Jim

M Posted 10 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

When I think of where BrightEdge is today, it’s hard to believe that only eight years ago we were a bootstrapped startup operating out of my kitchen. Believe it or not, the picture above was taken right after my co-founder Lemuel moved into the 900-square-foot condo I shared with my wife and newborn daughter to found BrightEdge. At that time, the iPad was still two years away, the top social network was MySpace, and the prevailing marketing technology only involved ad optimization.

But Lem and I had a different idea about where the market was heading. We realized that in order to understand performance and create winning content, brands needed to understand the full context. This required a massive web-wide index, which is why with servers stacked under my kitchen table we built the early version of the Data Cube. From humble beginnings, to where we are today we’ve come a long way. Now spending millions of dollars on servers and technology, our vision for content performance has come to fruition.

As a community, leaders across every industry are investing in content performance. In fact, brands are increasingly investing in digital content to the tune of $135 billion. But, just because a company is acting on an opportunity doesn’t mean they’re taking full advantage of it — according to BrightEdge research, 59% of content marketers say that their budgets aren’t aligned with performance. To truly rise above the noise, content marketers must run their programs by the numbers. That’s why, at Share15 last month, we were excited to preview innovative new technology to take content performance marketing to the next level.

With Content Atlas and Intelligent Experiences you can run content marketing by the numbers. These new technologies work in tandem to create real-time visibility into your content marketing program, allowing you to easily communicate the impact on goals and build a data-driven playbook to optimize content performance and ensure maximum impact.

Content Atlas

Content Atlas enables you to run content marketing by the numbers and automatically map content performance across the four key phases of the customer journey – awareness, consideration, purchase and loyalty – and compare it against the competition. Content Atlas displays all of this rich information in a dashboard, allowing you to visualize the landscape surrounding your content strategy.

More importantly, it can tell you why any discrepancies between your content and that of your competitors might exist.  

These insights become all the more powerful when paired with recommendations. That’s why Content Playbook within Content Atlas assigns prescriptive steps to help close gaps and optimize existing content and further increase your lead in success areas, all while telling you exactly how much your opportunities are worth. This in turn helps you validate investment in content that generates the greatest return and scale back or improve those that yield lower returns. 

Intelligent Experiences

Intelligent Experiences works in conjunction with Content Atlas — it takes the analysis and recommendations of Content Atlas and builds out a guided workflow around that insight. In other words, if Content Atlas is the who, what, where, when, and why, Intelligent Experiences is the how.

Intelligent Experiences empowers you to create more engaging, curated experiences for your audiences. This begins by highlighting opportunity areas and referencing successful competitors’ content in order to automatically generate an optimized customer experience. What’s more, it allows marketers to publish directly from the platform.

And, since each channel is so unique, Intelligent Experiences optimizes content for each one, allowing existing, underperforming content to be automatically optimized for maximum performance. 

Flexible Integration

We know that many companies have invested in digital content systems, including CMS or an eCommerce platform. As such, our new technology is compatible with several existing systems, like Adobe Experience Manager and hybris, adding intelligence into content performance and customer experience.

Members of our community are having great success creating optimized content at scale. Felipe Carreras Director of E-Commerce at Best Western International joined me onstage to discuss the success he’s had leveraging the BrightEdge platform with Adobe Experience Manager. Best Western was able to create over 16,000 pages of unique content for 2,056 individual property websites in three months with a team of five individuals.

When Lem and I founded BrightEdge, we were excited about the future of marketing, and the opportunity to create technology to transform content performance. In partnership with the community we’re thrilled to see how far content performance marketing has come.

Customer success has been our top value and driver of innovation since the beginning days of BrightEdge, and we couldn’t have done it without you. We look forward to our ongoing partnership as we continue to innovate, lead, and elevate performance — together.

A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

Content is the cornerstone of successful online marketing. As you begin to mature your content production, you will find that producing the material requires building a culture within your company that supports using this strategy. At Share15, we brought together a team of presenters who understand this need and put together talks about the maturing of the content production process.

Covering topics such as scaling content, content and the competition as well as the convergence of content with other aspects of online marketing, this track prepared attendees to take their content production to the next level. These were the exciting presentations to which we were able to listen.

