TIQ Digital

Author: TIQ Team

  • How B2B Marketers Can Get the Most Out of Webinars in 2020

    How B2B Marketers Can Get the Most Out of Webinars in 2020

    There has to be a word for the creeping dread B2B marketers have been feeling this year, preferably something German with a ton of umlauts.

     

    As we watched events in the spring cancel, postpone, or go virtual, we held out hope that summer would be different. Then July’s events moved out. Now it’s looking like the type of large-scale events B2B marketers depend on will have to wait until 2021… at the earliest.

     

    But we don’t have to despair! We can close the gap with virtual events. The speaking gig at an industry conference can become a webinar, as can a planned panel discussion or product demonstration. 

     

    The good news is plenty of people have more spare time than before to watch your webinar.

     

    The bad news is that everyone who makes webinars has time on their hands, too. So, your webinar has to have a little extra oomph to stand out in the crowd. 

    Here’s how you can level up your webinar creation and promotion.

     

    How to Get the Most from Your B2B Webinar

    It’s no longer enough to put up a slide deck and talk through bullet points. These tips will help you make a more compelling webinar — and make sure that people attend it.

     

    Start with Content Research

    No marketer worth their salt would make a blog post without doing content research. Why should your webinar be different? 

    To determine the best subject matter for your webinar, bring all of your research tools to bear:

    • SEO research via SEMRush and Google Analytics
    • Question research via BuzzSumo and AnswerthePublic
    • Prospect feedback from your sales team
    • Competitor content evaluation

    All of these resources will help you home in on the topics that your audience most wants to hear about. Your research might even drive what type of webinar you create: If your audience needs how-to advice, you might do a live demonstration. If they’re looking for thought leadership, you might partner with influencers. Speaking of the latter…

     

    Reach Out to Influencers

    In case you missed the headline yesterday, B2B Influencer Marketing is kind of a big deal. There’s no greater boost to your credibility (and your potential audience) than adding industry thought leaders to your webinar. 

     

    Look for people who are influential with your audience — those who are regularly producing content and engaging with anyone who posts a comment. They don’t have to have Taylor Swift-level follower counts to make a difference. They just have to be able to get a relevant audience’s attention and hold it.

     

    Also, it’s not enough to just have someone appear with you on camera, though — it’s important to ask meaningful questions that will enable a substantive discussion. Keep your content research in mind as you plan the interview.

     

    Create a Landing Page & Promote

    Give your audience plenty of time to prepare for your webinar. We recommend starting outreach at least two weeks beforehand, and up to a month if you can swing it. 

     

    Create a short landing page to collect sign-ups — include a few key points you plan to cover, and introduce yourself and your guests. You can promote the landing page via social media — image-led social works well — and blog content that builds anticipation for your topic.

     

    Don’t forget to include the webinar in your newsletter, and to enlist your influencers to drive pre-registration.

     

    One great way to promote the webinar, and focus your content at the same time, is to poll your audience via social media. Ask for their thoughts on your topic. Ask what they most want to know about it. Ask what they would like to ask your thought leader guest. These posts can help drive registration while also making sure the content will be more relevant to the audience.

     

    Change Up the Format

    The Q&A, the panel discussion, the lecture — there are a few tried-and-true formats for webinars. But as the market gets flooded with content, we need to be more creative. For example, what about a working session instead of a discussion, where your panel collaboratively creates something? Or what about spicing up an interview with interstitial, pre-produced video content? 

     

    You could even host the webinar on a platform like LinkedIn Live (while recording it for later publication, of course) and interact in real time with the audience. Just make sure to have a moderator to help keep the questions flowing smoothly.

     

    Plan and Practice, But Be Flexible

    It’s always a good idea to run through your entire webinar a few times before you go live. If you’re doing a lecture or presentation format, that means practicing all the content you plan to put across. For a panel discussion or interview, you may not be able to do a full run-through with your influencer, but you can still test the technology you will be using.

     

    Don’t let your practicing and planning make your presentation too rigid, though. You should be able to follow an interesting conversational thread in your interview, or incorporate an audience comment in your presentation, without the whole thing going off the rails.

     

    Of course, it’s always going to be tricky to run a live presentation, especially if you or your guests don’t do this type of presenting for a living. It can be challenging to think on your feet, come across as engaging, and keep a conversation focused and interesting to your audience.

     

    Which is why I’m going to court controversy and say…

     

    You Don’t Have to Be Live

    As we think about changing up the format and offering a higher-quality experience to the audience, it may be time to let go of the idea that webinars have to be live. 

     

    After all, editing is the gift that you give to your audience. You wouldn’t write a blog post in real time with a hundred people watching. You wouldn’t record a podcast episode and publish the raw audio. So why not pre-record and edit your webinar?

