So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on sponsored content. We walk through what sponsored content is, determining if it’s the right tactic, and what you can do with your content instead. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- How to look at traffic on third party sites
- Deciding if sponsored content is worth the money
- Alternative options to sponsored content
Upcoming Episodes:
- SEO – Keyword analysis basics – 9/30/2021
- SEO – Competitive analysis basics – 10/7/2021
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:20
Well, hi again, welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show, I did that without the banner this week. This This week, we’re talking about using SEO data to place sponsored content. So I’m joined by Chris and John. And today we’re gonna be talking about how to look at traffic on third party sites to see if it’s worth trying to get your content placed. deciding if sponsored content is even worth the money. That’s a big question. That comes up a lot. So we’ll talk about that. And then alternative options to sponsored content. So if it’s sponsored content isn’t the right thing. What are you doing said? So that’s what we’re covering today. So Chris, where do you want to start?
Christopher Penn 1:00
Let’s start by being clear about what we mean when we say sponsored content, because there’s a lot of different advertising options in in this case, so I guess we should give some backstory over in our our friends at spin sucks, they have us a slack. So do we, you can see ours at TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash analytics for marketers. The spin sucks Slack, I don’t have to have jitneys in but but someone was asking about I got a competing PR agency was saying we can guarantee you a story placement in Business Insider for only, you know, X, X dollars, whatever, you know, guaranteed results in two weeks. And logically we know for folks who have been in the PR industry, we know that they’re not getting a sweet place to the journalist, there’s buying some content. So what that would look like what we mean by sponsored content. Here’s an example. This is from the BBC, the BBC has a division called storyworks. And companies come in. This one’s paid by some company called Robo ROC, where they create content that looks like BBC content. strange person, I guess the executive of some kind, robot vacuum, etc. It looks like a really nice, well placed piece of garbage, but of course, it is paid. Here’s another example. This is on business inside you can see here. This is created by inside of studios with this company. And this looks very, very much like business Insider’s typical content, same format and everything. It just does have that little bit of disclosure towards the end and little tag. So when we talk about sponsored content, this is what we mean.
Katie Robbert 2:38
So Chris, at the top of this article, it does actually say sponsored content. So isn’t that is that something that has to be disclosed? If it is sponsored content? Like are there rules around that?
Christopher Penn 2:51
There are rules, the FTC has created rules around, basically any form of advertising has to be disclosed as advertising.
Katie Robbert 3:00
Okay. So Alright, so now that we know what sponsored content is, so, you know, we get, you know, unsolicited emails all the time from people trying to, you know, get us to pay money to get our stuff shown, you know, so why, what’s, what’s the value of paying to get your content instead of doing it organically?
Christopher Penn 3:28
Well, there’s, there’s two schools of thought about this one is, you know, it, you’re guaranteed an outcome of some kind, namely, getting your stuff in here. In the world of public relations, this is really important, because an awful lot of the time. The stories that companies are pitching really aren’t news, right? In fact, they’re there’s far from New and news as you can get, and they’re not particularly compelling. And so if you’re a PR practitioner, for example, and you know, you just know that your company or your clients news is anything but this is an attractive option to satisfy, say, like a senior executives, like I need to see my stuff in Business Insider, like Okay, give us 20 grand, we’ll, we’ll make sure it appears there. And you know, there’s little to no chance of the publication picking it up otherwise. The other thing is if you have the capability to analyze different types of sponsored content and and see what kind of traffic you get, you might find that some kinds of sponsored content, particularly on industry, or niche publications, may make good sense because the readers that they are going to see it anyway.
John Wall 4:42
Now, how about some of the sponsored content? I mean, really, with the exception of it saying sponsored at the top? I mean, it seems like digitally, it’s exactly the same as the organic stuff. So you know, are there any real differences
Christopher Penn 4:55
other than the disclosures, a lot of these the companies that put together sponsored content really want it to look like the organic news? Well, well, alright, so
Katie Robbert 5:06
go ahead.
Christopher Penn 5:08
So much so that a few have gotten in trouble over, you know, every now and again for not being sufficiently upfront about disclosing like, this was paid for by so so
Katie Robbert 5:21
you know, it’s it’s one of those things that I’m sort of putting myself in the shoes of the consumer right now like when I, like I don’t, as I’m reading articles I don’t look for, is it sponsor? Is it not? So I don’t look for did a company pay to put their content here? Or, you know, did they have a really good comms team who was able to get it placed for them? I look for it, was the article relevant to me? And do I get anything out of it? So as a consumer, I don’t care if it’s sponsored or not. So I can understand, you know, the company wants to get it out there to as many people as possible. But, you know, crappy content is crappy content, it doesn’t mean that people are going to respond to it. So, you know, it’s sort of the thing that we always kind of go back to is like, well, if you write really good content, then that’s like, the hard part is over, like, people will want to read it. But that’s a whole other thing. But yeah, as a consumer, I don’t care if it’s sponsored or not, I care if it’s useful.
