Do you run Facebook ads to promote your business? Wondering how the Facebook pixel can help optimize ad delivery for specific goals? In this article, you’ll discover how to install and use the Facebook pixel to track website traffic and create trackable Facebook ads. What Is the Facebook Pixel? The Facebook pixel is a piece
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Thinking about running Facebook Ads but don’t know where to start? Want a primer on Ad Manager before running ads? In this article, you’ll learn to navigate the Facebook Ads Manager main menu and discover the basics of creating and analyzing your Facebook ad campaigns. How Do I Set Up My Facebook Ads Manager Account? To
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Want to use a Facebook group for business? Wondering how to promote your products and services in Facebook groups? Whether you create a Facebook group or join one managed by someone else, you can use groups to position yourself, find new customers, and more. In this article, you’ll discover how to use Facebook groups to
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Did you have an affinity for telling stories when you were younger? It may have gotten you into trouble with your parents and teachers back in the day, but that skill can pay off big time as an ecommerce marketer on social media. Big Commerce reports that a growing number of ecommerce brands have started using storytelling to engage with their customers over social media.
“Building a successful online store in today’s hyper-competitive ecommerce landscape requires more than an attractive website, a nice product display, and easy checkout. When a customer reaches your shopping cart, it’s often after he or she has encountered your brand throughout a long journey filled with multiple stops and detours… Captive audiences are a thing of the past, which makes brand storytelling vital to distinguishing your brand in a crowded marketplace.”
I had the opportunity to monitor the #SMTLive Twitter chat a couple of months ago.
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The Why, What and How Facebook is your number one social media platform.
I am sure that you’re familiar with Messenger right! This is the little app that attaches to your Facebook account and allows you to send private messages to your friends.
Just recently Facebook added a few cool features to the app. Now you can add a picture to your story, use filters and add masks to your images to make them super cool and funky. Along with creating groups for conversations.
I think this cool app is revolutionary for the business world, being able to connect with our prospective clients and existing ones instantly, will change the way we communicate in business!
In addition to these quirky features (which I must say are super fun to work with) they introduced Facebook Messenger Bots. You may think this is a little nerdy or only for the robotics world, however, stay with me, I am going to knock your socks off, as we say in Australia!
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Do you want to reach more customers and prospects using Facebook Messenger? Have you tried Messenger ads? Messenger ads display inside the Messenger app on the home tab, increasing the likelihood people will interact with your business. In this article, you’ll discover how to set up a Messenger ad. What Are Messenger Home Ads? Unlike
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show with Michael Stelzner, we explore Facebook’s latest growth with Mari Smith; Amazon’s social network, Spark, with Jeff Sieh; LinkedIn’s
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Many people believe that the only benefit to using infographics is to build engagement on their blogs. And although this is true, there are actually a lot more benefits to creating infographics and other forms of visual content that go unnoticed and unattempted.
In fact, infographics are a great way to build relationships, boost organic traffic and take advantage of cross-platform sharing.
Better Relationships
One of the main strategies we’ve used in the past to build better relationships with influencers is the creation of guestographics. Guestographics essentially means “guest infographic”. It has similar benefits to contributing guest posts to various blogs and sites within your industry.
Here’s how it works:
Does your business serve a specialized customer base? Wondering how to reach specific niche audiences with Facebook ads? To explore a strategy for retargeting specialized audiences using Google ads in combination with Facebook ads, I interview Shane Sams. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by randfish
Typical link outreach is a tired sport, and we've all but alienated most content creators with our constant link requests. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines five smart ways to earn links to your site without having to beg.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, I'm going to help you avoid having to directly ask for links.
Some people in the SEO world, some link builders are extremely effective. If you go to the Russ Jones School of Link Outreach, you need to make a big list of people to contact, get in front of those folks, outreach them, and have these little success rates. But for some of us, myself included, I just absolutely hate begging people for links. So even though I often produce content that I want people to link to, it's the outreach process that stops me from having success. But there are ways around this. There are ways to earn links, even from very specific sources, without needing to directly say, "Hey, will you please link to this?" I'll try and illustrate that.
So the problem is I think that most of the web at this point is sort of burned out on this conversation of, "Hey, I have this great resource." Or, "Hey, you linked to this thing which is currently broken and so maybe you'd like to," or "Hey, I noticed that you frequently mention or link to blah, blah, blah. Well I have a blah, blah, blah like blah, blah, blah."
Folks I think are just like, "Oh, my God, I hate these SEOs, like I'm so done with this." Most of these folks, the journalists, the bloggers, the content creators of all kinds start to detest the link requests even when they're useful, even when they help your success rates. I mean, great success rates.
The world's best link builders, link outreach specialists, when I talked to agencies, they say, "Our absolute best folks ever hover in the 5% to 10% success range." So that means you're basically like, "No. Nope. Nuh-uh. Uh-uh. No way. Sorry. Uh-uh. Yeah, no. Uh, no." Then, maybe you'll get one, "Okay, fine. I'll actually link to you."
This can be a really demoralizing practice, and it also hurts your brand every time you outreach to someone and have no success. They're basically associating you with . . . and in fact, there are many people in the SEO world who my only association with them is, gosh, they have asked me for a lot of links over the years. It kind of sucks the souls from people who hate doing it. Now granted, there are some people who like doing it, but you have two options.
Number one, you can optimize the outreach to try and get a higher success rate, to do less damage to your brand when you do this, to make this less of a soul-sucking process, and we have some Whiteboard Fridays on exactly that topic and some great blog posts on that too. But there are ways to build links without it, and today I'm going to cover four and a half of them, because the fifth one is barely a tactic.
5 Tactics to earn links1. The "I made this thing you'll probably use"The first one is the tactic — I'm going to use very conversational naming conventions for these — the "I made this thing you will probably use." So this is, in effect, saying not, "Hey, I made this thing. Will you link to it?" but rather, "I made this thing and I can have some confidence that you and people like you, others like you, will probably want to link to it because it fulfills a specific need."
So there's some existing content that you find on the web, you locate the author of that content or the publisher of that content, and you form a connection, usually through social, through email, or through a direct comment on that content. You have an additional resource of some kind that is likely to be included, either in that particular element or in a future element.
This works very well with bloggers. It works well with journalists. It works well with folks who cover data and studies. It works well with folks who are including visuals or tools in their content. As a result, it tends to work well if you can optimize for one of those types of things, like data or visuals or ego-bait. Or supporting evidence works really well. If you have someone who's trying to make an argument with their content and you have evidence that can help support that argument, it will very often be the case that even just a comment can get you included into the primary post, because that person wants to show off what you've got.
It tends not to work very well with commercial content. So that is a drawback to the tactic.
