Contently provides Fortune 500 companies (such as Facebook and Walmart) with content marketing expertise. We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Contently’s distribution team to discuss how they help these companies achieve brand awareness through content marketing.
What are the attributes of a brand that will succeed with content marketing?
They’re deeply-data driven, with a strong content strategy derived from their buyer personas and audience insights on what type of content those buyers crave. They focus on targeting the people that matter to their brand, and constantly optimize their content to take advantage of new opportunities.
How do you define success?
Success depends on the business goal that a brand is trying to achieve. For brands seeking engagement and brand awareness, for instance, we use Contently Analytics to measure proprietary engagement metrics like Average Finish, Average Time Spent with Content, Engagement Rate, and Return Visitors. Or if a brand’s goal is lead conversion, we examine how content drives conversions and down-funnel results.
What have been your biggest pains with the native advertising process?
Being dependent on an account manager was problematic because we didn’t have full control to make changes on our timeline, limiting us from achieving the lowest CPC possible.
Further, the areas in which we had control, such as creating headline and image variations, analyzing the data, then optimizing campaigns were prohibitively time consuming.
Contently focuses on four key tactics to achieve success:
- Start with a high CPC bid to find right audiences fast
- Front load budgets at opportune moments during the campaign cycle
- Spread budget throughout the day by adjusting CPC bid when nearing daily cap
- More combinations of headlines and images equals greater success
To help Contently achieve their goals, Brax implemented campaign budget options that enabled Contently to optimize spend without the intervention of Outbrain.
Next, Contently used the Brax bulk ad creator to quickly and efficiently upload ads with every combination of headline and images. This allowed Contently to A/B test more variations to achieve high engagement rates in a much shorter time frame because the time spent creating headline and image combinations was cut in half.
Contently also found that more variations of headlines and photos led to greater success in finding the right audiences faster. This allowed them to pause what was not working well, and then test alternative combinations to increase the volume of high engagement visitors.