Christopher Penn 6:17
And that is the pitch that a lot of ad tech companies and advertising brokers and companies like this inside will say it’s like, Look, you know, your contents gonna show up like any of our other content, the consumer doesn’t care. Sometimes they can’t even tell the difference, not because we do anything malicious, but just because people don’t pay attention to that stuff. So why not buy the full page placement that you really want, rather than pestering our writers?
John Wall 6:44
Yeah, I mean, if your SEO plan is, hey, we need X number of inbound links. I mean, you can just buy your way into that.
Christopher Penn 6:51
Exactly. So after our friends told us about this, this ad firm, because they claimed to be a PR firm, but they’re just really selling advertising. We had the question, well, what if that’s the right choice? Like as much as it’s, you know, I have the temptation to make fun of such tactics. We don’t know is that, could they be right? Like, could they actually say like, yeah, sponsored content works, and and you’re better off paying the, you know, 510 $20,000, for a guaranteed placement, as been, you know, banging your head against the wall. So what we want to know was, well, how would you know, like, how would you know that some content does better than others. One of the things you’ll note here, and you can see it in the URL, the URL here has a little sc in it. That’s business Insider’s way of saying our sponsor content stored in this URL structure, when you go to the BBC, there is bbc.com, slash storyworks. So the story works is always highlighted in the URL. So if we were to extract a random sampling of pages from all these publications, we would be able to get some of the sponsored stuff and a bunch of the on sponsored stuff as well. And then we can take a look and see what is the difference between these these two types of content. So the way that you would get to that would be through an SEO tool. And you know, we we use at our shop, the href software, I still can’t ROC the fact that the first part of that name is silent. But well, I would press RS like a
John Wall 8:41
this is one of the great mysteries of the universe, how a company that does nothing but marketing has a rough time coming up with a name that people can say.
Christopher Penn 8:51
So in a system like this, I can go in and say I want to see pages from a site like Business Insider. Now, the challenge that we’re going to run into is there’s a lot of them, there’s almost 600,000. And you know, only a certain percentage are going to be sponsored, run sponsored. So what we need to do is extract a lot of these pages, if not all of them. In this case, I’ve already done the repeated exports to get to the the rough sample of these pages, and then we need to look at the URLs and say, What’s the difference? So there is a way to do this. Like if you want to do this in Microsoft Excel, you could it would be a an extremely large spreadsheet. But yeah, you can do it you would you would copy and paste all this and then you could start doing math on the different columns. Katie, you look puzzled.
Katie Robbert 9:49
Well, I guess I’m wondering is is there a more straightforward way, you know, you know, can someone do it within the tool and just filter it down? To the URLs that only have sc in them, or, you know, can they export the data and then just filter by only the URLs that have sc and look at, you know, the relative, you know, traffic to those pages.
Christopher Penn 10:16
The second part of what you’re talking about is exactly what we’re going to do. So we’re going to filter by the URLs to get a sense of what is now I’m going to use R, because it’s a lot faster than watching me copy and paste for 20 minutes. But if you don’t use R, you can do exactly what Katie just said, and put it on a big ol Excel spreadsheet. And then use statements like count if and stuff to count whether that you know, the SC is in the URL. And so let’s start, let’s go ahead and clean things up here. Let’s start with Business Insider, and go take the Business Insider content, we’re going to load it all up. And we should get what we got here we have 55,000 pages total of which 41,000 unique. And we know that the SC sets, this is sponsored content. So if we were to summarize all the different metrics. Oops, forgot my ungroup statement there. Let’s take a look at just this quick summary. sponsored the, we’re gonna use h refs, we’re gonna use two metrics, one, the traffic, the href, think that takes that page gets. And they get that data from things like Bitly clicks from third parties from some of their own data collection efforts. And then the number of tweets of that URL, people tweeting that URL. And so those are, I think, two decent measures for trying to understand another one that we could look at. If you want to view referring domains, if you want to see like, Does the sponsor content, get you more incoming links, but for now, we’re gonna leave that off. For Business Insider, we see that sponsored content, that is non sponsored content gets an average of 922 visits per page, and gets about 60 tweets, on average, sponsored content gets 37, almost 38 visits per page and about one, one tweet, so there’s a pretty big difference there.
