20+ Visual Design Resources for Efficient Marketing Campaigns

Hey, marketing pros and newbies! Would you agree that any kind of promotion is much more efficient when enhanced with attractive visuals? Startups are often tight on budget and simply can’t afford to hire a designer. That’s why marketers should be able to run their campaigns by themselves and it’s not a science fiction, but a reality. With a whole lot of design resources for Marketers providing even the smallest design elements you might need, you can cope even with a complicated task like creating an infographic, for instance.

This is an undeniable fact. The human brain processes visuals much faster than words and remembers them for longer periods of time. What’s more, pictures make data much easier to comprehend. It’s easier to draw people’s attention with an image. Pictures engage the users and improve their experience on site.

It’s not an issue to supply each and every one of your adds with an eye-catching photo, cool banner, clickable button, intuitive icon, whatever if you have a photographer and designer in your team.

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4 Tools to Find and Manage Influencers

Are you working with social media influencers? Wondering how to vet and recruit influencers? In this article, you’ll discover four tools to manage your influencer relationships. #1: Identify and Vet Influencers With Influence.co and Social Blade Influence.co is a tool that helps you easily find and connect with influencers who want to work with brands.

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7 Biggest Social Media Mistakes Businesses Make That Damage Their Reputation

It’s easy to see why savvy business owners are so easily lured by the power of social media marketing. It offers the possibility of big returns with almost no capital investment and virtually anyone is able to open an account for free and begin sharing content. Unfortunately, in the hands of an inexperienced business owner, the low startup costs and ease of use may be a recipe for disaster.

How a Social Media Crisis Happens

Whenever you get 2.46 billion people together sharing their opinions, there’s bound to be some conflict and misunderstanding that causes negative ripples across your social profiles. An angry customer could start a Twitter tirade because of an unresolved bad customer experience. Your social media manager might pull a Ted Cruz and accidentally “like” or share an inappropriate post on your timeline. A disgruntled employee could post something unprofessional. Even large corporate accounts have been hacked, resulting in embarrassing, albeit sometimes funny, status updates.

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6 Tools for Social Media Content Inspiration

Need more ideas to fill the gaps in your social media posting calendar? Looking for tools to help? In this article, you’ll discover six tools and websites that will help keep your social media content interesting, timely, and relevant. #1: Discover Unofficial Holidays and Popular Events With Forekast Forekast is one of the best places

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Getting Real with Retail: An Agency’s Guide to Inspiring In-Store Excellence

Posted by MiriamEllis

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Content Marketing With Video

Content marketing has been around for hundreds of years.  Content includes things like white papers, books, demos, literature, just to name a few.  Think about it. When you were a kid, how many cartoons where just content marketing aimed at getting you to ask your parents to buy toys?  Thanks to the internet, we have more tools available to us to distribute content marketing now than ever before.  However, the world is also now full of more noise in the form of content than ever before.  Content marketing has unfortunately become a buzzword resulting in a lot of brands creating content, but this isn’t really marketing. It’s just noise.

In reality, content marketing is some form of educational information.  It is not about what the company sells.  The idea is to provide good information that the reader or viewer cares about, so they become loyal to the brand. 

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How to Pin a Facebook Lead Ad to Your Facebook Page

Want to generate qualified leads from Facebook? Wondering how to make your email lead form what people see when they visit your Facebook page? In this article, you’ll discover how to use Facebook lead ads without spending any money. #1: Create a Lead Ad Via Ads Manager While Facebook doesn’t give you the option to

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Tracking Your Link Prospecting Using Lists in Link Explorer

Posted by Dr-Pete

I'm a lazy marketer some days — I'll admit it. I don't do a lot of manual link prospecting, because it's a ton of work, outreach, and follow-up. There are plenty of times, though, where I've got a good piece of content (well, at least I hope it's good) and I want to know if it's getting attention from specific sites, whether they're in the search industry or the broader marketing or PR world. Luckily, we've made that question a lot easier to answer in Link Explorer, so today's post is for all of you curious but occasionally lazy marketers. Hop into the tool if you want to follow along:

Open Link Explorer

(1) Track your content the lazy way

When you first visit Link Explorer, you'll see that it defaults to "root domain":

Some days, you don't want to wade through your entire domain, but just want to target a single piece of content. Just enter or paste that URL, and select "exact page" (once you start typing a full path, we'll even auto-select that option for you):

Now I can see just the link data for that page (note: screenshots have been edited for size):

Good news — my Whiteboard Friday already has a decent link profile. That's already a fair amount to sort through, and as the link profile grows, it's only going to get tougher. So, how can I pinpoint just the sites I'm interested in and track those sites over time?