Scaling content

The efficiency with which a brand can create the content it needs will impact its productivity and profit. For businesses to mature, they need to improve their ability to produce content at scale. They require a company culture that encourages the efficient development of the high-quality content that can be throughout the marketing campaigns. This also means learning to repurpose content to serve multiple audiences at different points of the buyer journey. A successful content scaling process knows how to create content efficiently and also leverage it for its maximum potential. To dive into this topic at Share, we heard from Kelvin Lee of a Financial Institution from Australia, Robert Reneau of Maxim Integrated, Allison Fedella of CareerBuilder and Jaime Peach of House of Fraser. Some of the important points they made included:

• to build a successful content brand, you want to ensure that everyone understands what content success can accomplish and what everyone needs to do to get there
• build a team that is transparent and centered around data
• create a content production process that focuses on collaboration and build morale by sharing successful results
• provide training and create a process that includes content repurposing
• scalability means teaching others how to produce content successfully

Content and the competition

Businesses everywhere are beginning to realize the value of content creation. According to the Content Marketing Institute, in 2014, 70 percent of B2B companies and 69 percent of B2C companies reported that they were making more content than they were in 2013. As the Internet becomes increasingly saturated, however, there will be increased competition for brands. With the Google algorithm updates that were oriented towards weeding out low-quality content, organizations are also recognizing the importance of high-quality content. This will make competition even more fierce. For brands to excel in this content battleground, you have to be familiar with your competition.

Knowing who your main competitors are and how well their marketing strategies are working can give you key insights into how to improve your own efforts. You can gain insights about your customers, about areas where you might be weaker and even untapped potential that can help give you an edge. For this session we heard from Pia Adolphsen of Network, Brad Beiter of Performics, Felipe Carreras of Best Western and Scott Lavelle of OpenTable. Their talks included some excellent insights and points that helped attendees walk away feeling confident such as:

• fill in gaps based upon a SERP analysis that lets you know what competitors are doing and where their strengths/weaknesses lie
• remember that the key to marketing is connecting and competing
• use competitors for ideas about how to create better content and what customers want to see, do not copy content
• remember that the quantity of content is not as important as the quality
• aligning content to what users want to see is vital

Content convergence

There is no mistaking that content has become increasingly interlinked with social and search marketing. In this key trifecta, each piece exerts considerable influence on the others, and the cornerstone is high-quality content. When you produce engaging content that provides value for your users, you increase the odds of that content being shared and passed around social media. From social media, you can attract more readers and more backlinks, which will then boost your quality and engagement metrics as measured by Google. As your content rises on the SERPs, you then increase its visibility and the likelihood of more readers finding it and sharing it on social media. Search, social and content form a cycle that work together to improve the rankings of content. For brands to boost their visibility and traffic, they must learn how to leverage the full trifecta. At Share15 we heard from Deborah Carver of Nina Hale, Inc, Michael DeHaven of Bazaar Voice, Richard Mastriani of Wyndham and Suzanne Szostak of Google. These three offered fantastic tips and advice for brands looking to learn how to use this cycle including:

• 70 percent of searches are discovery-oriented
• you can increase traffic by 4x - 9x by moving into the top 3 for target keywords
• use Data Cube to find new keywords and create content around those words
• use multiple channels to support content such as paid social traffic, social media, etc

With content providing the cornerstone, organizations have the potential to create dynamic online marketing strategies that can engage potential customers wherever they might be online. Our presenters at Share15 did a fantastic job of providing attendees with the insights they need to make the content marketing track an insightful and engaging few days.

A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

Search marketing continues to be an extremely competitive industry. Countless businesses compete on the SERPs for customers’ attention, meaning that brands have little room for mistakes. Given the high stakes, it is clear why search marketers have many concerns about their efforts. Some pressing issues include how to expand their campaigns to other languages and regions, how their sites appear in SERPs and how to create a culture of mature SEO production in their own companies.

At Share15 we brought in representatives from major brands including Microsoft, VMware, Hilton, Motorola and Schneider Electric to discuss these issues. The talks they gave were enlightening and engaging. Here are some of the highlights.

