A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

Often, when people discuss digital marketing, they spend most of their time speaking about factors such as search rankings and Share of Voice. They end up neglecting the most important factor in the success of a marketing campaign: people. It is too easy to regard a top three ranking for a particular keyword as the end-goal itself, rather than seeing it as a vehicle to genuine marketing success. At Share15 two weeks ago, we had two outstanding presentations that explored the importance of the human factor in digital marketing. They looked at the importance of cultivating brand advocates and influencers who can help spread your message and extend your reach. They also looked at the engagement of customers on an intimate level through automation and personalization. Here are some of the enlightening insights they had to share with us and the attendees.

Content, Influence and Human Capital

For brands to effectively influence buyers, they must have a strong reputation. According to this Influencer Marketing Agency, reputation is built by continually being a good resource for customers when they go online to learn more about a particular topic. This reputation also develops when you have credible brand advocates who are willing to tell others about the positive experience they had with your company. The importance of brand advocates cannot be understated. According to Nielsen, third-party reviews from friends and family continue to be the most trusted source of information for customers.

Consumers generally question the credibility of the advertising that brands put out about themselves, but they will often listen to those that they view as being objective. Cultivating a positive reputation begins by understanding the intended customer. This goes beyond having a basic idea of whether you are selling to large or small businesses. You want to understand psychological and behavioral best practices to comprehend what your consumers are looking for and what has the power to motivate them to purchase. You then create the optimized content that will help answer the needs put forth by the customer. The mission does not end with engaging content, however.

You must continue to place the needs and desires of the customers at the forefront of the business practices. Brand influencers, people who already have a strong personal reputation within your intended audience, can also be valuable advocates. When you find influencers who can reach thousands of people the impact can be incredible. Cultivating these relationships requires time and effort to demonstrate that you have something of value to offer the influencer and their audience. Mel Carson of Delightful Communications and Majestic, Peter Krmpotic of Adobe and Travis Low of Revana Digital offered some great insights into how brands can achieve these goals. Here were some of their intriguing ideas that they shared with us:

• just 15 percent of people will trust the messages they hear from brands
• you can find influencers through surveys, programmatic tools, cross referencing data and luck
• when speaking with potential influencers, have a plan and goal in mind and be able to explain what they can receive through the partnership
• when trying to target influencers, make sure you have content they can use and appreciate
• efforts to improve marketing campaigns are often side-lined by people’s opinions and fears, so have clear KPIs that can be used to measure progress

From the Majestic presentation

Email and Marketing Automation

Email continues to be a valuable tool for marketers, with well over half saying that email marketing generates ROI for their brand. It is also estimated that by 2017 there will be 206 billion emails sent every day to 4.9 billion accounts. Email is an efficient means to reach customers because of its popularity. By personalizing the messages that customers receive, you can maximize this impact and take your success even further.

Digital marketers also have to be aware of how customer expectations are beginning to change. Customers value individualized interaction with brands and they want to know that their interests and needs are being addressed personally. Marketing automation and email give marketers the tools to respond to customers in real-time based upon their behavior when interacting with the company's web properties. For example, a visitor who has visited the website a few times and visits the pricing page without making a purchase might receive an automatic email that provides them with a free trial or a discount.

As brands communicate more effectively with their page visitors through their understanding of behavioral marketing and automation, they can increase engagement and conversions. Dave Lawson of IgnitionOne, Tyler Altrup of Oracle/Eloqua and Rodrigo Fuentes of Listenloop explored this topic and provided attendees with an in-depth look at the power of automation. Here were a few of the incredible tips with which attendees walked away:

• email continues to have a positive revenue impact and is the channel of choice for 69.7 percent of Internet users
• email provides opportunity for lift across channels and across devices-- it is a linchpin
• marketers are slowed down in their automation efforts by a division between digital and offline interactions with the brand and a lack of cross-channel data consistency
• marketers must learn to adapt customer journeys to actual behavior
• to meet customers, brands must adopt hybrid or holistic approaches-- silos must be taken down

​Digital marketing continues to evolve at a rapid pace. The technological capabilities and the influence of algorithm updates power much of this change, but marketers cannot neglect the human factor. Customers are the end-goal for companies, not rankings. By keeping people at the forefront through maximizing the customer experience and empowering automation and personalization features, brands can better serve their customers and improve their digital marketing success. Take our digital marketing quiz to test your knowledge.

