Articles by: "Brandon Carter, Content Marketing Specialist—Outbrain"

Without knowing you very well, I’d be willing to guess you split a majority of leisure time online between two activities: sifting through content and flirting with ordering something online. I know I do…

We’re constantly clicking in and out of content. Just about every search result that isn’t an ad points to an article containing the information we seek. The article itself is surrounded by even more links pointing to more content. Our social feeds are basically news feeds, at this point. The sites we visit out of habit usually include a few blogs. Somehow, at some point during the day, we end up on YouTube. And I haven’t even mentioned “Netflix and chill” or Spotify.

Then there’s Amazon. Should we just designate one tab that’s always open for Amazon so we can get literally whatever our heart desires at the click of a mouse?

We spend so much time doing both, brands are trying to figure out how to leverage one to drive the other (we sometimes refer to this practice as content marketing. Heard of it?). Well doing so first requires an understanding that browsing content and browsing products are very similarly behaviors.

When people are browsing—whether it’s a bookstore, online retail, or their Facebook feed—they’re subconsciously waiting to come across something that catches their attention. Something that makes them stop in their tracks for a second because it’s intriguing. Their curiosity is piqued.

And it turns out the same triggers appear across a range of experiences: the element of surprise and the element of familiarity.

Two sides of the same coin
The element of surprise makes sense as a trigger. To be surprised is to be awakened out of our daily slumber by something we deem remarkable.

In the bookstore example, we might stop in our tracks purely because a book cover strikes us as remarkable. Since we didn’t know it existed before we saw it, we’re surprised, and then intrigued. For at least a few seconds, we want to know more.

In digital content, the remarkable often announces itself in a headline. Sometimes, it’s a fraction of a headline, like trending keywords on Twitter. It’s easy to make fun of the kinds of headlines we’re talking about, but then again, we all continue to engage with, laugh at, and share them with our friends.

In fact, the magnet that draws us to the sites that form our daily habits—the Facebooks, Twitters, Buzzfeeds, CNNs—is usually this expectation of surprise. We know we’re going to see different stories or items every time, we just don’t know what they’ll be. The cycle becomes familiar… and it’s one we’re quite happy to repeat.

It turns, out this is an incredibly natural intersection for commerce to enter into.

For what is eCommerce if not the art of piquing curiosity and then removing all barriers to exploration until the clicks turn into a sale?

Inducing curiosity
One of the first jobs in eCommerce is to induce curiosity about the product for sale. And one of the best ways to do that is to eliminate any barriers to curiosity.

Those barriers would be things like a site that looks cluttered or disorganized and tends to overwhelm consumers. Or a site that looks 20 years old and turns people off as soon as they enter.

As the business owner, you ensure some basics: You make sure your site is welcoming and modern-looking. You have your products appear against a white background to really make the products pop off the page. You merchandize them in an orderly fashion on a grid. You don’t want them to appear cluttered, so you leave a decent amount of white space around each product. You make the navigation really simple but descriptive so people can browse in an informed way.

eCommerce shares all these principles in common with engaging content; you want it to be welcoming, you want it to look modern, you leave plenty of white space, and you use simple but descriptive navigation to keep people engaged when they’re ready for the next piece of information. That includes “recommended” items as well.

If you think about it, recommendations are really just a way to navigate to the next page in an informed way. In eCommerce, that finds expression in, “You just looked at this item, so you might be even more interested in this similar item you didn’t know I had.” And in the content world, that finds expression in, “Because you watched that on Netflix, you might want to watch this tonight.” The recommendation engine’s job is take what you’ve familiarized yourself with and turn it into the next surprise.

For that reason, just about every page of every eCommerce site should be equipped with this recommendation mechanism. It keeps people interested. It delivers surprise. And it becomes a familiar part of the consumer journey.

If a user lands on your blog, suggest a product relevance (even if there isn’t an obvious one). Point them to an even better blog post. Use your newsletter as a curated cross-section of both your content and your products. Repeatedly. Until it becomes a familiar surprise for your audience.

Given the opportunity, your customers may yet surprise with how they respond.

Brandon Carter is a Content Specialist at Outbrain (@brandedcarter @Outbrain). He began his career as a staff journalist for the Maine weekly ‘The Coastal Journal’ before moving to New York and joining the product licensing divisions of Peanuts Worldwide and Sesame Workshop.

Research

Content marketing, ad blocking and other trends that rocked digital publishing in 2015

December 9, 2015 Brandon Carter, Content Marketing Specialist—Outbrain

2015 was as existential as they come for digital media and advertising. Some of the biggest stories that captivated the industry represented tough questions that have been brewing for years but are no longer avoidable.

So which of these stories captivated the industry? We analyzed 5,600 articles from industry trades that were published between Jan. 01 — Nov. 11, and the approximately 4 million resulting page views to determine which topics resonated most, and when.

General Findings

Content Marketing accounted for the most overall page views of the trends analyzed in 2015.
Mobilegeddon generated the most page views/story (which we can use as a measure of “degree of interest” in a topic), then effectively vanished from people’s minds.
After its initial splash in May, Facebook Instant Articles seemed to vanish from the radar until Fall, when it wasrolled out to more publishers and more users.
News that Programmatic accounted for 20% of all 2014 digital ad spend got the industry’s attention in July.

The Ad Block Problem
The conversation about ad blockers reached fever pitch in September, as news broke that Apple’s iOS would let users install ad blockers and that some ads could avoid being blocked… for a price. Advertising Week Sept 28 — Oct 2, was essentially an unofficial summit on how to deal with the rise of ad blockers.