2. The "You list things like X, I have or I am an X."So this is rather than saying, "I would like a link," it's a very indirect or a relatively indirect ploy for the same thing. You find resources that list Xs, and there's usually either an author or some process for submission, but you don't have to beg for links. You can instead just say, "I fit your criteria."
So this could be, "Hey, are there websites in the educational world that are ADA-compliant and accessible for folks?" You might say, "Well, guess what? I'm that. Therefore, all of these places that list resources like that, that are ADA-compliant, will fit in here."
Or for example, we're doing design awards for pure CSS design, and it turns out you have a beautifully-designed site or page that is pure CSS, and so maybe you can fit in to that particular criteria. Or websites that load under a second, even on a super slow connection, and they list those, and you have one of those. So there's a process, and you can get inclusion.
3. The "Let me help you with that."This can be very broad, but, basically, if you can identify sources and start to follow those sources wherever they publish and however they publish, whether that's social or via content or broadcast or other ways, if you find those publications, those authors expressing a need or an interest or that they are in the process of completing something, by offering to assist you will almost always get a link for your credit. So this is a way where you're simply monitoring these folks that you would like to get links from, waiting for them to express some sort of need, fulfilling that need, and then reaping the benefit through that link.
This is sort of a modified version of "I made this thing you'll probably like." But instead of saying, "Here's the thing that you will probably like and maybe include," you're saying, "I noticed that you have a product, a piece of content, a tool, a new piece of hardware, some physical product, whatever it is, and I like it and I use it and I happen to fit into the correct demographic that you are trying to reach. Therefore, I am happy to contribute an endorsement or a testimonial." Oftentimes, almost always, whenever there's a testimonial, you will get a link back to your source, because they'll want to say, "Well, Rand Fishkin from Moz says X and Y and Z," and there's the link to either my page or to Moz's page.
5. The "Guest contribution."The one you're probably most familiar with, and it was probably the first one that came to mind when you thought about the "How do I get links without asking for them?" and that is through guest contributions, so guest blogging and guest editorials and authorship of all kinds. There are a few Whiteboard Fridays on that, so I won't dive deep in here.
But I hope you can leverage some or all of these tactics, because if you hate link building the outreach way, these all have more work that goes into them, but far, far better results than this 5% to 10% as the top. Five to ten percent is probably the bottom range for each of these, and you can get 50%, 75% on some of these tactics. Get a lot of great links from great sources. It just requires some elbow grease.
All right, everyone. Thanks for watching. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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http://ift.tt/2v3bZnUMove over, baseball. America’s new national pastime is binge-watching.
Ask your friends what they did over the weekend, and several will probably admit to burning through several seasons of Game of Thrones. Streaming platforms, such as Netflix and Hulu, revolutionized the way people consume TV shows. Society’s changing behavior has caused the likes of HBO to embrace the trend, allowing audiences to binge on Girls, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and True Detective.
When Twin Peaks was reborn on Showtime in May, the premium TV network aired the first two episodes but offered the first four new installments of David Lynch’s venerated series early on its streaming service. Showtime reported its single biggest day of user sign-ups thanks to the buzz surrounding the show, with the reboot drawing 1.7 million viewers across Showtime’s various platforms.
The binge-watching phenomenon has taught cable networks and digital content providers important lessons about customer preferences. The behavioral shift also offers invaluable insights for savvy marketers about messaging, storytelling, and customer delight.
What We Know About BingingNetflix and Hulu have achieved success in the streaming world by creating truly customer-centric experiences. Whether people are commuting to work or lounging in bed, the services enable them to watch their favorite TV shows for hours at a time. Instead of waiting several months to see how a cliffhanger is resolved, users can immerse themselves in different universes to their hearts’ content. It doesn’t get much more customer-centric than that.
Whether people are conducting research at work or decompressing with entertainment at home, they like to really dig into the task at hand. Binge-watching capitalizes on this desire, offering an efficient way to get a lot done in a single sitting (or spread out over multiple sessions, if that’s a better fit). Marketers can cater to these preferences by creating content experiences that allow audiences to take as deep a dive as they want.
In a B2B situation, this might include a video series, articles, ebooks, case studies, or infographics—essentially a range of valuable materials that give customers a deep understanding of the problem they’re looking to solve, the ways it can be solved, and how you can help them do that. Prospective B2B customers crave as much information as possible before they make a decision. To this end, binge behavior can satisfy even the most persnickety prospect.
Bingeable content experiences also cater to how B2B decision-makers operate. A single 800-word article isn’t going to cut it for someone researching new software solutions, but you can make it easier on them by providing plenty of content to digest.
Content consumption patterns can also help you track prospects as they move toward a purchase. If you notice a flurry of activity from one potential customer, it likely indicates that he or she is nearing the next stage in the buying journey. Spotting this behavior pattern and being able to react to it can help you help a prospect become your ideal customer.
This is where content personalization can play a big role. By triggering the next appropriate content experience, you can help facilitate and feed the urge to binge.
Spinning a YarnIf you want people to binge your content, you need to tell a compelling story. Each chapter should build on the previous installment, inspiring people to further their own hero’s journey. Here are a few ways to bring binge-watching’s benefits to your organization.
1. Establish themes that speak to your customers’ needs.Great stories begin with a mission, and content strategy is no different. What need are you trying to fulfill for your audience? What experiences are you trying to create?
Showtime’s decision to release several Twin Peaks episodes early to subscribers was a brilliant move because it capitalized on the buzz surrounding the series and addressed the audience’s penchant for binge-watching. Giving subscribers the chance to go deeper into the series at their leisure addressed audience desires for viewing flexibility. Identify your audience’s core needs, and craft your strategy around those needs rather than your own service or brand.
2. Respond to your audience’s content preferences.When Netflix opted to release entire seasons of House of Cards at once rather than in weekly installments, the company showed a keen understanding of how to keep people engaged. Instead of insisting people return to the service to watch a new episode each week, the company empowered users to keep going while they were already in a content-consumption mindset. This approach allows people to watch at their own pace and caters to the binge-watching crowd.
Pay attention to your own audience’s preferences. You might release content on a schedule that works for your team, but consider how people might consume your articles and videos if it were up to them. A recent DemandGen report found that 88 percent of respondents are overwhelmed by the amount of available content, and 71 percent said they want content that’s easier to access. You can eliminate friction in content consumption and draw prospects further into your brand experience by personalizing content that appeals to their particular interests (more on that later).
3. Create storylines that lead to the next step.It goes without saying that your content must be valuable, but it should also have a purpose. In the same way a strong narrative guides viewers toward an ultimate resolution, your content should naturally steer potential customers toward your desired action. Don’t hit people over the head with calls to action, but make sure each piece you publish corresponds to a subsequent step and overarching goal.
