INBOUND 2016: Jeremy Goldman "You are Your Content: The Future of Content Marketing"

Thanks. Hello. Hello. Thank you guys so much for being here. Just going to see if we can click through and actually, and while we quickly get this rolling, this was my original title today, but I feel like enough people are going to be talking in one way, shape or form, so I just decided to go with this one. And actually, just very quickly, if you can indulge me. I feel like it's kind of wrong to have something that ties into, like, you can't talk about content and not create content at the same time. So Snapchat or Instagram? Quickly, Instagram. Okay, so can we do like a quick oh, Snapchat started like cheering a little too late, you know, like the election. Anyway, very quickly, can we give a quick hello and say hidden bound? Okay, cool. Sounds good. Thank you so much. Now that we have done that and wasted a little bit of your time, I want to talk about content in general and about how important it's going to be for the future of marketing. And while I think a lot of you here are saying, wait a minute, it's kind of important right now, more and more content has the ability to actually somewhat represent the way that we interact with one another in the quote, unquote, real world. So I think in a lot of ways it's becoming more and more relevant. And we did a little bit of a study and showed that video is more and more going to be synonymous with content. And other things are going to be, if anything, they're not going to be the norm. They're going to be somewhat deprecated. But before we get to that, I just want to say very quickly a little bit about firebrand and what we do. We are based out of New York. Go Socks. Just kidding. For the next three years. You know, that's really the overall horizon of what we think about from a professional standpoint. We do a combination of a number of different things, like first party research, meta analysis, sentiment analysis, and use all those things to try to study where things are going in a number of different ways. Okay, so just some of what we cover. Social media, advertising, influencer relations, live streaming, ad blocking, those are some of our most recent topics. But video in general is going to be something that I really want to tell you guys why we found it's going to be incredibly important over the next few years. So ultimately, if you look at this statistic, I think that this is a pretty impressive statistic overall. And if you look at this, you're not even scratching the surface, right? Because this is only referring to YouTube. And if you look at statistics, you'll see that actually this number is changing all of the time. So go to Google. Impressive video statistics. And the numbers that keep on showing up are different and even more daunting for people who aren't creating video. So I want to go into just. I'll show you. This is an interesting thing that we did a few months ago in partnership with Social Fresh, and you'll look to see that images were the most popular thing that were being created by content creators on an ongoing basis, and videos were one of the top few. And since then we've done sentiment analysis to actually see that video is growing at a pretty rapid rate. And this study is only a few months old now. Image based posts, they're the most popular option from a content perspective for a lot of reasons. They're easy to create. And over the last half year, you've basically seen live streaming, you've seen all these other things that have shown up that have made it easier and easier to create video. And that's been why we've had this major resurgence and growth in video overall. And this is what my friend sue said in our original study, which I think is really important. Invest in the top. You know, if you're talking about the top social platforms, investing in video is the right way to go for a lot of reasons. And in large part, the major platforms are giving greater preference to this type of content. So if you want to stand out, if you want to make sure that your social ad budget goes as far as possible, video is going to be the kind of thing that you have to invest in. So what we did is we engaged in a pretty extensive study of video marketers and decision makers. And we tried to see what does the future of video content look like going into 2017. And what we found is that from an objective standpoint, in terms of how marketers are using video, we're still very, very new. And the way that you can tell that we're pretty new is that the way that social media started up is that everybody was focused on awareness, awareness, awareness at the beginning. And then they realized, wait a minute, we have to drive people down the funnel. Okay, so what that tells you is that we're still relatively nascent. And if you get more serious and start focusing a little bit more on conversion and sales and figure out what's going to work for your brand and drive people down the funnel, you're going to have a major advantage against competitors who are still kind of like the 90% who are focused pretty much on awareness. Another key thing is that customer service, that's an underserved area where amazingly people are under investing and you have a lot of opportunity to grow. If you focus in an area where other people are not necessarily spending their time and dollars. If everybody else is zigging, that's often an opportunity to zag and you can gain a lot of loyalty that way. Now when we're looking at VAT 19 and overall they're not actually spending that much on these videos because they found a way to do repeatable formats. And that' that's the kind of thing that I think that a lot of folks are looking to do is to have a higher level of quality, but to do something that you don't just constantly reinvent the wheel every single moment of every day. So 3 million views on this video alone and there's a 31 to 1 positive to negative sentiment ratio which I think is one of the most important things to actually take a look at. And I wrote an article in my Ink column if anybody wants to take a look. If they follow that bitly. I've got a few other examples of best and breed video companies and I promise I'm not sucking up when you see the next one. But video for the sake of video is not a winning strategy. And that's something that I think that VAT 19 clearly understands and the companies that are winning with video are really paying a lot of attention to. I think that when you look to see the importance