     

    It’s true there is an immediacy to a live presentation that would be lost with a pre-recorded one. But the boost in quality for the audience could cover that loss. And you can still have an interactive experience with the audience through chat. You could even play the pre-recorded portion first, then hop on the video stream live for an audience Q&A.

     

    There’s an enormous gap between the standard slideshow & lecture webinar and the produced, polished video that audiences appreciate most. Pre-recording and editing is one way to start closing that gap. 

     

    Follow Up with Extra Content

    What should your audience do next after attending the webinar? That’s a question to answer before you take your first registration. Once you have a next step in mind, create a content bundle to send to each registrant after the webinar airs. This bundle could include a normally gated eBook or two, some recommended reading from your blog, or more content from your influencer guests.

     

    You can also create extra content from the webinar to help fill out your editorial calendar. Use excerpts from your discussion to fuel blog posts. Repurpose the audio as a podcast. Pull the best quotes to use as video posts on social media that drive to a gated version of the recorded webinar. Essentially, it’s about getting the most value possible from your content asset — the same thing you do with eBooks or blogs.

     

    Webinars Killed the Radio Star

    The pandemic has made webinars a go-to tactic for marketers who are missing out on face-to-face events. But as more marketers get into the webinar game, your content needs to be extraordinarily valuable and extremely well-promoted. If you plan, produce and promote your webinar with the same strategic care that you use for the rest of your content marketing, you’ll bring your audience more value and earn their attention in return.

     

    Check out our CEO Lee Odden in a recent webinar: Social Media in the Times of Social Distancing.

     

    The post How B2B Marketers Can Get the Most Out of Webinars in 2020 appeared first on Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

     

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  • How To Level Up Marketing Content From B2B Influencers

    How To Level Up Marketing Content From B2B Influencers

    B2B Marketing- Methodology

    Why do you even need a content person for influencer marketing?

     

    After all, the influencers are providing the content. You just have to collect their pearls of wisdom, make them look pretty in a PDF, and you’re good to go, right?

     

    I’ll confess, on my first influencer marketing project, I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing there. Over the last few years, however, I’ve come to understand the role that content marketers can play in shaping influencer content.

     

    It’s the content lead’s job to shape the conversation with the influencer. We have to ask the right questions, and provide a structure and framework to elicit thoughtful, detailed responses.

     

    There are a few extraordinary thought leaders who will dash off a thousand-word, amazingly insightful response to the vaguest prompt. But most folks — even those who write for a living — need more to go on than “What is the biggest problem facing our industry?”

     

    The influencers you’re talking to have spent hours of time and effort learning about their subject matter, building an audience with powerful, useful content that provokes action. When you email that list of questions, or sit down for an interview, make sure you don’t leave any insight untapped.

     

    Here’s how we at TopRank are evolving our influencer approach to get at that next-level content.

     

    How to Unleash Your Influencer Content

    So you’ve identified the true influencers to your target audience, you’ve developed relationships, and now you’re ready to co-create content together. Before you start, make sure you lay the groundwork for a productive Q&A.

     

    Ask More Specific Questions

    Influencers will take their cue on how to answer based on how you ask the question.  If you start with a mile-high question like, “What challenges should leaders be aware of right now?”, you’re likely to get a high-level response, something vague and oracular. That’s not because the interviewee can’t get into specifics — it’s because you didn’t invite them to.

     

    A better approach is to find out the biggest challenges that your industry is facing, pick one, and ask what we should be doing about it: “The latest Gartner report says that 75% of managers don’t have enough donuts in the breakroom. What are the options for HR leaders to fix this problem? What do you recommend?”

     

    Limit the scope of your question, and you invite the influencer to give a more detailed response.

     

    [bctt tweet=”Limit the scope of your question, and you invite the influencer to give a more detailed response. @NiteWrites on #InfluencerMarketing interviews.” username=”toprank”]

     

    Don’t Ask Questions Everyone Knows the Answer To

    It’s easy to fall into this particular trap. You offer the influencer softball questions that have a broad consensus for the answer, they agree with the consensus, everyone goes home happy. 

     

    I’m talking about questions like, “Do you think automation is, on the whole, a good thing or bad thing?”  And they answer, “Well, it’s a different thing. It will cost some people their jobs, but for others it will make their jobs less repetitive and more meaningful, and that will open up new opportunities to innovate.” 

     

    The above is perfectly acceptable, content-wise, but it’s a waste of your influencer’s time and talent. You don’t hire LeBron James to dunk on a 4-foot rim. Ask questions you don’t know the answer to, questions that your industry is struggling with, questions that cry out for guidance!