John Wall 12:18
Yeah, obviously, that seems like you’re just getting killed. If you’re sponsoring the content. It’s like 30 times the traffic 60 times the Twitter eat.
Christopher Penn 12:27
Right. And if we look, let’s let’s go do a bit more digging. Let’s take a look at just the top 25 non sponsored stories. First, let’s see what that looks like. Just to get a sense of what’s in the news, right? We have you know, last kingdom is Netflix, his latest binge worthy British thing the Dow Jones index, something from the election because this is to all the 2021 the Dow Jones 30 how to log it to Facebook. And so these are you know, these are stories that get a lot of traffic hundreds of 1000s of visits. 30% of Kohl’s coupons. I didn’t know Kohl’s was that big of a deal. But you know, the best laundry and 2021 Bitcoin prices have a loop a YouTube video What does NSFW mean? 100 126,000 people were reading it. I give up on people.
Katie Robbert 13:18
So it’s so this doesn’t tell us anything? Because it’s all over the place.
Christopher Penn 13:23
Exactly. So this tells me why this gives you a general sense of the what non sponsored content is most popular on Business Insider. One of the things that would be a logical thing to ask if you are a company looking like we were looking to play some content is is this even the right audience? Right, based on what people are reading here? I’m not sure.
John Wall 13:45
Yeah, my opinion of this hard hitting news is really kind of kind of bugging me.
Christopher Penn 13:53
And now let’s do the same thing. But let’s look at at sponsored content and try and get a sense of like, what kind of stuff is popular in the sponsored realm, if anything? This is really interesting. So one story, Sam’s Club, benefits using the Sam’s Club, credit card did really did did decent, you know, 1600 visits, and then all the other stuff out so much.
John Wall 14:20
It’s funny that totally matches what the calls 30% off thing though. It’s like the same content really.
Christopher Penn 14:26
Right. Exactly. So from you know, this is a site called Business Insider, you would think it would be more
John Wall 14:35
business, business E.
Christopher Penn 14:39
So this is one example. We can see here, you know, obviously IBM has done a couple of pieces. We see a whole bunch of sort of what you would expect actually is probably blog content that somebody repurpose, right how we tell us to succeed in e commerce in China. Just smells like a blog post. If you like somebody borrowed from the corporate blog,
Katie Robbert 15:02
what’s interesting is, at least as you know, at a first glance, is that the titles of the sponsored content are less actionable, I guess maybe that’s not the right word, but they’re less like, how to do this. And what’s this and, you know, 10 ways to do this. Whereas the unsponsored content is more of the, like, help content, it feels like. Yeah, you know, like, how to log into Facebook 30% off 10 simple ways. You know, and, and that’s not true of all of them. There’s still a lot of weird stuff in here that like, I don’t know, why would read the article, but at least these ones seem to me a little bit more that they actually tell you what the article is about.
Christopher Penn 15:54
Right, which is, I think that’s an important content marketing lesson in itself is like, if you’re going to spend a lot of money on sponsored content, maybe, you know, make it as try to make it as appealing as as the stuff that we know, does well, whether or not we want to read about these things, any of these individual topics. You’re right, at least, you know, like this one, he had chainsaws, right and originally invented for helping with you know, I will definitely go and read what the best of that is, it sounds fun. So that’s Business Insider. Based on what we’ve seen, so far, I’m kind of feeling like that that would be a no for me. Like the the differences too big. So let’s take a look at the bbcs Now, let’s we’re going to rerun the same thing. We’ll load up the BBC data. This case took about 20,000 articles here at the BBC 17 visits for sponsored content and then about two tweets and for non sponsored content about 3000 visits and and 61 tweets again you know BBC articles here clearly the the non sponsored has a lot more juice. Let’s go ahead and look at the top stories on the non sponsored
Katie Robbert 17:11
let’s consider a top story.
Christopher Penn 17:14
By traffic ordered by about traffic Sean Connery dies. The Canadian election. Fake photos Kim Jong moon. What exactly is a Karan? And where did the meme come from? So they again, this is very much you can tell general news with a distinct weight towards your world news, which you would expect at the BBC.
Katie Robbert 17:40
Well, it also it also speaks to the squirrel brain that we all have of like, ooh, shiny thing. Ooh, shiny thing. Ooh, shiny thing. Like, again, it’s it’s a little more news, but it’s still all over the place.