International Search & Localization

Search optimization can be a major driver of leads and revenue for companies, but for those who want to take their brands overseas, questions about how to effectively use search in other countries can abound. Not only are their other search engines that might dominate the country, but you also have to think about issues such as cultural differences, translations and understanding the local people well enough to effectively motivate them to make a purchase. These problems can make conquering international search marketing an intimidating endeavor.

At Share15, we heard from representatives of global brands including Marco Muijsert of Philips, David Fisher of Schneider Electric, Michael Velasco of Motorola Solutions and Melissa Walner of Hilton Worldwide. These talks explored critical ideas about international search. They discussed creating regionally-accurate translations, global sites versus microsites and creating a global team to make the entire project a success. Here are some of the key points from their talks:

• search should tie together all of the teams involved in localization
• scale towards local markets
• reach global audience through localization not translation
• remember regional differences (English in the US vs. the UK)
• when not executed well, microsites can have issues, such as competition, in SERPs

Universal SERPs

As a search marketer, you know that SERPs seem to change on a regular basis-- such as the local carousel, the 3-pack and Google Quick Answers. Each of these changes can have an enormous impact on the visibility and traffic that sites receive. Since there is little warning that these changes are about to take place, however, sites often struggle to optimize their pages for the new layout after it has already been implemented. During this presentation session, attendees heard from industry experts about how to optimize their sites so that they can be ready for any future SERP display changes. By optimizing multiple types of content, websites can help enhance and strengthen their position in the rankings and make sure their site is ready for any changes that the future might bring. For this presentation we heard from Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting, Duy Vu of Assurant and Vincent Wehren of Bing. They provided some fantastic content that we wanted to share:

• focus on identifying key questions that customers ask and providing value-added answers
• use visuals, like infographics, to communicate a compelling narrative
• remember that voice/speech queries and longer, more complex queries increasing, so search engines are looking to really understand web pages and their content

Scaling In-House

The importance of organic search for the amount of traffic a website receives cannot be underestimated. According to our own research at BrightEdge, organic traffic is single-handedly responsible for 51 percent of traffic to websites. SEO cannot be confined to a single silo. Instead, it must integrated into all the content produced (learn more about integrated marketing). This content is then used to fuel the marketing ventures across the entire brand. For brands to effectively market to their audience, they have to be able to optimize their content production at scale. This requires growth and maturity as a brand to create a culture where SEO is viewed as a critical part of operations and can be effectively utilized for marketing success.

At Share15 we heard from experienced marketers Adam Souza of VMware, Alex Volk of Microsoft and Danielle Yuthas of Wellbiz. During their talks there was some great information shared including:

• the need to break down silos
• create ‘quick wins’ for the team when beginning to transform marketing culture to boost morale
• use education to get new team members onboard
• do not overlook the importance of data
• do not be afraid to take risks in areas that have the most promise
• there is a maturity curve that describes businesses and departments as they get onboard with SEO

For brands to succeed in search marketing they must explore their organizational maturity and how they optimize their content for SERPs. Brands that are interested in going overseas also have many considerations for successful international optimization. The search marketing segment of Share15 did a fantastic job of exploring these ideas and leaving all attendees feeling ready to conquer the competitive field of search marketing.

A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

Search marketing continues to change at a rapid pace, leaving many marketers feeling intimidated and unsure about where to begin. Technology and customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and brands must adopt new strategies to keep up.

At Share15, we explored the future of search marketing. We dove into the trends and our presenters provided incredible insights about how to face the future. Our presenters covered subjects related to hot topics such as mobile, understanding the ever-changing algorithm and data learning.

Mobile Friendly

With each passing year, mobile devices have only grown in importance for customers, and Google’s 2015 mobile update cemented their role in search. People use their smartphones and tablets to access the Internet, research products and make purchases. Our own research here at BrightEdge found that by Q3 of 2014, the size of purchases made on mobile devices was within 10 percent of those made on desktops. Customers are not shying away from making purchases of all sizes on-the-go. Brands need to be able to keep up with these customers, who want websites that are fully accessible on their mobile devices. It is not enough to just make the website fit on the screen.