of becoming goal oriented with every single video that you have, you have to have a core objective. You can't just say it's kind of awareness and it's kind of converting people, people to a sale. You have to say for each one that you create that there's a particular objective that you have in mind. And you don't just whip up a ton of videos because you read somewhere that you need to have a high level of quantity. If you try to check off, like I was saying, too many different boxes at once, then you're serving no master. And you can't, you know, basically you can't be a jack of all trades and master of none. When we're talking about video marketing roi, this is something that we found very interesting in our study. Overwhelmingly you see that marketers have seen a positive ROI from their video marketing efforts. They don't necessarily calculate it that well, but overwhelmingly most of them say that they've seen a positive roi. So how many here think that this is a good thing? Raise your hand, trick question. No, it's not. Because now everybody else figures this out, and then it makes it harder and harder because there's a glut of content. Okay. And there's going to be a glut of crap content. There kind of is already. So to an extent, this is a good thing. But you have to understand that whenever there's. I mean, we've all heard of the California Gold rush, right? Everybody rushes because they're like, wow, I can create a few great videos, and now I'm going to be rich, no problem. And then everybody else gets the same exact idea. So it's kind of a little bit of a. It's great that there's a positive ROI to be had there, but you just have to be careful. You have to make sure that your quality level is up and that you don't just create something for the sake of creating something. So one company. I don't know how many people have heard of HubSpot. Anybody? Okay, cool. How many people haven't? Okay, wow. We got one person. Cool. Brave. So. And I actually put HubSpot in, believe it or not, not just because we're here, but because they actually do a really interesting job. And a lot of people who have B2B firms, and I think there are a lot of B2B folks who are here, feel that I have something that's not super visual, so how can I actually make it pop? Right? And what's great about this is that you find something like 15,000 customers, and you find a way to make it visual in a creative, unexpected way right now, ultimately, with this. And we can go back to the. Of the deck. Thanks so much. When you look at this one, to see the overall relative intermediate budget of this one and the fact that they found this humble, brag way of doing it where they actually honored all of their employees as part of the video, right? And then you have 7K. It's not that many video views in relation to 3 million on something that's consumer focused, but that's okay because you're a B2B solution with a B2B price tag, and it's more important to actually be focused. And this is one thing that I actually think is very important to understand is that when you're trying to win with respect to video, you have to figure out who you're trying to reach out to. And it's almost too bad that on YouTube and Facebook, you know, you have, like, that total number of people who've seen it counter, and that can run you astray. You can be focused on the wrong metrics because at the end of the day, if HubSpot didn't find a way to get more customers through the door by creating campaigns like this, they would probably stop doing it. And I think that that's the same thing is true with every video vendor, because video is not cheap. When we say it's intermediate, that's intermediate in relation to all of video. But when you talk about blog content, intermediate is actually relatively cheap compared to video. Right. So you have to make sure that you're investing in the right things. Now, again, 26 to 1, positive sentiment, ample social media fodder, and goodwill for the rest of their customers. You kind of have to look at something and say, there are a few softer metrics that are harder to measure, but that's okay. Now, going viral to that point should never really be your main objective ever as a video marketer. I think that the term going viral was really big a while ago, back when I feel like Obama was in his first term. Remember that guy? And then now, actually, things have changed so much. And if you try too hard to go viral, you know you're going to be seen as trying too hard. And if anybody was like me in high school and you were trying way too hard to impress somebody to go out on a date, you would probably wind up being over 34, which was my longest streak in that regard. And I think that there are a lot of marketers who have that same exact problem as they're just trying way too hard and it just winds up being a little sad. Right now this is the third and final brand I want to show you guys. And this is Refinery 29. So by the way, and the reason why I think I was really unlucky with girls in high school was because I often dressed like this. And Refinery29, how many people are familiar with fashion lifestyle site? Yeah, they actually do a lot of things that reinforce their brand in a number of different ways, Right? So they create this kind of higher quality editorial, documentary style footage. Right? They have this, but they also have to look at the Vat 19 example. They have a lot of quick one off, you know, trying to go five days detoxing without having any coffee. Right. Or other things like that. So they try a lot of different formats, but they do things that reinforce the their brand. And that's why when we were talking about the soft metrics before, I mean, you can do sentiment analysis around your brand and you can say, do people feel good about interacting with you? Do they feel like you're actually telling the stories that you're meant to be telling as a brand. And in a lot of ways, I think that that's one of the more important things you can be doing with video. So we can jump back to the deck. Thank you. And when we look to see ultimately how it's actually paid off for Refinery, you see that it's a not insignificant budget here, but you've got 2.33 million views on this video alone. A really good positive to negative sentiment ratio. And it establishes a certain sense of thought, leadership and reinforcing your brand. So every time you're creating a video, I challenge you to try to think what are the types of things that you can do that are going to reinforce what