Last week the Share15 team managed to catch up with Alex Edlund, Director of Global Search, at Marriott International for an exclusive interview on the digital revolution at Marriott. As part of the Share15 interview series Alex shares insights into how advancements in technology and user behavior have forced companies to rethink how to best structure and operationalize their marketing organizations. Alex is the Global Director, Search Marketing for Marriott International where he oversees performance-marketing initiatives for more than 4000+ properties worldwide.

Since 1927, when the journey began, Marriott has only had three CEOs. Marriott operates more than 4000 hotels in 70 countries and employs roughly 150,000 people around the world. The Marriott search marketing team manages multiple agencies across the world, responsible for growing search visibility in a multi-billion dollar channel.

The search landscape – search engines in the travel industry

BE: How much has the search landscape changed over the last year?

AE: Search engines are increasingly successful in delivering a single platform experience for your content needs. The travel industry has seen a great change in how consumers behave in search with a growing number of users clicking on links that keep them in search engines. This has many implications-- both for users and companies. We are noticing organic click share decrease as ad space grows and Google Hotel Ads are seeing much stronger integration and click share than ever. As a company we need to understand and act on these trends to ensure we remain competitive in growing search visibility.

BE: What has had the biggest impact for you at Marriott?

AE: The on-going shift in consumer behavior cross-device must serve as the largest impact to how we measure and engage with people. Not only does it force us to rethink attribution, it also drives design and delivery of mobile first experiences that serves content differently. The opportunity to deliver relevant messaging is greater than ever, but there’s also a great challenge in executing that relevance in an increasingly complex environment.

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

AE: Marketers need to understand that your data strategy is everything to the success of your marketing efforts. Your marketing decisions need to be informed by a model that routinely finds and influences the right consumers in the right moment irrespective of channel. Companies who employ sophisticated data capture, integration, and modeling practices and use this data programmatically will thrive.

BE: What tips can you share on adapting to rapid change in the market?

AE: Advancements in technology and user behavior force companies to rethink how to best structure and operationalize their marketing organization. Gone are the days of channel teams and last-click attribution. Additionally, listen and empower your customers and build trust and loyalty through authenticity. Traditional branding practices are not effective in today’s transparent world. Companies who understand that the power of balance has shifted are equipped to win. Find a way to let consumers advocate on your behalf.

The search, content, and digital media revolution

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

AE: The two are inextricably linked through goal alignment, injecting SEO visibility into content marketing efforts, and using search insights to shape content calendars.

BE: How critical is measurement of content in your organization?

AE: Marriott has gone through a digital revolution with the establishment of a massive 65-person in-house content studio, MLive, our social media hub and content marketers in every corner. Over the last six months we’ve produced a wealth of content projects such as “Two Bellmen,” “French Kiss,” Marriott Traveler and working together with influencers. Our goal is to become the Red Bull of travel, the world’s favorite travel company and to get there we need cutting-edge measurement. We employ a series of analytics tools to understand what content drives visibility in search, social media, and beyond.

Content marketing and the brand vehicle

BE: Tell me more about your view on the convergence of content and digital marketing.

AE: Content marketing is the new branding vehicle. We connect with our customers by sharing stories that they can relate with and aspire to experience. While our goal remain to put "heads in beds," we must never forget that we are a travel company, and people seek all forms of content to inspire travel. When we talk about native advertising or the idea of using unique and compelling content to win the hearts, minds, and wallets of next generation customers, that starts with great content and digital marketing exposes and amplifies that content to a larger audience. In the last year, no major content project at Marriott has gone without the support of a paid distribution plan, and I suspect we’ll continue that way for a long time ahead. Consumers want information and a reason to care, and today’s successful content marketing builds brand affinity through storytelling.

The orchestration of paid, owned, and earned media

BE: What are the challenges and what advice can you give the audience about the convergence of paid, owned and earned media?

AE: It takes time and orchestration among several, sometimes disparate, groups of people from various departments with different stakes in the game. It’s time-consuming and labor-intensive with all the required orchestration. You’re creating a micro-symphony and if you get it right, you can make substantial impact. If you get it wrong, nothing happens. So, create multiple scenarios with contingency plans to hedge your bets.

Marriott session at Share15

AE: My session covers the previous question about the challenges and insights that we at Marriott gained from a recent project that brought several groups together to create an experience that would lift and shift the perception of Marriott as a travel company. This involved utilizing paid, owned, and earned media to offer a unique experience to our next gen customers.

The Marriott and BrightEdge partnership

BE: Could you tell the audience a little more about how you use BrightEdge and how the platform helps you achieve your business objectives? AE: Data transparency has been a real issue for search marketers for quite some time now. BrightEdge fills a strategic role in Marriott’s search marketing strategy in driving high-impact decisions through content and search insights. The BrightEdge Data Cube is a tremendous technology that gives Marriott insights and captures missed opportunities. The Data Cube continues to be an extremely valuable capability. BrightEdge makes me smarter.

