Since the very dawn of digital marketing, the amount of options advertisers have had for reaching the online public has been in a constant state of growth. Most people today are excited about mobile marketing and social media, as they are the most popular topics of conversation in the online marketing community. However, it seems there will always be those out there that believe content reigns king. Last month, I wrote about small businesses and their hesitance to adopt other online marketing platforms into their campaigns. Small business marketers are only a small portion of the marketing community that believe content will always be the best solution.

As everyone knows, content is more of a category than a singular marketing method. With that said, eMarketer has recently released some research from CopyPress, a content marketing software company, regarding which form of content will bring the greatest ROI.

As far as cost goes, the most affordable types of content turned out to be articles, video and white papers. These results are understandable, being that they are all effective marketing methods and companies can create these types of content on their own. Therefore, there is a lot of room for return, making them very cost effective.

Here are some of the results reported in a chart by eMarketer;

Content with the Best ROI According to Marketing Professionals Worldwide

Featured Articles: 62%

Video: 51.9%

 

White Papers: 45.6%

Photos: 37.8%

Interactive Media: 36%

Sales Copy: 29.7%

Infographics: 27.9%

Buyer’s Guides: 21.6%

Illustrations: 17%

Motion Graphics: 11.3%

In order to receive the return on investment that CopyPress has found for each content type though, one must also consider how and by whom content is created. The creator of marketing content is arguably the most important piece of the puzzle. However, according to this research from CopyPress, only about 65.6 percent of those marketers asked said that authorship was indeed and important part of the marketing strategy.

As was state above, there are quite a few marketers that still feel that content is the best method of all digital marketing options. What is interesting is that there is evident growth in the number of people that think this way. Content marketing has continued to peak the interests of more and more marketers, according to CopyPress. In fact, in 2012 only about 18.9 percent of marketers said that their main marketing focus for the year would be with content marketing. Now in 2013, the number of marketers focusing mainly on content has shot up to 34.8 percent. This represents a greater growth in focus than any other marketing platform studied in the research.

Content has always been an effective marketing method, and it seems that with all of these marketers finding higher levels of interest in it, it may be a good thing to consider. After all, why make changes to something that already works?

It is really rare that a day goes by when I do not read somewhere, something about the importance of mobile when it comes to marketing in today’s digital society. However, there are still those countless marketers that think mobile is not something that requires immediate attention, feeling like it still has a long way to go before it is worth their while. Well, although these marketers have good reason to believe that mobile is still in its infancy to some degree, it does not necessarily mean that they should be holding off. As we have all seen through the never-ending flow of reports measuring mobile’s success of the years, smartphones and tablets are a major contributor to online advertising prosperity these days. In fact, new numbers from comScore are showing just how important mobile really is right now.

The big news is that in terms of total time spent surfing the web, 37 percent is now spent by consumers on the mobile web. Even though the PC still accounts for the other 67 percent, mobile devices are still reaching for 40 percent, making them a pretty significant consideration for marketers.

2012 was another milestone year in the life of mobile as continued innovation in hardware; software and device functionality lays the groundwork for the future of the industry. Smartphones and tablets are ushering in a new era of multi-platform media, with consumers becoming increasingly agnostic about how, when and where they engage with content.

Although a lot of people have contemplated which year we can truly call the “year of mobile,” I think it is safe to say that 2012 really presented a good case for its nomination for the title. With the growth we saw in 2012, mobile has become a huge part of what marketers now need to pay attention to. Not only that, but comScore is predicting even further adoption of smartphones and tablets by consumers. According to comScore, some of the dominating reasons for surfing the web are now accomplished mostly on mobile devices, including things like checking the weather, looking at maps, listening to music, and arguably the most important is social networking.

In response to their findings, comScore has predicted not only an increase in mobile adoption by consumers, but marketers as well. They see mobile as becoming a branding medium, allowing brands to greatly increase their presence among consumers, getting their name out into the world.

After taking a look at comScore’s numbers from this recent 2013 Mobile Future in Focus report, it seems a bit crazy that so many marketers are still iffy about the idea of putting money and time into configuring some sort of mobile campaign effort. However, if the company’s predictions do hold true, the numbers will continue to skew in mobile’s favor, and the PC will turn into a way of the past. Sure, people will surf the web on a PC at work or while bored at home, but mobile devices are making their way toward being the devices of choice among digital consumers.

The everyday advertiser loves Google for offering so much in the way of advertising tools, and bringing them so much success in using them. However there are others out there, particularly some of those other top names on the web that hate Google. They do not necessarily hate that the company is so successful with their enormous advertising presence, but because Google is known as the big boss in the advertising world. Surely there are some companies that simply accept the fact that Google will reign over them, not feeling any desire to fight the juggernaut. However, there are those others, like Microsoft which has waged a war with Google, doing everything it can to take the company down a notch or two.

Last month, I wrote about Microsoft’s attempts at damaging Google’s reputation with their Scroogled campaign. This campaign was based on the claim that Google was reading Gmail users’ emails and using the information to focus heavily on paid, targeted search ads and ads within Gmail itself. While it was true to some degree, it turns out that most Gmail users do not mind Google scanning their emails for keywords, especially considering it allows the company to serve better ads to these consumers.

Either way, Microsoft was still determined to hurt Google with the campaign. The company released countless attack ads through email, search engines, and they even went to the trouble of creating TV ads against Google. Scroogled has been a well-known campaign among advertisers and consumers alike, but it seems the campaign was not quite as effective as Microsoft had hoped.