(2) Make a list of link prospects

This is the one part we can't automate for you. Make a list of prospects in whatever tool you please. Here's an imaginary list I created in Excel:

Obviously, this list is on the short side, but let's say I decide to pull a few of the usual suspects from the search marketing world, plus one from the broader marketing world, and a couple of aspirational sites (I'm probably not going to get that New York Times link, but let's dream big).

(3) Create a tracking list in Link Explorer

Obviously, I could individually search for these domains in my full list of inbound links, but even with six prospects, that's going to take some time. So, let's do this the lazy way. Back in Link Explorer, look at the very bottom of the left-hand navigation and you'll see "Link Targeting Lists":

Keep scrolling — I promise it's down there. Click on it, and you'll see something like this:

On the far-right, under the main header, click on "[+] Create new list." You'll get an overlay with a three-step form like the one below. Just give your list a name, provide a target URL (the page you want to track links to), and copy-and-paste in your list of prospects. Here's an example:

Click "Save," and you should immediately get back some data.

Alas, no link from the New York Times. The blue icons show me that the prospects are currently linking to Moz.com, but not to my target page. The green icon shows me that I've already got a head-start — Search Engine Land is apparently linking to this post (thanks, Barry!).

Click on any arrow in the "Notes" column, and you can add a note to that entry, like so:

Don't forget to hit "Save." Congratulations, you've created your first list! Well, I've created your first list for you. Geez, you really are lazy.

(4) Check in to track your progress

Of course, the real magic is that the list just keeps working for you. At any time, you can return to "Link Tracking Lists" on the Link Explorer menu, and now you'll see a master list of all your lists:

Just click on the list name you're interested in, and you can see your latest-and-greatest data. We can't build the links for you, but we can at least make keeping track of them a lot easier.

Bonus video: Now in electrifying Link-o-Vision!

Ok, it's just a regular video, although it does require electricity. If you're too lazy to read (in which case, let's be honest, you probably didn't get this far), I've put this whole workflow into an enchanting collection of words and sounds for you:

I hope you'll put your newfound powers to good. Let us know how you're using Tracking Lists (or how you plan to use them) in the comments, and where you'd like to see us take them next!

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How to Retarget on Facebook and Instagram With Dynamic Product Ads

Want to retarget website visitors with ads for products they viewed but didn’t purchase? Wondering how to set up dynamic product ads for Facebook and Instagram? In this article, you’ll discover how to remarket to website visitors with dynamic product ads using Facebook Ads Manager. What Are Dynamic Product Ads? Dynamic product ads let you

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How Much Data Is Missing from Analytics? And Other Analytics Black Holes

Posted by Tom.Capper

If you’ve ever compared two analytics implementations on the same site, or compared your analytics with what your business is reporting in sales, you’ve probably noticed that things don’t always match up. In this post, I’ll explain why data is missing from your web analytics platforms and how large the impact could be. Some of the issues I cover are actually quite easily addressed, and have a decent impact on traffic — there’s never been an easier way to hit your quarterly targets. ;)

I’m going to focus on GA (Google Analytics), as it's the most commonly used provider, but most on-page analytics platforms have the same issues. Platforms that rely on server logs do avoid some issues but are fairly rare, so I won’t cover them in any depth.

Side note: Our test setup (multiple trackers & customized GA)

On Distilled.net, we have a standard Google Analytics property running from an HTML tag in GTM (Google Tag Manager). In addition, for the last two years, I’ve been running three extra concurrent Google Analytics implementations, designed to measure discrepancies between different configurations.

(If you’re just interested in my findings, you can skip this section, but if you want to hear more about the methodology, continue reading. Similarly, don’t worry if you don’t understand some of the detail here — the results are easier to follow.)

Two of these extra implementations — one in Google Tag Manager and one on page — run locally hosted, renamed copies of the Google Analytics JavaScript file (e.g. www.distilled.net/static/js/au3.js, instead of www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js) to make them harder to spot for ad blockers. I also used renamed JavaScript functions (“tcap” and “Buffoon,” rather than the standard “ga”) and renamed trackers (“FredTheUnblockable” and “AlbertTheImmutable”) to avoid having duplicate trackers (which can often cause issues).

This was originally inspired by 2016-era best practice on how to get your Google Analytics setup past ad blockers. I can’t find the original article now, but you can see a very similar one from 2017 here.

Lastly, we have (“DianaTheIndefatigable”), which just has a renamed tracker, but uses the standard code otherwise and is implemented on-page. This is to complete the set of all combinations of modified and unmodified GTM and on-page trackers.

