Retail Marketing Advantage

Online shopping has become an increasingly important factor in the retail industry. Online retail revenue had 11 percent growth, year-over-year, during the first quarter of 2014. Online shopping retail is projected to continue to grow from $231 billion in 2012 to $370 billion by 2017. It is also estimated that more than a third of every dollar spent in retail stores has been influenced by digital interactions with the brand. For businesses to thrive in the modern marketplace, they must be able to succeed online. At Share15 we want to help our retail attendees gain the insights they need to make their online goals a reality. That is why we have brought in speakers from some of the leading retail brands to discuss some of the most pressing issues impacting those in this vertical. 

Creating a remarkable experience

The core challenge for many retail brands is to find a way to get their voice heard above the crowd. The marketplace today has become incredibly saturated with products and brands that fill nearly every niche available and it is extremely difficult to develop a product that cannot also be purchased from a competitor. This means that retailers must focus instead on the buyer’s experience. They need to be enticing from the first interaction with the customer through the transaction and even after the customer has made their purchase. Creating this outstanding experience begins online. An estimated 81 percent of shoppers will conduct online research before they make a purchase. This includes 60 percent who will use a search engine to look for specific products. People are interested in learning more about their options and what is available to help them solve their problem.

Retailers must focus on answering this need to begin the creation of a fantastic experience. Knowing exactly who your customers are and what they want to learn about can be particularly helpful. This can be done by constructing customer personas that illustrate the central categories of customers that your business attracts and what drives those customers to make a purchase. This will guide your content development, your optimization efforts and your personalization initiatives.

At Share15 you will be able to dive deeply into the creation of  customer personas and how to leverage data to understand your audience. Gain insights about how to create content for multiple personas and how to use your content to build engagement. Jesse Farley of retail giant Cabela’s and Erin Everhart of The Home Depot will be two of the presenters. You can also listen to Adam Audette of RKG speak about going beyond the algorithm. Many retailers struggle with the ever-shifting requirements. The year 2014 alone saw multiple updates that targeted low-quality content.

The mobile update of April 2015 also left many brands struggling to ensure that their content was up to date.Keeping up with the Google algorithm and how customers search Audette and his co-presenters will help you understand how and why the algorithm keeps changing and how you can optimize strategies and data that will keep your site in front of your customers’ eyes. They will speak about focusing on the end user instead of focusing on the algorithm and how this can benefit your company as a whole.

Using data to drive decisions

Given the intense competition of the retail marketplace, you need to leverage data to ensure that you are reaching your marketing goals. Listen to Jay King of Ben & Jerry’s and Stefan Zechner of Western Union Company speak about leveraging data to ensure that campaigns are executed with maximum efficiency. In the heavily competitive retail marketspace, keeping costs down whenever possible is critical for success, so ensuring that your marketing campaigns are aimed precisely at your target audience and that no resources are spent unnecessarily will be valuable. Data can also help you better engage with your audience by helping you understand them and what they want to find. This can further help enhance the customer experience. The power of data can be incredible.

Mastering the multi-channel approach

As a digital savvy retailer, you know that meeting your customers’ needs requires having a strong presence on multiple platforms. You want customers to find you on search, engage with you social, and convert either on your website or be inspired to visit one of your stores. Managing an integrated campaign that allows you to take a holistic approach and look at your customer’s journey across the different spaces where they might interact with the brand. This will help you remain relevant in the minds of your customers and improve brand reach. You can explore the convergence between search, social and content by listening to a presentation by Jamie Peach of House of Fraser (UK) and consider how to build marketing campaigns holistically so that you can reach your customers across the digital ecosystem.

Search and social are heavily intertwined with content as all three must work together to create content that is truly optimized and ready to bring in the retail customers that online marketing is capable of producing. You can also listen to Allan Price of Monster Energy give a presentation on managing an integrated marketing campaign. He and his co-presenters will look at how to use multiple channels and build cross-functional teams that can work towards a common goal and deliver a common message.

Managing a successful retail brand requires mastering the arts of online marketing, e-commerce, social, and physical retail. Meeting the needs of these digital customers poses many challenges for retail brands. Come to Share15 to listen to industry leaders and gain the insights you need to succeed. If you have not registered yet for Share15, visit our event website and sign up today. We look forward to seeing everyone in just a few weeks.    

You have 200,000 Twitter followers – you are an influencer right? Wrong - In today’s tech-savvy, socially-enabled generation, marketing influence can often be misinterpreted thorough social media statistics alone. Marketing influence should not be characterized by the number of Twitter followers a person, or brand have and/or the frequency in which they automatically repost and repurpose content.