Microsoft has now made the decision to stop creating ads attacking Google for its practices, according to an article from public media blog, KQED. It seems that the only success Microsoft found in their attack ad campaign was getting 110,000 people to sign a petition to, “Tell Google to stop going through your email to sell ads.” The petition’s goal was 25,000 signatures, and Microsoft far surpassed that number. However, the petition did not get far past that point, making very little change to the way Google does business.

However, an article from Marketing Land reports an email conversation with Stefan Weitz, Microsoft’s senior director of online services. In the conversation, Weitz reports that just because Scroogled is done with creating attack ads against Google, it does not mean that the Scroogled campaign itself is over. Here is the response from Weitz reported by Contributing Editor at Marketing Land, Greg Sterling;

As the issue has jumped into the mainstream and is becoming more present in everyday Americans’ minds, the amount of paid media we need to run to raise awareness is decreasing. That the campaign has jumped from mainstream back into the technosphere (see the RSA conference this week where Google’s GC again avoided the core issue) shows how it’s not just about ads running – it’s about the substance of the problem. We are definitely not dropping the campaign issue when we see things like 114k people from around the world have signed the petition and we’ve seen over 3.5MM people head to the Scroogled site.

Facebook has received its fair share of criticisms from just about everyone that has ever used the site, be it for social advertising or checking in on the activities of friends and family. There are many theories out there that explain why Facebook is so often doubted by the masses, but one thing is for sure; the company is successful. Up there with names like Google and Twitter, Facebook is probably the best known website among consumers. In the past few months, it had seemed like criticism of Facebook had dulled down quite significantly, as the company gave people more and more to look forward to. However on Sunday, Nick Bilton of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article covering some issues that Facebook is now presenting.

Essentially, Bilton reported seeing decreasing engagement numbers on his personal posts. He claimed that these lower engagement rates were the result of Facebook shoving back the organic content posted by users to allow more room for Promoted Posts. This way, the company would be able to generate substantially more revenue for itself.

I recently tried a little experiment. I paid Facebook $7 to promote my column to my friends using the company’s sponsored advertising tool.

To my surprise, I saw a 1,000 percent increase in the interaction on a link I posted, which had 130 likes and 30 reshares in just a few hours. It seems as if Facebook is not only promoting my links on news feeds when I pay for them, but also possibly suppressing the ones I do not pay for.

Facebook proudly informed me in a message that 5.2 times as many people had seen my post because I had paid the company to show it to them. Gee whiz. Thanks, Facebook.

These claims are heavy, potentially giving Facebook a sort of greedy and money grubbing reputation. Although it is simply the case of one man’s experiment, the results are shocking. Of course though, Facebook was quick to respond to these claims in a post in their Newsroom, called “Fact Check.” This was their response;

There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true. We want to clear up any misconceptions by explaining how the News Feed algorithm works.

First, in aggregate, engagement – likes, comments, shares – has gone up for most people who have turned the Follow feature on. In fact, overall engagement on posts from people with followers has gone up 34% year over year.

Second, a few data points should not be taken as representative of what actually is happening overall. There are numerous factors that may affect distribution, including quality and number of posts.

This is exactly what anyone would expect as a response to such claims of course. Regardless, it seems that in this case Facebook has been wrongly accused of something huge. I suppose this just goes to show that just because one person says something, it does not necessarily make it a universal fact.

With its growing popularity in the past year or so, marketers have had high hopes for Instagram as a reliable destination for social advertising efforts. Although there really has not been many incredible marketing feats using Instagram, the potential that the social network held was very clear. Now, it seems that this ever-growing potential from Instagram is turning to progress, as brands are beginning to see the results they believed so strongly the social network could bring. There is a new study circling the web today, coming from Simply Measured, a social media analytics company. The study shows us evidence of Instagram’s growth in marketing success and of brands’ new-found love for the social media network.

Brands on Instagram

This is the third of these studies from Simply Measured that measure marketing on Instagram, this one entitled “Instagram Brand Adoption Study February, 2013.” According to this study, 59 percent of the top brands from Interbrand’s Top 100 are currently using Instagram for marketing purposes. In November’s study, this number was only at 54 percent, which means a 9 percent change occurred from quarter to quarter. For purposes of comparison, the company also reports that from November to February, Facebook adoption only changed 1 percent, Twitter adoption was down 1 percent, Google+ was up 4 percent, and Pinterest also had an impressive growth of 10 percent.

As for the amount of brands with over 100,000 followers on Instagram, the number rose from 8 in November to 10 this month. Simply Measured expects this number to grow even further in coming months, keeping at a steady pace with the current growth that is being seen. Engagement is also on the rise for brands using Instagram, as the company reported at 35 percent increase in engagement for those top 100 brands in these past three months.

Engagement In-Depth

To be more specific regarding engagement, the number of photos posted by brands between November and February was about 2,608. The number Simply Measured gives for engagement per photo on Instagram was 4,816, which is a 31 percent growth from November. Also, 59% of these photos are shared to Twitter, with Tweets per photo hitting 22, which is 17 percent less than the last study reported. As for Facebook, the company’s recent acquisition of the photo-sharing network has caused a constant sharing of photos between it and Instagram. Therefore, 98 percent of brand photos were shared to Facebook, with engagement per photo hitting 274. This represented a 30 percent change from quarter to quarter.

As we addressed in November, integration between Facebook and Instagram has allowed users to have photos they ‘like’ appear in their Facebook feeds. The result has been a continued increase in per post engagement and a greater share of brand photos posted to Facebook.

With Instagram being primarily a photo-sharing network, marketers have to use slightly different methods than they would with other social networks. However, the way that Instagram photos are shared across the majority of other social networks helps marketers reach much more than the 100 million monthly active users that Instagram just recently announced it has reached.