As the efficacy of outbound marketing continues to wane, more and more marketers are considering native advertising and content marketing as viable alternatives. According to our survey, 72% of clients have asked their content marketing agencies about native advertising.
While these two strategies have many similarities, one of their major differences is cost. Based on new exclusive research conducted by Fractl and Moz, these top-tier publishers require the following minimum spend to produce native advertising campaigns for brands:
Methodology
The goal of our research was to take a data-driven approach to comparing the efficacy of native advertising versus content marketing. For the first part of our study, we created a 14-question survey for content marketing providers which explored everything from the cost of their services to the reach of their campaigns. Our friends at Relevance were kind enough to offer the raw data on their native advertising cost research as well, allowing us to focus on gathering additional cost data from the top-tier publishers we maintain relationships with. After we received the survey responses from over 30 different content marketing agencies and cost data from close to 600 digital publishers, we began our analysis.
I. Identifying marketing objectives and challenges in the digital age
Before we dive into our findings, it's important to know the collective objectives and challenges of the inbound marketing age. Since Fractl and Moz spearheaded this study, we wanted to use an authoritative third-party source to support our research and set the stage for our discussion.
For that, we'll refer to HubSpot's State of Inbound 2014–2015 Report. The four graphs below shed light on marketing's key objectives, challenges, and wins.
1. The top 60% of marketing objectives focus on increasing leads, converting customers, and reaching relevant audiences.
2. The number one challenge marketers report is proving the ROI of their marketing activities.
3. SEO is the number one lead-generating source reported by inbound marketing professionals.
4. The companies with the highest ROI focus on blogging, organic search, and content amplification.
Right out of the gate we see that content, organic search, and content amplification are leading the way for marketers, priming content providers and promoters for exponential growth.
So how does content marketing compare to native advertising?
II. The landscape of content marketing and native advertising opportunities
The bullhorn of radio, television, print, and other one-way interruptive marketing approaches are quickly losing efficacy, allowing content marketing and native advertising to step in and solve the following problems:
- Banner blindness: The average click-through rate (CTR) of display ads is 0.1%.
- Eroding email engagement rates: Industry CTRs range from 1.5%–4.79%.
- Skipped pre-roll ads: 94% of people hit the skip button.
- Fragmented consumer attention: 77% of people watch TV while using another device.
- Inability to track outbound marketing ROI: Marketers can easily track content performance and conversion with inbound.
- High cost-per-lead for outbound marketing: Inbound leads are more cost-effective, with over 2x the marketers citing inbound (45%) as their primary source of leads versus outbound (22%) in 2014.
- Low brand engagement: While outbound marketing interrupts consumers, inbound marketing attracts and engages prospects in an organic way.
But what are the major differentiating factors between content marketing and native advertising?
Both content marketing and native advertising can be used to generate brand awareness and engagement. While top-tier publishers sell themselves on their large, built-in reach, sponsored content doesn't guarantee engagement. Below, we created a Buzzsumo analysis of 38 BuzzFeed native advertising campaigns in comparison to 58 Fractl content marketing campaigns. The BuzzFeed campaigns were calculated using all of the posts on a "Brand Publisher's" page (e.g. Kindle); while the Fractl campaigns were calculated using all of the campaigns executed for each of our client's during 2014.
At Fractl, we've earned an average of 90 links and 10,000 social shares per campaign, across 140 different campaigns executed between 2013 and 2015. In comparison, with native advertising, you're often just paying for the ability to publish content solely on the site you're partnering with. Although BuzzFeed boasts monthly traffic numbers in the multi-millions, this doesn't guarantee social engagement nor syndication of a campaign, as seen above.
Further into our research, you'll see that that content marketing agencies are doing the additional legwork with influencer marketing to amplify their content, which creates a larger reach than most top-tier publishers offering native advertising.
Furthermore, content marketing results directly impact a client's organic search positioning, whereas native advertising is limited by Google's guidelines:
- Content Marketing: ROI can be tracked through increased organic rankings as a direct result of earning a diverse, high-quality link portfolio.
- Native Advertising: Reach is limited to the number of paid publisher partnerships, and "sponsored links" are not allowed to pass value.
Has the cost of native advertising been inflated as a means of recovering revenue, or is it truly worth the tens of thousands of dollars that top-tier publishers are charging?
Let's dig further into the numbers to find out.
