Is your digital marketing strategy based in fact?

Hunches and intuition are great, but they only take us so far. If we rely on them too heavily, we can even put ourselves out of touch with reality. Facts keep us grounded. They let us see the playing field for what it is, giving us the opportunity to find a competitive advantage.

I’ve compiled the 7 facts you should follow for two simple reasons. They have massive implications for the industry, and they are frequently ignored. These 7 facts will help you see the hidden areas of the playing field, and find your advantage.

1. Only 2 of the top 10 most popular sites on the web are content sites

And that is being generous. The 10 most popular sites, according to Nielson, are Google, Facebook, Yahoo, MSN/WindowsLive/Bing, YouTube, Microsoft, AOL, Amazon, Wikipedia and the Ask Search Network. Of those, only YouTube and Wikipedia can truly be considered content sites.

This makes an important, if controversial, point: Objectively speaking, content is not king. Usefulness is king. The most popular sites on the web give people something to do, not just to consume.

To be clear, I’m certainly not arguing against content marketing, which is a tremendously useful way to grow, and more importantly keep, an audience. It’s also part of a strategy used, to some extent, by all of the top 10 sites above.

However, digital marketers who believe the “content is king” meme are putting themselves out of touch with reality, because the data says something very different. The majority of the most successful sites prioritize tools, communities and interactive platforms before content.

The Mashables, Buzzfeeds, and HuffPos of the world certainly do well for themselves, but they take second priority.

It’s also crucial to realize that even YouTube and Wikipedia would be nothing without their interactive platforms.

No digital marketer, not even a content marketer, can fully understand the web they compete on without understanding and admitting this fact. As you can probably guess from my demeanor, I’ve ranted about this before.

2. Email reach exceeds social media reach

While social media is a very powerful tool, it is still not as effective as email when it comes to reaching your existing audience. According to Mailchimp, average email open rates exceed 21 percent. By contrast, average organic Facebook reach is only 6 percent.

Similarly, Mailchimp’s study shows that average email click through rates exceed 3.1 percent, while Twitter click through rates were only 1.64 percent back in 2012, and are probably much worse these days. (Furthermore, tweets are more like email subject lines than emails, so it might be more fair to compare this with email open rates.) Finally, according to Monetate, average email conversion rates are 3.19 percent, while average social conversion rates are 0.71 percent.

None of this means social media isn’t great. It is. But it should be thought of primarily as a way to interact with influencers and your customers, as well as a way to reach new people, rather than as a way of reaching your existing audience.

3. One third of web traffic is mobile

While marketers seem to have jumped onboard the social media bandwagon, despite its decreasing capacity for reach, a surprising number are neglecting mobile.

Back in June, 2013, only 6 percent of Fortune 100 companies had mobile-friendly websites. I’m not aware of any similar, more recent studies, but things don’t seem to have changed much.

This should be concerning for several reasons. According to StatCounter, 31.08 percent of US web traffic is coming from a mobile device, as of July, 2014, and it is growing. According to Moveable Ink, an amazing 66 percent of emails are opened on a tablet or smartphone. According to QuickSprout, 30 percent of mobile shoppers will abandon a transaction if it isn’t optimized for mobile.

4. 86 percent of mobile time is spent in apps, not online

If there’s one place where digital marketers have completely and utterly missed the boat, its in the world of mobile apps.

According to research by Flurry, as of March, 2014, 86 percent of mobile time is spent not online, but in mobile apps. What was once thought of as a fad has now emerged as the clear winner of the mobile platform. While mobile online traffic is growing, as described above, app usage has grown much, much faster.

The study estimates that the average US consumer uses apps for 2 hours and 19 minutes per day. And since many of these apps connect to the internet, this leads us to another very interesting fact…

5. People spend more internet time in mobile apps than on PCs

According to Nielson, people spend 29 hours per week connected to the internet with mobile apps. By comparison, they spend 27 hours accessing the web from a PC browser, and approximately 5 hours accessing the web from a mobile browser.

(If those numbers seem to conflict with the “30 percent of web traffic is mobile” figure, remember that this is about time spent, not about number of visits.)

In short, mobile apps are now almost as popular a way to connect to the internet as browsers, PC or mobile. To imagine that the internet is still just a place for browsers is to bury your head in the sand.