     

    [bctt tweet=”You don’t hire LeBron James to dunk on a 4-foot rim. Ask questions you don’t know the answer to, questions that your industry is struggling with, questions that cry out for guidance! @NiteWrites on #InfluencerMarketing” username=”toprank”]

     

    And, of course, give your influencer plenty of time to think about these questions and formulate thoughtful responses.

     

    Let Your Audience Ask the Questions

    One of the best ways to get at these more detailed, more challenging questions is to see what questions your audience is actually asking. There are two ways to go about soliciting audience questions for an influencer.

     

    The first is the direct one: Ask on your social media channels and your email newsletter. For example, a Twitter post could say, “If you could ask Lee Odden one question about influencer marketing, what would it be? Answer with #AskLeeO.” Collect the most pertinent questions and let them guide the interview.

     

    The second way to let your audience ask the questions is to do some keyword research. The topics your audience is searching for are the ones they need answers on. If they had the answers, they wouldn’t be searching! But don’t stop at the highest-volume keywords; those are likely to be too general. Dig into the long-tails on a tool like SEMrush to get at the burning questions.

     

    Ask for Stories

    Many of the influencers we work with are consultants, keynote speakers, or have been executives at multiple companies. These folks have a ton of practical experience — we just have to ask them to draw on it.

     

    Instead of asking, “What do you think are the three biggest challenges,” ask, “What problems are your clients coming to you with?” Or, even better, “Have you had clients with a similar problem? Tell me about how you advised them, what they did to solve it, and what success looks like.”

     

    Asking for stories like this gives your influencer a chance to demonstrate their expertise in action, and offers your audience a more grounded, relatable look at your topic.

     

    Power Up Your B2B Influencer Content

    Content planning is a crucial part of influencer marketing. It’s the content team’s job to ask questions that meet audience demand, inspire thoughtful contemplation, and make full use of the influencer’s experience and insight. Asking the right questions is the difference between good and great influencer content.

     

    If you want to level up your B2B influencer marketing content, make your questions specific, skip telling the audience what they already know, and ask for unique stories that only your influencer could tell.

     

    Want to power up your influencer marketing even more? Check out The B2B Marketing Force Multiplier: Integrated SEO and Influencer Marketing.

     

    The post How To Level Up Marketing Content From B2B Influencers appeared first on Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

     

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  • IAB’s first publication on blockchain in advertising paints an optimistic picture

    IAB’s first publication on blockchain in advertising paints an optimistic picture

    Blockchain Report

    In a sign that blockchain is picking up steam as a solution to some of digital advertising’s biggest problems, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released this week its first publication on the topic.

     

    The white paper, “Blockchain for Video Advertising: A Market Snapshot of Publisher & Buyer Uses Cases,” surveys the technology, its potential added values — including transparency, reduced fraud and increased efficiency — and looks at several use cases.

     

    Blockchains are distributed ledgers where transactions are open to all participants and, once recorded to the chain, are virtually impossible to change. There is no central authority because blockchain tech is built on various kinds of consensus. The advantage of this approach is trust between parties who don’t know each other, and possibly less fraud because transactions are known.

     

    From the IAB white paper

    The report looks at several pilot projects. There’s AdLedger, a non-profit consortium of ad and media companies that is working to mainstream the technology. Los Angeles-based MetaX has launched Ads.txt Plus, which employs blockchain so publishers can maintain and publish their own Ads.txt files of approved suppliers of their inventory. Eventually, authorized sellers might be able to verify authorized sellers even if the sellers’ names aren’t shown.

     

    Kochava’s XCHNG intends to open-source its blockchain framework later this year, based on the idea that insert orders can become smart contracts. And NYIAX has built its blockchain-based environment on Nasdaq’s Financial Framework, but instead of stocks, it adds a new asset class: digital ads.

     

    IAB’s paper is bullish on the technology, noting that this year will see more deployments in advertising, many in the proof-of-concept or pilot stage. By next year, IAB predicts, blockchain could take hold in the industry. But it also notes the challenges, such as improving blockchain’s sluggish performance speed, creating standards for identity management and a raft of legal issues.

     

    The vision is certainly enticing for an ad industry struggling to maintain its balance against fraud, transparency and a new approach to personal data because of the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Here’s one glimpse of that possible future, outlined in the white paper by MadHive CTO Tom Bollich:

    “In the future, we would like to push the ad server out to the edges. Instead of housing user data in a centralized data store, [MadHive’s blockchain project] allows users to keep their data completely private by pushing ad decisioning to the edges — to the users’ devices. For example, can I put an ad server in your TV that is cryptographically sealed and holds your personal information inside of it? The ad server actually asks for advertising as opposed to getting pushed advertising. You never actually tell anyone who you are. That’s the future we see. Can your TV work with your phone, and then maybe even your fridge, to know who you are and give advertisers a deeper understanding of who the user is? We think so — and the blockchain can deliver it.”