III. Cost analysis of the native advertising industry
Based on HubSpot's report, 93% of companies with an annual marketing budget between $1 and $5 million are practicing inbound.
Estimates from BI Intelligence show that spending on native ads will reach $7.9 billion in 2015 and grow to $21 billion in 2018, rising from just $4.7 billion in 2013.
But can most businesses afford the exorbitant costs for native advertising on top-tier publishers? Is the ROI worth it? Using native advertising cost data gathered by Relevance and Fractl, we analyzed the cost of native advertising on general news publishers with a domain authority (DA) greater than 80 and a social following greater than 100,000 – highly sought after placements for most brands.
The average cost of launching a native advertising program with a top-tier news publisher was $54,014.29. The highest cost was $200,000.
When we expanded our analysis to include all publishers who have a DA greater than 80, we found the average cost of launching a native advertising program was $35,482.50*.
*Average value derived from original cost totals and not the averages displayed in the image above.
When we evaluate all publishers and blogs below a DA of 80, we see the less valuable publishers (lower reach) offer a significantly reduced cost. For sites with a DA less than 80, the highest cost was $20,000 and the lowest cost was $10.
As outlined above, native advertising cost is largely associated with authority and reach. However, since engagement isn't a guarantee and the costs can be exorbitant for most brands, there's a need for other options that leverage and amplify content.
IV. Analysis of the efficacy of content marketing
Through our exclusive survey of over 30 content marketing agencies, we discovered how the content marketing landscape compares to native advertising.
1. 70% of content marketing agencies offer monthly retainers.
The industry is largely dominated by retainer packages, which often include production on multiple campaigns, influencer marketing, and on-site/overall strategy consultation. As represented in this pie chart, the pay-per-word structure is quickly eroding, and more comprehensive inbound marketing strategies are taking its place.
2. Retainers tend to fall into four buckets: $1,000–$5,000, $5,000–$10,000, $10,000–$50,000, and $50,000–$100,000.
Of all of our questions, this answer had one of the most evenly balanced responses, which demonstrates that there is a content marketing package that almost every business can afford. Similar to the native advertising scale, content marketing costs largely relate to the scope of the projects being produced (e.g., press releases versus interactive graphics) and their reach (e.g., influencer marketing versus no outreach).
3. On average, 65% of agencies produce between 1 and 10 campaigns per month for each client.
With content marketing campaigns, success is largely determined by a portfolio of executions: it's natural to have some campaigns flop for reasons outside of your control (i.e., poor publisher headlines, trending stories monopolize news, etc.), but over a portfolio of executions (i.e., three- to six-month retainers), most agencies can guarantee a base level of success.
4. Articles and infographics represent almost 60% of production, with case studies, interactive graphics, and videos accounting for close to 30% of production.
Based on our previous survey of 500 top-tier publishers, we found that articles and infographics were the most sought after content formats, so it's good to see most agencies are producing what's in-line with the publishers that will give them the largest reach.
5. Excluding outliers, the average content marketing campaign earns 27 links.
Across 38 native advertising campaigns produced by BuzzFeed, only eight backlinks were earned – an average of 0.18 backlinks per campaign. If you include the BuzzFeed article itself as a pickup (like we did in section II), you'll get an average number of campaign pickups of 1.18.
6. The average for each agency's "most successful campaign" is 422 links and the median is 150 links.
Again, we see a fairly even split with this response, likely relating back to the even split we saw with the monthly retainer.
7. Does agency cost correlate to performance?
Here, we see the sweet spot for success comes from agencies that are given the budget to produce larger-scope campaigns and invest in influencer marketing – those charging $5,000 to $50,000 per content marketing campaign or retainer.
8. 48% of clients measure content marketing success by the number of leads, high-quality links, and total social shares generated by each campaign.
Remember, marketing professionals listed two top objectives: increasing the number of leads and reaching the relevant audience. With content marketing, this translates directly into the number of leads generated from high-quality links/placements, and reaching the relevant audience translates into total social shares/engagement on a targeted campaign.
9. 39% use DA to evaluate the authority of a link.
While 39% of agencies use DA to evaluate the authority of a link, an almost equal number of agencies (35.7%) aren't tracking link authority. This is interesting, considering high-quality links were reported as the number two metric for content marketing success; however, high-quality links only accounted for 14.3% of the total pie, so DA might only be tracked by the agencies that have the budget to produce campaigns that earn high-quality links.