When crafting your content, focus on quality over quantity. More doesn’t always mean better—even when you’re creating binge-worthy materials. Consider BBC’s Sherlock, which offers three 90-minute episodes each season but has become a darling of the binge-watching world. Don’t constrain yourself with external factors such as time and format. Decide what format will best serve your audience, and use that as your guide.
4. Personalize your content.Personalization is a huge driver in the rise of binge-watching. Viewers can curate lists of their favorite TV shows and movies, using rating systems to teach their preferences to content providers. They can also rewatch past seasons to satiate their appetites while they await new episodes. That’s how Netflix kept people engaged when it began to offer hit shows like Mad Men and The Walking Dead. Easy access to the entire run of each series was essential to the user experience.
The ideal content experience is one that adapts as customers become more mature in their understanding of the problem they’re looking to solve. If someone lands on your site while researching a specific topic, you might suggest they check out a beginner’s guide or an interesting tutorial series to provide them with some background. Once you’ve created a solid foundation, you can start to build on that personalized content experience.
Focus on content personalization to facilitate binge consumption and create your ideal customer.
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5. Leave them wanting more.
Providing bingeable content is a great way to enhance your brand experience and your relationship with audience members. That said, you don’t want to simply release a great series or ebook and then rely on the original content to carry engagement. Plan follow-up content so you can draw people back to your site in the weeks after that big launch.
You could also offer a few installments upfront and then spread out future releases to sustain interest. Hulu employed this strategy with The Handmaid’s Tale by offering the first several episodes at launch before it transitioned to a weekly release schedule. This approach gives people a chance to consider how the story develops each week, building anticipation for the next chapter.
Binge-watching has drastically changed the way the entertainment industry operates. Companies that want to take advantage of our propensity to binge must deliver innovative, high-quality content on a regular basis. These lessons hold true for marketers, who can use content-driven experiences and content personalization to facilitate binge consumption and create their ideal customer. In the words of the Content Marketing Institute’s Robert Rose, deliver “the right value, to the right audience, in their time.”
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It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. The internet has changed a lot, but not that.
Okay, what you know is also important. But, today we’re going to talk about “who you know” and how to connect with people on Twitter.
The advantages of relationship building on Twitter are huge. Connect with new prospects and customers, develop partnerships to grow your business, surround yourself with like-minded people you can learn from and grow with, the possibilities are endless.
But how do you strategically build relationships on Twitter?
In this post, I’ll go over how to build a relevant following, how to make it easy for people to find you, and how to deepen relationships on Twitter.
Ready? Let’s get to it…
Follow First to Make Connections
If you’re first starting out or having trouble making connections on Twitter, consider a follow-first strategy.
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Want to design Snapchat geofilters on the go? Have you seen the Snapchat in-app geofilter creation tool? In this article, you’ll discover how to easily create and purchase custom Snapchat geofilters from within the mobile app. #1: Design Your Snapchat On-Demand Geofilter To get started creating your geofilter, open the Snapchat app. From the camera
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by Angela_Petteys
To say marketing automation is a complex subject is putting it mildly. On the surface it seems simple enough, but once you get just a little bit deeper into it, it’s overwhelming. Even if you work with marketing automation on a daily basis, it can be hard to describe.
When used correctly, marketing automation can be useful in helping sales and marketing teams do their jobs more effectively so they can reach their goals. But there are also a lot of misunderstandings about what marketing automation is and isn’t. Let’s try to get a better understanding of what marketing automation is and how it can potentially help a business.
What is marketing automation?Marketing automation is the use of software to deliver personalized messages to customers and leads. The software allows you to create a dynamic series of messages to send to your contacts. The message a person receives is decided by factors you specify, like what their spending habits are, where they are in the buying process, and past interactions they’ve had with your site.
Delivering content that’s tailored to a person’s needs and interests helps build stronger relationships which, in turn, can help increase conversions and revenue. Marketing automation can help you accomplish all these things while streamlining your operations at the same time.
In the broad scope of things, marketing automation incorporates several different aspects of marketing and business development, including email marketing, content development, conversion rate optimization, and lead generation.
The benefits of using marketing automationBy far, one of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is that it helps sales and marketing teams work more efficiently. People love personalized content; sending out personalized emails generates six times more revenue than sending non-personalized emails. But manually sending out customized messages to contacts simply isn’t practical. Marketing automation platforms handle the mundane and repetitive work that goes into delivering personalized content, giving sales and marketing professionals more time to focus on things that are more interesting and challenging.
Not only does marketing automation make it easier to deliver messages, it makes it easier to figure out where people are in the conversion process. Marketing automation programs typically have a lead scoring feature which helps users quickly identify which leads are the most sales-ready.
One of the most common reasons why businesses consider using marketing automation in the first place is because they want to improve their conversion rates and revenues. Marketing automation is a way to encourage customers to stay engaged longer, making it more likely they’ll stick around long enough to convert. On average, companies that use marketing automation have 53% higher conversion rates and an annual revenue growth rate 3.1% higher compared to companies that don’t.
For products and services with longer conversion cycles, marketing automation can also help speed up the process. In one example cited by VentureHarbour, Thomson Reuters was able to reduce their conversion time by 72% by using marketing automation software.
What applications are there for marketing automation?While marketing automation has several different applications, email messaging and lead generation/nurturing are among the most common.
Yes, email is still relevant as a marketing tool. While it’s easy to say things like “Everybody’s on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram,” it’s simply not true. However, most Internet users do have at least one email address. Email inboxes also tend to move at a slower pace than social media feeds, giving you the best chance at making a direct connection with your contacts. There's a multitude of ways marketing automation can be used with email:
And that's just to name a few.
Many companies use marketing automation to solicit feedback from their contacts, regardless if they’ve converted or not. Whether it’s by sending out surveys or asking people to send comments directly to them, the information they garner can be extremely valuable in guiding changes that will help improve their revenues in the long run.
Given that personalized emails generate so much more revenue than non-personalized emails, marketing automation can be an effective way to nurture your leads. According to Marketo, about 50% of leads in any system are not ready to buy and nearly 80% of all new leads will never become sales. With marketing automation, the goal is to give people something of value when they need it most so that they’re more likely to convert. Effective lead nurturing generates 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Nurtured leads also tend to make larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
Marketing automation platforms are also often commonly used to manage social media campaigns, create landing pages, and conduct ongoing A/B testing.
B2B vs. B2C marketing automationBusinesses of all sizes can potentially benefit from marketing automation, but whether a business has a B2B or B2C model is going to have an impact on the type of messaging used in their campaigns. While both types of businesses would have the main goals of improving conversions and revenue, there are differences in how they’ll reach that goal.
