The New Digital Landscape: Content Performance Marketing - Duane Forrester

CPM google serp layout changes

BrightEdge Content Performance - Moneyball for Marketing

A BrightEdger
A BrightEdger
M Posted 11 years ago
t 9 min read

Moneyball Marketing

Tune in to hear BrightEdge VP of Marketing and Products Brad Mattick speak with the Glenn Gow, the CEO of Crimson Marketing, in an exclusive podcast interview on Moneyball for Marketing.

The Moneyball for Marketing podcast invites leading industry guests to examine how marketers can apply big data and technology to improve their strategies. Brad sat down to discuss the state of content marketing.

In the 20-minute podcast titled, Brad and Glenn dig into the enormous influx of digital content that’s created and shared daily, the challenge of making sense of all of it, and how to effectively use the data that’s available to marketers. Nowadays, nearly every brand is a publisher, producing seemingly endless amounts of content to compete for the ultimate prize of consumers’ attention.

The result is what we like to refer to as a “content battleground” — and in order to win that battle, brands will have to be identify what content works, and what doesn’t. Brad shares best practices for winning the content battle, including why brands need to incorporate automated data insights to guide them on the “why’s” and “how’s” of their marketing strategies, and why brands must move past first party data alone to understand the broader competitive landscape.

Content does not live in a vacuum, so being able to understand the ins and outs of your competitors will give you a leg up when it comes time to battle. Just as athletes watch rivals’ film to prep and practice prior to the big game, marketers can prepare for the content battleground by understanding competitor strategy.

Check out the recording to hear Brad’s take on where content marketing is headed and how brands can use data technology to understand content marketing performance and win on the content battleground.

For more details on the content battleground, also check out our new thought leadership white paper, produced jointly by BrightEdge and SAP.

This free-to-download paper shares insights, best practices, and a three-part process to guarantee content marketing success. 

3 Essential Elements of Content Performance Marketing

Learn how to ensure high content performance

3 Essential Elements of Content Performance Marketing

Today’s content marketing landscape is a battleground with companies fighting for consumer attention. Marketers spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year creating new digital marketing content. However, this content has limited value unless it is actually found by users, optimized to achieve maximum impact and measured to assess business results.

In this thought leadership paper, BrightEdge and SAP share numerous insights, tips and a simple 3-step process to guarantee future content performance marketing success and return on investment. The white paper also highlights key content marketing challenges that brands and marketers face

Leverage our full whitepaper to aid you in becoming a thought leader in your industry.

CAPTCHA
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Content Optimizer

Content Optimizer optimized vs. un-optimized content iceberg graphicAs brands become publishers, content is created, consumed, and shared at unprecedented scale. More than 27 million pieces of content are shared each day — making content marketing more strategic for businesses than ever. As consumers interact with dozens of brands, every brand is fighting the battle for attention. The digital world is now the battleground for customer engagement.

Brands are eager to understand which content performs — and how it impacts their business. And to remain competitive, marketers need to understand who they are competing with, and what their competitors are doing to succeed.

BrightEdge Content Optimizer 4.0 enables brands to address these challenges head-on to create content that wins. What’s unique about BrightEdge is that we don’t just rely on first-party data. Instead, we analyze the web at scale to provide more impactful, actionable insights.

Now for the first time, content writers can increase the performance of their content while at the same time improving productivity. Armed with machine learning and insights into content demand powered by the BrightEdge Data Cube, authors can focus on the right topics. With the ability to tap into web-wide competitor content data, marketers know where their competition is succeeding and failing to develop content that outruns them.  And through an intuitive user interface, Content Optimizer 4.0 guides writers step-by-step to create content that is optimized for maximum traffic, conversions, and revenue without breaking or slowing down the content creation process.

BrightEdge Content Optimizer screenshot of "Find Topics" interfaceBrightEdge + Adobe

BrightEdge is an Adobe Accredited Application Partner, with a five-year history of developing integrated technology offerings. Content Optimizer 4.0 brings the most powerful features and the intelligence of BrightEdge seamlessly into Adobe Experience Manager to drive proactive content optimization during content creation.