About Share15 – the high concentration of digital and search marketers

BE: Why Share – why do you attend?

AE: ‘Share15’ has evolved greatly over a short span of time. No conference today has assembled such concentration of search and digital marketers from big brands and that’s a very compelling proposition. I want to hear and learn about innovation in our space from individuals in companies similar to Marriott. I am really looking forward to the connections and conversations sparked by like-minded people from all over the world.

More about Alex

Alex is Swedish-born and raised. He met his wife in Spain in 2004 and moved to Las Vegas four years later, where he made a career in digital marketing. Alex joined the largest family in hospitality a year ago to run Marriott’s search marketing program. He lives in Bethesda, MD, with his wife and two kids, age four and two. A soccer fan and keen traveler don’t be surprised if you find Alex singing ABBA in a karaoke bar.

Share15 – join the digital marketing community

 This year Share15 is even bigger and better with over 60 speakers from an envious collection of the world’s leading brands. In fact, no other conference compares to Share with regard to:

1. Concentration of quality brands and thought leaders at Share15
2. Focus on delivery of insights and actionable takeaways
3. Zero tolerance on sales pitches
4. Attendee profiles across search, content and digital marketing

Space is limited so register now to avoid disappointment. #Share 15 @brightedge

Meet Eric Enge

As a professional who has worked in SEO since 2002, Eric Enge has seen his share of industry changes. He now serves as the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting and is the lead author for The Art of SEO, which will be released for its 3rd Edition by O’Reilly Media in August 2015.

The 50-person Stone Temple Consulting agency works with some of the world’s largest brands and truly practices what they preach. They bring in their clients exclusively through their content marketing strategies - there is no sales team! Eric will be attending and speaking at Share for the first time this year and is excited to rub shoulders with some of the greatest minds in the industry.

Getting together so many advanced and experienced marketers promises to provide everyone in attendance with fantastic learning and networking opportunities. Eric and BrightEdge sat down to discuss the upcoming conference as well as the changing digital landscape and how companies can get noticed.

About Share

BrightEdge (BE) We are excited to hear about your presentation at Share. Tell us more about it.

Eric Enge (EE): I am going to present on the evolution of the digital and SEO professional (or the SEO team) and what it takes to be successful in today’s environment. My talk will illustrate how a successful SEO program contains many different elements that must work together to successfully get content in front of the appropriate audience. At the heart of the talk will be some ideas about how to pull together an organization or develop a personal strategy that will help you deliver outstanding results while also minimizing potential disruption from future Google algorithm changes.

In my experience, it’s best to stay focused on your customer. Yes, you need to be smart about what Google is doing as well as the mechanics and limitations of search engines. Your primary priority, however, should always be on your customers and how to create a superior experience for them. That is what Google wants to rank highest anyway, so by making this your chief focus you will be prepared for future Google shifts. I plan on exploring these and other ideas to a much deeper degree so that people can walk away with a firm idea about how they can create a strong, lasting content strategy.

BE: What advice can you give share attendees in order for them to make the most out of their Share15 experience?

EE: Pick out the people you really want to hear speak (pick me, pick me!) and make a point of putting aside the time in your calendar to see their presentations. Then, take advantage of networking opportunities to meet some new people and perhaps forge some new partnerships.

About the industry

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

EE: Google will continue pushing towards building the Star Trek computer. That means they will expand their computing capacity, continue to experiment with more rich-answer boxes and continue to add more structured databases of information. You will see more progress on this during the coming year. You will also see more action against various types of spam as well. Perhaps more doorway updates, a Panda or Penguin update, etc. I’d also expect that the mobile update will see a major revision before the year’s end.

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

EE:The search world and the role of the web is now highly integrated. Content on your site plays a direct role in bringing links to your site and establishing your overall authority. Content measurement is also the primary driver of growth for our business and we take it extremely seriously. Measurement allows you to gauge the success of your efforts and helps you fine tune your campaigns so that you can see continuous results over time. At the same time, one of the biggest challengers for marketers is finding a way to stay above the noise. The sheer amount of content being produced now means that for your content to attract attention it has to be meaningful and it has to be helpful.

Generic, uninspired content is not going to cut it any more. You need to choose your channels wisely and pick the ones where a large percentage of your target audience spends time- for both your paid and owned strategies. Creating differentiated content and distributing it through the right channels will help you get the most earned media results.

About BrightEdge

BE: How do you work with BrightEdge?