Real marketing influence is a byproduct of credible and authentic personalities (people) and sources (content), and the best marketers and brands know how to combine human, psychological and behavioral best practices and then utilize technology to further enable them to understand, connect and engage with their audience of influencers.

Marketing influence can be defined as many things – from simply connecting with a person to impacting a defined and specific business outcome – but regardless of your goal or your technique (inter-personal or technological) there is a formula for success.

Below are nine steps that you can use as a guide for marketing INFLUENCE for blending interpersonal skills with social research and online tactics:

• Identify
• Navigate
• Follow
• Listen
• Utilize
• Engage
• Nurture
• Convert
• Evaluate

1. Identify. Before you conduct any marketing influence outreach make sure you are targeting the right people, at the right level and for the right reason. Building your target list is critical to outreach success. For example, ensure that you segment influencer types in terms of factors such as:

• Academic high -level market influencer
• Brand ambassador (customer, product and sales enablement)
• Community influencer (a specific topic or influence in a certain segment of market)

 

Build your marketing influence campaign accordingly and map your marketing influence strategy to key goals such:

1. Brand evangelism and sharing of insights
2. Specific corporate, product and customer success/sales goals
3. Specific metrics - a blog post, a joint content proposal, a business recommendation or a specific ‘relationship build’ goal

It is important to understand what type of marketing influence you want to have and what type of marketing influence is the best match. Many hybrid marketers target influencers across multiple persona types while for others specific individuals can be mapped to certain influencers.

2. Navigate. Navigating your way through to the right influencer takes a concerted effort. Many marketing influence campaigns are misdirected when they identify the wrong influencers based on researching vanity metrics and hence actually nurture the wrong relationship.  

Social media and user-generated content has meant that access to influencer connections are more visible and accessible than ever before. However navigating your way through to the right connection requires researching and developing, not just one, but multiple relationships through first, second and sixth degree connections.

3. Follow. The development of social media tools, monitoring systems and engagement platforms has empowered marketers to ‘follow’ as well as lead. Technology has fueled the growth of influencer marketing to such an extent that you can follow, monitor and listen to what your market, target influencers, brands and customers saying.

Platforms such as Twitter, Hootsuite, LinkedIn, Brandwatch and Radian6 are great monitoring systems that help bridge the gap between ‘follow’ and ‘listen’.

In this article, here, Lee Odden from Top Rank takes us through over 22 social media marketing tools that help source connections and follow influencers.

4. Listen. The ability to follow is easy but the ‘ability to listen’ is one of the most vastly underused tactics in this industry. Technology can help you identify and engage with influencers, but the ability to listen is a human/behavioral discipline. Technology can deliver the insight but it is up to you to digest it. This is especially the case in marketing influence.

Just like sales – successful marketing influence relies on listening. If you don’t really understand your target influencers in terms of what they say, what they like, how they feel and what they want, then your outreach and engagement campaigns become little more than spam. This is where social media monitoring technology adds real value to your influencing campaign.

Return on Ignorance

As marketers we, quite rightly, focus on ROI in terms of Return on Investment. However one of the main reasons why influencer campaigns, and business initiatives as a whole, fail is due to “Return on Ignorance” – the cost of not listening.

• Understand your target influencer ‘inside and out’ and work out what is in it for them, (WIIFT) not just you.
• Understand your target influencers’ company and brand
• Understand your target influencers’ market and key challenges
• Spend 60% of your time reading, consuming information and monitoring what is happening in market
• Assign 2 to 3 hours a day to read, listen and understand
• Utilize your knowledge – see next step

#5 Utilize

As mentioned earlier in the article – marketing influence is based on relationships. Relationships, like links, are actually earned. marketing influence is not bought, and building your influencer database takes hard work, dedication and time. Utilize all data, assets and information at your disposal to build up profiles of influencers you would like to engage with.

Work out what is in for you and what is in it for them and begin to think about how best to engage.

#6 Engage

To maximize business impact from your influencer campaigns only engage once you have established a meaningful goal, story or project of mutual interest. “Random acts of engagement” due to the proliferation of social media serve little purpose other than the individual ego.

As per the guidelines above - ensure that you have identified the right person or brand, listen and understand the needs and wants and have a message/story/goal that will resonate with your target. For example, if your goal and reporting metric (see evaluation) of success is number of followers, number of contacts, amount of content you distribute then you are actually on the wrong influencer track.

Engaging and building influencer relationships is part art and part science. Utilize all online tools at your disposal but ensure your ‘influencer mix’ includes:

• Online engagement – see the conversation prism below
• Telephone conversations (yes telephone!)
• Conferences and conference meet-ups
• In-person meetings
• First, second and third degree meetings
• Leading industry events
• Networking events
• Social engagements

7. Nurture. The key to developing long lasting and productive outcomes from influencer outreach lies in the ‘nurture’ stage.