Identify the Right Topics and Content

  • Consumer Demand Targeting — Find the topics that are highest in demand and lowest in competition, ensuring content is optimized from day one.
  • Topic Personalization Engine — With the power of the BrightEdge Data Cube, pinpoint the group of topics your audiences care about most and optimize  for multiple topics all in one step.
  • Topics to Page Pairing — Pair the right topics with targeted web pages to improve organic search and customer reach without cannibalizing other pages.

Scout the Competition

  • Competitor Analysis — With the BrightEdge Data Cube, a detailed analysis of competitors’ digital content provides immediate insights to quickly take action. Webpage content is broken into page components, along with recommendations to create content that’s optimized before publishing.
  • Powerful Competitive Insights — Track top competitor strategies on page elements and use the insights to optimize pages for best performance.

BrightEdge Content Optimizer screenshot of competitive analysis feedBrightEdge Content Optimizer social analytics screenshot

Build Better Content and Incent Improvement

  • Content Optimization Progress Tracking — Apply content development best practices with on-page recommendations that drive content performance. Recommendations guide content authors seamlessly through each step directly within Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), prompting optimization recommendations for more effective content.
  • Content Optimization Score — Set content improvement targets for each marketer to motivate content improvement by gaining points toward their target score.
  • Tailored Optimization— Assign more weight to content improvement steps that will have the greatest impact on your business to prioritize these enhancements.
  • Seamless Workflow — Access the Content Optimizer guided user interface within the AEM page-editing menu sidekick (AEM 5) or within the top navigation Content Optimizer icon (AEM 6), enabling seamless optimization within the content creation process.

Create a Culture of Content Optimization

  • Measure Content Optimization Compliance  — Understand where content optimizations have been completed, or still need to be made.
  • Policy Compliance Across Your Organization — Manage policies with built-in support for multiple teams, templates, websites, and policies. Set guidelines at the account level, or for all site-wide content.

BrightEdge Content Optimizer dashboard view screenshot example

Take It Easy on IT

Organizations can easily customize the impact level of content for their different business units with automated web content policy management, all while maintaining a secure enterprise environment.

  • Designed for Enterprise Architecture — Working with current infrastructure and IT investments, data is transferred through HTTP proxy and standard package share installation.
  • Enterprise Grade Security — Secure API access with government level encryption policies.
  • Trusted Technology — BrightEdge actively supports over 7,200 account integrations via the BrightEdge Connect API.

As brands realize the competitive advantage of engaging content, it’s increasingly important to optimize content while it is being developed and understand its performance.

quote

Global Data Cube

At BrightEdge our top value is customer success, which means delivering innovations to help our customers stay ahead in the competitive search landscape. Our goal is to be the best partner in content performance, which is why we consistently deliver the most advanced technology and content marketing.

For over six years, the BrightEdge Data Cube has been at the foundation of BrightEdge S3, powering our Customizable Recommendations, Search Opportunity Forecasting, Page Reporting, and much more. In that time we’ve continuously enhanced the Data Cube, and are now exposing this lightning fast, research on-demand technology to our customers. The Data Cube provides marketers with the insights they need to make strategic business decisions that drive revenue. Only an enterprise SEO company would design and maintain such a useful resource.

Access billions of pieces of data on-demand

The BrightEdge Data Cube is a massive content repository, the industry’s largest data set, made up of billions of pieces of information including keywords, search terms, rich media, and content, along with its performance on the web. BrightEdge processes more than 100 terabytes of data each week. We do so because today’s marketers need a massive data set to be able to understand their entire organic search footprint and build a competitive strategy to win. The Data Cube delivers to marketers the same level of big data processing power and scale that Facebook and Twitter bring to the consumer space.

Perform research, identify opportunities, and explore competitive strategies

Within one centralized view, marketers may perform either URL-based or keyword-based research in real time. BrightEdge provides two ways to access the Data Cube. With Goal Based Research we help marketers quickly identify the data that matters most, aligning content performance with business outcomes. With Freeform Search marketers can enter in a keyword or URL in the same way a Google search is performed.