EE: We get fantastic competitive analysis data from BrightEdge. We use this valuable insight on our client’s behalf to help them see results from their content campaigns. Our clients use the BE platforms to collect key data points, such as Share of Voice measurement, to perform Content Optimization and much more. We use the data to tune the digital marketing strategies we put in place for our clients.

The fun stuff

Did you know that Eric was the 1984 World Champion in Foosball? It was in an event known as Goale War. He also won the US National Championship in 1985. Foosball at Share15 for a beer anyone? Anyone? Eric promises to deliver an engaging and informative presentation at Share15 this September.

We look forward to speaking more with him about the industry and the future of digital marketing in just a few weeks.

If you have not signed up yet to participate in this exciting conference, there is just a short time left to take advantage of the Early Bird Special! Early Bird pricing ends July 31.

Share15 Details September 21-23 Westin St. Francis San Francisco, CA We hope to see you there! 

Brand new products are unveiled every day — and many of them fall short. In fact, up to 95 percent of the new products introduced each year are ultimately unsuccessful. That’s a lot of time, money and relationships wasted. The reality is that consumers today demand near perfection, and with so much innovation occurring in and outside of Silicon Valley on a daily basis, we’ve all been spoiled in receiving it. But what happens when a new product doesn’t measure up? It’s a quick road to obsolescence for one reason: customers don’t value it.

The key to building a successful product ultimately lies in delivering value to your customers — not once, but repeatedly. In an era of almost complete transparency, customer satisfaction and feedback has never been more accessible or more essential. Every company should be focused on leveraging customer relationships to drive product development priorities. Tapping into honest, insightful feedback is key to understanding what delivers value, drives business success and ultimately becomes essential to any customer’s work. Here’s how we do it at BrightEdge:

Build a circle of trust for customer satisfaction

The first step to leveraging customer relationships is to start listening. No matter the size or industry of your customers, they all have a monumental importance in finding your own product success. Their willingness, dedication and honesty in offering product feedback are key to future innovation — so listen closely and respectfully. Take their hang-ups, difficulties and feedback seriously and identify the big issues that plague the larger group. If you’re looking for complete honesty, be prepared to hear it, and make your customers feel safe in giving whatever feedback they have. It’s all constructive in the end. At BrightEdge, we’re lucky enough to have developed powerful relationships with our customers — and we continue striving to strengthen these relationships every day (we even won an award for it!). We know that a huge part of finding success as a company lies in customer relationship management, so we work to empower our product managers with time to meet and get to know the businesses we serve. Building relationships starts with trust, so we prioritize building it with customers before expecting intellectually honest feedback.

Nice-to-haves won't change the world

As an expert on your product — and your industry — it’s up to you to understand what your customers need as opposed to what they think they need. However, it’s also important to remember that surface-level necessities might be symptoms of deeper, more complicated problems that need solving. And the distinction between those lies in two questions.

The first: Will your product help the customer satisfied and successful? Whether that’s in their relationships, their profits or their overall business results, customer success (and satisfaction) is what keeps your business growing. However, you’re not just in business to answer every customer’s whim — presumably, you’re looking to innovate on a larger scale.

So, that begs an important second question: Can your customers live or work without your product? Whether a product helps each of your individual customers succeed or not, this answer must inarguably be “no.” While building an indispensable product naturally takes time, Salesforce or Oracle didn’t get where they are by creating a suite of nice-to-haves. Optional technology is simply not enough to support business results and to renew customers year after year. We pay close attention to how our customers value our products, and we take note of the results of their product usage.

If enough of our customers identify the same issue, we know it’s a priority item. The problems worth solving are the ones that directly affect how our customers work, and we know that solving them is what keeps our customers loyal. We’re deeply invested in the success of our customers and customer satisfaction as a collective, which is why we’re inviting them all to be a part of Share15, the leading digital marketing event of the year. Join us in San Francisco this year to learn how best to leverage BrightEdge technology as well as to hear from industry experts on how to optimize success in marketing.  

Content Performance Marketing is a driving force in digital marketing, which requires an organized and disciplined approach to producing and tracking multiple asset classes, including the site, images, videos, graphics, and importantly the blog. Understanding how prospects and customers interact with content on the customer journey helps plan and manage content assets. In Google Analytics, under Audience/Users Flow you can visualize the customers’ paths into, through and out of the site.

Why blog? Blogs usually work toward the top of the funnel to build initial awareness and brand recognition. Related content suggestions will help move visitors laterally through the blog and internal links in the blog will help pull visitors deeper into the website. Getting readers to subscribe to a newsletter or download a white paper will transition them from the outer funnel into the middle prospect funnel where you can better control the interaction with outreach.