Two of Distilled’s modified on-page trackers, as seen on https://www.distilled.net/

Overall, this table summarizes our setups:

Tracker	Renamed function?	GTM or on-page?	Locally hosted JavaScript file?
Default	No	GTM HTML tag	No
FredTheUnblockable	Yes - “tcap”	GTM HTML tag	Yes
AlbertTheImmutable	Yes - “buffoon”	On page	Yes
DianaTheIndefatigable	No	On page	No

I tested their functionality in various browser/ad-block environments by watching for the pageviews appearing in browser developer tools:

Reason 1: Ad Blockers

Ad blockers, primarily as browser extensions, have been growing in popularity for some time now. Primarily this has been to do with users looking for better performance and UX on ad-laden sites, but in recent years an increased emphasis on privacy has also crept in, hence the possibility of analytics blocking.

Effect of ad blockers

Some ad blockers block web analytics platforms by default, others can be configured to do so. I tested Distilled’s site with Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, two of the most popular ad-blocking desktop browser addons, but it’s worth noting that ad blockers are increasingly prevalent on smartphones, too.

Here’s how Distilled’s setups fared:

(All numbers shown are from April 2018)

Setup	Vs. Adblock	Vs. Adblock with “EasyPrivacy” enabled	Vs. uBlock Origin
GTM	Pass	Fail	Fail
On page	Pass	Fail	Fail
GTM + renamed script & function	Pass	Fail	Fail
On page + renamed script & function	Pass	Fail	Fail

Seems like those tweaked setups didn’t do much!

Lost data due to ad blockers: ~10%

Ad blocker usage can be in the 15–25% range depending on region, but many of these installs will be default setups of AdBlock Plus, which as we’ve seen above, does not block tracking. Estimates of AdBlock Plus’s market share among ad blockers vary from 50–70%, with more recent reports tending more towards the former. So, if we assume that at most 50% of installed ad blockers block analytics, that leaves your exposure at around 10%.

Reason 2: Browser “do not track”

This is another privacy motivated feature, this time of browsers themselves. You can enable it in the settings of most current browsers. It’s not compulsory for sites or platforms to obey the “do not track” request, but Firefox offers a stronger feature under the same set of options, which I decided to test as well.

Effect of “do not track”

Most browsers now offer the option to send a “Do not track” message. I tested the latest releases of Firefox & Chrome for Windows 10.

Setup	Chrome “do not track”	Firefox “do not track”	Firefox “tracking protection”
GTM	Pass	Pass	Fail
On page	Pass	Pass	Fail
GTM + renamed script & function	Pass	Pass	Fail
On page + renamed script & function	Pass	Pass	Fail

Again, it doesn’t seem that the tweaked setups are doing much work for us here.

Lost data due to “do not track”: <1%

Only Firefox Quantum’s “Tracking Protection,” introduced in February, had any effect on our trackers. Firefox has a 5% market share, but Tracking Protection is not enabled by default. The launch of this feature had no effect on the trend for Firefox traffic on Distilled.net.

Reason 3: Filters

It’s a bit of an obvious one, but filters you’ve set up in your analytics might intentionally or unintentionally reduce your reported traffic levels.

For example, a filter excluding certain niche screen resolutions that you believe to be mostly bots, or internal traffic, will obviously cause your setup to underreport slightly.

Lost data due to filters: ???

Impact is hard to estimate, as setup will obviously vary on a site-by site-basis. I do recommend having a duplicate, unfiltered “master” view in case you realize too late you’ve lost something you didn’t intend to.

Reason 4: GTM vs. on-page vs. misplaced on-page

Google Tag Manager has become an increasingly popular way of implementing analytics in recent years, due to its increased flexibility and the ease of making changes. However, I’ve long noticed that it can tend to underreport vs. on-page setups.

I was also curious about what would happen if you didn’t follow Google’s guidelines in setting up on-page code.

By combining my numbers with numbers from my colleague Dom Woodman’s site (you’re welcome for the link, Dom), which happens to use a Drupal analytics add-on as well as GTM, I was able to see the difference between Google Tag Manager and misplaced on-page code (right at the bottom of the <body> tag) I then weighted this against my own Google Tag Manager data to get an overall picture of all 5 setups.

