AdSense for Content Marketing?

As I blogged about earlier, the “world UNPLUGGED” study has important implications for marketers. Specifically, younger users rely on information coming to them via their social networks rather than actively seeking out news and information; and these users also are usually satisfied to be informed by the headline alone, infrequently clicking on the shared links. What does it mean for the future of content marketing?

In the last post, I pointed out some basic implications and how marketers need to adjust, right now. There are longer-term implications, though.

New Post Formats

Online advertisers have been changing their ads from banner ads and simple listings to interactive ads, in order to capture viewers’ attention and get them to interact. We’re likely to see similar new types of formats for posts on social networks. Since this is largely controlled by the social networks, I expect it to be a later evolution. We will likely see new types of posts that let content marketers provide interactive elements in the post–elements that appear in users’ feeds, so the user doesn’t have to click a link in order to interact or view the entire content. Playing videos in place on Facebook or Google Plus is an example of this “never leave” format.

Micro-Segmenting

We are all familiar with audience segmentation. Marketers will need to develop subsegments for niche marketing as a regular practice. Even if your target market is sports enthusiast in general, you will need to identify and target much smaller subsegments:  20-something, midwest, college basketball fans, for instance.

Why? As my last post noted, more and more users are only clicking on links when the content is “personally compelling.” Identifying subsegments to a very specific degree allows marketers to determine what is personally compelling to that audience and build the content and copy to match.

Single-Sourcing Content

When we developed content at Microsoft, we used tools that allowed us to “single-source” the content. We would write the original content once, then generate variations of it, such as localized versions translated into different languages. The core content was still “connected” to the original content, though. So, if a product feature changed, we could change the core content and all the translated versions would be updated to match.

Similarly, some ad networks allow advertisers to create multiple versions of their ad-copy. A sports ad might have three versions, one advertising a sale on Football equipment, another advertising a sale on Basketball equipment, and another for Soccer equipment. The ad copy is the same for all three except for the name of the sport (Football, Basketball, and Soccer) and the graphic (a Football, a Basketball, and a Soccer ball). When the network serves up the ad, it chooses the appropriate version for the page it is serving the ad to. If the user is reading an article about Basketball, he’ll see the Basketball ad, for instance.

We’ll see the same thing with post copy in content marketing. Based on the micro-segmentation, content marketers will create different headlines and blurbs  for use in content sharing. Even the content will be different, with three versions of the same article, each slightly different to accommodate its micro-segment.

Timing and Relevance

Already we’re seeing applications, such as Timely, that deliver tweets at the best time based on audience activity. Others monitor the conversation and deliver tweets when they are most relevant to the current discussion (Socialflow).  We’ll see more of this kind of application. Timing and relevance are key to that need to be “personally compelling.”

Putting it All Together

The challenge will be  putting all of this together into applications or even content-marketing networks similar to ad networks like Google AdSense. Marketers will need to be able to research and create their micro-segments, the various, targeted versions of post copy, and the different versions of their content. They’ll need to be able to distribute their links/post-copy when and where it’s timely and relevant.

Of course, advertising platforms can deliver ads directly to the user when that person views a web page. In the case of content marketing, there is usually not a direct path to the user. Instead, the posts have to be compelling enough that people decide to share them into their personal networks. Another challenge, entirely.