A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

As digital marketing becomes increasingly sophisticated, the silos that once separated channels, campaigns and even the skills of marketers themselves have come crashing down. This was a message clearly delivered to our attendees at our Share15 conference last week. We had the pleasure of hearing from representatives from a variety of major brands, like Best Buy, IgnitionOne, Oracle/Eloqua, Marriott, Monster Energy and Adobe. These speakers deeply explored key topics, offering valuable insights and inspiring great conversations. Here were some of the conversations and presentations that dominated the digital marketing track.

Talent Management

As the digital marketing world becomes more complex, so does the role of the marketers themselves. Marketers can no longer succeed when they remain confined to a single, specialized role in digital marketing. The content marketer needs to be able to interpret analytics that tells him whether or not he is engaging the intended audience. The paid advertising specialist must also know how to draft content that will engage the people who click on her ads. Many marketers are beginning to see the value in branching out beyond their specialities. According to Adobe, an estimated 40 percent want to reinvent themselves, but only 14 know how to go about it. Jay Middleton of Adobe, Dan Mooney of John Wiley & Sons and Michelle Rife of BrightEdge offered some fantastic insights into this topic. The presentation included highlights such as:

• the importance of providing training for everyone in areas such as digital analytics and social marketing
• the biggest talent gaps are in areas such as analytics, mobile, content marketing, social media, email, marketing automation and SEO
• valuable hybrid marketers also need fantastic interpersonal and communication skills to drive projects forward.

Integrated Campaigns

Customers themselves are also becoming increasingly sophisticated. They are no longer interacting with brands on a single platform. Instead, they are journeying between websites, social pages, paid advertising and reading reviews, all before they make a purchase. To meet this need, campaigns need to be similarly integrated. Failing to provide these customers with a strong, consistent brand image across the platforms will make the intended message much weaker, which can impact conversions and brand reputation. Mark Fiske of Ancestry.com, Alok Jain and Deepak Goyal of eZedia and Allan Price of Monster Energy addressed this topic, leaving attendees with new inspiration for leading the integrated campaigns back at their own businesses. Their talks touched upon highlights such as:

• measuring success and distributing content through different channels tend to be among the chief challenges for marketers
• content is the foundation of all integrated marketing
• the value of content intelligence and effectively scaling content to drive success
• it is possible for attribution models to change as you gain more insight or realize errors-- do not wait for the perfect model to get started

Paid, Owned & Earned

Paid, owned and earned media are an integral aspect of any digital marketing strategy. The intersection of these three has become increasingly apparent as businesses are able to see how they influence each other. For example, high-quality owned media, such as website content, will impact the success of a paid marketing campaign as well as the cultivation of earned media. A successful digital marketing campaign, therefore, requires a keen understanding of how these areas work together and how to design successful, engaging campaigns that appropriately use each specialty. Cindy Phan of VMware, Charmaine Madamba of Citrix, Michael Thomas of Noble Studios and Alex Edlund of the Marriott offered several case studies and intriguing examples that helped attendees see how these three intersect. They covered important topics such as:

• The importance of data when determining strategy and success
• The value of collaboration and cross-functional teams working together to take advantage of insights and best practices
• In the end, the most important criteria of a digital marketing campaign is the revenue and profit it drives, so measure ROI

Cross-Channel Marketing

Successful marketing means looking at far more than different aspects of online marketing--there must also be recognition that consumers are not just interacting with brands while online. Interest might be sparked when seeing a commercial on TV or hearing one on the radio, for example. With successful cross-channel marketing, brands will keep their messages consistent across these various channels and understand how to integrate their analytics and attribute revenue to both on and offline conversions. John Hensel of Best Buy, Jennifer Day of Tableau and Ujjwal Bhattarai of Brady Corp explored best practices with our audience and had everyone leave feeling confident in their understanding of cross-channel marketing. They discussed key insights including:

• the importance of using facts instead of opinions to drive marketing decisions
• choosing and using metrics wisely-- do not go for flashy, go for valuable
• the insights gathered when looking at the customer journey, such as from an email to making a phone call
• cross-channel marketing means acknowledging that customers want to use more than one channel, such as searching for information online while in store
• the value of understanding customers and the paths they take to purchases

Digital marketing continues to evolve as marketing techniques, and the customers themselves, become more sophisticated. The silos between different aspects of marketing and the roles of marketers are no longer enough to succeed in this rapidly advancing industry. At Share15, our speakers sought to explore these changes through engaging presentations that enlightened attendees, sparked excellent conversations and helped establish the conference as one of the most valuable events to attend all year. Take our digital marketing quiz to test your knowledge.

Lennon Liao

M Posted 10 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

The world of content development is becoming increasingly competitive. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 86 percent of B2B marketers report that their organizations are using content marketing and 70 percent of them are creating more content than before. Businesses are recognizing the value of online marketing, which means that the space will become even more saturated. The saturation will also be coming in the form of high-quality content.

The past year has also seen several algorithm updates that have been aimed at raising the bar of the content available online. As brands respond to these updates, it will be even more of a challenge to rank well and reach more audiences. The key to overcoming these challenges is to use data to monitor each phase of the customer journey. You want to look carefully at your content strategy and gauge how well customers are finding your content and how they are responding to what you have to say. Just looking at page views will not give you the strategic insight you need about how you compete with others in your industry. You will also not be able to see the contribution of specific content investments in terms of revenue and engagement.

Bridging the gap between raw data and real-business context

Telling a data-driven story is not always easy, however. First, as marketing technologies evolve and reach more audiences online, more information is being generated across the different channels. This includes data such as rank, share of voice, revenue, revenue per visit, conversions, visits, conversion rate, bounce rates, average time spent on site, page views, backlinks, indexed pages, viewability, interaction rates and video completion rates.

With BrightEdge StoryBuilder, you can analyze nearly any metric that might be valuable to your brand. This includes metrics from BrightEdge, along with other metrics from your Web Analytics and third-party systems. Rather than trying to make sense of the raw data or metrics derived from your campaigns, StoryBuilder helps to elevate the value of your story by translating the data into metrics that matter for your business, told in a way that is relevant. For example, instead of analyzing “visits” or “rank,” StoryBuilder helps to uncover the value of this data by linking it to questions in context of the brand’s marketing goals and desired business outcomes. So if you are in retail, where your business is highly seasonal, your goal could be something like: "I want to grow revenue by 30% year-over-year for a product category through organic, paid and social channels."

Instead of looking at revenue data, you might ask more probing questions, such as:

• How well has revenue been performing this season vs. same time last year?
• Are we following the same cyclical performance trends, or are we under performing?
• Which are the key channels that drove the most revenue per visit?

And if there is a shortfall in revenue, you might investigate and ask: “Was there a decline in visits?” And if engagement and conversion are higher than a prior period, you might ask:

• Where are people visiting, and where are they most engaged throughout their customer journey?
• What were the compelling offers used in high-converting pages?

If your marketing strategy is to increase brand awareness but you have a smaller budget, you could look into organic channels and investigate:

• How well am I competing for market share in organic search?
• Which product categories have the highest market share on organic search, and which have the lowest?
• What can you do to increase your market share?

With BrightEdge StoryBuilder, you no longer need a data science degree or data analytics expertise. Instead, BrightEdge integrates data from the various digital marketing channels and translates the data into questions that map to a business context. So rather than pulling data into Excel and analyze offline, you now have the answers you need immediately.

 The Scope of StoryBuilder Capabilities

We have assembled a Questions Library that was developed based upon our experience working with over 1200 customers and brands worldwide. It is now available to help you accomplish your goals. Say you wanted to increase your brand reach and traffic. You can use the StoryBuilder to find the answer to insightful questions such as:

• Which organic search engines are driving the most traffic?
• How well is my content reaching consumers on mobile?
• How efficient are we at acquiring customers through my paid and organic channels? Where should I reallocate budget?
• How well is my content competing on page one of Google? Who am I competing with?
• How well am I showing up in the top three positions on mobile?
• What is my overall Share of Voice and did it improve? Who is edging up and how?
• If your goal was customer acquisition or revenue YoY growth then find answers to:
• How well am I performing this year compared to the same time last year?
• Which content pages are top movers & shakers?
• How is revenue trending across our top product categories?
• How efficient are we at acquiring customers through these channels?
• What is the revenue mix by channel?