Research can be performed in two ways: Goal Based or Freeform

Goal-Based Research
Data Cube initial screen

Goals You Can Select

Why it Matters

Identify high-volume keywords – Find related keywords with search volume greater than 1,000 and develop new content to drive traffic and engagement

Focus on popular keywords that drive the highest demand

Discover long tail keywords – See results that contain more than 3 words in a phrase that are driving competitive performance

Identify less-competitive keywords that convert better

Explore high value keywords  – Find keywords with a value greater than 80 and prioritize efforts

Hone in on higher converting keywords

Uncover videos and rich content – Identify competitors running successful rich content strategies and find other ways to rank in the SERP

Discover new content opportunities and increase visibility in the SERP



 

Freeform Search
BrightEdge Data Cube

Understand the real demand for your content with the Data Cube Score

With the Data Cube Score you can understand how well you are targeting demand and gain a detailed understanding of the topics that resonate best with consumers.

BrightEdge Data Cube Score

Win with Contextual Recommendations

Improve performance with semantically-related topics powered by the Data Cube

About Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): Web content is crawled by a search engine and the most common words and phrases are collated and identified as the keywords for the page. LSI looks for synonyms related to the title of your page.

For example, if the title of your page was “Outdoor Furniture,” the search engine would expect to find words relating to that subject in the content of the page as well, e.g. “patio furniture”, “patio sets”, “patio umbrella”, “adirondack chairs,” and “porch swing”.

Content Analysis in Data Cube

Contextual Recommendations drive performance

  • Powerful insights - Tap into the power of the Data Cube to identify semantically related keywords
  • Identify low-hanging fruit - Identify keywords with low competition that you consider optimizing
  • Actionable - Identify keywords that you’d like to manage, track, and assign as Tasks in BrightEdge

Trended Data analysis enables spot-on content strategy

Trended Data in Data Cube shows you exactly what content and which keywords have been your best (or worst) performers over time. This information allows you to easily benchmark, evaluate, and improve your SEO performance. Even better, you can see whether your competition is trending better or worse at various points in time, and exactly when their performance trajectory started to change. This powerful level of detail arms you with all the insight you need to win at content-driven SEO.

View trended performance of your rich media

Data Cube Universal results

Global coverage

The BrightEdge Data Cube supports ten search engines: Google US, Google UK, Google Australia, Google Brazil, Google Canada, Google Denmark, Google France, Google Germany, Google Japan, and Google Netherlands.

Seamless integration with your content performance workflow

At BrightEdge one of our core tenets of product design is that data is only as good as what users can do with it. Research is only meaningful when it’s actionable. That’s why when we built the BrightEdge Data Cube, rather than creating a standalone research tool, we instead built and integrated this research technology into our platform. With the BrightEdge Data Cube brands have an end-to-end workflow for driving performance. After discovering keywords that work well for your competitors, you can prioritize keywords, and then optimize them in BrightEdge S3.

data cube tools

Optimize Content with Content Optimizer

The BrightEdge Data Cube is a tremendous technology that gives Marriott insights and captures missed opportunities. The Data Cube continues to be an extremely valuable capability. BrightEdge makes me smarter.

quote

We absolutely use Data Cube for our clients. We love it. Clients love it.

quote

Data Cube has capabilites that I never thought were possible.

quote

How Adobe Won 66% Share of SEO Voice

B2B software maker took a bigger slice of the organic traffic pie

8%
growth in organic, non-branded traffic
63%
of organic traffic driven from new pages

THE PROBLEM

A few years back, Adobe found that overall organic traffic to their website for non-branded keywords was very low. They had one product page with all of their features on it (more than 30 of them), but no detailed features page. Though the content was completely relevant, Google was unable to apply one theme to the page, which resulted in low or no rankings for any one specific keyword.

