Content Marketing in the
Performance
Era
Shafqat Islam
Co-founder & CEO
NewsCred

We’ve come a long way
in five short years…

As content marketers, we used
to think of ourselves as
publishers.
We’re not. The end goal is
business action, not eyeballs.

PAGEVIEWS

ENGAGEMENT
PAGEVIEWS

ENGAGEMENT
PAGEVIEWS
PERFORMANCE

The goal isn’t to be good at
content.
The goal is to be good at
business using content.

1
Grow
Marketing
Influenced
Revenue

Drive
Operational
Efficiency
2

Increase
Brand
Equity
3

But performance
often comes at a cost

People don’t like it

Attention is a
scarce commodity

14
Ad blocking is now on
615 million devices
Jan 2010 Jan 2011 Jan 2012 Jan 2013 Jan 2014 Jan 2015 Jan 2016 Jan 2017
21M
30M 39M
54M
121M
181M
216M
236M
145M
275M
380M
DESKTOP BROWSERS
MOBILE BROWSERS
Apr 2009 - Dec 2016 • PageFair

People are ignoring your ads.
And it’s even scarier if you
consider millennials on
mobile.

Loyalty is dead

58%
of shoppers
enrolled in loyalty
programs don’t
use the program
at all

of buyers will
shop around at
every purchase
87%

Every purchase cycle is a
battleground to win a customer

Waste not
Want not

Only 9% of total ad impressions
get looked at for more than a
second
21

22
100
54
35
9
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
110
Impressions Viewable
Impressions
Viewed
Impressions
Impressions
viewed for >1s
%ofImpressions

That is the irony of
performance marketing

But the fatal flaw
is not in performance

Exceptional storytelling
performs better

People don’t buy what you do.
They buy why you do it.

Purpose-driven brands
grow 3x faster than the S&P 500

Brands that could be identified by
their ideals were 4x more profitable
than the S&P 500

If you’re not creating
MEANINGFUL CONTENT
that drives business results…

… you’re just contributing to the
NOISE

Initial Results
470K
470K uses of
#breaking2 hashtag
600K
600K mentions
of Nike
87%
87% positive
sentiment

Initial Results
2T
2 trillion impressions
5M
5 million views of
the livestream
4 CHAPTERS
4 chapters of
content (text and
video) on their hub

Initial Results
5.2X
5.2X more
engagement on the
The Zoom Vaporfly
Elite shoes content
App CTAs
CTAs to download the
Nike App
Shoe CTAs
CTAs for the shoe on
the content hub for
Breaking2

Society of
Grownups

We know this is very
hard to do

The Science of
Content Marketing

38
The Content
Marketing
Maturity Curve
PUBLISHING CONTENT
TO PRIMARY CHANNEL
MEASURING ENGAGEMENT AND
OPTIMIZING
DRIVING TO MICRO-CONVERSIONS
CONNECTING ACTIONS
WITH ROI OF CONTENT MARKETING
OPTIMIZING TRAFFIC, SUBSCRIBERS,
AND DISTRIBUTION FOR INCREASED ROI
DOCUMENTED CONTENT
MARKETING STRATEGY
DISTRIBUTING CONTENT
ACROSS CHANNELS
REPLICATE PROCESSES ON A GLOBAL
AND CROSS-REGIONAL SCALE

39
A Proprietary
Methodology with
Predictable Results

The NewsCred Methodology
40
STRATEGY TRAFFIC ENGAGEMENT ACTION MONETIZATION
Measuring and
optimizing for
highest-quality
traffic
Documented content
marketing strategy
Attracting more of
the right traffic
Driving the desired
behaviors
Correlating against
real business
outcomes

41
The Content
Marketing
Maturity Index

An index that assesses the
maturity of your content
marketing program

Some industries are ahead of others
0. 12.5 25. 37.5 50.

What is your north star?

What makes the content
marketing performance era
different?

We can have both
EXCEPTIONAL CONTENT
and the ability to
MEASURE IT

We exist to help you predictably
achieve these goals

But ultimately you are the
revolutionaries that will make
marketing great