    Source

     

  • Quora adds more contextual & behavioral ad-targeting options

    Quora adds more contextual & behavioral ad-targeting options

    Quora launched its ad platform in 2017 with topic targeting. Now, the question-and-answer network is expanding its ad targeting offerings.

     

    Quora announced Monday more options for behavioral and contextual targeting to either narrow or widen audience targets.

     

    Behavioral (people-based) targeting

    Last summer, Quora introduced website retargeting to the platform. Now it’s adding interest and lookalike options

    • Interest Targeting — Reach users who have engaged with specific topics by reading questions, voting on answers and more.
    • Lookalike Targeting — Cast a wider net by targeting users that have similar attributes to an advertiser’s existing audience in Quora Ads manager.

    Contextual (content-based) targeting

    In addition to topic targeting, Quora is adding two new options for contextual targeting.

    • Question Targeting — Ads can show on specific questions and be tailored to that content. This is Quora’s most granular level of targeting.
    • Multiple Topic Targeting — Upload your Google keywords to find matching Topics on Quora and target multiple Topics with your ads.

    Location and device targeting can be layered on top of any of these options.

    Additionally, advertisers on the platform can now exclude certain questions and certain audiences from their campaigns.

     

    This Article Originally Appeared on Marketing Land
    Source
  • 3 tips to make every marketing implementation a success

    3 tips to make every marketing implementation a success

    Implementation Strategies

    Technology in marketing abounds. Marketers use tools to send emails, track customer and prospect engagement and save preference information for future use.

     

    But with the growth of technology in marketing come the challenges of martech implementations. Marketers are constantly installing new solutions that will help them work smarter and reach leads more effectively, and successful implementation of these tools is imperative.

     

    Marketing organizations are finding themselves functioning like IT organizations as they migrate to new technologies, integrate existing solutions and make upgrades from older versions. But unlike IT organizations, which are well versed in successful implementations, this is a relatively new function for marketing organizations.

     

    IT organizations have learned over the past 50-plus years what it takes to implement on time and within budget while delivering expected functionality. Beyond selecting the right tool, a successful implementation must not cause a disruption in service. Most importantly, the new tool must meet business expectations and provide equal or greater functionality than currently exists.

     

    By taking advantage of these learnings, marketing organizations can make sure their new solutions will produce the expected results. Below are three tips for successfully implementing new marketing tools.

     

    1. Develop a project management plan

    Create a project plan — you don’t have to use a sophisticated project management tool to create it. Plenty of free tools are available.

    Include expected time frames, responsible resources and dependencies. Stretch the plan across a bell curve so the expended effort slowly ramps up, has the majority of effort in the middle, and then gradually ramps down.

     

    Projects that are built without dependencies, and where all the effort takes place concurrently, oftentimes fail due to frustration among members of the implementation team, wasted effort or missed deadlines.

     

    Continuously track your project to ensure it’s on time. The more finite the unit measured, the more accurate the tracking and the more quickly potential issues will be spotted.

     

    Vigilantly monitor tasks in the critical path. These are the action items that must be accomplished on time in order for another part of the project to proceed. Know what affects the critical path (technical setups, team members, leadership), and make sure any risks are mitigated.

     

    2. Communicate

    Communication is critical both within the implementation team and between the business owners and the project team. Sharing risks, status updates and successes ensures there won’t be any surprises.

     

    A level playing field where both business owners and the project team can communicate ensures all points of view are being heard and discussed. In large implementation projects, there often are varying points of view and opposing business drivers. For project success, there must be understanding and convergence.

     

    Also be sure to extend communication outside of the business owners and project team. Continuously share the benefits of the new tool, but don’t hide the risks.

     

    The marketers and business units that will use the new tool are curious; they want to know the impact to their daily jobs.

     

    Share updates using a “what’s in it for me” focus. The users of the new tool don’t necessarily care about the project. What they care about is how the new tool will affect them and when they will be using it.

     

    3. Walk before you run

    Without well-defined business requirements, you cannot realize success. But keep the business requirements realistic. When expectations are too broad, either in terms of project scope or impact to the business, there is a high potential for project failure — think reduced scope or project overruns.

     

    Limit the actual implementation to a single team or project instead of the entire marketing organization. Wide-scale implementation increases risks because of the increased complexity and the number of moving pieces involving new integrations and responsibilities.

     

    Instead, roll out the new technology piece by piece and stabilize it until problems are worked out. This limits large-scale business disruption and provides an opportunity for the refinement of the new martech tool before it’s implemented organization-wide.

     

    IT organizations have learned there is no silver bullet to ensure project success. Every project that’s started has the potential to fail.