If your goal is to understand content relevancy and engagement you can check:

• How well is mobile driving people to my site?
• How efficient are we at converting customers?
• Which content is driving the most engagement?
  • How engaged are mobile consumers with my brand?
  • Where are we seeing the most drop-off in site engagement?

Regardless of the questions you might have, StoryBuilder can help you find the answer quickly. Create charts and graphs to make your digital narrative visual and engaging to fully grasp your online performance and where you have room to improve. You can get answers to “how well are you performing this year compared to last year?” You can create new tables where you can compare valuable data points such as this week to last week, this week to the same week last year, week over week and year over year. For example, you might notice that while your current week is performing poorly compared to last week, your revenue compared to the same week last year has gone up.  

The ability to apply numeric filters to cross tabs has also been added. If you wanted to compare keywords between two domains and see if a drop out of the top five slots meant that a competitor moved into the spot, you now can. These are just some examples that showcase how content marketers can elevate the value of their marketing outreach and results. With the StoryBuilder platform, we are continually looking for ways to improve the available capabilities so that you have access to the information you need to make sure your content succeeds in the increasingly competitive world of search and content marketing.

StoryBuilder can help you understand your brand reach, engagement and acquisition by providing you with the answers and insights you need to direct your marketing investments and remain one step ahead of the competition.  

A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

It’s hard to believe that another Share conference has come to an end. Wednesday was the final day of the event and it definitely ended on a high note. Attendees started the day at opening sponsor labs with Jumpshot and Majestic carrying the enthusiasm and energy over from Tuesday night. The hotel was buzzing with excitement as people moved into the day’s opening general session Digital Elevation: Transformation.

Woodson Martin, SVP Marketing Cloud Operations for Salesforce and Clay Stobaugh, EVP and CMO of Wiley, took the stage to share how today’s leading organizations are taking advantage of data-driven marketing.

The rest of the day flew by in a flurry of insights, case studies, and rich discussions — everything from Adobe and Wiley’s take on the Hybrid Digital Marketer to a discussion about Data Learning and Decision Making with Ben & Jerry’s, HP, Movoto, and Western Union (during which Ben & Jerry’s surprised the audience with a very sweet treat!)

We also saw more great news coverage of Share15 from publications like AdWeek’s SocialTimes and Martech Advisor. Social engagement around #Share15 continued its momentum from Tuesday, with tons of feedback, insightful thoughts, and photos making their way to the ongoing social conversation.

Thanks to all of our amazing attendees, speakers, sponsors and organizers who helped make Share15 a success. We can’t wait to see everybody next year at Share16. Check out some content from Wednesday’s sessions below to continue the learning!

Digital Marketing

The digital marketers dove deeply into the human factor in digital marketing. Although algorithms and computers can help elevate your content and display it to users, it is only when those users click and engage with your content that you are on your way to success.

Content, Influence and Human Capital

Presenters: Mel Carson, US Brand Ambassador for Majestic Delightful Communications Peter Krmpotic, Sr. Product Manager for the Adobe Experience Manager Travis Low, Vice President of SEO and Organic for Revana Digital Attendees were treated to three exciting talks that explored how to incorporate people into digital strategy. This included creating brand advocates, personalizing customer experiences and influencing industry experts. This session focused on having a better understanding of human psychology and behavior to grow the brand.

The Hybrid Digital Marketing - Talent Management

Presenters: Jay Middleton, Director of Global Search Marketing for Adobe Dan Mooney, Director of Digital Analytics for John Wiley & Sons, Inc Michelle Rife, Senior Director Global Talent Acquisition for BrightEdge Hybrid marketers are becoming highly desirable as the marketing world becomes increasingly complex. Marketing silos are being broken down as roles become intermingled and techniques become more sophisticated. The need for hybrid marketers, who can work in more than one area, are becoming increasingly apparent and talent gaps are forming. These sessions focused on closing the gaps, learning how to build assets and how marketers can build their careers for the exciting future ahead. 

