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How To Find Gaps in Your Content Strategy

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How To Find Gaps in Your Content Strategy

Inside your content strategy lies holes that you can’t easily see.

These gaps may manifest themselves from the very beginning or materialize over time. But no matter their origin, these crevices present opportunities to improve your brand’s content marketing.

Target audiences and sales enablement are two common areas where gaps exist. If you’re not performing keyword research, conducting social listening, and generally keeping a pulse on what your target audience wants to learn, you could leave loads of opportunities on the table.

Among the marketers’ top two content marketing challenges identified in CMI research are creating content for the buyer’s journey and aligning content efforts across the sales and marketing teams, according to the same research. When marketers craft content to equip salespeople to share with prospects, they can help grow the company’s client base. But this can’t be done piecemeal.

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Your #ContentStrategy has holes. It’s time to find them, says @Kelsey_M_Meyer via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

So, how do you identify the gaps so you can address them and allow your content marketing to achieve its goals? It requires a four-step assessment.

How to perform a content gap analysis

Each step is designed to show what might be missing from your content marketing toolkit.

1. Perform a content audit

content audit reveals what’s missing from your strategy and what your content competitors have that your brand doesn’t. That insight can inform future subjects for your blog, white papers, case studies, and other owned content. 

To begin, inventory all the content on your website along with their essential metrics. You can put this together on a spreadsheet to compare and contrast the success of each asset. Don’t get caught up in flashy metrics. Instead, focus on the metrics that connect to your business goals, like page views, bounce rate, average visitor time on page, page-one keyword rankings, and backlinks. These metrics also reflect your audience’s reaction to your content.

Next, inventory your competitors’ content to identify what outranks your assets in search engine results for your targeted words. Track their strongest-performing content’s publicly available metrics, such as comments, shares, and backlinks, to identify topics you could reimagine in your content plan.

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Inventory your competitors’ content to identify what outranks your assets. Reimagine these topics in your #content plan, says @Kelsey_M_Meyer via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

2. Conduct keyword research and social listening

Keyword research can unearth a treasure trove of insight into what content your audience wants to know. Crack open a tool like Ahrefs or Moz’s Keyword Explorer to see what words people use to search for content related to your industry. Sift through these keywords to identify questions asked within your area of expertise that you can answer through new content assets.

See what your audience talks about on social media. Social listening tools like Sprout Social, HubSpot, and Hootsuite can help. You can analyze conversations, including mentions of your brand or industry, to learn more about your audience. You may identify new content opportunities by understanding how your audience feels about your brand, their needs and goals, and their most common challenges related to your industry and offerings.

3. Identify the failed marketing goals

Every content marketing strategy should have documented goals quantified within an achievable timeframe, such as 50 marketing-qualified leads per month. With your goals laid out, you can quickly review them and spot any goals you haven’t achieved. They indicate potential gaps that need to be closed.

For example, if you continually fall short of those 50 leads a month, look at your traffic numbers and conversion rates from individual assets or check page views for landing pages to identify how those numbers trend with your lead numbers. Or what percent of visitors who download an asset complete the call to action? Asking these bigger questions can help you highlight any anomalies in your strategy and reimagine a better flow.

4. Crowdsource your way to discovering what’s not there — and should be

While the first three steps in the content gap analysis look at past behavior, this step looks forward. Ask followers and subscribers what they’d like to know more about. Send a brief poll or survey by email or post to social to open your eyes to content themes your audience craves.

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Survey your audience to see what #content themes they crave, says @Kelsey_M_Meyer via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

You also can ask inside your company, given it is likely stacked with intelligent, talented people with a lot of experience. Ask them what they think is missing from your content or content marketing strategy. You can do it formally with a poll or survey or informally in face-to-face conversations. Among the questions to ask:

  • Do our competitors share content on subjects you think we should cover?
  • What industry-related new stories have you read that you would like to see our leaders talking about?
  • Why do you think we’re missing [insert goal] repeatedly? What do you think could be done to help reach it more consistently?

This input can reveal content gaps you didn’t realize. If you’re lucky, it also can shower you with creative ideas.

Close the content gaps

Even the strongest marketing departments in the world have gaps in their content marketing strategies. However, they aren’t afraid to pinpoint and rectify those gaps, which gives them a competitive edge. If you want to join their ranks, you need to do the same. As a reward, you’ll be more likely to reap better returns on your content investments.

All tools mentioned in this article were suggested by the author. If you’d like to suggest a tool, share the article on social media with a comment.

Want more content marketing tips, insights, and examples? Subscribe to workday or weekly emails from CMI.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]

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YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples

Introduction

With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.

Types of YouTube Ads

Video Ads

  • Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
  • Types:
    • In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
    • Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.

Display Ads

  • Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
  • Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).

Companion Banners

  • Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
  • Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.

In-feed Ads

  • Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.

Outstream Ads

  • Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.

Masthead Ads

  • Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.

YouTube Ad Specs by Type

Skippable In-stream Video Ads

  • Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Vertical: 9:16
    • Square: 1:1
  • Length:
    • Awareness: 15-20 seconds
    • Consideration: 2-3 minutes
    • Action: 15-20 seconds

Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads

  • Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
  • Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Vertical: 9:16
    • Square: 1:1

Bumper Ads

  • Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
  • File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 640 x 360px
    • Vertical: 480 x 360px

In-feed Ads

  • Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Square: 1:1
  • Length:
    • Awareness: 15-20 seconds
    • Consideration: 2-3 minutes
  • Headline/Description:
    • Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
    • Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line

Display Ads

  • Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
  • Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
  • File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
  • File Size: Max 150KB.
  • Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.

Outstream Ads

  • Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
  • Logo Specs:
    • Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
    • File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
    • Max Size: 200KB.

Masthead Ads

  • Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
  • Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
  • File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).

Conclusion

YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!

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Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists

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Why We Are Always 'Clicking to Buy', According to Psychologists

Amazon pillows.

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A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots

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A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots

Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.

To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.

Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots

Salesforce’s evolving architecture

It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?

“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”

Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”

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That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.

“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.

Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”

Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot

“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.

For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”

Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”

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It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”

What’s new about Einstein Personalization

Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?

“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”

Finally, trust

One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.

“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”

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