V. The ROI of content marketing vs. native advertising
As we saw in Section I, proving ROI is a marketer's biggest challenge. In fact, 20% of inbound marketers aren't measuring ROI. However, those who are measuring ROI have been able to prove that inbound unlocks ROI and ROI unlocks budget.
So, how do you prove ROI? And which tactic is best for your brand?
As a starting point, we'll refer to Neil Patel's estimates for content marketing by the numbers:
Using these metrics, we came up with a beta content ROI calculator which determines campaign ROI by analyzing traffic, social shares, links, and major placements:
When we plugged our most viral infographic to-date into our handy calculator, we found the client received a low estimated ROI of greater than 1,551% and a high estimated ROI greater than 2,942%.
Now, let's perform the same analysis for Intel's most successful BuzzFeed native advertising campaign "15 Things We Did At School That Future Students Will Never Understand," which earned 109,020 social shares and 1 backlink generated from BuzzFeed itself. Since there's no way for us to determine traffic data as an outsider, we'll assume this post made it to BuzzFeed's "top posts this week section." Out of the 20 top posts from this past week, the average view count was 989,332, which we'll use as our guesstimate for their traffic number.
At the $100K level a brand gets 3 custom pieces of content from BuzzFeed, meaning this single campaign cost $33,333.33. When we put the max value for links and major placements, and Neil Patel's highest estimated value for visitor and share, we find Intel's campaign ROI was:
This puts the high-performing campaign ROI for BuzzFeed at 720.53% and Fractl at 2,942%.
Based on all of the above, we know that the average content marketing campaign can deliver the same if not better KPIs than most native advertising campaigns. While some companies have the budget to invest in both tactics, others have to focus on the tactics driving the highest ROI. So, which tactic is right for your brand?
Whether you go with content marketing or native advertising, you'll always need to refine your processes to increase your content ROI. To do this, download our research bundle and leverage data-driven insights on content creation and pitching best practices.
In closing, we want to give a special thanks to Relevance for providing us with the raw native advertising cost data from over 500 publishers.
We'd also like to give a shout out to the 32 agencies that participated in our study and generously provided their sensitive data to produce our report.
What do you think about the value of native advertising versus content marketing? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Wow, this is NOT one post worth of info. This is a massive lot. I worked through it once now but need a few more reads.
(I'm reading & replying to this while watching tv ... I'm one of the 77%)
Couldn't agree with you more. This is a lot of information that probably could spawn 10 different posts just from the data presented here. Great post!
This is surely worth more than one read (maybe even one without the TV being on in the background).
Thanks, Lars! There will definitely be a few spin-offs of this research, and we hope it inspires others to expand on the topic, as well.
Glad you enjoyed our research, Matt. I was sleeping while you were commenting, so you're a step ahead of me!
Ha, I'm often about half a day ahead on things as I'm in Melbourne. Congrats on promotion to the main blog!
I have nothing to add other than to say this post absolutely crushed. I love the data/research and would be very interested to hear the eventual ROI of this particular campaign.
Thanks so much, Jonathan! Check out my recent Moz post to get an idea of what long-term content marketing ROI looks like.
A great article and love how data-driven it is. It'll be interesting to see how the ROI of these marketing efforts is influenced by having done an initial behavior segmentation of one's market and having selected the most attractive segment before launching content marketing efforts. I often find that 'shotgun' content marketing approaches are less effective than targeting a specific segment (based on size, growth rate, competitive density, profitability, etc..) and then developing the right content for that segment, deploying it through the appropriate channels that only that segment uses and selecting the right influencers that 'talk to' that segment. Thanks again for the rich post!
Thanks, Jennifer! We're big fans of data-driven content.
A mistake most brands make is assuming that one campaign will be the silver bullet that achieves every KPI they're tracking. At Fractl, we don’t rely on one type of campaign to achieve the diverging goals of our different clients. Most agencies will offer a variety of campaign-types to target each stage of the buying cycle, for example:
Persona development is highly recommended for the first three campaign-types listed here; however, if your end goal is increased organic rankings as a result of earning a large volume of high-value links and engagement, then you typically want to pursue viral campaigns. In this case, when executing viral campaigns, you don't want limit your reach by producing narrow scope ideas that only resonate with a niche market.
There's a campaign blend that's right for every brand depending on what their goals are, but I definitely agree that persona development is a valuable foundation for conversion-driven content.
This is an excellent article but needs several readings to be understood well.
Thanks for sharing.
