Welcome back to Web Marketing Wednesdays (WMW), Southwark Consulting’s weekly roundup of news and notes from the digital marketing world! This week’s edition of WMW explores brand storytelling, the role of word choice in content sharing, the future of Google AdWords and some interesting news on social logins. As always, the goal of this column is to provide higher ed admissions and marketing staff with a quick rundown of the latest digital marketing trends. Read on for all the latest news…
We’ll kick off this week’s column with two great pieces on ‘brand storytelling’. For the uninitiated, brand storytelling is best defined as the sweet spot where a company or institution conveys information about their attributes, features and benefits via a compelling story. For a primer on how this works – and why stories and storytelling are so powerful – check out Richie Kawamoto’s ‘Can Anyone Hear My Brand’? While the focus of the article is around small firms seeking to be noticed in a sea of social media and digital marketing, there are some very instructive lessons for the higher education world. After you’ve perused that piece, check out Michael Brito’s ‘Brandy Storytelling with Content, Not Ads’ to get an overview of why content marketing can be more powerful than advertising – all via excellent quotes from business leaders with first hand experience. Brito’s article also points to a larger piece from Contently that delves more deeply into this arena for those who are interested.
Assuming you have mastered the art of brand storytelling and are now focused on sharing your stories across distribution channels (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…) you should read Neil Patel’s wonderful piece (and infographic) on the role that word choice plays in the sharing of content. Patel breaks down each of the key social networks and analyzes the posts that were most frequently shared – looking for patterns in word usage and illustrating some very interesting trends. A quick read of this piece should prove instructive for your future tweets, status updates and more.
In other news this week, Google unveiled details about the future of AdWords. The folks at Digital Aptitude offer an excellent blow-by-blow of the new features Google is working on as well as an embed of the webinar ‘Step Inside AdWords’. This is must viewing for anyone who runs a b-school AdWords program (or supervises a media buyer in this domain).
And finally, we’ll wrap up this week’s WMW with an interesting piece from TechCrunch that focuses on social logins (e.g. all those sites that allow you to join/sign in with an existing social media account). While we haven’t seen many business schools allow social logins as a way to ease the prospecting process for applicants, things may be moving in that direction. Regardless, the article is filled with interesting facts – like how Facebook is the network of choice for more than half of all social logins.
That’s the news for this week! Thanks for tuning in!
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