     

    Mitigating failure happens through structured project management and a consistent methodology designed to move projects forward. It also happens through honest and open communication among project team members, business owners and the solution’s users.

     

    With an eye to these rigors followed by IT organizations, marketing teams will consistently be able to benefit from each new marketing solution by TIQ they implement.

     

    Source
  • 3 Ways Humans Can Do PPC Better Than Machines Alone

    3 Ways Humans Can Do PPC Better Than Machines Alone

    Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic in PPC, but until the machines fully take over day-to-day account management, there are a few key areas where human PPC pros can still add a lot of value.

    Use business data for bid management

    Bid management can be one of the most repetitive and boring tasks of managing PPC because after a model has been built, you are left with an ongoing task of executing the plan, and this may involve downloading the data, putting it into the correct format, and then running it through your formulas to determine the new bid. For machines, this might sound like the perfect dinner on a Caribbean beach at sunset, but for us humans? Not so much. Repetition is dull, and since it’s a dull task, we tend to become a bit less thorough with our analysis as time goes on.

    This is why both Google and Bing offer automated bid management solutions. There are also many third-party bid management solutions that aim to improve on shortcomings of the bid management solutions from an engine. Though it is a well-known fact that the engines can do amazing bid management work, their solutions are generic and can ignore aspects that the business owner knows will impact their online conversions.

    There are four clear advantages to using the engine’s bid management systems:

    1. They are free to use.
    2. They are based on best-in-breed algorithms.
    3. They have access to a lot of auction-time signals that advertisers don’t get (e.g., who is the user, what did they search before).
    4. They can set bids in real-time based on auction time signals.

    But there are several things these automated bid systems cannot do:

    1. Know the context of the performance that is measured through conversion tracking (e.g., conversions were slow yesterday because there was an issue with servers in one of the data centers).
    2. Understand the factors that impact the industry (e.g., a plumber with 15 vans will be better able to service a distributed customer base than one with just three vans).

    The ideal bid management system combines the algorithms from the engines with data from your business. To this end, advertisers should calculate their own CPCs based on in-house data and then submit these bids to the engine as an Enhanced CPC, so that Google or Bing can adjust the bid up or down based on what they know about each auction.

    This is a reason why tools like Optmyzr are popular for managing bids. They can help automate bid strategies that use a combination of data from the search engine (like historical conversion rates for individual keywords) and business data (like phone sales data, e-commerce returns data, or even how the weather impacts sales).

    Optmyzr’s Rules-Based Optimizations let advertisers mix business data with AdWords data to create the perfect bid management automation.

    Optmyzr’s Rules-Based Optimizations for bids are also ideal for agencies who want to add value beyond what the engine’s own bidding system can do but don’t want to build complex technology in-house that they need to maintain as Google and Bing go through their frequent updates to the API. Prebuilt recipes can be installed in seconds to help advertisers reach goals like target CPA, target ROAS or target position. These recipes can be enhanced over time as more is learned about factors that impact performance, whether they’re based on Google’s data or internal business data.

    Use keywords to target shopping ads

    A second area where PPC pros should take back some control from the machines is with managing keywords for shopping ads. While shopping ads are automatically targeted to relevant queries that match the product in an advertiser’s feed, there is always the option of adding negative keywords.

    In a rather extreme, yet interestingly practical way, you could actually target a specific keyword not by the inclusion of that term, but rather by the exclusion of all other terms.

    This is the foundation of “Query Sculpting,” a PPC technique that deploys negative keywords to drive traffic to the desired target. And because negative keywords are much more explicit than positive keywords, they are the main tool.

    Even in search campaigns, query sculpting is done with the addition of negative keywords. And while this makes a strange sort of sense, our logical side is still asking, “Why can’t it be done by simply adding exact match positive keywords?” Because ever since Google’s latest change to the algorithm, exact match no longer truly means “exact.”

    Query sculpting for shopping campaigns was invented by Martin Roettgerding and later refined by various entities, including SmarterCommerce. Martin’s technique requires maintaining three parallel Shopping campaigns and proactively adding certain types of negative keywords.

    But proactively adding extra campaigns and unnecessary negative keywords can really eat into an account’s allowance for a number of keywords under management. Optmyzr, taking into account the pros and cons of both sides, has a solution that uses recent performance data to sculpt queries when it is clear they could perform better elsewhere in the account: The Shopping Negatives Tool.

    The Shopping Negatives Tool analyzes the performance of the same search queries across different ad groups in a shopping campaign, finds the ad group in which the query is not performing well, and recommends adding it as an exact match negative.


    Optmyzr’s Negative Keyword tool for shopping ads identifies where negative keywords should be added to “query sculpt” the traffic so that more sales, and more profitable sales, will result from the budget spent with the search engine.