There is a huge difference between a contact and a relationship. Using social media as an example, everyone in today’s new media ecosystem can establish a contact by simply using LinkedIn, Twitter or any other social media platform. However, marketing influence is not a contact - influence is an outcome of a relationship.

8. Convert. The art of persuasion is a discipline of which sales is based upon and being a marketer, influencer or thought-leader actually means you are a sales person at heart. The most successful marketers and influencers actually have strong sales backgrounds.

In this Fast Company article Kevan Lee shares a wealth of insight into the psychology of marketing influence, persuasion and conversion. 

To get the best results from any influencer campaign balancing marketing and sales skills is essential. Be it a company, individual or departmental effort sales and marketing (this applies to all marketing in general) should be aligned. Ignore the myths and focus on a result.

As with everything in marketing balancing soft measures of marketing influence (i.e. a connection, a conversation or objective) and hard metrics (i.e. a result such as an asset, sale or upsell) defines how you measure success.

9. Evaluate. As with any marketing campaign ensure that you take time to step back and evaluate your success in line with 8 points above.

The bottom line is that marketing influence can be conducted and measured in multiple ways. For one person that could mean spending $100,000 on a broad reaching conference, campaign or asset and gaining a 4X return. For others it could mean spending $1000 on a strategic, individual influencer project and landing a $2 million dollar contract.

Influencer marketing success can be evaluated in many different ways depending upon the scope of and aim of your approach. Smart marketers utilize and evaluate marketing influence success across multiple avenues – some they share and some they don’t.

Liked this post? Check out our new piece on SEO marketing strategy.

Data-Driven Content Marketing

Stefan Zechner is the Digital SEO, Social and Content Marketing Lead for Western Union. He focuses primarily on new customer acquisition through natural search and search optimization. He is accustomed to working with a variety of different departments, including IT, Content, Paid Performance, PR and Marketing at large.

Stefan ensures that there is cohesiveness throughout all of the different teams’ content activities and that all campaigns adhere to SEO best practices. Stefan’s incredible experience and expertise makes us excited to welcome him as a speaker at Share15. We had the chance to sit down with him and speak for a bit and we wanted to share some of the highlights from our conversation.

The Impact of Industry Changes

BrightEdge (BE): What changes in the search industry have had the biggest impact for you and your company?

Stefan Zechner (SZ): The mobile algorithm update in April 2015 was huge. It sparked a mindset change within our organization and helped us understand where our customer base and our future customers - especially millennials - have their focus. This, in turn, has been a huge influence on our UX department.

On the Rise of Personalization

BE: How do you see the space evolving over the next year - what should marketers look out for?

SZ: I think personalization is going to be huge. Semantic search is the first big step in this direction, but I feel strongly that this is just the beginning. It is all about getting more involved, more personalized and more direct in your communication with consumers as a marketer.

On His Presentation at Share

BE: What will you be discussing at Share15?

SZ: I will be delving into data-driven content strategy. I will explore how to use data to drive the right people to the right content at the right time and why SEO is such an important part of this process.

The Incredible Value of Share

BE: What will bring you to Share this year?

SZ: Because sharing is caring - but more seriously: I work under the mantra that when you share something, you challenge yourself and others to become better and more effective. BrightEdge is providing a platform, a safe-haven, for SEOs that ought to be used for collaboration and education. There are a variety of approaches to modern SEO obstacles. While we are all facing the same or similar issues, there are many roads that lead to success. I look forward to discussing issues, such as looking at content marketing and content creation through the lenses of compliance and legal challenges. The exchange of ideas and the opportunity to meet more professionals will be outstanding.

The Role of BrightEdge

BE: What role does BrightEdge play in your organization?

SZ: We use BrightEdge together with our agencies to not only assess current performance but also to check trends and research new keyword opportunities. We use a variety of different BrightEdge capabilities, in particular the Share of Voice and Competitor Analysis. The new StoryBuilder, which helps us create reports faster - and even on-the-fly - is awesome.  We love the variety and power of the BrightEdge technology. They also offer excellent customer support, which is always a fantastic resource.

The Fun Stuff

BE: Can you tell us some fun facts about your brand?

SZ: Western Union has been around for more than 160 years and has been transferring money for 140 years. We were the first company to launch a domestic communication satellite network, the first transcontinental telegraph line, the first microwave system to connect two cities, and the first singing telegraph. The brand has an incredible legacy and I enjoy being a part of it.