Integrated Campaign Management

Presenters: Mark Fiske, Vice President of Channel Marketing for Ancestry.com Operations, Inc Alok Jain, Co-CEO and CMO and Padmini Murti, Co-CEO for eZdia Allan Price, Global Director of Digital Marketing for Monster Energy To engage with customers online, brands need to broadcast a consistent image across all platforms. Customers have now largely abandoned content silos and instead engage with brands in a variety of different ways before they make a purchase. For brands to successfully meet these needs, they need to have consistent marketing messages wherever the customer might be. This means taking a holistic look at marketing efforts, but a large gap remains between those who say they prioritize cross-channel marketing integration (67 percent) versus those who have an accurate understanding of their customers so that they can adapt accordingly (43 percent). This session addressed these challenges.

Content Marketing

Success in content marketing means knowing how to leverage content to work for you. It is not enough to just have countless pages of content on the website, that content must serve a purpose. Wednesday presentations worked to help attendees see how to make that happen.

Content & Competition: Creation & Curation

Presenters: Brad Beiter, VP of Performance Content for Performics Scott Lavelle, Director of Global SEO for OpenTable Felipe Carreras, Director of Ecommerce for Best Western For content marketers to see return from their content investments, they must produce material that outperforms the competition. You can only accomplish this goal when you take the time to understand who your competition is and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. This session looked at ways to size up the competition and gain an edge.

Content Convergence: Search, Social & Content

Presenters: Richard Mastriani, Director of SEO for Wyndham Hotels Michael DeHaven, Product Management and SEO for Bazaar Voice Susanne Szostak, Brand Solutions and Content Merchandising lead for Google/YouTube Deborah Carver, Content Marketing Manager for Nina Hale Content can no longer be confined to one silo. Instead, it needs to be present and ready to engage customers wherever they might be. This session explored how content, search and social work together and why this is important for marketers.

Content Measurement Metrics; Pages & Performance

Presenters: Chris Bennett, CEO and Founder of 97th Floor| Kirill Kronrod, Senior Global SEO Manager for Adobe Cade Burk, Search Manager for The Container Store Metrics are critical for content to succeed. WIthout metrics, you will just be guessing about the types of content to which customers will respond best. You will not have the insights you need to know how you compare to your competition and what new avenues you can pursue to expand content reach. These presenters explored how to use these metrics and leverage the information for content success.

Search

Once you have all the other factors in place, visibility all comes down to search. You can have the best content in the world, but if no one can find it, then it will do you brand little good. Our Search sessions on Wednesday explored how to take search optimization efforts to the next level.

Scaling In-House - The Search Org Maturity Curve

Presenters: Adam Souza, Senior Web Marketing Manager for VMware Danielle Paske, Senior Digital Media Manager for Wellbiz Brands Alex Volk, Director of Search Marketing for Microsoft Organic search consistently remains the chief driver of traffic towards websites. As brands develop and cultivate the content they need to fuel this attention, they often find themselves encountering problems of scale. These presenters helped marketers see how to mature their production to meet search demand.

Data learning & Decision Making - Crawl, Walk & Run

Presenters: Jay King, Senior Interactive Manager for Ben & Jerry’s Sudhir Sharma, Director of SEO for Movoto Stefan Zechner, Global SEO Manager for Western Union By 2020, the digital universe is expected to contain an estimated 44 trillion gigabytes of data according to the IDC. This is beyond the capacity of the human brain to understand and compute. The data produced can hold tremendous insights for companies, but they must learn how to leverage it.

These sessions explored hot topics like machine learning, how to use data to guide content production and how to better understand the intentions of the target audience. 

Universal SERPs - Question, Quick Answers & Finding the Right Blend

Presenters: Duy Vu, Global SEO Manager for Assurant Vincent Wehren, Senior Product Lead for Bing Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple SERPs perpetually change as the developers try to find better ways to meet the needs of the users. The 3-pack, Google quick answers, the local carousel and other changes have greatly impacted brands’ visibility.