As of May 2015, there were approximately 47 billion web pages indexed on Google. For businesses looking to leverage the internet to find customers, that number can be intimidating. Read more on blogging and SEO and learn the eight Steps to a Successful blog in Jim Yu's popular post on SearchEngineWatch.

 

 

29% of companies report that they do not do site and page testing and we suspect the number is even higher. Landing pages are where content meets psychology. These pages are optimized to entice customers not only to read the content but to click on the offer, fill out the form, and convert into leads. While these pages might look simple to the viewer, a well-optimized landing page has actually been carefully constructed and tested to capture the attention of the customer. The landing page is your opportunity to convince customers that your initial offer is worthwhile and get them to become a lead, connect to your brand, and do business with you.

Optimizing the Design

The key to a successful landing page is simplicity. A 2012 study co-published by Google found that website visitors are far more likely to favor websites that are less visual complex and have more predictable layouts. When customers become overwhelmed by excessive information, images, and other content on the page, they will become more likely to bounce off the page without converting. A high-quality landing page will follow these guidelines:

• The desired customer action is clear: the form and offer are both easy to find and understand.
• The layout is simple: there should be no excessive information or images that detract from the desired customer action. Use one to two images that help to communicate the nature of the offer but eliminate any distractions.
• One CTA: One landing page per CTA, too many confuse customers about what they are supposed to be doing and it decreases conversion rates.
• Use a simple form: The form should be as short as possible to minimize the ‘cost’ that the brain perceives. Asking for too much information --even ‘optional’ information-- decreases conversions.
• Build trust: assure visitors of secure servers, use customer testimonials, and display badges, logos, and awards that increase trust in your company. BrightEdge works to build trust by displaying the logos of companies they have worked with.

Pay Attention to Language

The language you use on the landing page should be consistent with the offers you used to bring the customer to the site. That means keywords that had been used to entice people to visit the site should be repeated on the landing page. They should be used in the URL, the headings, and in the content. This will help reassure site visitors that they have landed on the correct page. Technology like the BrightEdge Data Cube can help you identify meaningful keywords that will help the landing page speak to visitors and identify their needs and user intent. People also have an innate desire to avoid loss.

A study run in 2007 monitored how college students responded to two emails. One asked them to sign up early for an offer to receive a discount. Another warned them to avoid signing up late and receiving a penalty. Although the frequency the same in both emails, 93 percent responded to the warning to avoid a penalty, compared to only 67 percent that responded to the offer to receive a discount. This is a psychological phenomenon called loss aversion. People worry more about avoiding losing out on an opportunity than receiving a potential award. Language used on the landing page should reflect this insight. Remembering to keep the content on the landing page brief and to the point, use the opportunity to point out to your visitors what they would be missing by passing on your offer. Bullet points and short paragraphs can be wonderful for communicating this information.

Look at how BrightEdge has their content arranged on the landing page for their demo offer. Language also can make a difference in the wording of buttons and sign-up forms on the page. People generally respond better to buttons that speak to them from their point of view, such as “Start My Free Download” vs. “Start Download” or “Start Your Free Download”.

Landing Page Testing

When a landing page is visited by thousands of people per day, even increases by just a few percentage points can mean a dramatic increase in leads and revenue. A/B testing gives you the power to optimize your landing page to maximize your conversions. In a basic A/B test you will create two versions of your page.

For example, you might want to test two images on the page or the wording of your offer. A/B testing will allow you to run both pages simultaneously. The program will randomly show either site A or site B to your visitors in equal amounts. The site that gains the highest percentage of conversions will be the winner. You will then make this site your standard landing page. A/B tests can also be used to compare several pages at once in more complex tests. Landing pages can be used to test nearly everything about a landing page, from major differences, such as layout changes or bounce rate, to small details, such as the color of the conversion button.

Conversion optimization specialists have seen measurable differences in conversion rates from making very small changes, such as a red button or a green button. There are a variety of different A/B testing tools available. Google Analytics Experiments is an option. This platform lets you test up to ten versions of a single page and allows you to customize who participates in the test. VWO is another popular A/B testing tools that allows you to create separate versions of the website by inserting a small JavaScript code into the webpage. Adobe Target offers sophisticated multivariate testing options and BrightEdge has announced an integration with it call Landing Page Optimizer, which enables marketers to:

• Gain access to in-depth, real-time competitor landing page data
• Quickly create landing page tests based on your actual competitors’ content

 Quality landing pages can make an enormous difference in conversion rates and the success of a digital marketing campaign. According to Econsultancy, companies who have improved their conversion rates have used 50 percent more tests on their websites to identify weaknesses and maximize the impact of landing pages. While landing pages might look simple, the thought and care that must go into the development is enormous. As you prepare to build landing pages, remember to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and then test repeatedly to refine the methods.