Christopher Penn 17:55
Right? Exactly. SEO Tiktok overtakes YouTube for average watch time in the US silence actually is mildly interesting.
Katie Robbert 18:04
Not really.
Christopher Penn 18:06
Mild. Okay, let’s take a look at storyworks and see how his BBC storyworks match up. Okay, already better than Business Insider. That was a bunch of zeros for afterwards. But here some tourism stuff. More tourism, more tourism. Tourism. Is that interesting? is there’s a lot of tourism stuff in this positive but it does it you know, decent? It’s it’s not it’s not a zero.
John Wall 18:37
Yeah. And like Katie was saying with the other titles, these titles are way more compelling.
Christopher Penn 18:43
Yeah, how to beat jetlag travel in the COVID-19 world. You know, there’s there’s other stuff like, you know, hack tech, how technology is transforming Japanese culture. That’s that’s not as compelling. But yeah, there’s definitely, you know, somewhat improved quality. So, even though the traffic numbers are not great for this, it’s certainly better than than business insight is was. Okay, let’s do one more. Let’s do BuzzFeed. Everybody’s favorite short attention span theater.
Katie Robbert 19:15
It’s gonna be all quizzes.
Christopher Penn 19:17
Probably. This is really interesting. The difference is much narrower 11 visits for sponsored content 92 visits for not less than a half a tweet for sponsored content, and two for naught. So there’s there’s a pretty sizable difference here in terms of the content so let’s take a look at the top traffic
John Wall 19:42
that you have. Is that like 70x characters
Christopher Penn 19:47
and this is definitely clickbait content. clickbait content, you know, all Yeah, exactly. It’s all pop culture stuff. 72 keto friendly Trader Joe’s products.
John Wall 20:08
What is your spirit animal? There you go.
Katie Robbert 20:12
Well, that’s Liberty tweets you missed last week. Yeah, I’m gonna lose sleep over that.
Christopher Penn 20:21
So okay is you know this, there’s, there’s definitely a clear audience for this content. Let’s take a look at their sponsored content now and see if we can figure out what’s going on with that.
John Wall 20:32
The fact that the headline, the longer you take to complete this quiz, the dumber You are the fact that that gets clicks.
Christopher Penn 20:39
Now, what’s interesting about BuzzFeed is that BuzzFeed doesn’t necessarily do placed content, what they do is, is they allow a company to sponsor an article. So like, that’s what is your spirit animal, if you were to go into that quiz, it is sponsored by, I think it was like Ragu, or something like that. Some big. So there are definitely some stories that do well, but in this case, again, not zeros like this is inside as was but also not nearly the size. But this is very much in line with the rest of their content, and stuff. And so we can see like the 24 things about fall that will put a smile on your face, what’s your superhero power, best moments in punked, history, etc. So these are things that are pieces that other companies that have sponsored, just to get their brand in front of an audience. So in all three cases, I think it’s safe to say, we can conclude that the amount of traffic of the sponsored content piece gets is substantially lower than a non sponsored piece. So if you are working with a public relations agency, and they’re talking about, is it better just buy your way in from at least from a traffic perspective? The answer’s no.
Katie Robbert 21:55
Well, and the feedback from the So to be clear, this group of people right here, we are not comms and PR professionals. And so we look at it from a data standpoint. But the feedback from the actual PR pros in that conversation was that, you know, sponsored content is not the right strategic move, because it lessens the value of the work that they do. And I agree with that, because there’s a reason that that job function exists. And if companies can just pay to get really crappy content, on a website that someone else has been working hard to get placed, organically, that’s a really stellar piece of content, like, Yeah, it does seem a little bit like the sponsored content is like a cheat. And I get that it’s not to cheat, like, if you have the money to pony up to do it, then that’s fine. But then why are these people over here busting their butts, to try to get you know, the same result?
Christopher Penn 22:55
Yeah, a part of that, I think also goes to when you’re advertising is you’re effectively putting your content in front of somebody else. Whereas when you’re getting coverage of it, you’re getting essentially an implicit third party endorsement. You’re saying that the publication without taking money for it. But your news was newsworthy enough that it deserves some shelf space. Whereas if you have to buy your way in, not true, not everybody pays attention to those tags. But it’s clear that if the story that you had to share was good enough, it would have made its way into the publication already from an unpaid perspective.