Effect of GTM and misplaced on-page code

Traffic as a percentage of baseline (standard Google Tag Manager implementation):

	Google Tag Manager	Modified & Google Tag Manager	On-Page Code In <head>	Modified & On-Page Code In <head>	On-Page Code Misplaced In <Body>
Chrome	100.00%	98.75%	100.77%	99.80%	94.75%
Safari	100.00%	99.42%	100.55%	102.08%	82.69%
Firefox	100.00%	99.71%	101.16%	101.45%	90.68%
Internet Explorer	100.00%	80.06%	112.31%	113.37%	77.18%

There are a few main takeaways here:

• On-page code generally reports more traffic than GTM
• Modified code is generally within a margin of error, apart from modified GTM code on Internet Explorer (see note below)
• Misplaced analytics code will cost you up to a third of your traffic vs. properly implemented on-page code, depending on browser (!)
• The customized setups, which are designed to get more traffic by evading ad blockers, are doing nothing of the sort.

It’s worth noting also that the customized implementations actually got less traffic than the standard ones. For the on-page code, this is within the margin of error, but for Google Tag Manager, there’s another reason — because I used unfiltered profiles for the comparison, there’s a lot of bot spam in the main profile, which primarily masquerades as Internet Explorer. Our main profile is by far the most spammed, and also acting as the baseline here, so the difference between on-page code and Google Tag Manager is probably somewhat larger than what I’m reporting.

I also split the data by mobile, out of curiosity:

Traffic as a percentage of baseline (standard Google Tag Manager implementation):

	Google Tag Manager	Modified & Google Tag Manager	On-Page Code In <head>	Modified & On-Page Code In <head>	On-Page Code Misplaced In <Body>
Desktop	100.00%	98.31%	100.97%	100.89%	93.47%
Mobile	100.00%	97.00%	103.78%	100.42%	89.87%
Tablet	100.00%	97.68%	104.20%	102.43%	88.13%

The further takeaway here seems to be that mobile browsers, like Internet Explorer, can struggle with Google Tag Manager.

Lost data due to GTM: 1–5%

Google Tag Manager seems to cost you a varying amount depending on what make-up of browsers and devices use your site. On Distilled.net, the difference is around 1.7%; however, we have an unusually desktop-heavy and tech-savvy audience (not much Internet Explorer!). Depending on vertical, this could easily swell to the 5% range.

Lost data due to misplaced on-page code: ~10%

On Teflsearch.com, the impact of misplaced on-page code was around 7.5%, vs Google Tag Manager. Keeping in mind that Google Tag Manager itself underreports, the total loss could easily be in the 10% range.

Bonus round: Missing data from channels

I’ve focused above on areas where you might be missing data altogether. However, there are also lots of ways in which data can be misrepresented, or detail can be missing. I’ll cover these more briefly, but the main issues are dark traffic and attribution.

Dark traffic

Dark traffic is direct traffic that didn’t really come via direct — which is generally becoming more and more common. Typical causes are:

• Untagged campaigns in email
• Untagged campaigns in apps (especially Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Misrepresented organic
• Data sent from botched tracking implementations (which can also appear as self-referrals)

It’s also worth noting the trend towards genuinely direct traffic that would historically have been organic. For example, due to increasingly sophisticated browser autocompletes, cross-device history, and so on, people end up “typing” a URL that they’d have searched for historically.

Attribution

I’ve written about this in more detail here, but in general, a session in Google Analytics (and any other platform) is a fairly arbitrary construct — you might think it’s obvious how a group of hits should be grouped into one or more sessions, but in fact, the process relies on a number of fairly questionable assumptions. In particular, it’s worth noting that Google Analytics generally attributes direct traffic (including dark traffic) to the previous non-direct source, if one exists.

Discussion

I was quite surprised by some of my own findings when researching this post, but I’m sure I didn’t get everything. Can you think of any other ways in which data can end up missing from analytics?

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Facebook Testing Influencer Marketing Search Engine

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, we explore Facebook testing a search engine for influencer marketing, Instagram’s new Mute option, and other breaking social media

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Alexa Flash Briefings: What Marketers Need to Know

Want to reach people regularly via their smart speakers? Wondering how Alexa flash briefings work? To explore how marketers can benefit from Alexa flash briefings, I interview Chris Brogan. 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 busy marketers, business

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How Do You Set Smart SEO Goals for Your Team/Agency/Project? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Are you sure that your current SEO goals are the best fit for your organization? It's incredibly important that they tie into both your company goals and your marketing goals, as well as provide specific, measurable metrics you can work to improve. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines how to set the right SEO goals for your team and shares two examples of how different businesses might go about doing just that.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about SEO goals, how to set smart ones, how to measure your progress against them, how to amplify those goals to the rest of your organization so that people really buy in to SEO.