The Mobilegeddon That Wasn’t?
After the initial news about Google changing its algorithm to reward more mobile-friendly pages in its search engine results, interest in Mobilegeddon quickly died down as people realized its impact was minimal or indeterminate on their business.

Content Marketing Becoming the Norm?
Content marketing is now a routine part of industry coverage, and has been for the last couple of years. Unlike the other trends in this analysis, interest in content marketing was less subject to dramatic spikes and dips, growing steadily throughout the year as marketers focused on tips for doing it better, planning for 2016, and its overall growth in the industry.

Native Interests
Native advertising generated its interest in relation to two developments: Snapchat announcing the creation of a native ad agency with a handful of media companies at Cannes Lions, and Advertising Week, where Ad Blocking dominated the conversation. Native advertising began to resurface as an alternative for brands and publishers.

Facebook Instant Articles
After making waves with its initial announcement and launch of Instant Articles — which hosts a publisher’s content directly in the News Feed — radio silence ensued for the duration of the summer, leaving many to wonder if it was getting off to a slow start. Then in September, Facebook added more publishers to Instant Articles, and in October, rolled it out to all iPhone users, which re-ignited interest.

The spike in intrigue over Facebook Instant Articles perfectly embodies a tough question publishers have been mulling for years but is no longer avoidable in 2015: at what point do I pull back on trying to pool audiences on my own site and invest more heavily in reaching new audiences where they already congregate?

Naturally, the reaction to Facebook’s offer varied, as some wondered how far Facebook would go in using publisher content to fuel their growing media empire, while others urged caution in how much content should be Instant vs. Owned.

But perhaps lost in the shuffle was Facebook’s own justification for presenting a publisher’s content to users in this way, the same justification Google used in its push Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) push.

A Better User Experience
It almost always comes down to the user.

From the ongoing discussion on what native advertising should look like, to the initial panic over “mobilegeddon,” at heart is how to work towards an Internet consumers are almost uniformly pleased with. In a way, the popularity of both ad blockers and content marketing are symptoms of that ideal.

Innovation | Perspectives

Data-driven design: informing readers’ deeper desires

April 1, 2015 Brandon Carter, Content Marketing Specialist—Outbrain

So much of digital publishing is now focused on the post-mortem: What happened on my site? Which stories performed well? Which stories did my audience share? Are those two things equivocal? How can we do better next time?

The emergence of data as a publisher’s new best friend in answering those questions is a compelling development, provided publishers have the tools and teams to act on this new information. Understanding audience behavior and patterns can inform everything from the way that editors plan and program content to the new products publishers build (or, just as importantly, don’t build).

Unfortunately, the constituent who consistently gets left out of the post-mortem is the most important one: the reader. Maybe it’s time to reconsider.

A while back, my colleague Elizabeth thought her HuffPo app was actually including her in the postmortem – by telling her how she was doing as a reader.

More than most people I know, Elizabeth is acutely aware of the kinds of stories she typically reads and makes no apology if they skew towards, say, “lighter” categories in Entertainment. (She is, for the record, a whip-smart graphic designer.)

So it was with great delight she observed that News and Tech & Innovation appeared foremost in her category navigation, ahead of even Comedy (which she’s constantly trying to get me to appreciate more as a pastime). The order of these Categories, she insisted, was moving periodically according to her recent reading habits. The fact that, at that moment, News and Tech were ahead of her self-described favorites, was evidence that she was blossoming into the well-rounded reader she aspired to be.

Neither of us was entirely sure her HuffPo app was actually playing back this data to her, but in a way it didn’t matter because it provided an interesting perspective: What if publishers explicitly reflected back our current regimen of content? What could that do for our relationship with publishers – and engagement with their content?

Most of us would like to think we’re relatively informed readers, even if we’re not up on the very latest in global politics or other proxies we use for “being informed.” And most of us would admit we have some guilty pleasures mixed in there too — from listicles to cat videos to celebrity gossip, few of us are completely immune to the appeal of these stories, no matter how frivolous or motivated by schadenfreude.

To stretch the nutrition metaphor a bit, maybe some sort of “content pyramid” would help us identify and organize the optimal consumption of each “content group” specific to our needs.

Theoretically, this is a utility publishers could provide with their growing data fluency. Opting in to an interaction like this could fulfill a need – not too far removed from why we share content on our social networks – in the form of validation; it could serve as a measure of reassurance, encouragement, or simply well-defined information on what kinds of readers we are (kind of like a less cynical Buzzfeed quiz), and by extension, the people we aspire to be. At its most basic function, a utility like this would communicate that the publisher and the reader had in fact entered into a relationship predicated on consideration and appreciation of the reader’s time and habits.

For publishers it could even be used to incentivize audiences to step up their engagement with certain categories or products e.g. rewarding users who hit a certain threshold with access to exclusive content. It might even be a service worth paying for.

We’re starting to see signs that publishers are moving towards more relationship-building cues via reader utilities. The Pool, a new site from 6 Music presenter Lauren Lavern and former Cosmopolitan and Red Magazine editor Sam Baker joins the likes of Medium in telling readers right up front how long it will take to consume each story. The Pool goes a step further and lets users search for content based on how much time they have.

A logical next step in this more personal approach to publishing would be to not just reflect what users should read based on their habits, but to let them know what they are in fact reading, acting as the mirror that journalism has always purported to be, albeit on a larger cultural scale. In digital, publishers have the opportunity to project that responsibility down to an individual level.