you want to be known for. Now, this was probably my favorite. If you're going to take a picture of one slide, this would be it. I'm just saying. But what we did is we tried to say which platforms have given you a satisfactory return on investment this past year. Okay. And then we said for future investment, which is going to be the top place that you spend your money. So for the first question, you can say multiple places that they give you a satisfactory roi. What we've always found is that people tend to spend most of their money in one place. Right. Now this is a huge thing for Facebook because what you actually see in satisfactory return, you see 83% of people said it was satisfactory and 64% say that's the top place they're going to be spending next year. Now, when you look at that for YouTube, 50% said it was satisfactory and only 20, 21% say that that's the main place that they're going to be spending their money for next year. Year. So I think that more and more it's kind of like a winner take all area where people are going to be investing a lot of their budgets in one or two areas. Now you have to figure if everybody's investing in Facebook, a, maybe there's an arbitrage opportunity for you to invest elsewhere. Right. Or B, maybe you just have to acknowledge this and try to figure out how do I invest more in great advertising folks to run budget, to run my budget so that more people will see my video because organic reach is for the most part dead or dying. So I think, you know, yeah, like I was saying, the fact that YouTube and Twitter, which has tried to push a video, but it just doesn't look like it's going to happen. Just like the word fetch in mean girls, you Know, it's like they're trying and it's no dice. So, anyway, yeah, I wanted to have a very topical reference there. Now, are you ready? Okay. Marketers need budgets, right? But you also need manpower in terms of making things actually work. So with the color here, it's a little bit hard to read. But just to show you, when we're talking about ready from a manpower perspective, you've got 36% of people saying that they're ready. Another 26, 27 say that they're somewhat ready. Now, for budget, you've got people who say that they're ready. About 51% of folks do. And ultimately, looking at this, you know, it tells a little bit of a mixed story that you have a lot of people who still don't feel that they're getting the resources to invest in video to the extent that they feel is necessary. And I think a lot of this depends on the size of the company that you work for, or if you are the decision maker who can just actually start to invest right away. What we see is that it takes generally a while from making the case for a budget or for extra heads internally before you actually get that support from management. Right? So if you feel that you're not getting that type of support, better to make that case sooner rather than later. Now, building on that point, I think that talking about investments in general, not all video is created equal. And I think we all know that just looking around, okay? I mean, I've seen really great cat videos, and I've seen really bad cat videos. They're all pretty awesome. So investments rewarded. And if you have an attempt, it doesn't have to be high budget. But when you do something that looks like very little effort was put into it, it does not do well. And yet the challenge is that everybody here is going to be pressed to do more and more video, and everybody here is pressed to do more as opposed to less. And then you figure out, how can we do this quickly and efficiently? And if everybody else is thinking the exact same way, then the best content has to rise to the surface. So that's really, I think, the challenge that we all face now, building that Facebook versus YouTube point from before, when we're looking to see, where have you seen your best ROI? Facebook is overwhelmingly winning over YouTube in this regard. And when you're only allowed to pick one option for where you're getting your best return, Facebook was smart in this regard by figuring out how to make video views relatively cost effective. Right, because people will move their budgets over to Facebook because they got a higher return doesn't mean that that return is always going to happen or that's always the place to actually be putting your budgets. So I would say, really, the first half of next year is going to be a point where you're going to have to evaluate this and make sure that your return is not dropping considerably. At Firebrand, we ran a test on a Facebook Live internal experiment where we put pretty much the same budget every single week and just looked to see what actually happened. And what we saw is doing everything else being equal, we could see basically 8% higher costs from a week to week basis. Now, that's just one particular experiment. Go out and run your own and figure out where the returns are going to be for you. Now, when we're talking about these two, this was, I thought, really interesting. When we're talking about engagement, where do you get the most engagement? And Facebook overwhelmingly wins that, I think, more than YouTube, in part because trolls just, you know, responding on YouTube comment threads. I don't think a lot of people consider that engagement. And generally it's not positive for your brand in general. So when we're talking about this whole divide, it actually stresses to us how important social is as the fabric for the Internet as we know it these days. It's going to be essentially everything. So that YouTube, while you might get more evergreen hits out of something on an ongoing basis, it might not necessarily be enough to sustain something if you don't have social behind it. You know, and platforms, we've seen this more and more where people with Instagram stories, they started posting on Instagram stories. And I know I did a quick poll before, but Instagram stories versus Snapchat, say, which is your favorite Instagram, okay, so Instagram's kind of winning that in this room. And I think that part of it for a lot of people seems to be because we're actually getting a lot of interaction from Instagram. Because once you launched Instagram Stories and you had more contacts on there and you saw 230 people saw you eating that poppy seed bagel, you were like, wow, you know, like, I'm, you know, pretty famous. And on Snapchat, you might have had like 100 people, right? And there's like a big difference there. So really, the importance