This is brilliant! I need to reread a few times and get my head around it all.
This is exactly what I have been telling clients but now I have awesome stats and figures to back it up!
Thanks for the compliment, Amy! I'm glad you'll be able to use this research for the greater good of the industry.
That is a brilliant post, alot to digest but brilliant.
Thanks for the feedback, John! I hear it goes down well with a few shots of espresso.
Kelsey, this research is dynamite! Thanks so much for sharing.
To me (as an SEO) this is all a no-brainer. OF COURSE you should be doing very targeted content and influencer marketing, because that build sustainable value in an owned marketing channel, it's highly measurable, and has a clear path to ROI.
But (as an SEO), OF COURSE I would say that ;)
What have the reactions been from people who we would expect to be more "native-first"?
You're welcome, Ethan! Thanks for the engaging comment.
I agree, as SEOs and Inbound marketers, we know the value of our services; the goal with this research was to present outside data to back up our (self-serving) claims, and further prove we're the authority we say we are.
When I originally pitched our agency survey, I only received pushback from one older marketing agency. Their theory was that Content Marketing and Native Advertising should both be used in harmony. Of course, they're probably an agency of record servicing mostly large, Fortune 500 companies who have multi-million marketing budgets to play with.
I'm sure as we continue to syndicate this research, we'll run into more "native-first" people, so I'll have to keep you posted. So far, our clients and prospects have found the research to be helpful in educating their more traditional c-suite executives, so we're off to a solid start!
Kelsey,
This is a fantastic piece of research by your collaboration and the way you represented the whole study, it is just awesome.
I always believe,
"Content marketing is different from other forms of online marketing in that it does not always deliver ROI quickly. It may take weeks or months for a piece of content to be discovered by people and the search engines."
But now, I have to revise my approach towards it.
Thanks so much,
Umar
Hi Umar, it's great to see you in the comment thread again!
Stick with your belief - content marketing is a long-term investment, especially when your goal is to increase the organic rankings of a brand in a highly competitive vertical. In the post, I outline,
"With content marketing campaigns, success is largely determined by a portfolio of executions: it's natural to have some campaigns flop for reasons outside of your control (i.e., poor publisher headlines, trending stories monopolize news, etc.), but over a portfolio of executions (i.e., three- to six-month retainers), most agencies can guarantee a base level of success."
If your goal is simply a short sprint for brand awareness and social engagement, success may be achieved on a shorter timeline; however, if your goal is an aggressive and sustainable organic impact, content should always be something you're investing in. Some of our largest brands and most successful clients have engaged with us since 2013.
Thanks Kelsey for your feedback. It's always great to interact with you to learn some new ways of perceiving things.
You're right. It's indeed a long-term investment and to keep the clients you have to be smart, transparent and quick.
First, I'm curious Kelsey - do you have any data on the cost of actually building a brand from the ground up on content marketing? Perhaps another way to think about it is "What impact does having a known, established, favorable brand have on content marketing ROI?"
My experience has been that brand has on overwhelming influence on determining efficiency (and as a result ROI) for content marketing as brand effects everything crucial to content marketing success (IMO) including (but not limited to):
I think it would be really interesting to see 1) some comparisons on the value and 2) how to track the value of content marketing when you are working with a relatively unknown entity in a space compared to being able to leverage a major brand that already brings so much to the table.
I wonder if in some cases paying to play is really the only feasible option.
Second,
Do you have any opinions on the value of Neil Patel's "research" into the cost/value of content marketing? For instance, he breaks down the total number of "visitors" they received to their infographics on kissmetrics, and then assigns them a value of $.05 "if you were to buy them". Why $.05? What value did these visitors actually hold in terms of meeting or helping them achieve business objectives?
Overall enjoyed the post and appreciate the time you took putting it together. I hope this helps marketers and businesses better understand the potential benefit that content marketing can have for them when done correctly!
Grand Slam! Love the article. Especially the DA costs based on ranges. I found that to be very interesting. Most people focus on the power (page authority) and Trust (domain authority) but often forget to utilize the Trust Factor, both Moz and Majestic's Trust Flow Metrics. You can build metric DA and PA through less than desirable practices, but the site will not pass on the trust, and that "trustedness" of the referring domains is what will carry the most weight, especially if it topically relevant. Thanks so much for the great info!