B2B salesB2B sales tend to have longer conversion cycles than B2C sales and often involve products or services that require a more long-term commitment. (Of course, there are some exceptions.) Because of this, B2B messaging has a greater emphasis on long-form content like whitepapers, case studies, and e-books. When major purchases are being considered for a business, multiple people are often involved in the decision-making process, so it’s not always a matter of winning over one person like it is with B2C sales. It’s important for the business with something to sell to establish themselves as an authority in their industry — offering in-depth informational content is a great way to do that.
B2C salesSince B2C sales move at a faster pace, the content used in their messaging is typically much simpler. For example, Sephora customers aren’t going to be interested in long case studies about a product, but they might appreciate a 30-second video demonstrating how to use a product instead. For B2C companies, the focus tends to be more on brand building and giving customers reasons to come back, so their messaging typically includes things like abandoned shopping cart reminders, personalized product recommendations, and offers tailored to specific types of customers.
Key conceptsAlthough many different aspects of marketing and business development come together in marketing automation, the whole process is ultimately driven by a few core concepts.
Conversion funnelsA conversion funnel is the process a person takes toward becoming a customer. Now that it’s so easy to find product reviews and shop around, a lot of people don’t just buy things from the first place they see it for sale. Marketing automation is a way to keep people engaged so they’re more likely to convert.
The conversion funnel can be broken down into a few basic stages:
Ideally, after a person converts once, they’ll be so happy with their decision that they become a repeat customer. But as people move through the conversion funnel, whether they do it once or several times, some of them will always drop out at each level. On average, only 1–5 % of people who enter a conversion funnel actually convert. When people drop out, it’s known as churn, and while some churn is inevitable, marketing automation can help reduce it. By understanding the needs and interests of people at each stage of the conversion funnel, you’re better able to keep them engaged by providing them with the type of content they’re most interested in.
For example, let’s say a company installs vinyl windows and they advertise heavily in the local media. At any given time, a large percentage of the thousands of people who see their ads won’t take any action after seeing one because they either don’t need new windows or because they live in a rental property. No amount of additional messaging will win those people over. But since replacing windows can be very expensive, the people who actually do need them typically spend time doing research to make sure they choose the right type of window and get the best price. If this company were to send additional information about vinyl windows to the people who contact them to get an estimate, they may be able to convince more people to convert.
Feedback loops and metricsOne of the basic laws of physics is that for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. A very similar concept also applies in the world of marketing automation, and it’s known as a feedback loop. When you send a message to a person, the recipient will have some kind of reaction to it, even if that reaction is to do nothing at all. That reaction is part of your feedback loop and you’ll need to pay attention to your metrics to get an idea of what those reactions are.
Feedback loops and metrics are a reflection of how effective your marketing automation strategy is. Whether a person converts, clicks through to your site, ignores the message, flags it as spam, or unsubscribes from your list, that tells you something about how the recipient felt about your message.
When you look at your metrics, you’ll ideally want to see high open rates, clickthrough rates, and maybe even some forwards, since those are signs your content is engaging, valuable, and not annoying to your contacts. Some unsubscribes and abuse reports are inevitable, especially since a lot of people get confused about the difference between the two. But don’t ignore those metrics just because they’re not what you want to see. An increasing number of either could be a sign your strategy is too aggressive and needs to be reworked.
User flowWhile conversion funnels refer to the process taken toward converting, user flow refers to the series of pages a person visits before taking an action.
When you have traffic coming to your site from different sources like PPC ads, social media, and email messages, you want to direct users to pages that will make it easy for them to take the action you want them to take, whether it’s buying something, signing up for a free trial, or joining an email list.
You also have to keep in mind that people often have different needs depending on how they arrive at a page, so you’ll want to do your best to make sure people are being taken to a page that would appeal to them. For example, if a person is directly taken to a product page after doing a search for a long-tail keyword, that’s fine since they’re clearly looking for something specific and are more likely to be ready to convert. But someone who clicks on a PPC ad and fills out a form on a landing page is probably going to want more information before they make any decisions, so it’s not time to give them a hard sell.
WorkflowsWorkflows are where the automation part of marketing automation comes into play. Your workflow is the series of triggers you create to deliver messages. Creating a workflow involves taking yourself through the entire process and asking yourself, “If this happens, what should happen next?”
Workflows can consist of many different triggers, such as how long it’s been since a person has taken an action, interactions you’ve had with a person, or actions they’ve previously taken on your site. Some types of workflows commonly used by retailers include sending discount codes to customers who haven’t made any purchases in a while, reminding people to review products after they’ve had some time to enjoy their purchase, and sending reminders to people who have recently added items to their cart without actually making a purchase.
Important steps in creating a marketing automation strategy1. Define your goalsThis might seem like an obvious point to make, but before you do anything else, you need to decide exactly what you want marketing automation to help you achieve so you can plan your strategy accordingly. Are you trying to generate more leads? Working to build up business from return customers? Trying to boost sales during an off season? Each of those goals is going to require a different strategy, so it’s important to understand exactly what your main objectives are.
2. Identify who to targetOf course it’s important to understand the needs of your customers at all points of the conversion process. But depending on what your main goals are, your time and energy may be best spent focusing on people who are at a specific point of the process. For instance, if you’re not really having a problem with lead generation but you want more people to convert, your time and energy would be better spent focusing on the middle and lower parts of the conversion funnel.
3. Map user flowsBy using marketing automation, you’re trying to get people to take some kind of action. Mapping user flow is a way to visualize the steps people need to go through to be able to take that action.
Depending on the way a person arrives at your site, some people might need more information than others before they’re willing to take that action. You don’t want to make people go through more steps than are necessary to do something, but you don’t want to hit people with a hard sell too soon, either. By using state diagrams to map user flows, as recommended by Peep Laja of ConversionXL, you’ll see exactly how people are arriving at a page and how many steps it takes for them to take the desired action.
4. Segment and rate your leadsIt’s important to remember that not all leads are necessarily equal in terms of quality. Your database of contacts is inevitably going to be a mix of people who are on the verge of buying, people who are still researching their options, and people who probably won’t convert, so it’s not possible to create broad messages that will somehow appeal to all of those types of people. Rating your leads helps you figure out exactly who needs further nurturing and who is ready to be handed over to a sales team.
The interactions a person has had with your content and the actions they’ve taken on your site can be a reflection of how ready they are to convert. A person who has viewed a pricing page is most likely going to be closer to buying than someone who has simply read a blog post on a site. A person who has visited a site multiple times over the course of a few weeks is clearly more interested than someone who has only visited once or twice in the past year. Marketing automation software lets you assign values to certain actions and interactions so that it can calculate a score for that lead.
Marketing automation also lets you segment your database of contacts to a very high degree so you can deliver messages to very specific types of people. For example, when working with a B2B business, a marketer might want to target messages to people with certain job titles who work at businesses of a certain size. With B2C sales, a retailer might want to segment their lists to give special offers to people who have spent a certain amount of money with the company or send product recommendations to people who live in certain locations.
