With an overabundance of content, how can brands stay ahead of competitors and on top of their audiences’ feed? The answer is in ownable conversations.
Brands everywhere have caught on to the effectiveness of content marketing and its ability to reach their audience in places traditional advertising can’t — and the landscape is now teeming with content as a result. But despite being flooded with news and information, B2B audiences are still struggling to find content that speaks to their unique industry pain points.
A recent Edelman-LinkedIn study revealed that 71% of decision-makers say that half or less than half of the thought-leadership content they read or watch gives them any sort of valuable insights. How can brands manage to elevate their content so it meets their audiences’ expectations? Enter ownable conversations: a more intentional and substantive approach to creating thought leadership content.
To start, let’s define exactly what ownable conversations are.
Ownable Conversations, Defined
“Ownable conversations are editorial perspectives that highlight a brand’s unique value and category expertise to their audience. As “big ideas” they allow for a range of expert-driven discussions, industry nuances, and clear perspectives that help to increase market awareness and build brand reputation.”
Yes, this marks the induction of another term into the already over-supplied marketing dictionary. But for their unrivaled ability to elevate your content strategy, ownable conversations more than warrant entry — and your time. Why? Because ownable conversations are your insurance against generic content.
Ownable Conversations Give You the Upper Hand
In the 2022 edition of CMI’s annual B2B Content Marketing Report, two-thirds of marketers say they expect their content marketing budget to increase this year.
Translation: the landscape will only become more competitive from here on out — which should give you all the more reason to implement a strategy that can fend off the opposition.
Investing in an ownable conversation can help you to:
- Steal share of voice from competitors
- Drive increased traffic to your digital properties
- Retain and engage your target audience
- Steer you out of the cycle of creating generic content
- Establish credibility by highlighting your expertise
- Prime future customers for your products and services
How to Spot an Ownable Conversation
Ownable conversations have some key trademarks.
1. Must Harness Something Proprietary
Give audiences something that only you possess.
The best way to stand out is to offer audiences something no other brand can: proprietary information. This is generally in the form of data insights or original research. A study from Buzzsumo and Mantis Research reveals that 94% of respondents agree that “original research elevates their brand’s authority in the industry.”
If you’re in a hyper-competitive category, or building a new one, original research is one of the fastest routes to making a good impression and establishing your credibility. Consider turning any type of first-party data (anonymized, aggregated, of course) into content. And if you don’t have access to data, you can easily generate it via surveys.
Brand example:
IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report is a highly anticipated annual report if you work in the IT, technology, or cybersecurity industry, — whether you’re an IBM customer or not.
Why it works:
Everyone is covering cybersecurity news, but no one has the breadth of experts IBM has in-house who are able to put that news into context with thoughtful analysis and real-life applications. Against a backdrop of proprietary data, IBM uncovers what makes cybersecurity exciting for the people behind it, while showcasing what’s next for the future of industry, emphasizing the brand’s authority in this space.
2. Must Exhibit Your Niche Expertise
Highlight your subject-matter expertise.
The more niche your expertise, the better. That’s not to say that your associated content also has to be niche, but where possible, your aim should be to increase the knowledge of your audience.
A CMO Council study claims that only 12% of marketers think their content marketing programs reach the right audiences.
One possible reason is that brands are failing to serve the content that B2B professionals need. An ownable conversation asks you to meet your audience’s needs by showcasing what you’re uniquely good at. For example, if you’re in digital advertising, what specific lane within digital advertising can you drill down into and claim as your area of expertise?
Brand example:
As exemplified in many of its case studies, Waze’s niche is in-car advertising. Via this lane of expertise, the brand illustrates its ability to drive awareness, reach new customers, and increase visits to brick and mortar stores.
Why it works:
In a time where advertising is being disrupted, Waze offers a truly unique option for brands to reach their audience. By occupying this niche corner of the market, Waze highlights its competitive difference in a highly fragmented landscape via executions across a suite of content, including case studies, blog articles, and proprietary insights by category.
3. Must Be Innovative
Challenge the status quo.
A global B2B study conducted by Edelman revealed that 81% of business executives want provocative insights that challenge their assumptions rather than validation of their current thinking. An innovative point of view helps your brand stand out, and therefore strengthens brand awareness.
And being disruptive should come from a natural place for your brand. Because when you get down to it, every company has a value proposition, and that value proposition always has something to do with improving the status quo. Brands should seek to elevate the category, rather than merely keeping up with its competitors. By doing so, they take a natural leadership position.
Brand example:
GE’s 2017 “Balance the Equation” campaign was crafted to address the gender imbalance in the STEM industry.
Why it works:
This GE campaign expertly identified a sweet spot between what was happening culturally (a lack of women in the STEM industry) and GE’s agenda for innovation. While GE had historically been known for innovation in aviation, renewable energy, and other industries, this campaign allowed the brand to emerge as a change-maker and champion of diversity.
By pledging to put 20,000 women in STEM jobs by 2020, the campaign’s unifying message of #balancetheequation increased GE’s share of conversation, as evidenced by several earned media mentions, heightening the brand’s reputation, and increasing its appeal as an employer of choice.
The Anatomy of an Ownable Conversation
To bring ownable conversations to life even further, let’s discuss a conversation that we built for Studio by Informa TechTarget on ‘brand-to-demand marketing’. We defined our POV on the category as follows:
Brand-to-demand marketing is an approach that balances long- and short-term growth strategies to build the brand, earn trust, and deliver leads. We achieve this through the creation of relevant and timely content that connects all touchpoints of the audience’s journey.
This is an ownable conversation for our Studio by Informa TechTarget because it focuses on growing brands through an integrated approach to marketing, that balances brand and demand activities leveraging content marketing, our area of expertise. What’s more, it leverages content as the broker and connection between the two, often opposite, strategies to reach previously unattainable levels of cohesion across marketing.