I really appreciate your kind words, Steve! The DA costs based on ranges was one of my favorite parts of the study. It was also really interesting to see how high-value links now outrank the total number of links as a success metric. As more client's adopt this forward-thinking approach to content KPIs, I think we'll see more people investing in authority and trust metrics as a focal point of reporting.
Great information. I'm not sure that the cost of creating the social media activity and cost of creating links should be used as the value.
Long term, particularly for inbound marketing, social media presence wanes very quickly. Pretty much the moment your Likes or Retweets or whatever have occurred, their value is almost nil. Visitor sees, visitor clicks, post or promotion scrolls down the social media timeline and is gone and forgotten, sometimes within minutes.
Getting traffic through well placed links continues for days, weeks, months and in some cases years. That's beside any SEO benefit they may have.
For the immediate campaign, yes the "value" and "cost" might be the same. 6 months down the line the social media impact of the spend will be minimal, the impact of the links will, in some cases still rocking at a good percentage of its day one value.
you ve done an incredible article....i loved the graphics too
An excellent article, but I need to read it several times to learn it all in ... xD
It' really incredible article . Special thanks to sharing with graphical resprestantion .
Why do all Inbound marketers feel the need to trash Outbound? This line in your post is completely unsubstantiated and undermines your credibility: The bullhorn of radio, television, print, and other one-way interruptive marketing approaches are quickly losing efficacy. Based on what research? That "interruptive" TV spending is at an all time high? That the impact of Outbound on Site and Search activity is a given (though should certainly be studied more)? How does a consumer search for something they're not even aware of? How does a consumer build interest in something they had previously not even thought of? Hey, Inbound is great. But something has to drive awareness, interest, desire and intent. Perhaps this "interruptive" success story will interest you: https://j.mp/1EQRvht
Kelsey, Thanks for sending me the link to the research. This is an excellent study with great detail. I'm definitely in the crowd needing to study it more closely. But one area of segmentation I wish was there is the kind of reach needed/expected by the company doing the marketing. For example, our clients target institutional trading organizations. There are only around 500-1,000 target institutions and maybe 5,000 to 10,000 members of the target audience, most of whom are not particularly active on social media. So our native advertising efforts target trade publications (that might not have extremely high DA scores, but that are very respected by the target audience). I'd imagine that many B2B companies are in similar circumstances where the volumes needed to prove ROI based on your model will never materialize. Any thoughts on other approaches to an ROI model? We use sales as a key measure, but that result is impacted by so much more than the content marketing that it's not a perfect measure.
In depth and eye-opening! This definitely deserves a re-read!
Wish I'd stumbled upon this earlier but better late than never. Very informative. I'm using some of the stats for my stakeholders meeting. :-)
Fantastic article. As others have mentioned, will need to read and review a few more times as there's so much to absorb. Would like to download the reports as per the CTAs in the article however the links don't seem to be working? Thanks
Quite a detailed research Kelsey :) I'm a big fan of content marketing and there is no doubt that digital marketing is way more effective in terms of ROI and cost. The biggest hurdle however is explaining all these things to clients who are just concerned about the returns in short span of time. A reason why most of us get fired because they are too much agitated to see the conversions which take some time and investment.
Any data on NON national brands? Maybe even start ups? It is so much easier to market well known brands because you don't have to fight the trust factor. What I mean is there is always a level of mistrust online and that is easier to overcome when the brand is more recognizable. Thus it takes less talent to make a project successful. I always like hearing stories about businesses that over come those hurdles.
Great question, Bill.
While at first we might assume national brands carry a larger trust factor, there are many variables working against them, too. For example, as a national brand your content often has to go through many rounds of approval (PR, Legal, etc) before it can be published. Depending on the stakeholders, this process can water down a campaign and reduce its potential reach. Once you jump through these hoops, you risk coming out with an asset that is overly-branded, which is a huge turn off to most top-tier publishers and their readers. Also, if you have a timely campaign, this lengthy review process can cause you to miss out on the ability to leverage a trending news story to gain more press. Lastly, most publishers get inundated with traditional PR pitches from national brands (press releases, etc), which can make them more averse to receiving pitches from these companies.
One of our most successful client's started with us as a brand new lead generation site in a somewhat controversial space. As a startup, that brand was willing and able to take more risks with innovative campaigns and contentious topics, which boosted their overall engagement. As a smaller company, the stakeholders were agile and could give feedback on the fly, which enabled us to leverage more timely campaigns/trending news stories. While national brands may be able to open more doors with their name, startups close the deal with their innovative content strategies. You can check out this brand's success story here.