This represents a dramatic shift in the way the internet is used. Historically, the internet has primarily been thought of as an open, crawlable space sharing data that browsers can recognize.

Right under our noses and with very little reaction on our part, the internet has, almost overnight, become a series of walled-in gardens that are only accessible with the right app. And the vast majority of the time being spent on those apps is being dedicated to a handful of properties.

Here’s the breakdown according to the Flurry study mentioned earlier:

Gaming takes up 32 percent of the pie. Social networks eat up 28 percent. YouTube takes another 4 percent. That leaves just 36 percent for everything else: entertainment, utilities, productivity, news and other miscellaneous apps.

I hate to say it, but I think small businesses missed the boat. While big business took well over a decade to truly settle in on the internet, a few major players seem to have virtually dominated mobile apps in a very short period of time.

While app retention rates are improving, only 39 percent of users open the typical app 11 times or more, and 20 percent will only open it once. By comparison, typical email churn rates are about 19 percent per year.

There are still tremendous opportunities in the world of apps, and marketers can leverage them in order to retain an audience and build a reputation, but you’re not going to accomplish it with a simple “content app.” You will need to build something genuinely innovative.

And, of course, you can buy ads on relevant mobile apps.

6. Organic search refers more traffic, and more converting traffic, than any other source

The following results from a study by MarketingSherpa speak for themselves:

Forty-three percent of respondents say organic search was the highest source of traffic, and 29 percent said it was the highest source of converting traffic. Email took a close second on converting traffic.

The implications of the study?

• SEO is massively undervalued as a source of revenue
• Good branding is likely responsible for a good portion of converting search traffic, since search engines are the second most common method people use to navigate to specific sites, right after direct traffic
• Email marketing campaigns deliver nearly as many conversions as organic search
• Organic social media and other referring sites perform essentially identical to one another.

Of course, these results shouldn’t be misinterpreted to mean that this is necessarily true for your industry, or even that it represents what is possible in each medium if it is used correctly.

7. Social sharing does not correlate with in-depth reading

Image Credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

If you are using social media metrics such as likes and tweets as a way to measure “user engagement,” you are making a fatal mistake.

Here is what Chartbeat’s data scientist, somebody who actually has access to this kind of information, had to say to Newswhip about social sharing and actual content consumption:

[Our finding] doesn’t mean, of course, that social activity doesn’t drive traffic (it obviously does) or that individuals who take social actions aren’t more engaged on page (we don’t collect the Twitter account of each individual reading a page, so we don’t have any data about this). It does mean that stories that are highly social are not more likely to be deeply read by the average reader, and stories that are deeply read are not more likely to be socially active.

The way this was initially reported by Venturebeat was somewhat misleading, and some may have misread it to believe that social sharing and social referral traffic are completely unrelated.

What the results actually indicate is that if something gets shared heavily, that doesn’t mean the average reader is spending more time reading it. If that doesn’t sound revolutionary enough for you, you should try turning it on it’s head to see the practical implications.

If you want people to share your content, the content itself isn’t where you should put your focus.

That’s right.

Now, obviously, content serves no purpose if it doesn’t engage your readers and get them interested in coming back for more. I’m not trying to say content doesn’t matter. I’m saying that if you want to increase visibility in social media and drive referral traffic, the content isn’t what makes the difference.

It’s the tweet, the Facebook post, the headline, that makes the difference.

What correlates with heavy sharing? An intriguing, mind-blowing, funny, relatable, inspiring, and usually visual piece of bite-size content, like the captioned images that dominate your Facebook feed. A link from that image to your blog post translates that from heavy sharing to heavy referral traffic. And a good blog post translates heavy referral traffic into heavy audience retention.

People share bite-size pieces of information that convey something of interest in a very small space. They do not really share blog posts. Blog posts simply piggyback on the bite-size piece of content that does get shared, in the hopes that the people who click through will be interested in what they find.

Staying in touch

If you’re like most marketers in the industry, I suspect at least one of these facts came as a surprise. This is why it’s important to deliberately put our hunches and intuitions to the test.

What fact do you think is most neglected in the industry? We all have our blind spots, and I’d love to see what I’m missing.

Thanks for reading.