THE SOLUTION

Kirill Kronrod, Senior Global SEO Manager at Adobe, was tasked with figuring out how to improve overall organic traffic to the website from non-branded keywords. With so many features, the existing page he had was quite long and very dense. He decided that he would run a pilot creating 15 individual pages for 15 of the features. Each of these pages was specific to not only one feature, but also to one of the non-branded keywords they wanted to rank for. He found these keywords through his analytics platform, Google Webmaster Tools, and the BrightEdge SEO platform. He used BrightEdge’s Share of Voice report to see how his test performed, not only in regard to traffic gain, but also to see if and how Adobe was able to capture a larger slice of the pie from its competitors.

kirill kronrod adobeTHE RESULTS

In the first year, organic traffic for non-branded keywords grew 8% along with improvement in conversions. Adobe then rolled out individual feature pages for the remaining product features and now 63% of all non-brand organic traffic is attributed to the new individual feature pages. Additionally, the Share of Voice report from BrightEdge now shows that Adobe claims about 66% of the traffic from those non-branded keywords, meaning the 5 competitors they’re tracking through BrightEdge only account for the remaining 34% of volume.

BrightEdge Share of Voice report shows for our set of competitors that we identified... how we were able to establish a really big dominance on non-brand optimization and, based on the findings, how we can expand.

Request a demo of the BrightEdge platform today!

Cabela's Masters Content Performance Marketing and Organic Traffic

Jesse Farley leveraged BrightEdge for analytics and performance and elevated SEO as well as his function

THE PROBLEM

Cabela’s is a national physical and online retailer of hunting, fishing, and camping gear. Jesse Farley, Cabela's online marketing strategist, wants to develop and deploy content that guides customers through their journey to purchase and the user experience they sought. With a large catalog of products, Cabela’s needs to prioritize where to put the content marketing focus to maximize results.

THE SOLUTION

“At the end of the day it’s going to be sales, what drives the dollar. We leverage the BrightEdge platform to look at all of the steps to get to that sale from keyword placement to SERP results, to traffic, and then to sales.

The Data Cube has been phenomenal. It allows us to look at where are we in the mix, where we stack up against our competitors, and informs decisions on, frankly, getting ahead of them.

BrightEdge has been really good at providing us with the statistical data that allows us to drive the business forward. Some of our KPIs are our rankings, traffic and then, ultimately, sales.” See Jesse's Cabela's Testimonial video.

THE RESULTS

Jesse Farley, Online Marketing Strategist for Cabela's“Using BrightEdge allowed us to think outside of ourselves. We want to be able to create unique experiences for our customers that make them feel comfortable and focused in the content they’re consuming.

"BrightEdge enables us to show our executive leadership what we can do and put the metrics behind that that they didn’t necessarily think we would have. So, they hear content marketing and they don’t necessarily know how to monetize that and BrightEdge has allowed us to help get that into their minds. With the BrightEdge platform we’ve been able to communicate the effectiveness of content marketing from the C-Suite up to the board of directors," says Jesse Farley.

"The BrightEdge platform has allowed me to take basically one analyst and treat them as five. It condenses it all into one area to where we can ask the same questions and give the same answers from one platform.”

BrightEdge has given me the ability to elevate not only my program but my career. I’ve been able to really demonstrate to the enterprise how powerful content marketing can be.”

Content Performance Marketing

In today’s world brands are dedicating an average 39 percent of their marketing budgets to content marketing and producing 27 million pieces of content every single day. Each brand’s content is fighting a battle for consumer attention, and with this explosion of content the brands need to understand the relative content quality and performance bar.

As brands have become publishers, the digital world has become the most important distribution channel. The BrightEdge Content Performance Marketing platform helps brands Target Demand, Optimize Content, and Measure Results to win on the content battleground.

Watch this video where Oracle, Adobe, Wellbiz Brands, and more discuss Content Marketing:

Wiley partners with best-of-breed solution providers, like AdobeBrightEdge, Oracle, and Salesforce 

whose toolsets ensure we perform at our best.

quote

You have to make sure your messaging is aligned across all channels, and more importantly, they’re all working together to achieve the common business goal; that’s an omni-channel strategy.

quote

I feel as though I am constantly learning something new when I sign in.

quote

I think if you’re not doing Content Performance Marketing, you’re missing the boat.

quote

Share14 CEO Keynote

 

CPM google serp layout changes

Cheapflights, OMD, Performics, Starcom on Content Marketing

Cheapflights, OMD, Performics, and Starcom MediaVest Group discuss Content Marketing

 

A New Era of Content - Develop Content That Measurably Performs

A new era of content white paper

,