This is a big challenge. So many folks that I've talked to in the field have basically said, "I'm not sure exactly how to set goals for our SEO team that are the right ones." I think that there's a particularly pernicious problem once Google took away the keyword-level data for SEO referrals.

So, from paid search, you can see this click was on this keyword and sent traffic to this page and then here's how it performed after that. In organic search, you can no longer do that. You haven't been able to do it for a few years now. Because of that removal, proving the return on investment for SEO has been really challenging. We'll talk in a future Whiteboard Friday about proving ROI. But let's focus here on how you get some smart SEO goals that are actually measurable, trackable, and pertain intelligently to the goals of the business, the organization.

Where to start:

So the first thing, the first problem that I see is that a lot of folks start here, which seems like a reasonable idea, but is actually a terrible idea. Don't start with your SEO goals. When your SEO team gets together or when you get together with your consultants, your agency, don't start with what the SEO goals should be.

• Start with the company goals. This is what our company is trying to accomplish this quarter or this year or this month.
• Marketing goals. Go from there to here's how marketing is going to contribute to those company goals. So if the company has a goal of increasing sales, marketing's job is what? Is marketing's job improving the conversion funnel? Is it getting more traffic to the top of the funnel? Is it bringing back more traffic that's already been to the site but needs to be re-earned? Those marketing goals should be tied directly to the company goals so that anyone and everyone in the organization can clearly see, "Here's why marketing is doing what they're doing."
• SEO goals. Next, here's how SEO contributes to those marketing goals. So if the goal is around, as we mentioned, growing traffic to the top of the funnel, for example, SEO could be very broad in their targeting. If it's bringing people back, you've got to get much more narrow in your keyword targeting.
• Specific metrics to measure and improve. From those SEO goals, you can get the outcome of specific metrics to measure and improve.

Measurable goal metrics

So that list is kind of right here. It's not very long. There are not that many things in the SEO world that we can truly measure directly. So measurable goal metrics might be things like...

1. Rankings. Which we can measure in three ways. We can measure them globally, nationally, or locally. You can choose to set those up.

2. Organic search visits. So this would be just the raw traffic that is sent from organic search.

3. You can also separate that into branded search versus non-branded search. But it's much more challenging than it is with paid, because we don't have the keyword data. Thus, we have to use an implied or inferred model, where essentially we say, "These pages are likely to be receiving branded search traffic, versus these pages that are likely to be receiving non-branded search traffic."

A good example is the homepage of most brands is most likely to get primarily branded search traffic, whereas resource pages, blog pages, content marketing style pages, those are mostly going to get unbranded. So you can weight those appropriately as you see fit.

Tracking your rankings is crucially important, because that way you can see which pages show up for branded queries versus which pages show up for unbranded queries, and then you can build pretty darn good models of branded search versus non-branded search visits based on which landing pages are going to get traffic.

4. SERP ownership. So ideas around your reputation in the search results. So this is essentially looking at the page of search results that comes up for a given query and what results are in there. There might be things you don't like and don't want and things you really do want, and the success and failure can be measured directly through the rankings in the SERP.

5. Search volume. So for folks who are trying to improve their brand's affinity and reputation on the web and trying to grow the quantity of branded search, which is a good metric, you can look at that through things like Google Trends or through a Google AdWords campaign or through something like Moz's Keyword Explorer.

6. Links and link metrics. So you could look at the growth or shrinkage of links over time. You can measure that through things like the number of linking root domains, the total number of links. Authority or spam metrics and how those are distributed.

7. Referral traffic. And last, but not least, most SEO campaigns, especially those that focus on links or improving rankings, are going to also send referral traffic from the links that are built. So you can watch referral traffic and what those referrers are and whether they came from pages where you built links with SEO intent.

So taking all of these metrics, these should be applied to the SEO goals that you choose that match up with your marketing and company goals. I wanted to try and illustrate this, not just explain it, but illustrate it through two examples that are very different in what they're measuring.

Example one

So, first off, Taft Boots, they've been advertising like crazy to me on Instagram. Apparently, I must need new boots.

• Grow online sales. Let's say that their big company goal for 2018 is "grow online sales to core U.S. customers, so the demographics and psychographics they're already reaching, by 30%."
• Increase top of funnel website traffic by 50%. So marketing says, "All right, you know what? There's a bunch of ways to do that, but we think that our best opportunity to do that is to grow top of funnel, because we can see how top of funnel turns into sales over time, and we're going to target a number of 50% growth." This is awesome. This can turn into very measurable, actionable SEO goals.
• Grow organic search visits 70%. We can say, "Okay, we know that search is going to contribute an outsized quantity of this 50% growth. So what we want to do is take search traffic up by 70%. How are we going to do that? We have four different plans.
  • A. We're going to increase our blog content, quality and quantity.
  • B. We're going to create new product pages that are more detailed, that are better optimized, that target good searches.
  • C. We're going to create a new resources section with some big content pieces.
  • D. We're going to improve our link profile and Domain Authority."