BE: What about some fun facts about yourself?

SZ: I cannot function in rooms that are warmer than 50 degrees. I also work best between 1 and 3 am and find that the best ideation can come during a good old SciFi series. This was a fun and enlightening conversation with Stefan. We look forward to hearing his presentation at Share in just a few weeks. If you have not signed up yet, make sure you do not miss the opportunity to hear him and the other speakers. Visit our event page and learn more fantastic reasons to attend.

Conference Details September 21-23 Westin St. Francis San Francisco, CA.

 

Majestic and Backlinks

Majestic is one of the leaders in providing backlink analysis and we are excited that they will be joining us in a few weeks for an educational lab at Share15. Majestic is our partner and helps to power our own backlink management software. The data our users can access through their technology is very useful and helps us provide a complete SEO management system that provides recommendations on how to get backlinks. We always enjoy having the opportunity to speak with Majestic, so we wanted to chat a bit before Share15 kicks off in just a few weeks. Dixon Jones, the Marketing Director for the brand, was able to find the chance to sit down with us. The conversation was very helpful and insightful and we wanted to share the highlights.

What Majestic will be presenting at BrightEdge's Share15

BrightEdge (BE): Can you tell us a little more about what you will be presenting at Share?

Dixon Jones(DJ): Our main objective is to let the attendees that are interested really get under the hood of backlink analysis because as people get technically proficient they are really able see the value of that data. Then there is a whole second learning curve in understanding how to turn “Link Analysis” into “Link Intelligence”. That might sound a bit cliche, but that is what we are doing. We will be running a workshop that will let attendees see how data is collected, how to analyze it, how to understand metrics and how to benefit from what we have to offer. By running this as an optional workshop, we hope to be able to go very deep into the Majestic engine without boring those that just want an overview. Those who are looking for more of an introduction can come to our booth with live data to see what we can offer.

What makes BrightEdge Share so special?

BE: Why Share15? What are you excited for the most about this event?

DJ: When we said that we would be at Share15 that was no small commitment. We will be traveling 5,351 miles from Majestic’s offices and we will be represented at director level. That is how important we view Share. Why Share15? Because we sense that this will be the “big” one. We attended Share14 and we were happy to be involved. There was an impressive turnout with fantastic attendees and speakers-- but we think that Share15 is going to be even better. It will have the same caliber of attendees, but also will be even more attuned to helping Majestic share knowledge and insight with the audience.

On getting the most out of the BrightEdge Share Conference

BE: What advice would you give to Share attendees to get the most out the event?

DJ: Network! There is so much talent at Share, but the talented people are not necessarily the extroverted ones. Just remember that the person that you probably REALLY want to talk to at the coffee break or the drinks reception is not the boisterous one taking up the limelight... but the quiet one in the corner. That said, you also want to have an exit route planned if you find yourself having to spend the entire conference speaking with the same person.

The Value of the BrightEdge-Majestic Partnership

BE: How has your partnership at BrightEdge influenced Majestic?

DJ: BrightEdge is Majestic’s largest user by many measures-- not least the sheer amount of data that they consume. It is enormous and both sides have invested a huge amount of energy in the early stages of the partnership, ensuring that the data bridge was robust enough for BrightEdge’s demands. I do not think any other partnership could have pulled this level of link-data crunching off. We respect BrightEdge’s ability to handle data and we believe that we have been a most reliable partner. To help cement that relationship, we allow BrightEdge to set up “BrightEdge Gold” accounts for their customers directly. This allows customers of BrightEdge to use one of the most advanced backlink checker tools and work directly with the Majestic data without any need for setting up a separate supplier agreement. This is a unique element of our very strong partnership. This was a fantastic conversation with Dixon Jones of Majestic.

We cannot wait to continue it in just a few weeks when Share15 kicks off in the heart of San Francisco. If you have not had the chance to register for the conference, visit our event page now to make sure you do not miss the opportunity.

Conference Details September 21-23 Westin, St. Francis San Francisco, CA

Generate Backlinks for SEO

Backlinks can be valuable for search engines looking to understand the role a particular website plays within the digital ecosystem of a topic. SEO backlinks speak to the perceived popularity and authority of the website and how helpful users find the information. As the Google algorithm continues to update to better understand user intent and identify high quality content, however, they have also been taking a careful look at these links. Link farms and links from low quality pages no longer can help websites and might even hurt them.

The role of backlinks in current SEO is debated as marketers try to determine if there is a place for link building in optimization efforts. We believe that SEO backlinks continue to play a valuable role in the success of content, but it is critical that you pursue your links effectively. Like everything else in SEO, your efforts become valuable when they offer something in turn for the end user. Here is what you need to know about effective backlink usage.