Katie Robbert 23:37
So I think that brings us to the last point that we want to cover is what are the alternatives that people can take aside from just writing better content? What are some, but in all seriousness, what are the alternatives to sponsored content? I mean, it’s obviously getting a really great comms team and PR team who can like, you know, pitch like nobody’s business, it’s writing, you know, really solid, useful content that people actually want to read, what are some other things to be able to do, as opposed to just defaulting to sponsored content?
Christopher Penn 24:12
One of the things that I think the public relations industry has not thought enough about is that influencer marketing includes them, not just in the sense of, Oh, I, you know, I as a PR person, I’m gonna go help recruit influences for a company and share the stuff. I think, you know, there’s, that’s certainly valid. But PR people don’t think of themselves as the influencers, right? If you have strong relationships with so and so at the New York Times, and so and so at the Wall Street Journal, and so and so at the Boston Business Journal, and you can reliably get them to pick up the phone when you call them. You are an influencer. You are an influencer. And as such, you can extend your influence to take the client story. Hopefully tell the client Yes, this is newsworthy, or guys come up with something better than you know, I know, you know, I know John’s does, the marketing of a copier podcast is not going to want to cover this because it’s it’s, you know, it’s a you and 1000 other companies do exactly the same thing. But if you have something it’s truly actually news, then I can go and use my my relationship, my influence with John to get that story covered on the marketing over coffee podcast, I think that’s a mindset that PR people have not figured out yet that they are influencers, they don’t have to have big personal brands and be, you know, you know, Instagram celebrities, stuff like that, but they do have to have those relationships. And the definition of influence is that you can somebody to do something through persuasion, as opposed to swiping a credit card.
Katie Robbert 25:49
Well, and that way, I think we’re starting to go down like the road of like, what defines an influencer, and, you know, you’re talking about in two different contexts. And so when you’re talking about, you know, the PR industry as a whole, a lot of it is about relationship building, and networking and trust of, yeah, if you get my story placed, I, you can trust me, then I’m going to continue to give you good stories for your publication, that to me is different from, you know, what people typically think of influencers now is, I have a big reach of people. So if I hold up a makeup brush, 5000 people are gonna buy it, you know, those are, those are two different context. So I wouldn’t use the word influencer, in the context that you’re talking about, what you’re really talking about is those relationships, those interpersonal relationships that need to exist in order for someone in the PR space to be successful.
Christopher Penn 26:44
Exactly. But to your point about what are the alternatives of sponsored content, yet in the creation of quality content is important. But art on parcel of that is that you as a, as a generator of content, also develop that relationship with the publication, if you know, the PR person may make the introduction, but then, you know, you may change agencies or change staff or things like that. But if you are known to the publisher, whoever it is, then as long as you continue to create really interesting stuff, you can get seen, right? So you don’t have to pay for it. But it takes time and effort to build those relationships. Like we just did a piece yesterday on the top marketing technologies used by over 1000 companies and stockbrokers, martech landscape. Because we have a relationship with Scott, because we have a relationship with the martech organization in the market conference. And because we consistently create content, that is actually news, it was relatively straightforward to tag him in a LinkedIn post, you know, and have him then go reshare it on Twitter and stuff like that, and and get the story placed. Right. So we didn’t have to work hard at this campaign. But we do have to work hard at is maintaining that relationship over time. So a big part of making sure your content goes somewhere is you got to work on the relationships.
Katie Robbert 28:11
What do you think, John? Have you ever felt? So John, I feel like, of the three of us, you might be the most farthest removed from the PR industry? Is that? Is that an accurate statement?
John Wall 28:22
Yeah, yeah, I’m definitely you know, I know how that works. But I’ve never had hands on in that thing. And it’s interesting, I have a different perspective from the marketing over coffee side, too, because we get pitched all the time. content. And and and there are we have sponsors that we will create content with. It’s an interesting point, that kind of ties into what Chris was talking about. And like, I know that there are show sponsors that I can say to them, Look, if you sponsor the show, I know we can get to good stories from you, you know, we’re going to be covering email service providers anyways. And I know you have these good clients, and it changes everything, you know, becomes regular organic content. But yeah, it’s very interesting. It’s just fascinating to hear you guys talk about this, and especially where could the PR industry go? I mean, what do you guys think about that? Like, is there a way to keep take the existing model and have them understand that these people can actually become influencers if they’d become experienced enough in a vertical or do they just spin off and go and work in those industries as soon as they’ve got enough clout?