Now, you might say, "Wait a minute. Rand, this is a pretty common SEO methodology here." Yes, but many times this is not directly tied to the marketing goals, which is not directly tied to the business goals. If you want to have success as an SEO, you want to convince people to keep investing in you, you want to keep having that job or that consulting gig, you've got to connect these up.

From these, we can then say, "Okay, for each one, how do we measure it?" Well...

• A. Quantity of content and search visits/piece. Blog content can be measured through the quantity of content we produce, the search visits that each of those pieces produce, and what the distribution and averages are.
• B. Rankings and organic traffic. Is a great way to measure product pages and whether we're hitting our goals there.
• C. Link growth, rankings, and traffic. That's a great way to measure the new resources section.
• D. Linking root domains plus the DA distribution and maybe Spam Score distribution. That's a great way to measure whether we're improving our link profile.

All of these, this big-picture goal is going to be measured by the contribution of search visits to essentially non-homepage and non-branded pages that contribute to the conversion funnel. So we have a methodology to create a smart goal and system here.

Example two

Another example, totally different, but let's try it out because I think that many folks have trouble connecting non-e-commerce pages, non-product stuff. So we're going to use Book-It Theatre. They're a theater group here in the Seattle area. They use the area beneath Seattle Center House as their space. They basically will take popular books and literature and convert them into plays. They'll adapt them into screenplays and then put on performances. It's quite good. We've been to a few shows, Geraldine and I have, and we really like them.

So their goal — I'm making this up, I don't actually know if this is their goal — but let's say they want to...

• Attract theater goers from outside the Seattle area. So they're looking to hit tourists and critics, people who are not just locals, because they want to expand their brand.
• Reach audiences in 4 key geographies — LA, Portland, Vancouver, Minneapolis. So they decide, "You know what? Marketing can contribute to this in four key geographies, and that's where we're going to focus a bunch of efforts — PR efforts, outreach efforts, offline media, and SEO. The four key geographies are Los Angeles, Portland, Vancouver, and Minneapolis. We think these are good theater-going towns where we can attract the right audiences."

So what are we going to do as SEOs? Well, as SEOs, we better figure out what's going to match up to this.

• Drive traffic from these regions to Book-It Theatre's pages and to reviews of our show. So it's not just content on our site. We want to drive people to other critics and press that's reviewed us.
  • A. So we're going to create some geo landing pages, maybe some special offers for people from each of these cities.
  • B. We're going to identify third-party reviews and hopefully get critics who will write reviews, and we're going to ID those and try and drive traffic to them.
  • C. We're going to do the same with blog posts and informal critics.
  • D. We're going to build some content pages around the books that we're adapting, hoping to drive traffic, that's interested in those books, from all over the United States to our pages and hopefully to our show.

So there are ways to measure each of these.

• A. Localized rankings in Moz Pro or a bunch of other rank tracking tools. You can set up geo-specific localized rankings. "I want to track rankings in Vancouver, British Columbia. I want to track rankings from Los Angeles, California." Those might look different than the ones you see here in Seattle, Washington.
• B. We can do localized rankings and visits from referrals for the third-party reviews. We won't be able to track the visits that those pages receive, but if they mention Book-It Theatre and link to us, we can see, oh yes, look, the Minneapolis Journal wrote about us and they linked to us, and we can see what the reviews are from there.
• C. We can do localized rankings and visits from referrals for the third-party blog posts.
• D. Local and national ranking, organic visits. For these Book-It content pages, of course, we can track our local and national rankings and the organic visits.

Each of these, and as a whole, the contribution of search visits from non-Seattle regions, so we can remove Seattle or Washington State in our analytics and we can see: How much traffic did we get from there? Was it more than last year? What's it contributing to the ticket sales conversion funnel?

You can see how, if you build these smart goals and you measure them correctly and you align them with what the company and the marketing team is trying to do, you can build something really special. You can get great involvement from the rest of your teams, and you can show the value of SEO even to people who might not believe in it already.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your thoughts and feedback in the comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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19 Outstanding Hospital Social Media Teams

In many ways, spearheading social media for a major U.S. hospital is like spearheading social for any brand. Telling stories, engaging an audience, managing community feedback, and analyzing your efforts are part of every social media marketer’s job. Hospital social teams, however, face the unique challenge of operating in a highly regulated industry. Audiences look up to them as community leaders and educators. The patient stories they tell and feedback their receive often carry life-changing consequences.