What makes a backlink valuable?

Google, and the other major search engines, want to see backlinks that come from other reputable sites to your page. It is understood that if a website is linking to another site, it is vouching for the content of that page. If the link is coming from a spam or otherwise poorly regarded website, however, this link will be worth little. When you have established and trusted websites linking to your page, however, it can have a big impact on your page’s traffic and how it is regarded by the search engine algorithms. It is worth noting a backlink SEO controversy that arose in the beginning of 2015.

John Mueller of Google seemed to imply during a Google hangout that webmasters should not be focusing on building links. When comparing what Mueller spoke about during this hangout when taken in context with what he said in past hangouts, however, it could be largely agreed that he was discouraging trying to build links with sites through spam methods. You want to make sure your links come from a variety of different sources and you want those links to make sense in terms of logic and consistency between your site and the referring site. You should not have to trick people into linking or negotiating a ‘you link to me, and I will link to you’ type scheme. These are the situations that Google frowns upon and could end up hurting your optimization efforts.

Link building is valuable when it provides purposeful and logical input for the end user. When a link to your site will help users further investigate a topic or answer their questions, you have a high-quality link. If you would want a particular site to link to you, even if it were a nofollow-link, then you know that is a backlink worth pursuing on a content and a traffic basis.

How to generate backlinks that are high-quality?

• Produce high-quality content
• Promote your content
• Leverage your thought-leadership
• Target particular sites that would be helpful for links
• Watch your backlinks profile

1. Produce high-quality content. If you want other reputable websites to link to your own pages, you need to first make sure that your content is worthy of the attention. People will only link to your pages when they find the information interesting and informative. Original hard data numbers draw a lot of backlink support. Focus on understanding exactly who the content is intended for and then dive into producing the high-quality information that they would like to read.

Generic and material that is replicated in different forms throughout the web will not produce the intended impact. Instead, analyze the topic, offer your opinion and deeply explore the material so that people trust your site and walk away from the information having learned something new.

2. Promote your content. Once your content has been developed to the quality standards that your intended audience would like to see, social media can be an excellent vehicle for promoting your material. Although Google has indicated that it does not check the social reputation of authors, they do index social media sites like other websites. That means links from social pages, such as Twitter or Facebook, may serve as helpful SEO backlinks where the networks are crawlable.

Social media will also help in increasing number of people come across your content. The more people who are exposed to your high-quality material will increase the number of people who share, forward, and place links to your content in their blogs and other websites.

3. Leverage your thought-leadership. Editorial links that involve company mentions in the media, such as thought-leadership articles that you write and publish on other highly regarded sites, are extremely beneficial for a backlink profile. To succeed in this area, you have to take your time to find a few sites that effectively target your ideal audience. You want to make sure you understand who reads the publication and what they want to see. The piece should not be focused on being promotional but rather aim to establish yourself as a leader within your field.

Keep overt company advertising to a minimum and develop content that is interesting and informative to increase editorial back links. It will be a great addition to your backlink profile while also expanding your brand reach and reputation.

4. Target particular sites that would be helpful for links. In addition to sites where you publish, it can be particularly helpful to target a few other sites that would generate backlinks that are useful. You want to find websites that also speak to your target audience and will find your information helpful while also having a strong reputation. Finding websites with desired traffic and page rank can be a challenge, but there are a number of tools that can help you evaluate the websites based upon the value backlinks can offer your own site.

At BrightEdge, we use Majestic’s technology to power our backlink analysis on our platform. Through a backlink analysis, you can easily track your own SEO backlink profile, including information, such as the type of link and the page URL. You can also track the domains that you are targeting for backlinks to monitor your success with your efforts. Once you have found sites that would serve you well for backlinks, you then need to attract their attention. Engage with the website and the authors on and off the page. Follow them on social media, comment on articles and become a part of the site’s community. This will encourage the site owners to look at your site and see what you have to offer as well. When you pair these efforts with the high-quality content you should be producing, you will have the recipe for success with your SEO backlinks.

5. Watch your backlinks profile. The idea of negative SEO is a controversial one. Although the major search engines generally say that it is difficult if not impossible to hurt another site through negative SEO, there are also reports of brands saying that their websites were impacted when they generate backlinks from spammy sites. It is always a good idea to check your backlinks and make sure that they are from reputable sites and can help your search engine rankings. If you find links that are not up to your quality standards, it is possible to disavow them so that Google knows that you do not want this site counted among your backlinks.

