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Content Marketing Catchup: Fighting Facebook’s Declining Reach, Building a Loyal Audience, and More Must-Read Stories

Here’s what you missed while fulfilling all of your Disney fantasies at the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island…

5 Content Marketing Lessons From Key & Peele

What happens when you team comedy duo Key & Peele with Liam Neeson to promote an action movie? A seminar in effective content marketing for advertisers everywhere, writes Contently Co-Founder Shane Snow:

Comedy Central and the movie studios struck a deal to incorporate a promo for Neeson’s next movie into a Key & Peele skit, a common product placement type of situation. However, by the time we fans got to that promo skit, our relationship with Key & Peele—and Neesons—was strong enough that we didn’t even feel marketed to when he showed up and started talking about the movie. Read it.

‘Growth is Not a Hack’: 7 Strategies For Building a Loyal Audience

You can talk about content marketing strategy and ROI until your face turns blue—something we often do here on The Content Strategist—but it all begins with one central challenge: building a loyal, engaged audience. Yael Grauer reports:

During the Contently Summit on Wednesday, PureWow Director of Marketing Alexis Anderson, Mediaco Editorial Director Erin Scottberg, and Refinery 29 Senior Director of Marketing Irene Lee detailed some of the strategies they’ve successfully employed to build a loyal audience, as well as the steps they’ve taken to ensure that their audience is growing in the right way. Read it.

4 Ways Brands Can Battle Facebook’s Fast-Decreasing Organic Reach

Brands are spending more on Facebook, yet they’re reaching less people. According to Simply Measured, the total engagement for the top 10 brands on Facebook is down over 40 percent in the past year. After years of investing time, money, and effort building an audience on the social network, how can brands respond?

To reach the same engagement, brands will likely need to spend even more. But is it worth it—especially when you consider that Facebook may shake down brands even more in the future?

There are alternatives to renting an audience on Facebook, and while they might not be as sexy as the major social network, they do allow brands to expand their reach and make the most out of their investments. Here are four steps you can take to wean yourself off relying on the social network. Read it.

How Complex Is Turning Big Brands Into Big-Time Publishers

There’s been a common player in buzzworthy branded content campaigns lately, and no, it’s not Dr. Dre. Writes Haniya Rae:

Long-term, multi-million-dollar branded content deals between brands and publishers are in their infancy, but Complex Media, a network of content sites with its own ad network targeted at male millennials, believes they might be the future of the media business.

Judging by their recent success, they may be right. Over the past year, Complex Media has built out robust content platforms for Mountain Dew and Dr Pepper, and established ongoing relationships with ChampsConverse and Pepsi. Read it.

This Blog Will Let You Steal All of Refinery29′s Publishing Secrets

At the Contently Summit last week, Refinery29 Director of Marketing Irene Lee let revealed one of the industry’s best-kept secrets: R29 recently launched a blog where they pulled back the curtain on all their recent content experiments:

Spend a few moments on the blog and you’ll quickly notice a trend: The secret to Refinery29′s success is testing the heck out of every aspect of their content and email/social media distribution to find the perfect recipe for audience growth—a point Lee emphasized repeatedly during her panel, “Getting and Keeping an Audience.” On Intelligence, Lee and her team break down how they conduct their tests to in clear steps, which is awesome for those of us without data science degrees who still want to learn how to effectively use data to grow an audience. Read it.

Those are the must-read stories from us, but what stories from around the web inspired you this week? Give me a shout @JoeLazauskas.

Contently arms brands with the tools and talent to become great content creators. Learn more.

 

Image by David Blackwell

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