This session focused on helping businesses see how to use a variety of different types of content to ensure that the site will show up well on SERPs regardless of future adjustments.

The day ended with our final general session, Digital Entrepreneurship and Leadership. It was an excellent way to conclude the conference, with some of the best minds from Silicon Valley providing key insights about the importance of innovation and how to find your path to success.

Attendees were able to say their goodbyes filled with inspiration about what they can do with their own brands when they walk into the office on Thursday morning-- and that is the impact we wanted to achieve.

We all had a fantastic time at Share15 this year, and we believe that the attendees enjoyed themselves as well. We already are throwing around ideas about how we could possibly top this year’s experience at Share16, but based on the feedback that is going to be very hard to do. Know that we will spend the next year planning Share16 to make it the most valuable and invigorating conference you attend all year.

Adam Woodburn

M Posted 10 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

BrightEdge is perhaps our favorite software platform here at Be Found Online when it comes to reporting on and sorting data. Through innovative capabilities like Data Cube and StoryBuilder, BrightEdge is constantly innovating their platform to improve how SEOs and clients interpret traffic, revenue, and engagement metrics to convey clear and comprehensible data.

In this vein, since the launch of Search Console last spring, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, Google has made some significant updates to better consolidate queries. BrightEdge has responded to these updates with a slew of their own reporting platform updates.

Oh dearie, my queries! In the beginning of early August it’s very likely SEOs and their clients have already seen a “drop” in Clicks & Impressions metrics as a result of these recent BrightEdge reporting updates. However, don’t panic! While this may have caused some weaker-willed SEOs to run screaming to the hills, it most certainly is not that bleak. In fact, it’s quite the opposite:

Individual Page Impressions

All links to the same site are now counted as a single impression, instead of counting each page in the search results. The result is data that is cleaned up and now devoid of any avenue that didn’t lead to a visit. If you haven’t already, you will almost certainly see the total number of impressions in your BrightEdge reports decrease based on this update.

Different Data Storage Thresholds

The old Search Queries report and the new Search Analytics report have different set levels for storing data. As a result, one report may have a larger pool of data from which to make a summation, so you may notice this difference in the summed values section of BrightEdge reports. For instance, this may be noticed specifically in total clicks data for a specific time period. This is because one report will not have as much data as the other from which to make the total clicks summation.

Search Properties and Devices are Now Separate

The old Search Queries report has an option to filter by web, image, video, and mobile, and in this case mobile means web searches from a mobile device specifically. Desktop search and mobile metrics were combined for images and videos in the old report. In the new Search Analytics report, the device type and the search type are separated. Let’s say you’ve just put in a long day of crushing it at the office and you want to chill out with some videos of Truckasaurus.

Now, if you perform a Google search on a mobile device for images or videos of Truckasaurus, you will see in BrightEdge that the search originated from a mobile device. The alternative being all mobile device searches for images and videos of Truckasaurus, along with searches from desktops, being thrown into one massive pile… like the pile of mangled cars left in the wake of Truckasaurus.

Lower Image Click Count

Only clicks which expand an image or clicks on a link to the image owner’s website are counted in the new Search Analytics report, instead of counting any click on an image in all Web Searches and Image Searches.

So, now only clicks that resulted in a notable action are recorded in the new report. The result is a pool of data which is much more meaningful for understanding who is engaging with your images (of Truckasaurus).

Data Consolidated by Full Domain

Perhaps the most significant of the updates. If you own multiple hosts in a domain (for example, www.truckasaurus-rocks.com and truckasaurus-rocks.com), you might see your click and impression counts drop for each host. Why? The old Search Queries report often assigned clicks, impressions, or other data by domain name, where a domain might span multiple hosts.

Formerly, a click on a link to www.truckasaurus-rocks.com might be counted for both www.truckasaurus-rocks.com and truckasaurusrocks.com accounts.

Now, the new Search Analytics report assigns all clicks, impressions, and other search data to a single, complete host name. This means a click or impression on www.truckasaurus-rocks.com will only be counted toward www.truckasaurus-rocks.com, and not to m.truckasaurus-rocks.com, truckasaurus-rocks.com, or any other variations.

Find more information on the functionality of the Search Analytics Report in Google Search Console.