Social teams at these institutions have to be exceptional listeners and top-notch strategizers. We set out to identify the teams going above and beyond on social media—the truly exceptional in this challenging field. Below you’ll find the 19 best social media teams from the nation’s top hospitals, each one responsible for some of the most successful and engaging social media content in the health industry (which you can read more about in our latest report, below).

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NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital

Emily Berkowitz, Social Media Associate

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital boasts the most engaging social media presence of any hospital in the U.S., according to our latest research. As Social Media Associate, Emily masterminds NYP’s social strategy and upholds the hospital’s status as a supportive and educational community cornerstone.

Cleveland Clinic

Nada Youssef, Social Media Coordinator

Stephanie Petrucci, Social Media Manager

Shelby Simmons, Social Media Coordinator

Elizabeth Melhus, Social Media Specialist

Cleveland Clinic is lucky enough to have a large team of pros heading up its social media efforts: Nada Youssef, Stephanie Petrucci, Shelby Simmons, and Elizabeth Melhus. This stellar team generates twice as much social content as the average U.S. hospital and boasts one of the highest engagement rates in the country.

Mayo Clinic

Audrey Laine Seymour, Social Media Specialist

Rounding out the top three is Mayo Clinic’s Audrey Laine Seymour. Mayo Clinic stands head and shoulders above its peers when it comes to social video content and was responsible for one of the most “Loved” Facebook video posts of any hospital this past February.

UPMC

Shannon Shields, Social Media Strategist

Shannon has been with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center since 2015. In her time with UPMC, she’s built one of the most engaging social presences in the hospital industry, reaching audiences on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and—yes—even Pinterest.

IU Health

Daniel Woody, Associate-Senior Social Media Strategist

Daniel took charge of social media at Indiana University Health last year. Like its peers in the top five, IU Health maintains a prolific social presence and attracts a striking amount of engagement.

UCLA Health

Linda Ho, Director, Digital Marketing

Georgiana Masgras, Web & Social Media Strategist

Ashley Anderson-Dinielli, Social Media Manager

The top-notch social media team at UCLA Health places special focus on uniting their institution’s silos under a strong, unified brand voice. According to Digital Marketing Director Linda Ho, they’re devoted to their social media monitoring, which helps them take a proactive approach to engaging with their audience and stay aware of the social conversation surrounding the hospital.

One such proactive strategy is the UCLAMDChat series. This webinar series connects audiences with doctors and medical experts via Facebook Live, YouTube, and Twitter. Viewers tune in to get the latest information on medical advances at UCLA, conditions, and treatments.

Linda offers this advice to social media teams in heavily regulated industries: “Have a process in place to manage content as well as content contributors. Be patient as you work towards establishing a formal policy towards achieving your goals.”

Johns Hopkins Medicine

Elena Meadowcroft, Web Content Specialist

Breana Fischer, Internet Marketing Specialist

Elena and Breana both joined Johns Hopkins in 2016. In addition to running the hospital’s social presence, the team also maintains a successful email marketing strategy with a robust subscriber base.

UCSF Medical Center

Marc Fredson, Director, Strategic Marketing

Diana Silva, Associate Director, Digital Marketing Projects

Rob Odom, Vice President, Marketing and Brand Management

Sarah (Chan) Fan, Marketing Manager

Jeanne Zielinski, Marketing Manager

The social team at UCSF Medical Center caught our eye when they turned a Facebook link post—usually one of the worst-performing types of social content—into a major point of engagement. Rather than let comments simply accumulate on their announcement post, the UCSF team personally thanked every well-wisher.

Massachusetts General Hospital

Monique Tremblay, Digital and Social Marketing Manager

Since 2016, Monique has spearheaded Massachusetts General Hospital’s social strategy and even worked with local colleges to show students what hospitals are doing in digital marketing.

Mount Sinai Health System

Kavya Rathi, Communications and Marketing Associate

Danielle O’Malley, Assistant Director of Marketing

Courtney Seck, Marketing..

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How to Build Customer Trust Instantly

Oral surgery is, at best, a suboptimal way to spend an afternoon.

Uncertainty about the procedure is common. Concern about lingering pain is almost a given. Confusion about payment is typical, especially among patients without dental insurance.