    Using this technique, advertisers can run as many shopping campaigns in parallel as they want or keep everything in one campaign, and Optmyzr’s analysis will make suggestions for how to sculpt the traffic to drive more sales at a better ROAS.

    Create better ad tests

    Googler Matt Lawson has recently covered the new ways to think about A/B ad testing. Thanks to Google’s improvements in Machine Learning, there is less need to manually cull underperforming ads from an account. The premise is that the worst ad in an ad group could actually perform quite well with a subset of users hitting that ad group, which means that removing a slightly losing ad could actually be counterproductive.

    But he also says, “Delete stuff whenever an ad stops seeing a large fraction of the impressions and therefore generates minimal to no clicks. Then add a new ad to the mix. It’s better to have options.”

    To help with cleaning up ads that are seeing a minimal share of impressions in an ad group, you could use AdWords Scripts, like some that are part of Optmyzr’s suite of tools.  

    While Google is removing the need for manual testing of ads, and though they’re even doing some automatic generation of new ad text challengers, this remains an area where the human expert — someone who is close to the business being advertised — will have a leg up on automation.

    You’ve heard the story that if you gave 1,000 monkeys typewriters and an infinite amount of time, they’d eventually write all the works of Shakespeare. But monkeys eat lots of bananas and tend to prioritize climbing trees before writing those famous soliloquies, so they’d most likely take forever. And though the concept of play-writing monkeys does seem very attractive, advertisers aren’t willing to wait for an infinite amount of time. That’s why we still need tools that help us write great ads in the least possible time.

    Tools like Optmyzr can help with the ideation for new ads by highlighting ad text elements that have performed well historically.

    Tools like Optmyzr help you create better tests in less time. Here the tool makes suggestions for ad text variations to try.

    Frederick Vallaeys made the point that the PPC agencies of the future will be the ones with the best process for testing. Machine learning means computers can figure out the winners and losers, but conclusive test results will happen more quickly when using human insight to prioritize the most valid hypotheses for testing.

    Conclusion

    Exciting and perhaps scary times are ahead for all sorts of professions where AI will take over a plethora of tasks that used to require human intelligence. There’s a slight fog surrounding the future of human intelligence in the workplace, and though it isn’t thick enough to cover us just quite yet, it creates a bit of unease in many circles. What will happen when machines take over?

    It’s an inevitable passage, but the more human input we give these machines all throughout this transition period, the more effective they will be at helping achieve the shared goal of improving PPC performance. And in the meantime, human PPC pros have many opportunities to transform their day-to-day into something that will endure over time and set a solid foundation for working in an AI-first world.

    Source

  • How To Use Brand Mentions For SEO

    How To Use Brand Mentions For SEO

    Google has used links to determine the authority of websites since its early days: the idea of webpages casting “votes” for other pages by linking to them is at the core of the PageRank algorithm. This led to the rise of numerous manipulative link tactics. Google reacted with the Penguin update and manual penalties; link schemes evolved to outsmart the algorithm. New Penguin updates followed. The story went on for years until it no longer made sense.

    First, publishers started to associate links with a risk of getting penalized. Today, many of them (think Wikipedia, The Next Web, Entrepreneur, Forbes, and numerous others) simply nofollow outgoing links: They don’t want to be seen as “endorsing” every site they link to or even contemplate what the algorithm might make of it. They’re playing it safe, and you can’t blame them. But what good is the system if the biggest players stop casting their votes?

    Second, the internet is changing. PageRank’s idea of the web being a graph of pages connected by hyperlinks, which represent relationships between these pages in a very limited, binary way (link = trust; lack of link = lack of trust), is somewhat outdated. The web today is so much more than links and pages — it’s a full-blown ecosystem where relationships can be expressed in a million ways. Unlinked brand mentions and the sentiment behind them may be the timely replacement for a site authority signal the internet needs.

    In this post, we’ll take a look at how unlinked mentions may be used by search engines for ranking and how you can track and amplify these mentions to boost your SERP presence with a web monitoring tool like Awario.

    The evidence

    So what makes us think search engines use linkless mentions for ranking?

    1. Google and Bing have said it

    Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes mentioned in his keynote at Brighton SEO in September 2017:

    “If you publish high-quality content that is highly cited on the internet — and I’m not talking about just links, but also mentions on social networks and people talking about your branding, crap like that. Then you are doing great.”

    Duane Forrester, formerly senior product manager at Bing, pointed out at SMX West 2016 that unlinked mentions can be as strong a signal as backlinks, confirming that search engines can easily identify mentions and use them to determine site authority:

    “Years ago, Bing figured out context and sentiment of tone, and how to associate mentions without a link. As the volume grows and trustworthiness of this mention is known, you’ll get a bump in rankings as a trial.”