Building and maintaining a contact databaseThere’s no easy way around it: Building a high-quality database of contacts takes time. Marketing automation should come into play once you already have a fairly sizeable database of contacts to work with, but you will need to keep adding new names to that database on a regular basis.
One of the most effective ways to build a database of highly qualified contacts is by creating informative content. Blog content is great for providing high-level information, and it helps businesses build trust and establish themselves as an authority in their field. On the other hand, things like whitepapers and e-books are best for attracting people who want more in-depth information on a subject and are more inclined to be interested in what a business is offering, which is why those types of content are usually gated. With gated content, a person’s contact information is essentially the price of accessing the content.
For businesses that offer a service, free trials are an excellent way to get contact information since the people who sign up for them are obviously interested in what’s being offered.
Just say "no" to purchased listsWhatever you do, don’t be tempted to buy a list of contacts. Purchased lists may give you a quick boost up front, but they’ll work against you in the long run.
First of all, high-quality lists of contacts aren’t for sale. The kinds of lists you can buy or rent are typically full of invalid and abandoned email addresses. Even if a person actually does see your message, they likely either won’t be interested or will be skeptical about doing business with a company they’re not familiar with.
If you were to start sending messages to a list full of contacts of questionable quality, you’ll most likely end up with high bounce rates, lots of unsubscriptions, low open rates, and a whole lot of abuse reports. Email service providers pay attention to those sorts of metrics and if they start seeing them on a regular basis, they’ll view you as a spammer, which will only make it harder for you to get your message to more qualified leads once you have them.
Best practices for marketing automation messagingGet to the pointMake your point quickly and make it clear. We all have a limited amount of time each day and one thing people have little patience for is long messages. People just want to know what’s in it for them. How would your product or service solve their problem? What’s unique about what you’re offering?
Keep it activeBy implementing marketing automation strategies, you’re trying to keep people engaged. Therefore, your messages should be written in an active tone and encourage recipients to take some kind of action, whether it’s downloading a whitepaper, reading a blog post, watching a video, or making a purchase.
Remember where people are in the processDon’t forget that some types of content will be more appealing than others depending on where a person is in the conversion funnel. People who are just starting to learn more about a company or product are not going to be happy if they get hit with a hard sell, but highly promotional content could potentially be effective on someone further down in the conversion funnel.
Avoid looking spammyWhen used correctly, marketing automation is not spam — we’ll talk more about why that is in just a little bit. But don’t give your contacts the wrong impression. Certain things will always look spammy, such as typing in all capital letters, overusing the color red, and using too many links in the body of the message. If you’re going to use symbols in your subject lines or messages, don’t use too many of them. Avoid using words known to trigger spam filters.
If you’re unfamiliar with the CAN-SPAM Act, take some time to learn about what it means for your campaign. Subject lines need to be accurate and not misleading. Companies that send marketing messages through email need to provide a physical mailing address. (PO box addresses are allowed.) You also need to provide an unsubscribe option in all messages and make sure all opt-out requests are honored as soon as possible.
Hone your listBigger isn’t always better when it comes to contact lists. One of the key goals for marketing automation is to get your message to precisely the right people. Pay close attention to your metrics so you know who your most qualified leads are and get rid of the ones who aren’t responding anymore. You’re better off with a smaller list of highly qualified leads than with a large list of contacts who don’t care. If it’s been months since a person last opened a message from you, just remove them from your list and focus more on the leads who are more interested.
Misconceptions about marketing automationIt’s impersonalWhen done correctly, marketing automation can and should feel personal. In all fairness, it’s easy to understand how people get the wrong impression here — after all, the word “automation” is usually associated with things like computerization and robots. But for a marketing automation strategy to be successful, there needs to be a human touch behind it. Marketing automation simply makes it easier for you to get your message out there. It’s up to you to come up with content that will appeal to people and to create the strategy for getting it out there.
It’s spamWe all know how obnoxious spam is — marketers included. Marketers also understand how ineffective it is. While spam is an unsolicited message promoting something irrelevant to the vast majority of its recipients, the goal of marketing automation is to deliver highly relevant messages to users who clearly express an interest in it.
Unlike spam, marketing automation also frequently involves non-promotional content. Marketing automation messages absolutely can be promotional in nature, but ultimately, the goal is to foster positive relationships by offering something of value — and that doesn’t always involve a hard sell.
You can set it and forget itThis is another case where the word “automation” can give the wrong impression. When you think of something being automated, it’s easy to think you can just set it up, sit back, and let it run on its own. In reality, marketing automation is anything but a hands-off process. Marketing automation needs constant attention and refinement to make sure it’s as successful as possible. Many people use the A/B testing functionality of marketing automation software to run ongoing tests to see which sorts of content, subject lines, design variations, and CTAs people best respond to.
It’s just email marketingEmail is a significant part of marketing automation, but marketing automation isn’t just a new name for email marketing.
First of all, the types of messages involved in basic email marketing and marketing automation are distinctly different. When most people think of email marketing, they’re thinking of broad email blasts that go out to an entire list of contacts, but that’s just what you’re trying to avoid doing with marketing..
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Marketing, at its core, is focused on delivering wow-worthy customer experiences—or at least it should be. From your prospect’s initial engagement with your brand on social or through a piece of content to the moment they decide to buy, it’s a marketer’s job to create killer experiences that help usher them along in their buyer’s journey.
Next week, I’m cooking up three different webinars chock-full of surefire ways—from breathing new life into your social strategy to leveraging data and analytics—to engage your customers (and prospective customers) in order to boost your bottom line. Join me for one or all of these live events where I’ll be sharing actionable advice, case studies, and plenty of dad jokes about how to turn your customer’s experience into revenue.
How to Get 3,150% More Traffic Back to Your Content With a Killer Social StrategyHas your web traffic slowed to more of a crawl than LA’s 405 at rush hour? This high-action, fast-paced webinar is the solution. I’ll kick things off by exploring what makes customers click, share, and like on social—and then we’ll help you figure out how to turn that motivation into the right kind of messaging to drive social media traffic back to your content.
I’ll be joined by Nathan Ellering of CoSchedule on Tuesday, July 25 at 2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT to discuss how you can get over 3,000% (yes, really) more traffic to your website with the help of some well-played social media moves.
When you bolster your customer service, you have the capacity to elevate your revenue potential as well. Hear just how award-winning companies have already done it and different ways you can do it, too.
I’m getting together with customer service platform Gladly on Wednesday, July 26 at 2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT for an interactive webinar. (It’s not like The Escape Room, it’s like a Q&A where we troubleshoot your customer service woes.)
