As Chemistry Communications’ clients created more content and more ambitious distribution plans, manually distributing that content to dozens of native and social platforms became untenable.
Chemistry turned to Story by PulsePoint to make content distribution more cost- and time-efficient. The agency serves clients not only in content marketing, but through media buys across digital, video and radio.
The platform allows Chemistry to buy across more than 25 platforms, including social media platforms Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, native platforms like Sharethrough and TripleLift and content discovery tools Outbrain and Taboola.
With the platform, Chemistry Communications can buy media and optimize campaigns based on a metric it cares about: cost per engagement, with 15 seconds spent on a site post-click.
“Our platform has been built from the ground up to focus on what happens once the reader arrives at the domain,” said Andrew Stark, PulsePoint’s SVP of content solutions. The platform tracks details like scroll depth and scroll velocity and uses those metrics to feed optimization.
Because of the focus on post-click engagement, Chemistry saw its clients’ results improve when it switched to the platform.
“What was shocking was that we were seeing lower CPEs and lower CPMs than all the direct platforms we were using in the past,” said Jason Dille, VP of media at Chemistry Communications.
The platform – which PulsePoint recently redesigned for self-service clients – also improves the workflow and automates more processes.
For example, adapting images, headlines and text for 10 stories across 30 platforms adds up to at least 300 creative variations. PulsePoint’s platform automatically builds ad creative for each platform, which a campaign planner can immediately approve, automatically optimize or adjust – either through PulsePoint’s suggestions or manually.
The platform also can yield qualitative insights about the client’s content. A top-performing alternate headline could become the main one. And looking at how different stories resonate with audiences informs future content creation.
Although Chemistry initially used PulsePoint’s managed services, it has since migrated to the software-as-a-service platform to improve the workflow.
“We prefer to stay away from managed service because transparency can be an issue and margins can be there,” Dille said. And the agency prefers to be more hands-on. “We want to make the changes for our clients.”
However, the managed service did let the agency test out the solution with smaller budgets, Dille said.
Though Chemistry handles all forms of media for its clients – from digital video to radio – Dille believes that content marketing will evolve like the DSP landscape, as technologies emerge to deliver more strategic placements.
“They are adding targeting that’s similar to what we have in the DSP space, like ISP targeting, that will further evolve what performance looks like,” he said. In addition, Story by PulsePoint clients can upload their own data for targeting, or use an individual platform’s targeting definitions – like how Facebook defines women 35-44.
As targeting and automation improve, more budgets will shift to content distribution, Dille predicted. “This is going to be the future of digital advertising,” he said. “Content is where we are going to see higher engagement rates in the future.”