    2. Google’s patents have said it

    Google’s Panda patent (covered extensively by Bill Slawski here) also refers to mentions, aka “implied links,” as a signal that could be equal in weight to the good old backlinks:

    “The system determines a count of independent links for the group (step 302). […] Links for the group can include express links, implied links, or both. […] An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied link.”

    3. Google’s Search Quality Guidelines have said it

    Search Quality Guidelines is a document used by Google’s quality evaluators who rate web pages in SERPs; based on the ratings, Google develops changes to their ranking algorithm. From these guidelines, we know that reputation (aka the public opinion about a brand) matters for rankings.

    “For Page Quality rating, you must also look for outside, independent reputation information about the website. When the website says one thing about itself, but reputable external sources disagree with what the website says, trust the external sources.”

    4. It helps Google tell the good from the bad

    A few years ago, negative reputation could actually help some not-so-conscientious online merchants rank in Google, as bad reviews generated links and buzz around the brand. But when stories like this hit The New York Times, things weren’t funny anymore.

    In response to that story, Google incorporated an algorithmic solution to down-rank merchants that provide poor user experience. Not surprisingly, Google won’t say exactly how the solution works. One thing they did mention is their “world-class sentiment analysis system,” though it’s not completely clear whether it’s being used in the algorithm.

    What does this mean for your SEO strategy?

    The bad news is, you’ve got one more thing to track and optimize. The good news is that mentions are much easier to get than dofollow links and will likely pay off equally well. The even better news? If you already have a link-building strategy that’s working for you, you can continue using it to win mentions and stop stressing about publishers nofollowing your links (or not linking to you at all).

    Here are two things to include in your SEO strategy in 2018.

    1. Track brand mentions

    In addition to a backlink checker, you’ll need a monitoring tool to find mentions of your brand and product across the web. Mind that a lot of apps only look for mentions on social media, so make sure the one you choose is good at digging up mentions that come from around the web (think review platforms, forums, blogs and news sites). Awario, with its own web crawler, is really good at this. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial here.

    To get started, simply create an alert for your brand (if you’d like to track backlinks alongside, create a separate alert for your website URL). You’ll see your feed populate with mentions in a few minutes. From there, use Awario’s Reach metric to see the authority of every resource that mentions you, be it a website or social media user. You can sort your mentions by Reach to see the most influential posts first.

    On top of that, Awario has a sentiment analysis system, so you can quickly see the sentiment behind every mention, filter mentions to react to the negative ones quicker and, most importantly, aggregate the data to see which sentiment dominates your brand’s mentions (sentiment is used by Bing and likely Google, remember?). To do this, jump to the Dashboard module and examine the sentiment graph to make sure you’re doing well with your reputation. You can click on any point on the graph to see the positive or negative mentions from any day.

    Keep an eye on how your mentions and their Reach grow and how the overall sentiment of the buzz around your brand changes.

    2. Keep growing your mentions

    Link building isn’t just about links anymore. A lot of the same principles apply to building unlinked brand mentions, and there are also new, exciting tactics to try. Here are a few to get you started.

    • Reviews: Encourage and track customer reviews for your brand, and make sure to respond to the negative ones. Depending on the type of your business, platforms to track for reviews will vary: TripAdvisor and Yelp for restaurants, G2 Crowd for SaaS apps and so on.
    • Social selling: Social media is the place to go if you want to build brand awareness, get the conversation going about your business, and even do sales. Skeptical? Here’s a good post that explains the benefits.
    • Social customer care: Customers turn to social media to complain and ask questions about brands, and you want to be there to grow their trust and loyalty. Not only is this good for business, but the happy customers are likely to keep spreading the word about your brand, which can help SEO. Here’s a guide to get you started.
    • Competitor monitoring: Just as with backlinks, it’s important to track mentions of your competitors to see what they’re doing to grow awareness and learn from their tactics and mistakes. The benefits are infinite; here are the major ones.
    • Influencer marketing: In addition to your brand monitoring alerts, use Awario to track mentions of industry keywords. This will not only help you understand your audience better, but it will also find influencers to market your products through (use the Influencers report for that). Remember, as with backlinks, it’s not just quantity that matters — the more authoritative the person mentioning you, the more weight the endorsement has. Get started with this post.

    One last thing

    Links aren’t obsolete yet. They still matter, but the amount of buzz around your brand and its sentiment is no less important. And if you think about it, it makes sense. You want people to be talking about your business and saying good things about it. Is it any wonder search engines are putting this “buzz” into a quantitative metric so they can give searchers the results other people trust and love?

