANZ, the challenge is finding the audience that will engage with the content you are providing. “When someone is in search mode they have intent. They are looking for something and they have a pretty good idea in their head what they are looking for. But the question is how do you get to people who don’t even know about your content, or are not searching for your term?”

He says this is important in content marketing, where often you are not trying to get a response now but rather to build your brand, and provide value.

(Ayal Steiner, Outbrain)

“Our philosophy is that you want to position yourself as someone who is helpful. You basically reap the rewards later down the track,” he says.

“The philosophy behind a discovery engine is simple: how do you find an audience that is not searching for you but might be very interested to discover your content? I go to Google to look for things I know exist, and I use something like Outbrain to discover things that I never knew existed.”

Both Rosenberg and Steiner stress the importance of understanding modes of thinking.

According to Steiner, “When someone is already reading online and they are reading the content, that is a very powerful moment. It’s the moment when they are much more relaxed, when they have time, when they are in deep reading mode.

”And that is the opportunity. To find them in that moment of time and suggest something to them. That’s what the algorithms are designed to do: to help you discover things you are interested in.”

The secret sauce is how that is done. The answer is not necessarily the answer people always expect — related content. In fact, it turns out that contextual relevance is not the most powerful determinant of what is interesting.

Instead, discovery engines like Outbrain and Taboola incorporate a variety of metrics to fuel serendipity — simple rules, such as the idea that people who read one type of story often read another. Or measuring the amount of time people spend on a particular stories and comparing to other stories that hold their attention — and, most importantly, doing this at scale.

For publishers, this is providing a powerful way to churn customers around inside their own networks and to bring new audiences to their properties — particularly if they have targets to fulfill in support of branded content campaigns. For brands, it is also proving a reliable way to measure and predict audience acquisition.

It has the feel of predictive analytics, and it is certainly a form of data-driven marketing — both watchwords in the lexicon of the modern marketer.

However, it is also a new category, and one of the things holding it back is a lack of clarity among marketers about measurability. The capabilities are there, although compared to a product like Doubleclick — Google’s almost–20-year-old ad-serving engine — there is more work to be done.

And this is proving a potential inhibitor to content marketing, according to some research.

Time for a pause

Adobe’s Parkes says “We are really focused on ‘if you can measure it you can manage it.’” For now, she says, the vendors coming from a digital advertising background are probably more advanced around measurement than some of the content-marketing players.

Concerns about the measurability and accountability of content marketing are starting to be reflected in budgets, according to Gartner analyst and marketing specialist Jake Sorofman. He told Which-50, “Marketers want the same transparency around measurability from content marketing that they are used to from digital advertising.”

(Jake Sorofman, Gartner)

“We have seen a slight decline in the priority of content marketing in the US. It is certainly not a lack of interest from companies, but rather it’s a reaction to the difficulty of calculating ROI. And in tracing the thread from investment to outcome that creates the true transparency that marketing requires, and which makes it economically sustainable.”

As a result, he says, the growth of content marketing as a line item took a hit in 2013. However he stressed that the interest and activity remain robust. Rather, he suggests marketers are simply pausing a little to allow the technology to catch up to their expectations for transparency.

Forrester’s Skinner holds a similar view: “Marketers aren’t convinced they yet have the answers they need about the transparency of results.”

However, he also says it’s only a young industry and it will get better.

Taboola’s Rosenberg is sanguine on the point. “Expecting a young industry to develop the sophisticated tools that people like Doubleclick have, when they have been developing them for 10 or 15 years, is unrealistic. It will take time.”

The content-discovery platforms do have a powerful ally as they build out their current measurement capabilities though — performance.

“The sector is doing well in getting performance. Some of these platforms have been able to deliver quite well in terms of targeted traffic towards different pages. They are able to move traffic around in a pretty predictable way,” says Forrester Research’s Skinner. But he also warns there is a limit to customer and consumer endurance.

The overall content discovery market (beyond just the market leaders) is not doing as well at the whole long-term trust-building issue, he says. “There is a concern there that they are burning through their goodwill and trust with visitors to pages, and that will eventually dry up if it’s not managed well.”

Poor targeting and referrals cause damage to the experience. It’s a reason the Outbrains and Taboola are investing so much trying to maintain the quality of their results — though each takes a difference approach.

Taboola is very advertiser-centric — its philosophy is that it should accept ads broadly and then use algorithms to ensure that consumers see only the right ads. Outbrain is more traditionally editorial-driven and excludes certain types of advertisers and categories.

But as you go lower down the food chain, the Viagra ads become more frequent and apparent.

“If this escalates and blows up, eventually it will have an impact on performance,” says Skinner.

Future proof

The Adobes, Oracles and Salesforces of the world have been building out their technology stacks aggressively in recent years, as each positions for dominance in the lucrative digital marketing field. And IBM also, although it tends to be less visible and less of an acquirer.

None of these companies have yet opened the chequebook and brought content-discovery capabilities into their mix. Yet it is the obvious way to close the loop — to provide not only the tools to the reach and measure the audience, but the very audience as well. That would be a powerful ecosystem.

Skinner, for one, believes it’s a matter of time. “In talking to some of the content marketing platforms, they are starting to implement this. After the Compendium acquisition I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s starting to work its way into Oracle.”

And it is unlikely to end there.

Andrew Birmingham is editor of Which-50. Connect with him on Linkedin

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