Most oral surgeons and their staffs endeavor to answer these questions and quiet doubts when the patient is in the dental office. The best oral surgeons telephone patients the night after surgery to check on discomfort and residual bleeding and to confirm they’re following postoperative instructions.

But then there is Dr. Glenn Gorab of Clifton, New Jersey, who builds all-important trust with his patients not AFTER a procedure, but before he’s ever seen them.

How One Oral Surgeon Built a Trust Empire

Every weekend, Dr. Gorab calls each patient that is coming to the office for the first time the following week. His typical greeting is as follows: “Hi, this is Dr. Gorab, I know we have an upcoming appointment for you next week. I just wanted to call to introduce myself and ask if you have any questions prior to your appointment.”

This simple, remarkable gesture—connecting with a patient before he or she comes to the office instead of after—sets Dr. Gorab’s oral surgery practice apart and attracts constant attention.

Dr. Gorab says patients aren’t really sure what to make of the calls because they are so unexpected. “Most people are shocked that a doctor would call them prior to their appointment. They’re almost dumbfounded. It’s so out of the ordinary. They say, ‘No one has ever done this for me before.’”

These patients tell their friends about Dr. Gorab’s calls, and they deliver new patients through his front door on a consistent basis. His commitment to proactive customer service clones customers.

“I had two new patients just this week who said, ‘I understood from my friend that you were the guy that called her prior to the appointment, and I thought that was so nice, I wanted to come see you.’” These patients drove out of their way to visit Dr. Gorab, bypassing dozens of highly reputable oral surgeons located closer to their homes.

Dr. Gorab says 80 percent of patients mention the calls once in the office for their appointments. “They say, ‘Thank you so much for your call on Saturday.’ Or, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t home to take your call. Thank you for leaving me a voicemail,’” he told us.

This is so simple. Quite literally every physician—every professional service provider, even—could mimic it, yet they do not. Why?

Because we have been conditioned to believe that customer service starts once the transaction has been completed, and the consumer has received the product or service.

A much better approach is to understand that the most impactful customer service is that which transcends the transaction, ideally preceding it.

Twelve South Gets Ahead of the Customer Trust Curve

Just this week, I had an outstanding experience with a company that—like Dr. Gorab—has changed the time horizon on their customer interactions.

A year ago, I bought the Apple AirPods wireless headphones. For a while after they launched, I thought the whole premise was stupid. I didn’t want to give in to Apple’s naked cash grab, triggered by wholly eliminating the headphone jack on the iPhone 7, 8, and X.

But I travel so much that the convenience of a wireless listening experience wore me down. I succumbed. Turns out, I LOVE the AirPods. The audio fidelity is good (not great), but the size, convenience, and ability to easily take phone calls won me over.

Lately, however, I’ve been on more long-haul airplane flights that have the media screens in the seat back in front of you. This presents a tiny dilemma (admittedly, a first-world problem in every way): Wireless, Bluetooth headphones don’t work with those screens. Consequently, even though I’m a big fan of the AirPods, I still have to carry wired earbuds to plug into the audio on the plane.

The team at Twelve South—an innovative designer and seller of Apple aftermarket gear—decided to solve this issue by creating the AirFly, a Bluetooth transmitter that plugs into the airplane’s screen, and enables you to use your wireless AirPods. Smart!

Within about eleven seconds of receiving the email announcing the launch of AirFly, I had this gadget in my TwelveSouth.com shopping cart. Later that day, I was checking my upcoming flight schedule to try to predict when I would be able to try AirFly when I received an email from Twelve South.

I expected a shipping confirmation. But it wasn’t. It was much, much more, and it instantly reminded me of Dr. Gorab.

The email Twelve South sent wasn’t trying to sell me something else. It was 100 percent about building trust and doing so before the product was even received.

They provided a detailed guide—including animated GIFs and a video—showing me exactly how to set up and use the AirFly. The messaging at the top of the email was perfect:

Thank you for purchasing AirFly! We’re packing up your order and getting it ready to send. As soon as your package arrives, we know you’ll be anxious to get set up—here’s everything you’ll need to get started with AirFly.

Brilliant! This email builds anticipation for the arrival, while also cutting down on possible customer service questions downstream by providing help docs when the customer is MOST LIKELY to actually open and read the email—right after making the purchase.

Everyone can—and should—think about building customer trust ahead of time. It’s not difficult to do. You just have to change your perception of when the relationship and the trust-building can and should commence.

Bravo, Twelve South. I hope the product lives up to the promise. I think I’ll be able to give it a try next weekend, and I’ll update this post with my reaction.

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