Backlinks are the fundamental structure of the Internet and are quality signal to search engines that your content is valuable and that people appreciate what you offer. The key to leveraging this signal to increase your page’s ranking is producing high-quality content and getting it in front of the people who are likely to link to it. Follow the best practices, and use the backlink checker tools available to you to get the most out of your SEO backlink building and optimization efforts.

Go Global and Manage Your Content

The Internet has been growing rapidly around the world. According to Eurostat, 78 percent of EU member households had Internet access in 2014, which was 36 percentage points higher than 2007. In 2014, it was also reported that 50 percent of people between 16 and 70 had used the Internet to purchase goods and services, compared to 44 percent just two years prior. In parts of the EU, particularly the UK, Denmark and Norway, that number reaches over three quarters of people in that age range. Econsultancy’s State of Digital Marketing in Asia 2013 found that it is growing rapidly in Asia as well.

As many as 73 percent of survey company participants indicated that content marketing would become an increasingly important aspect of their business plans over the next year. The digital ecosystem is growing, and businesses that want to build their brands internationally must be able to scale their SEO marketing strategy, their content and meet the growing demand in other countries and other languages. An effective content strategy to go global with requires more than just translating a website. Here is what all marketers should know about going international with their global marketing strategy.

Understand need

To reach your international audience, you first must have an intimate understanding of what the customers in that particular region want to see from you. It is not enough to assume that every country and language needs their own local site-- that would not be cost effective and might even end up costing you customers. The information you need, however, cannot be understood just from your website analytics.

Research into the local need and website culture is necessary. If you want to sell a particular product in Scandinavia, for example, you want to first establish that there is a market for it. Your website analytics will only tell you how many people speak English well enough to use your existing site. It will not tell you if there is a sizeable market that will be more encouraged to buy from a local site. You also have to watch for duplicate content penalties if you are building multiple local sites in the same language. If you have separate sites for the UK and the US, for example, but simply transferred the same content from one to the other, you might find yourself penalized in search results. You need to make sure the content is unique for the different locations.

Take into account cultural and linguistic factors

There are numerous terms in English that cannot be translated directly into another language. Other languages have their own systems of slang and casual speech that your prospective customers will be using when they type keywords into their search bar. If you want your content to succeed internationally, your global content team has to consider the optimization efforts necessary in the new language. This requires the use of native speakers as translators, not just someone who studied the language for a few years.

Only someone intimately familiar with the culture will be able to provide you with content that is not only in the desired language but also speaks to the desired audience. You should note that using local domains instead of just “.com” can be very beneficial for local optimization. The local domain tells Google where the site serves, helping it rank higher in queries from that region. It also helps establish a degree of trust with the local population and encourages people to link to your site and trust that you want to serve local customers. Making use of Google’s hreflang tag can help Google understand alternate versions of your pages in different locations and languages.

Analyze

A successful marketing strategy to go global with would not be complete without a full analysis. Analytics can tell you what types of content are resonating most with the local population and where you need improvement. Without analytics, you run the risk of just producing continual content and information without the substance needed to make it efficient or valuable. A culture of content can help you accomplish this goal.

Content should not be viewed as an offshoot of a single department. It needs to be part of the entire digital marketing ecosystem. When done correctly, content can provide direct value to the organization by enhancing brand reach and reputation as well as bringing in leads and sales. That is why you should focus on hard metrics that directly measure the site’s performance, return visitors, content engagement, and impact to sales rather than just page views. Metrics that measure your brand reach and reputation can be particularly helpful as you move into a new country and language. You will be able to see how well your site has been received. Measure data such as:

• The number of unique and return views compared to bounce rates and the time spent on the page
• The number of leads and sales achieved
• The number of comments left on pieces and how people engage with it
• What people are saying about your brand and how your content impacts the sentiment
• The cost per lead and the cost per sale

Using tools like the BrightEdge Content Optimizer can be particularly valuable. With BrightEdge Content Optimizer, you can closely look at how your pages are performing and how your competitor’s pages are performing. Learn about topics that are the highest in demand but the lowest in competition so that your writers can produce content that will be most likely to attract the desired audience. BrightEdge Content Optimizer also works inside the Adobe Experience Manager, which makes it straightforward to optimize the content before it’s published, which helps your content perform sooner – reaching a wider audience – almost immediately upon its publication.

Using Content Optimizer has the additional benefit of delivering scalable content optimization tools that improve content performance globally. Although different parts of your team will be working with different languages and cultures, Content Optimizer gives you a common framework for managing content performance, improving traffic, centralizing global content performance analytics, and unifying your content teams across the world. As an increasing number of businesses look to expand to markets beyond the English-speaking world, learning how to scale content globally is critical. To find success on the international stage, however, you need to scale your content efficiently, keeping in mind both the international concerns and the analytics of your content.  