A mobile-friendly site takes into account common behaviors of mobile customers and is optimized to meet those needs. For example, people who are on-the-go are not likely to be too interested in reading multiple articles on the main page. Instead, they want to have easy access to your contact information or a click-to-call button. The site should be prioritized to reflect mobile behavior. We had the pleasure of hearing from Sean Kainec of The Home Depot, Denis Scott of OpenTable and Dave Lloyd of Adobe during this presentation. All three represent major brands that understand the demands of mobile. Their talks offered all attendees an incredible amount of insight. Here were some of the highlights:

• instead of thinking about mobile as a device, think of it as a lifestyle - focus on the person
• mobile is about fulfilling a customer’s need when they are in the moment
• focus on cooperation between the mobile team and the SEO team
• do not automatically go to responsive design -  many retail brands find that other designs work better
• remember when measuring progress that behavior and intent can be different on mobile
• develop apps that are keyword optimized and have local translations for targeted regions

Beyond the Algorithm

Google’s algorithm updates that have focused on rewarding relevancy and quality as well as the mobile update have made it clear that the user experience is the highest priority for the search engine giant. When you build your content with the end-goal of a positive customer experience, you will naturally develop the same priorities as the search engines themselves. This will give you the ability to get beyond the algorithm so that you can see progress in your SERP goals without as much worrying about the next algorithm update.

Optimizing for the user means going beyond outstanding content. It also requires making sure that the site structure is developed to provide the optimal user experience. Reviewing case studies and best practices can be incredible resources for those learning how to maximize their potential in this area. At Share15, we heard from brilliant minds, experienced in the art of optimizing for the end user. Jacqueline Urick of Sears PartsDirect, Binti Pawa of Time Inc, Adam Audette of Merkle RKG and Dawna Olsen of Epicor each added some great insights that helped our attendees feel empowered to see beyond the algorithm. Here were some of the main points the highlighted during the conference:

• there are two key pillars of SEO, technical and the audience
• technical SEO is critical for performance
• Google can read JavaScript, which includes redirects, and can render dynamic content
• it is important to create reports before and after each stage of a content migration to monitor performance
• use keyword research to optimize content organization
• always do a thorough audit after a content migration launch to make sure everything is working as expected
• expect surprises after a migration and fix problems immediately
• regularly run a crawl budget to answer key questions like how easily strategically important pages are accessed by bots

Data Learning and Decision Making

Personalization has become increasingly critical in a successful marketing strategy. Customers want to see brands that recognize their needs as individuals and respond appropriately. The amount of data available for marketers, however, is beyond what people can compute. According to the IDC, by 2020 there will be an estimated 44 trillion gigabytes of data, but the human mind is only capable of holding a million gigabytes of memory (source: American Scientist). Humans cannot keep up with the amount of data being produced alone - we will need the help of machines. This does not mean replacing humans with machines.

Machines will not be able to produce the creative elements of human marketing. What machines will be able to do is help humans interpret the data so that they can maximize their opportunities with their visitors. Data learning and decision making can help websites track customers’ visits to the site and display the most relevant information. It can also interpret information about the visitor’s personal situation, such as location and weather, to further personalize the page. The data can help you create a personalized journey for each visitor from the first time they land on the website through their purchase and into the post-purchase period. This will help you exceed customer expectations and create loyal brand customers. This topic was explored by Jay King of Ben & Jerry’s, Sudhir Sharma of Motovo and Stefan Zechner of Western Union. Each of the talks provided some great points about the ideas at hand. Here were some of the highlights that our attendees appreciated:

• make sure that SEO is employed as a cross-departmental effort
• have a strong monitoring process in place to gauge progress
• we have the data we need at hand, we just learn to leverage it to identify what customers are looking for - which is where tools like the BrightEdge Data Cube come into play
• listening to customers can provide valuable insights into the types of campaigns and content that would be appreciated
• gather data through a variety of sources such as social listening and A/B testing

Search marketing continues to evolve quickly and savvy marketers are seizing hold of the technology and techniques that will be the way of the future. By touching upon hot topics such as mobile, the algorithm and data learning, our Share15 presenters did a fantastic job of making sure our attendees were prepared for whatever the future might bring.