Customers hit up to 15 touchpoints before they choose to make a purchase. If you don’t know how to meet them in those moments, closing a sale can begin to feel a little bit like a game of chance. But with cognitive technology, you can leverage insights that surface unique customer interests and overall buying habits, in order to deliver a highly personalized experience that eliminates the guesswork and lands deals.
On Thursday, July 27, connect with IBM subject matter expert Anitha Gopinathan and me at 1:00pm ET / 10:00am PT as we unpack how data can help you personalize your marketing efforts to reach more customers in the right place and at the right time.
Three webinars. Three ways to get your hands dirty in your customer’s buying journey. Hope to see you on one, two, or all three of these sessions (all are free, and all will be recorded for replay purposes if you register).
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I’m often in Panera Bread restaurants. Usually, I’m there meeting with prospects or those in my network. On one such occasion, my appointment arrived early and selected a table near the front door.
During our conversation, I noticed customers stopping by the electronic kiosks to place their order. Then I noticed there were fewer than half the normal number of staff taking orders. Upon further scrutiny, I observed the location formerly that housed the terminals and staff had been replaced with a large area for pick up orders.
I started thinking about the contrast between the current Panera Bread business model and their former business model. Several years ago, their model was pretty simple: walk in, place your order with an employee behind their terminal, receive an electronic pager, go find your seat, retrieve your order when summoned. That was it!
Now one can order ahead, then simply stop by and pick up your food at the appropriate location skipping the line altogether.
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Do people copy your content and post it on their site without permission? Did you know the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) can help? In this article, you’ll discover how to file a DMCA takedown notice to protect your content from plagiarists and content scrapers. What Is the DMCA and How Does It Protect Bloggers
This post How to Submit a DMCA Takedown Notice first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by NickRebuildGroup
Ranking near the top of the SERPs for short-tail keywords in competitive business verticals can be extremely difficult. Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and similar sites have the market cornered on ranking at the top of search results. Even if you manage to rank in the first position, there are featured snippets, ads, map packs, and other SERP layouts that are dominating the space as well.
Because short-tail keywords have such broad search intents, it's in the search engine’s best interest to try and answer questions directly in SERPs. That is the intent of featured snippets. If a search engine is able to answer a user’s query without them leaving the results page, they believe that delivers the best result. And the proliferation of featured snippets is only beginning. According to Search Engine Land, 19.45% of queries will display rich answers (a form of featured snippets) in Google.
A search for “what is orthodontics” in an incognito Google Chrome window displayed the following featured snippet:
This search result satisfies at least one large search intent: “What is orthodontics?” I use this as an example because my agency and I had been trying to get a client to rank for this keyword for some time. They were a dental practice with locations across the US that offered both orthodontic and general dental procedures. We had optimized their locations for their orthodontic procedures, but we wanted to get their non-localized service pages to rank as well in order to draw new patients that may be in the beginning stages of looking for a new orthodontist. But without a local qualifier, it was difficult to get the pages to rank for the short-tail searches.
After a year and change of writing, optimizing, re-writing, and re-optimizing the content — all while building links — we weren't getting any movement with our organic rankings. It seemed that business websites were not meant to rank for these short-tail keywords. Content creators have long lamented that featured snippets don’t attribute where the content in the SERP comes from, thus leaching traffic away from the site.
We believed that rich snippets in SERPs would become more prominent — especially with mobile and voice search on the rise — and that, even without proper attribution, it would benefit our client to appear in these types of search results, especially if we were able to rank in long-tail, question-oriented searches. If we could rank in a featured snippet, where a potential consumer was asking a question about a service that we provide, it would benefit us to answer that question for them. Not only would we achieve the coveted “zero position,” we would position our client as authorities in their vertical, potentially increasing conversions.
With this in mind, we began developing the strategy that would ultimately lead us to ranking in featured snippet searches.
Q&A contentQuestion and answer content on websites is fairly standard. Many companies will place Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) content on their sites to help users with any questions they may have instead of answering them directly. Noting the prevalence of featured snippets in SERPs, we used the Q&A format to create new content to find out: a) could we rank for these queries? and b) would it benefit our client to rank in these queries?
Research & content creationUsing SEMRush, we conducted keyword research to find long-tail keywords with high monthly search volumes. Some of the phrases we decided to create the content around were “how long does it take to put on braces,” “how much does Invisalign cost without insurance,” and other similar queries. We also asked our client’s call team and Livechat correspondents to send us the most-asked questions they receive about orthodontics. The questions that the internal teams provided were primarily about pricing and insurance. This information was vital for our new Q&A content, as it allowed us to create answers we knew our users were looking for.
While researching current featured snippets, we gleaned that the content must emphasize the answer, not the answerer. Meaning, the content needed to be straightforward and answer the query without any marketing fluff. We ensured that our headers included the targeted keyword, along with the title tags. Once the content was created, we placed each question in the main navigation bar on the site, with each one leading to a separate landing page.
Link buildingAs most SEOs will tell you, backlinks are still a very important ranking factor. It was our belief that building links to our new Q&A content would be essential in ensuring that it ranked well. We built links exclusively via sites like Quora and Reddit, the idea being that these are places where people are already asking questions that we can answer as experts, while linking back to our site. In order to avoid spamming, we limited the number of links that we built per month.
ResultsAfter a year of collecting data, we can confidently say that not only were we successful in getting the site to rank for a featured snippet, but traffic to the orthodontics content increased by 46.10%, conversions from the content increased by 235%, and the conversion rate increased by 129.30%.
Organic sessions to the orthodontic Q&A content
Organic conversions from orthodontic Q&A content
Organic conversion rate from orthodontic Q&A content
The results were even more striking on mobile, where traffic increased by 91.46%, conversions increased by 322.22%, and conversion rate increased by 120.53%.
Mobile organic sessions to the orthodontic Q&A content
Mobile organic conversions from orthodontic Q&A content
Mobile organic conversion rate from orthodontic Q&A content
Measurement methodFor this study we only looked at organic and mobile organic traffic. We also only looked at traffic that landed on our site via the orthodontics content (meaning we only measured users that entered the site via one of the orthodontics pages from an organic source).
Attention metricsIt should be noted that this implementation was not successful in every facet. One of the most important goals for new content is making sure that users engage with it. And at Rebuild Group, we normally measure content engagement through attention metrics: pages/session, average time on site, bounce rate, etc.
Upon collecting the data, we noticed that all attention metrics decreased year over year. Our hypothesis is that because the content is both meant to answer a question and is easily digestible, users were more likely to leave the site after their question was answered. It explains why traffic, conversions, and conversion rate increased so much year over year and attention metrics decreased.
RankingsMost important to this experiment, we were able to have our site rank in the first position — or zero position — in search results for the query “how long do you wear invisalign a day,” while also ranking on the first page (though not the first position) for other Q&A orthodontic terms.