Great post. I worked with a company that produced around 10 pieces of content a day, most of them in some capacity had a native advertising element to them which was sold by the account managers to suppliers as part of the service. It was a bit tricky at times to keep the integrity of the content being created, but it worked really well and certainly helped justify the content writing teams efforts in content marketing, where demonstrating ROI was a bit woolley.
Wait a minute - these ROI calculations were made based on estimated $ values of social shares, links, etc?
Is that considered reliable data or am I missing something?
Hi Matthew, based on our survey results, the top three metrics clients use to measure content marketing success are: number of leads, high-quality links, and total social shares. Since clients tend to report back on the % increase in leads rather than the exact # of leads, the (beta version) of the ROI calculator focuses on the two other metrics that matter most to client's (high-quality links, total social shares) and can calculated using just the campaign. Each of the metrics in the tool have a movable scale, based on estimated values established by Neil Patel. Based on our survey results, we plan on updating our tool to include % lead increase, too, so stay tuned!
Links and social shares may be useful metrics but trying to assign a $ value to those outcomes and use that to make meaningful ROI calculations strikes me as an extraordinarily poor methodology.
I'd never give one of my clients an ROI calculation based on those numbers. Would you? Anyone else here? Maybe I'm doing it all wrong.
This is otherwise a great post and if it was about simply "reach and engagement" that'd be fine, but putting ROI into the title is extremely misleading, as the estimations you're making here are nothing of the sort!
I'm glad you enjoyed the segments on reach and engagement, Matt. Let me help clarify a few things on the short ROI analysis.
Measuring the value of links and social shares in this way is a very rough, inexact way to attempt to demonstrate ROI, but can be useful in helping to frame the discussion of the value of content marketing in general. Getting at the true ROI of content marketing efforts, and associated social sharing needs to be done through thoroughly understanding any/all information that can be gathered about how each channel drives true value (paying customers).
It certainly is possible, on a case by case basis, to make decent estimations as to what the value of links are. For instance, if we know roughly how many links, and the quality of links necessary to be competitive with the top ranking players in a space, and we know roughly what their organic traffic volume is for their most valuable terms, as well as roughly what our conversion rates are down the funnel, you can roughly estimate the value of a link.
So, if I need 1,000 unique linking domains of med-high authority to compete with the top player in my space on the major keywords I already know have high conversion rates, I can understand roughly the amount of money I should be willing to spend to build links and become competitive organically with that top ranking competitor.
Holy Content Batman! Lots of great research and insights! Thank you for putting this together...that alone must have been a chore!
I'm a big (and recent) fan of native advertising...and use it a lot in combination with my content marketing strategies. Basically...native advertising on very targeted websites is just one of my traffic pipelines to get 'eyes' on my content.
Great to see them compared side by side in terms of engagement, ROI for some of these big brands!
You're welcome, Jason. Content Batman has a nice ring to it, but I'd have to go with Content Batwoman!
I'd be really fascinated to see your side by side case studies, as well!
Nice blog source for information. I like to thanks for this blog .
This is what quality and thorough work means. You have helped push the industry forward. Thank you.
Thanks, Ramsri, onwards and upwards!
Hi Kelsey,
There are two banners at the bottom of the article that mention a "Download Guide" and "Download Research" that do not work.
Hi Marcelo, great catch! Looks like they were accidentally removed when we transferred the final post from a Google Doc to the blogging platform. The links are included in the intro text right before each image, but here are the independent pages for easy access:
Hey Kelsey thanks for the information. Yes videos have good reach today and explainer videos can be employed for any type of industry.
A superb article but today content in site should be very attractive to catch your audience. Also many viewers have gained more interest towards a video which explains things faster rather than a long content. So many businesses have tried out animated explainer videos to explain their business or product info in a faster but effective manner.
Thanks, Ramchandran! I agree that short, animated explainer videos are a great way to educate on-site readers.
In our survey of 500 top-tier publishers, video was the 6th ranked content format (10.5%) publishers wish they saw more of. Interestingly enough, video was also the 5th ranked content format that (7%) clients ordered most frequently.
While explainer videos are great for educating your on-site user base, it's typically more challenging to get large-scale press on these videos since they tend to come across as an ad. However, when you come up with a video idea that is tangentially related to your brand (e.g. eBay Deals - "Can Your Language Influence Your Spending?") then you tend to expand your reach with this content format