Why Content Marketing Fails, Instagram Engagement, and ROI (Return on Influence) - Web Marketing Wednesdays

Welcome back to Web Marketing Wednesdays (WMW), Southwark Consulting’s weekly roundup of news and notes from the digital marketing world! While we’ve devoted the last couple of weeks to internal pieces about the mobile first generation, we return to our usual format for this week and feature lots of great content from across the web. Read on for key advice on content marketing (and why it often fails), intriguing information about Instagram, an alternate definition of ROI and more! 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.

We’ll get things started this week with a great piece from Greg Satell at Forbes entitled Why Content Marketing Fails. In this article, Satell explains that content marketing is more about content, connection and vision than it is about marketing – which seems simple enough, but is routinely lost on most marketers who engage in content marketing. Speaking of which, there is a short piece from Yellow Barn Media that offers the following tidbit: “Have you ever met that person at a social function that can only talk about themselves? How annoying is that? That is how so many businesses act online. They post about how awesome they are, what kind of sales they have and more about them.” The blog post goes on to point out that businesses (or business schools in our case) who are carrying out content marketing or engagement marketing efforts need to spend less time talking about themselves and more time delivering valuable content that their customers (prospective applicants) might be looking for. According to Jamie Clark-Samples at Yellow Barn Media, this sort of behavior will result in a greater ROI – ‘Return on Influence’.

Shifting gears, we turn to Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgram for some interesting news about Instagram. While most marketers place Instagram far behind Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn on the social network hierarchy, the numbers in a recent Forrester study suggest that engagement between brands and individuals is much higher in Instagram (vs. Facebook or Twitter). With that said, Beal still cautions that not all engagement is created equal – pointing out that Instagram makes it fairly easy (and somewhat non-committal) for users to engage with photos in contrast to deciding to retweet something or ‘share’ it on Facebook.

Finally, we’ll close out this week’s column with a brilliant post that concisely outlines the seven reasons that blogging can make you (or your school) a better leader in your field. The post comes from Mark Schafer at {Grow} and my favorite item on his list is #6: “Managing through crisis” – where he argues that having a blog can be vital when dealing with a negative incident and getting out in front of it.

That’s the digital marketing news for this week. As always, thanks for reading!