We started ranking in the first position for this term in mid-January, though we lost the ranking shortly thereafter. We began to consistently rank in the first position in March and are still ranked there as of this writing.
Our belief is that by simply answering the question and including the keyword in crawlable parts of the content, we were able to rank in the first position for one of our targeted Q&A phrases, resulting in a featured snippet.
ConversionsConversions were measured as the number of contact form submissions sent during sessions where a user entered the site via the orthodontic content. As mentioned above, conversions and conversion rates for all organic and mobile organic traffic increased greatly year over year. However, the effects were not seen until 9 months into the experiment.
When the traffic was measured at 90 and 180 days, organic traffic to the new content was steadily increasing overall and via mobile devices, but conversions and conversion rate had not gone up compared to the previous year. It wasn’t until 270 days in, when we first ranked in the featured snippet SERP, that conversions began to increase.
Organic traffic to the orthodontic Q&A content
Organic conversions from orthodontic Q&A content
Once we were consistently ranking in the first position for a featured snippet SERP, while also ranking on the first page of SERPs for other queries, our conversions and conversion rates began to greatly increase.
Google HomeAs stated earlier, voice search is on the rise. Once we were able to rank as a featured snippet in a targeted SERP, we wanted to see if that featured snippet would affect how Google Home provided an answer to the targeted query:
*Note: This video was recorded on my phone, so the quality is not the best. You may need to turn up your volume to hear the question and answer.
As you can see, Google Home clearly attributes the answer to our client, answers the question, and then sends the user to the Home App, where the answer is again shown:
From there they can click through to the site on their mobile device:
In the end we drew a strong correlation between the implementation of the Q&A orthodontics content, ranking highly in rich snippet SERPs, and increased conversions and conversion rates. But like all things SEO, there are no definites when implementing this kind of strategy. We implemented content that drove users to a site that offered services they were looking for. Someone searching “how to boil water” is not likely looking to buy new pots and pans. Ultimately, it's important to know what your users are looking for and cater to their searches. Once you're able to answer their questions with simple, to-the-point content, the rest is easy.
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360 Video is a video that allows the viewer to see a 360 degree view from the location that the video is recorded. You can see the view from the top of a building and look 360 degrees around as if you were really standing on that building.
One of my favorite examples is from Red Bull. Red Bull is a good brand to follow for cutting edge ideas. They take us inside of a Rallycross race:
Documentary type footage is the easiest to create of all the different story genres using the 360 video. Google has been playing with this idea of 360 imagery for years with their Google Maps product.
360 video is a form of virtual reality, also known as VR
2017 is being called the year of 360 video. I expect some will call 2018 the same thing.
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Wondering if Messenger chatbots are right for your business? Want to know how to build your own chatbot? To explore why and how to create Facebook Messenger chatbots, I interview Ben Beck. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by randfish
Move over, links, content, and RankBrain — there's a new ranking factor in town, and it's a doozy. All kidding aside, the idea of searcher task accomplishment is a compelling argument for how we should be optimizing our sites. Are they actually solving the problems searchers seek answers for? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how searcher task accomplishment is what Google ultimately looks for, and how you can keep up.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're chatting about a new Google ranking factor.
Now, I want to be clear. This is not something that's directly in Google's algorithm for sure. It's just that they're measuring a lot of things that lead us to this conclusion. This is essentially what Google is optimizing toward with all of their ranking signals, and therefore it's what SEOs nowadays have to think about optimizing for with our content. And that is searcher task accomplishment.
In the past, they've had to do all sorts of algorithms to try and get at this from obtuse angles. But now, with a lot of the work that they're doing around measuring engagement and with all of the data that's coming to them through Chrome and through Android, they're able to get much, much closer to what is truly accomplishing the searcher's task. That's because they really want results that satisfy the query and fulfill the searcher's task.
So pretty much every — I'm excluding navigational searches — but every informational and transactional type of search — I mean, navigational, they just want to go to that website — but informational and transactional search query is basically this. It's I have an expression of need. That's what I'm telling Google. But behind that, there's a bunch of underlying goals, things that I want to do. I want to know information. I want to accomplish something. I want to complete an activity.
When I do that, when I perform my search, I have this sort of evaluation of results. Is this going to help me do what I want? Then I choose one, and then I figure out whether that result actually helps me complete my task. If it does, I might have discovery of additional needs around that, like once you've answered my disinfect a cut, now it's, okay, now I kind of want to know how to prevent an infection, because you described using disinfectant and then you said infections are real scary. So let me go look up how do I prevent that from happening. So there's that discovery of additional needs. Or you decide, hey, this did not help me complete my task. I'm going to go back to evaluation of results, or I'm going to go back to my expression of need in the form of a different search query.
That's what gives Google the information to say, "Yes, this result helped the searcher accomplish their task," or, "No, this result did not help them do it."
Some examples of searcher task accomplishmentThis is true for a bunch of things. I'll walk you through some examples.
If I search for how to get a book published, that's an expression of need. But underlying that is a bunch of different goals like, well, you're going to be asking about like traditional versus self-publishing, and then you're going to want to know about agents and publishers and the publishing process and the pitch process, which is very involved. Then you're going to get into things like covers and book marketing and tracking sales and all this different stuff, because once you reach your evaluation down here and you get into discovery of additional needs, you find all these other things that you need to know.
If I search for "invest in Ethereum," well maybe I know enough to start investing right away, but probably, especially recently because there's been a ton of search activity around it, I probably need to understand: What the heck is the blockchain and what is cryptocurrency, this blockchain-powered currency system, and what's the market for that like, and what has it been doing lately, and what's my purchase process, and where can I actually go to buy it, and what do I have to do to complete that transaction?
If I search for something like "FHA loans," well that might mean I'm in the mindset of thinking about real estate. I'm buying usually my first house for an FHA loan, and that means that I need to know things about conditions by region and the application process and what are the providers in my area and how can I go apply, all of these different things.
If I do a search for "Seattle event venues," well that means I'm probably looking for a list of multiple event venues, and then I need to narrow down my selection by the criteria I care about, like region, capacity, the price, the amenities. Then once I have all that, I need contact information so that I can go to them.
In all of these scenarios, Google is going to reward the results that help me accomplish the task, discover the additional needs, and solve those additional needs as well, rather than the ones that maybe provide a slice of what I need and then make me go back to the search results and choose something else or change my query to figure out more.
Google is also going to reward, and you can see this in all these results, they're going to reward ones that give me all the information I need, that help me accomplish my task before they ask for something in return. The ones that are basically just a landing page that say, "Oh yeah, Seattle event venues, enter your email address and all this other information, and we'll be in touch with a list of venues that are right for you." Yeah, guess what? It doesn't matter how many links you have, you are not ranking, my friends.
