Jim

M Posted 10 years 9 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 9 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.