Christopher Penn 29:24
Getting Ahead. It’s both. It is both. I mean, we know a lot of folks who work agency side who I’ll eventually do go in house because in house pays a lot better. But also, there is a PR industry. f8 who was talking? I was talking with Kate Westover about this the other day. The PR industry doesn’t realize the importance of its name, public relations, building relationships with the public, right. Make a lot of people and a lot of executives of companies think it’s actually Just Media Relations, hey, go pitch these stories to media. The evolution of public relations is almost disintermediated going straight to your public, you don’t necessarily need a BuzzFeed of business insight as if you’ve built strong relationships with your with your community, and you have influential people within that community. You know, when you look, for example, at the now 2000 people that are in the analytics for marketers slack group, right, that is a, that is our audience as our community, those are the folks who are paying attention. And so our public relations relating to those people, we don’t have to work through publication to get there. The In-Ear Insights newsletter with over 18,000 subscribers. That is our publication now. Could we be doing more to be in other people’s publications? Yes, 100%, we could be reaching out to more people more often. But even just something as simple as tagging the right people in on LinkedIn, when we put up a post, because we know that we’re talking about it’s going to help like when we publish this show, on our blog tomorrow. We know that we’re going to tag Gini Dietrich, we’re gonna tag the spin sex community bio share in the spin sex community itself, because the question came from there will pry tag people like Perry Hedrick, who’s a good friend of ours, and Joel Richmond, a good friend of ours in the in the PR industry say, Hey, you know, we’ll love your thoughts on what we talked about on the show. That’s public relations is relating to your public and knowing who those people are. So the evolution of PR is not just your flinging more money and trying to be all things to everybody, but saying, How good are your relationships with the public directly?
Katie Robbert 31:44
Can I just say, for a second, I just have any rant. I hate this trend of tech of being tagged in things randomly on social media, like if you want my attention, like, send it to me personally, but like, just being tagged in something on social media does not guarantee that I’m going to read it, but I’m going to share it if anything, I’m probably going to ignore it even more, because I didn’t ask you to do that. So that’s my little two second rant on that. But I understand what you’re saying, Chris, like, so these are people that you’ve named, that we have relationships with. And so it’s not just out of the blue, you know, those, you know, things on Twitter and LinkedIn where you see 800 people tagged, and you’re like, I don’t even know, I forgot what the point of the message was in the first place. Because now I’m getting 8 million notifications from people I’ve never met. And this is all just, you know, a bunch of noise. And so I feel like there’s just like, with everything, there’s the right way and the wrong way to do it. So if you’re going to go that route of tagging people in your posts on social media, then I would definitely caution you to say make sure that it’s not people who are going to be pissed off by being tagged and stuff for no good reason. Like, don’t just randomly, like go to lists, like, Okay, it looks like these five people are CEOs of companies that I want to get in front of. So let me tag them like, don’t do that. Make sure they’re people you actually have relationships with. And I think that is definitely the difference in terms of, you know, calling what you’re talking about public relations, because you have that relationship with someone, you’re not just randomly tagging people hoping that they might see it and say, Oh, that’s interesting.
Christopher Penn 33:21
Exactly. And if you do have the relationships, that is your, your, probably your best alternative to sponsored content is to know that you can work inside those relationships. For stuff, that’s actually news that’s actually worth talking about, and get the people that you care about to see it. So I would encourage you to look at the SEO tools that you have access to already. And see, do some investigation as we as we show today, if there’s a publication that you think would be interesting for your content to be in, use the SEO tool, look at the traffic, if they have a way for you to detect the sponsor versus on sponsored content, repeat the analysis we just did today. Again, you can do it in Excel, it’s just really takes a little bit longer to do than than the way we did it. But you’ll get the same outcome. We’re just making charts. No machine learning, no statistics, just adding stuff up. So you can totally do that in Excel, use the SEO tools, you have to look at that data, and then make a judgment call. If you see that, you know, on like we saw with the BBC. That might be your audience, right? If you survey your customers, you survey your your community and they say yeah, we are diehard fans of the BBC and like Hmm, maybe we should maybe it’s worth that for the reputation perspective. And then I guess the third part would be do your do your public relations well, and as Katie said, make sure you have a story worth sharing so that people are more likely to share it. Any other parting words
John Wall 35:00
Have a story worth sharing is really all the advice in the video needs on that friend.
Christopher Penn 35:06
Maybe that’s a topic for another show. How do you know when you have a story? Alright folks, take care. We’ll see you all next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast and a weekly email newsletter at Trust insights.ai slash newsletter. got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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