This is a natural space for Studio by Informa TechTarget to occupy since its capabilities are naturally oriented towards building programs that are long-term, employing a number of tactics across the customer journey, from first-party audience insights through to targeted distribution of niche B2B communities. While other competitors can do parts of the journey, Studio by Informa TechTarget prides itself on taking brands on the full brand-to-demand journey.
Looking back at our trademarks of ownable conversations, it ticks all the boxes:
- It harnesses something proprietary: it highlights our access to first-party audience data and ability to distribute via our targeted publications.
- It exhibits our niche expertise: it carves out a very specific lane we can own within the greater landscape of content and demand gen marketing that showcases all of our brand’s unique strengths across audience insights, content creation/brand storytelling, targeted distribution, and ROI.
- It challenges the status quo: it offers a new, research-backed model for marketing, challenging marketers to ditch stale approaches for a more modernized and cohesive strategy.
The executions and extensions of this ownable conversation are nearly limitless, and we can keep the conversation going for years to come.
Ownable Conversations Take Time
Like any investment in content, ownable conversations take time to build traction. We recommend three distinct phases (how long each takes will be based on your budget and resources).
Phase 1: Establish the conversation
Identify ownable conversations by locating the gaps in thought leadership content across the customer journey (vertical-specific trends, consumer insights, etc.) and within your category. Create editorial content to show your coverage of these key areas and drive an organic share of voice.
Phase 2: Hone your niche
Find the content within each ownable conversation that drives not only the highest traffic to your domain but also the highest engagement (e.g.. time on page, engagement rate, etc.). Explore how you can go deeper on those topics and carve out an even more specific corner of the market.
Phase 3: Grow your impact
Extend your reach, build brand salience and amplify your messages through rich, multi-channel content experiences and campaigns, reaffirming your brand as a leader in the digital advertising landscape, and the authority in the category.
What’s the ROI on Ownable Conversations?
There are many ways to measure the impact of ownable conversations. And it’s important to have this conversation earlier on when you’re developing the conversations to ensure that your team is aligned to the metrics set. Here are a few suggestions of what you could track:
Share of Voice:
Share of voice tracks your brand exposure in your market relative to your rival brands. This metric helps you understand how your brand’s content performance and presence stacks up against your defined set of content competitors. When launching an ownable conversations strategy, share of voice can help you assess whether the conversations you’ve chosen have helped you stand out.
Share of voice can be tracked across a number of mediums, but the basic formula for tracking share of voice is: Total industry mentions / your brand mentions *100 = share of voice
For determining share of voice on social, you’ll need to gather metrics from a social media monitoring tool such as RivalIQ, Buzzsumo, or HootSuite. Note: these sites do not track mentions and shares on LinkedIn. If you’re interested, you can also look at manually tracking engagement over time, by counting the number of reactions to a post divided by the number of engagements.
Additionally, you can leverage tools like HootSuite to track the reaction your industry is having to your content. How often are industry leaders re-sharing your assets? Are they commenting on them? What percentage of those reactions are positive or negative?
Share of Search:
Share of search equates to the strength of your presence in front of relevant traffic (SEO). You should identify and track keyword clusters associated with your key conversations. Note: If you’re building a new category (e.g., brand to demand) you may want to look at related keywords (e.g., integrated marketing, customer journey, content marketing funnel) to track share of voice.
There is an excellent article about the share of search, how much a brand is searched online (which relates to brand salience), that is relevant to measuring the impact of ownable conversations.
Similar to share of voice, it’s important to compare your ranking on selected keywords with that of relevant competitors.
Site Metrics:
Ownable conversations should also drive traffic and deepen engagement on your site, and are very much aligned to those top-of-funnel KPIs. The more brand awareness you generate, the more likely you’ll attract new visitors and re-engage existing audiences, which helps build pipeline, and thereby future customers.
The primary focus of ownable conversations is to build the brand, and earn trust, but in doing so, it helps to generate qualified leads for sales. You can measure this impact in several different ways, depending on priority:
- New Visitors: Since implementing your ownable conversations, have you seen an increase in net-new traffic to your domain? This is a great metric if your goal is brand awareness.
- Time on Page: Have visitors to your content pages spent more time engaging with the content? Explore this metric if you need to build trust with your audience.
- Return Visitors: Within a set date range (Note: Google Analytics defaults the length of time a visitor can be considered “returning” to a 90-day period), is there a larger percentage of your audience coming back for more content? This metric can help you identify which assets can help drive middle and bottom of funnel conversations.
- Average Pages Per Session: Have you seen a change in the number of pages a user explores before exiting the domain? Are these content pages? This is another excellent metric to show you’re building trust and authority. (Note: You can supplement this metric by exploring user flow on your domain, i.e. do they head to a product page after reading a specific content piece?).
Be sure to look at these metrics at the domain level (how your entire digital presence has changed), the hub level (the aggregate performance of all your content pages and assets), and the content level (how each asset performs individually). This will help you build a more accurate picture of how your content is impacting your digital presence.
Remember to also tag all your content to an ownable conversation so you can see what conversation is performing and which isn’t, and may require optimizing. This is a prime way to refine your content strategy overall, and remain strategic in choosing the conversations you should double down on.
In Summary
The global content marketing industry is expected to exceed $107 billion by 2026. And as the content industry matures, so should our best practices. As marketers and content creators, it is our mission to ensure we are creating the most value we can, not only to deliver on business goals, but to also ensure that we truly serve our professional communities. Ownable conversations are the next evolution of how we can elevate our programs to meet audiences where they are, with the information they need.
And in case you were wondering, yes, “ownable conversations” is an ownable conversation.
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