How To Create Successful Content Performance Marketing

BrightEdge engagement research reveals the secret to successful content performance

We’ve spoken often about the content battleground that has emerged: every brand is fighting for attention against the massive volume of content being published daily. So what truly drives performance? As the leader in Content Performance Marketing, we wanted to dig deeper and offer a window into how brands can compete and be heard above the noise. Tapping into the Data Cube, a dataset of billions of pieces of web-wide content, we analyzed how B2B and B2C can create successful content performance online and across devices in our Content Engagement Study.

The successful content performance engagement marketing gap

What we discovered is a major disparity between the content that exists and the content that drives traffic, conversions, and revenue. We refer to this trio as "engagement," which happens to be the best predictor of successful content performance. Our research shows that consumer engagement is a mere 20 percent with B2C content, while B2B content engagement sits higher at nearly 50 percent.

Industry analysis – hospitality engagement is high but vertical strategies differ by industry

Broken down by industry, you can get an even more granular look at how engagement stacks up. The range in content engagement levels can be attributed, in part, to the fact that each industry’s content and sales strategies differ. Read more about how strategies differ in the full report here:  

Smartphones lead by devide type but lag behind desktop engagement

Regardless of whether you work in Hospitality, Manufacturing, Technology, Insurance or Retail, when it comes to engagement one fact holds true: there is a massive opportunity for strengthening the performance of your content — and this is especially important when device type is taken into consideration.

Interestingly, we found that although smartphones lead all device categories in market penetration, they lag behind desktop in engagement by a whopping 30 percent. Fierce competition on the content battleground means marketers can’t just blindly produce content and hope it performs. Instead marketers need to implement a cycle of demand, measurement and optimization — combined with analysis of competitive data — to drive successful content performance across the board. To learn more about how various industries stack up on the engagement scale, or to gain actionable best practices to improve your own content, check out our Content Engagement Study.

Be sure to join us at Share15 September 21-23 in downtown San Francisco. We’ll be meeting with leading marketers to discuss, learn and share insights around topics like content performance and driving engagement.  

 

 

As the very first SEO manager for The Container Store, Cade Burk is responsible for leading and growing all of the brand’s SEO efforts. We had the chance to sit down with him the other day and talk about some of the changes the brand has seen recently as well as the upcoming Share conference. It was a great conversation and we wanted to share some of the highlights.

On changes for the brand

BrightEdge (BE): What has been the biggest change for your company in the past year?

Cade Burke (CB): There have been many exciting changes to The Container Store online department in the last year. This includes launching our SEO department in 2014. We have also been working on improving our mobile usability and functionality while also doing a site-wide, URL restructure. These efforts have been yielding some great results as we are eager to see where the next year is going to take us.

BE: What are you doing to shift the focus from keyword to page performance strategies?

CB: Since our SEO efforts are new, we still have to do a considerable amount of work with keywords. We believe that keyword research is the basis of a successful SEO platform. As we begin to look beyond these basic SEO techniques and reach towards page performance, we have been leveraging BrightEdge in a variety of ways. The platform, for example, provides us with social recommendations to increase social shares. We have also launched a new lifestyle blog, Container Stories. We hope that with our efforts to create highly relevant, SEO- friendly content we'll see a rise in our performance in the SERPs.

BE: How are you aligning your content and search optimization efforts?

CB: As the leader of storage and organization in the retail world, it is important for The Container Store’s online efforts to reflect this same level of authority. In doing this, like most, we want to better understand what it is our customers are searching for and what their basic need is when inquiring on a search engine. By creating fresh content on our new lifestyle blog, Container Stories as well as constantly updating our website’s content we hope for our content marketing and our SEO efforts to become synonymous. It is important for us to still remain in line with the Hummingbird update and to provide not only a “best answer” approach, but also supply semantically related searches that portray a conversational approach to our content as well. We want to aim to tell a cohesive, keyword- friendly story throughout our content and pages.

The SEO journey at Share15

BE: Can you tell us a bit about your topic for your Share15 presentation? You do not have to give away the game, but we would love to get some teasers.

CB: At The Container Store we only really created an SEO department last year, so SEO is still a pretty new initiative for our brand. I plan on using my presentation to discuss our SEO journey. I think a lot of the attendees will be interested in seeing how a major corporation begins such a project from the ground up. BrightEdge has been a powerful ally for us in this journey, and we plan on discussing how we have learned through our partnership and what we have been able to accomplish so far.

BE: What are you looking forward to most about attending Share?

CB: Personally, I am looking forward to learning more about how other SEOs work in their day-to-day. I am interested in their team structures and how they tackle SEO initiatives at their respective companies.