That is so different from how it used to be. It used to be that you could have that contact form. You could have that on there. You could not solve the searcher's query. You could basically be very conversion rate-focused on your page, and so long as you could get the right links and the right anchor text and use the right keywords on the page, guess what? You could rank. Those days are ending. I'm not going to say they're gone, but they are ending, and this new era of searcher task accomplishment is here.
Challenge: The conflict between SEO & CRO
There's a challenge. I want to be totally up front that there is a real challenge and a problem between this world of optimizing for searcher task accomplishment and the classic world of we want our conversions. So the CRO in your organization, which might be your director of marketing or it might be your CEO, or maybe if your team is big enough, you might have a CRO specialist, conversation rate optimization specialist, on hand. They're thinking, "Hey, I need the highest percent of form completions possible."
So when someone lands on this page, I'm trying to get from two percent to four percent. How do we get four percent of people visiting this page to complete the form? That means removing distractions. That means not providing information up front. That means having a great teaser that says like, "Hey, we can give this to you, and here are testimonials that say we can provide this information. But let's not give it right up front. Don't give away the golden goose, my friend. We want these conversions. We need to get our qualified leads into the funnel," versus the SEO, who today has to think about, "How do I get searchers to accomplish their task without friction?" This lead capture form, that's friction.
So every organization, I think, needs to decide which way they're going to go. Are they going to go for basically long-term SEO, which is I'm going to solve the searcher's task, and then I'm going to figure out ways later to monetize and to capture value? Or am I going to basically lose out in the search results to people who are willing to do this and go this route instead and drive traffic from other sources? Maybe I'll rank with different pages and I'll send some people here, or maybe I will pay for my traffic, or I'll try and do some barnacle SEO and get links from people who do rank up top there, but I won't do it directly myself. This is a choice we all have.
How do we nail searcher task accomplishment?All right. So how do you do this? Let's say you've gone the SEO path. You've decided, "Yes, Rand, I'm in. I want to help the searcher accomplish their task. I recognize that I'm going to have to be willing to sacrifice some conversion rate optimization." Well, there are two things here.
1. Gain a deep understanding of what drives searchers to search.
2. What makes some searchers come away unsatisfied.
Once they've performed this query, why do they click the back button? Why do they choose a different result? Why do they change their query to something else? There are ways we can figure out both of these.
To help with number 1 try:
Some of the best things that you can do are talk to people who actually have those problems and who are actually performing those searches or have performed them through...
I will provide you with a link to a document that I did around specifically how to get a book published. I did a survey that I ran that looked at searcher task accomplishment and what people hoped that content would have for them, and you can see the results are quite remarkable. I'll actually embed my presentation on searcher task accomplishment in this Whiteboard Friday and make sure to link to that as well.
What if I searched for disinfect a cut? What would I want to know? What if I searched for FHA loans? I'm buying a house for the first time, what am I thinking about? Well, I'm thinking about a bunch of things. I'm thinking about price and neighborhood and all this. Okay, how do I accomplish all that in my content, or at least how do I provide navigation so that people can accomplish all that without having to go back to the search results?
To help with number 2 try:
Understanding what makes those searchers come away unsatisfied.
So over time, if you watch those in your spaces and do some rank tracking competitively, you can see what types of content is helping people accomplish those tasks and what Google is rewarding.
That said, I look forward to your comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Why We Can't Do SEO WIthout CRO from Rand Fishkin
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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http://ift.tt/2uHOa4AHow much support do you need to back up your claims? If you’re in politics, not much. But then, no one trusts politicians.
As a brand leader, you need your readers to trust you. Stating facts without supporting evidence or citing trends without proof can damage your credibility and harm your brand. Fortunately, the web is full of authoritative information to back up your claims. All you have to do is find the right information from the right sources and be honest with your readers. Some sources are better than others, so for the best results, stick to these strategies.
Links to Trusted WebsitesLinking to related articles on trusted websites is an easy way to verify the information in your content. You benefit from the trust the other site has already established and prove to your readers you’ve done your homework.
Keep in mind, I specifically wrote “trusted websites.” Readers are more likely to believe in a source they know and trust. Supporting your investment advice with an article from Forbes provides more credibility than linking to Random Joe’s Investing Blog.
Likewise, you need to consider your target persona. Senior citizens are more likely to trust an article linked to AARP than MTV.com.
When using a website as your source:
Companies, websites, and private organizations run thousands of research studies on almost every imaginable subject. These studies are a goldmine for content marketers; they can back up your claims with scientifically proven data. Advising your readers about current content trends is always more convincing if you can back that claim with an analysis of over 640,000 posts, for example.
Research studies provide additional benefits beyond supporting your claims. Use them to:
Research studies are a goldmine for content marketers; they can back up your claims with proven data.
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Quotes from Experts or Scholars
Providing expert quotes can offer similar credibility benefits as a research study. An expert’s reputation or credentials suggest superior or specialized knowledge that often leads people to trust them. Expert quotes are powerful for positioning data interpretation in a specific way because the expert won’t have the same implied bias as you or your company.
As with any source, make sure you verify the credentials of the experts you quote. The last thing you want is to quote someone with questionable credentials or—worse—skeletons in their closet that could damage your credibility. If you don’t do your homework, someone else will.
Recruit an Expert or Influencer to Author the PieceIf quoting an industry expert adds credibility, imagine the power of offering an article by that same expert? You may be an unknown entity. An outside expert offers name recognition and trustworthiness, both for your project and your company. There are plenty of ways to locate experts in your field:
Remember that your expert doesn’t necessarily need a Ph.D. or to be a household name. An expert is anyone your audience sees as having a keen insight into the marketplace or the needs of your customers. That could be a customer who typifies your target persona or an agent at your call center. In fact, a recent Edelman study found that a person’s peers are viewed as equally credible as traditional experts.
More Tips to Up Your CredibilityReport on new research. For content portals for industry knowledge, provide links to trusted websites as a way to support your claims. This can help increase your SEO. You also can achieve occasional credibility boosts by reporting on relevant research as it becomes available and featuring guest posts by industry experts.
Write for industry publications. If you want to become a thought leader, write for respected industry publications to build your credibility. Again, you must back your claims with hard evidence, citing research and quoting experts in your field. But it’s a way of allowing the industry to vet you, instead.
Vet your marketing claims. Legal requirements vary by industry, but it’s always important to back any claims you make in a marketing campaign with industry-approved research studies. False or unsupported marketing can lead to legal trouble or even FTC intervention. Always double-check the sources—and context—for your claims.
Do your own research. If you want to do more than just report the latest trends, you need to up your content game. Sponsor your own research study to help establish yourself as a go-to resource for information.
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