of social in relation to video cannot be underestimated. Now, one or two other things, as we were talking before about getting the right kind of manpower and the right kind of support. So when you look at hiring trends, and I think that this is one thing that we want to also pay a lot of attention to, is we're going to be bringing things internally, a lot of us in this room, because it's going to be a skill set that you're going to need for your agency, for your brand. And I think that that's something that when you're thinking about either hiring out or bringing people on, you have over a third of the people who we spoke to to consider it difficult or extremely difficult to find video marketing candidates. Now, as video becomes more important, that's actually that number is expected to rise dramatically. Also, salaries for these people are going to go up from the numbers now, probably up as much as like 20 to 30% by our estimation. So just to see kind of what are the top roles that we're going to have to be looking for? You've got about 26% looking to hire video editors, about 23 and change will be hiring videographers. And you can read the rest. And you can see, like in case you're looking to switch careers in some way, this is probably a pretty good guide to be looking at in terms of where we're going to see the demand over the next few years with respect to video roles. And I think we've got just a few other quick things, but I think promotion of video content, right? That's another thing. We talk about manpower. We also have to talk about where does all of this video content be seen? And ultimately it's going to be seen more and more by people who are promoting it. Right? You've got over a third of people right now who are not promoting their video content on social. Now we again expect that number to change because it's going to be a cost of doing business. You're not going to be able to say, I'm going to create a video that I think is winning, where I took a decent percentage of my team and I allocated them towards creating this content that's going to engage people. But then, by the way, I'm not going to do everything in my power to make sure that people see it. So social media, digital marketing, it's another form of advertising, and there's an advertising component to it that I think we all have to acknowledge. So in terms of how often people are actually doing this type of promotion, all of these numbers are a baseline from late 2016. And we're expecting all of these to go up dramatically by our estimation, that daily number, you know, so the fact that we had only 7% of people roughly saying that they're promoting their content, video content every day on social media. By our estimation, within a year that number is going to be slightly below 30%. Right. So you can see if that number is going up 400% in a year. That means that's an area that you have to be investing in or at the very least thinking about how you're going to be addressing it. Right. And then in terms of what are the formats that are working. So we don't didn't have enough time to do like a cross tab on this to actually see see what are the popular ones versus which are the ones that are deriving the best roi. But here are the classifications that we put forth for video content. Okay. Brand hero. Videos that tell you a lot about the brand in question, Event coverage in general. If you've got something that has a real time aspect and you see more and more Facebook Live and Periscope like content fueling that particular category behind the brand. And employee driven. These are kind of like man on the street, except it's the man behind the scenes. Product or feature driven, which is often associated with actually deriving sales. And closer to the bottom of the funnel. And then actually news coverage or opinion, which depending on the brand you might be doing a lot of or none whatsoever. Testimonials for your product is actually probably one that if anything we see as being the most undervalued here. It's so much better to get other people to be talking about your product as opposed to having you talk about it, no question. And then aftercare, kind of like customer service, like content. And that is again an area that we think is underserved. And if you want to stand out, that's probably an area that you'd want to focus on. And then the size of content teams, I think this is our last major takeaway. These teams are overwhelmingly small. For almost every single brand out there, you've got four and five. That when you have a video team and we're defining that as sometimes it might just be one decision maker and everything's outsourced or if you're creating a lot of content inside, even for some large multimillion dollar firms, you've got really small teams and we're expecting that to actually continue. So you're going to have to really think long and hard about the types of hires and how you make sure that you adjust your brand to the video needs of the future and then quality versus quantity. So when we're looking at video growing so much in popularity and competition, the demand for this quality like we were talking about before, it's gone up and enormously. Right? And you can't do all these little things. And I think that this is probably like the number one thing that I would try to leave you guys with, is that somebody's going to say, well, you know what? You can shoot on your iPhone. And we've all seen great video shot on an iPhone. Right. I have nothing against Android. Cool, too. So the problem is, is that if you're doing the same thing that everybody else is doing from a time perspective, from a budget perspective, you know, something has to break through the clutter, and there's a good chance that it's not going to be your piece of content. And I value your time, just like I think all of you guys do. You don't want to create something, be so proud of it, and then realize, wait a minute, there's a lot better stuff that's out there, right? So that, to me, is one of the most important things I want to leave you guys with. Before we jump into questions, two quick things is that we put together kind of like this big orange paper, which has a lot of the findings from this and then a lot of other things. If you write down that bitly, you can download it later. And if you email, that's like an email that'll automatically send you a link to the whole entire presentation and all that other good stuff. And I think that that's pretty much it. And thank you so.