The role of BrightEdge in this journey

BE: Speaking of BrightEdge, what has been your favorite part of the platform?

CB: I love the inventive reporting options as well as the possibilities that are built into the platform. I feel as though I am constantly learning something new when I sign in. There are aspects that I have not quite mastered, but I am looking forward to seeing what else the platform is capable of doing. One tool in particular, however, saves my team and me hours of work - the Data Cube! We love the insights and analysis available. We are also very pleased with the level of communication we receive from our BrightEdge representatives and account managers. Everyone has been incredibly helpful and a fantastic resource to have.

The fun stuff

BE: Can you tell us something fun about yourself?

CB: I love to travel! Last summer I climbed Machu Picchu. For my next trip, I want to do the TransAmerica bike trail across America. I am also an avid reader and have recently been trying to step up my golf game! It was great having a chance to chat with Cade before Share begins and we look forward to continuing the conversation in just a few weeks.

If you have not yet registered for Share, visit our event page to learn more. We look forward to seeing you there!

Conference Details September 21-23 Westin St. Francis San Francisco, CA.

Knowledge-Based Trust: A New Ranking Factor?

On February 12th eight Google engineers set the search world abuzz by publishing an academic paper entitled Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources that describes how trust and factual accuracy could be used to rank websites in the SERPs.

Here is the abstract from the paper:

"The quality of web sources has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous signals such as the hyperlink structure of the graph. We propose a new approach that relies on endogenous signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source. A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy. The facts are automatically extracted from each source by information extraction methods commonly used to construct knowledge bases. We propose a way to distinguish errors made in the extraction process from factual errors in the web source per se, by using joint inference in a novel multi-layer probabilistic model. We call the trustworthiness score we computed Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT). On synthetic data, we show that our method can reliably compute the true trustworthiness levels of the sources. We then apply it to a database of 2.8B facts extracted from the web, and thereby estimate the trustworthiness of 119M webpages. Manual evaluation of a subset of the results confirms the effectiveness of the method."

We know that Google’s algorithm takes dozens and dozens of factors into consideration when serving up search results, and we know what a lot of those factors are, such as on-page use of keywords and topics, anchor text, domain authority, and PageRank as a measure of a page’s link equity. But trust? Yes, trust as a ranking factor may be coming soon. And it’s easy to understand why. For a full breakdown of how Google's search results pages have changed over time, access our Google SERP Layout Changes research report.

What problem is Knowledge-Based Trust solving?

We all know the problem – a number of sites have great link profiles that are not generally considered trustworthy. Think about all those celebrity gossip sites out there or sites put up by political fringe groups that garner lots of links. You have to wonder -- might it be possible to algorithmically fact-check millions of pages and sites to identify those that are more trustworthy than others? First, Google’s engineers crawled millions of web pages and extracted 2.8 billion trusted facts. Then they compared those facts to data they found on 119 million webpages to estimate the trustworthiness of each page. When they manually checked a subset of their results, they found their algorithm to be highly effective at ranking trustworthiness.

How is trustworthiness of a website defined?

The trustworthiness or accuracy of a web source is defined as “the probability that it contains the correct value for a fact (such as Barack Obama’s nationality), assuming that it mentions any value for that fact. (Thus we do not penalize sources that have few facts, so long as they are correct.)” This suggests the possibility of calculating domain-level trust as well as page-level trust. If the Knowledge-Based Trust algorithm were to be polished and deployed, Google could, for example, crawl millions of pages on The New York Times site and calculate a Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT) score for the entire domain. And presumably a news story published on this domain could rank highly even if it contains a number of facts that cannot be verified algorithmically because the domain is considered trustworthy. We already know through an analysis of URLs published in the In-Depth Articles feature that Google maintains a short list of trusted domains, such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Now imagine that Google has the ability to algorithmically rank millions of domains for KBT and rank search results accordingly. It may become Panda on steroids.

What will be the consequences of Knowledge-Based Trust?

This new world would seem to favor well-financed domains with strong fact-checking safeguards and niche sites with excellent quality control over more limited subject matter. And the consequences could be far reaching. Consider: if you were the editor of a medical publications site, KBT would increase the pressure on you to think even more carefully about publishing an article on potentially controversial research. Remember that article that kicked off the anti-vaccination movement? And certainly KBT would contribute to the continuing decline of link metrics as a ranking factor. Few will mourn the decreased weight of link metrics. There’s a quote in Google’s paper attributed to Isaac Watts that bears repeating: “Learning to trust is one of life’s most difficult tasks.” It looks like this could usher in a new era of trust on the internet.