Content Matters

I'm posting from MarketingSherpa's Selling Online Subscriptions conference today. 
Two interesting sessions this morning:
MarketingSherpa research director Stefan Tornquist on "Paid Content research: stats on what works" and Flint McGlaughlin, Director of MarketingSherpa parent MarketingExperiments providing case studies of landing page optimization.

I'm waiting for them to post those presentations to the attendee site, but in the meantime, here are a few highlights:

Stefan Tornquist - Key takeaways from their latest survey of online publishing marketers:
What's working for b2b publishers? - No real surprises on this one - SEO, Paid Search marketing, online advertising (banners & sponsorships), viral marketing.

Web 2.0 - looking at b2b publisher respondents as compared to a year ago:
- 55% offer RSS feeds (up 2% over prior year)
- 50% offer blogs (up 8%)
- 35% are providing video clips (up 13%)
- 25% are podcasting (up 5%)
- 16% offering wireless (up 4%)

Interestingly, when they look at the consumer publishing side, many of the key indicators are flat.
- 45% offer RSS (flat to last year)
- 44% offer blogs (flat)
- 41% offer video (flat)

The video number for consumer publishing caught me by surprise. While the raw percent of sites offering video was higher (at 41%) than for b2b publishers, I'm surprised to see that there was no year-over-year growth in that number for the b2c publishers, especially with all the expected growth in that market. I wonder if that's due to sites being afraid to embrace video, a lack of enough relevant content or something else. Sounds like an opportunity.

More to come later...