  • Nearly 80% of consumers would end a brand relationship over unauthorized data usage

    Nearly 80% of consumers would end a brand relationship over unauthorized data usage

    As we approach implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and brace for its repercussions in the US, privacy is on the minds of many brands and marketers. A new survey from SAP Hybris finds that a majority of US consumers (71 percent) will share their personal information but are also concerned about privacy and data protection.

    The study reflects that US consumers are fairly discriminating and want specific things in return for their data. And 29 percent of the study respondents were unwilling to share their data for any reason.

    There is a hierarchy of personal information that consumers will share, according to the survey. They are most willing to share email address (52 percent), followed by shopping history (37) and mobile phone number (25 percent). Interestingly, only 19 percent were willing to share their “real-time location,” though that data is currently being tracked anonymously on a mass scale.

    Percentages willing to provide personal information 

    At the bottom of the “willing to share list” were personal financial information (3 percent), Social Security numbers (3 percent) and access to social media accounts (9 percent). Separate survey data argue consumers will share location in exchange for clear benefits, like discounts or better shopping experiences.

    If they do share information, consumers expect brands to protect their interests (72 percent), be transparent in how the data are being used with partners (66 percent) and protect their privacy in the event of any criminal investigations (60 percent). It’s doubtful that most publishers, platforms and brands are complying with these expectations. Most brands and publishers are also not transparent about how they use data.

    Consumers also want personalization, a common refrain in surveys like this. The connection between providing their information and personalization wasn’t explicit in the survey, but it’s implied.

    What personalized service means to US consumers

    The survey also explored what alienates consumers and might cause them to end relationships with brands. Among the reasons: using personal data without their knowledge (79 percent), unresponsive customer service (78 percent), multiple mistakes (50 percent) and inconsistent online and in-store promotions (29 percent).

    Less serious but annoying to consumers were: excessive telemarketing/sales calls (61 percent), too many marketing-related emails (61 percent), irrelevant content (46 percent) and prolonged customer service interactions (40 percent).

    It’s safe to say that consumer data (including location) is increasingly used to personalize content, ads and experiences. But most of that is done without much transparency — in other words, without explicit consent.

    In May, practices like these will no longer be viable in Europe or with European citizens. We’ll see how much of that trickles over to the US market.

    Source

  • New report: The Internet of Things and blockchain tech are made for each other

    New report: The Internet of Things and blockchain tech are made for each other

    A new report from research firm Kaleido Insights proposes that two of hottest new technologies — The Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain — would make a really hot couple.

    In IoT, wirelessly connected sensors are embedded in almost everything — refrigerators, auto parts, dog collars, perhaps even cereal boxes.

    On the one hand, this means everything can be tracked, inventory-managed and made selectively accessible through a continual stream of signals. This flow of constantly talking objects and devices will help propel businesses away from a product-orientation (sell this car) to a service-orientation (sell the car, but maintain a connection with the car and the car owner).

    On the other hand, it means that there is a continual stream of signals for as many as 10 billion connected devices and objects in the next four years, according to some estimates. Needless to say, that’s a huge amount of tracking to identify those Things, verify who owns them, authenticate their interaction with other Things and so on.

    “The Internet of Trusted Things” report (free, registration required) proposes that blockchains — or other kinds of decentralized ledger technologies — could form the mechanism to monitor those oceans of signals.

    Among other features, blockchains can permanently record transactions and make them immediately available to every participant in the blockchain network.

    They can also enable “smart contracts,” which are software programs with a trigger and a payoff that can represent an agreement between buyer and seller, such as an automatic, agreed-upon payment when an ad is run on a site.

    And they can provide a coordinated, secure and transparent tracking of transactions and activities without the need for a centralized governing authority. Here’s a report illustration (originally created by IBM) visualizing the management of roles, behaviors, permissions, transactions and events through the use of a universal digital ledger:

    For report authors Jessica Groopman and Jeremiah Owyang, these and other characteristics make blockchain or similar distributed ledger technologies ideal for tracking the zillions of activities, identities and authentications that IoT devices and objects will require.

    This kind of decentralized tracking, they contend, can be essential for supply chain management, scheduling, repair histories, end-user authentication, asset sharing networks and other use cases in a world where every part, every product and many unsuspecting objects are constantly communicating.

    The report points to an IBM/Walmart pilot project that tracked food safety by monitoring the supply chain, using IoT sensors and blockchain. A startup called Everledger is employing public and private blockchains, along with sensors and computer vision, to maintain permanent records for fine wines, diamonds and fine art so that forgery is much more difficult. A group of companies is developing CarPass to track cars’ digital records as they go from manufacturer to a succession of buyers.

    Blockchains, however, currently have some issues that can derail this vision. First of all, they are relatively slow in processing, so the current generation probably wouldn’t scale to handle all those signals.

    Groopman acknowledged that blockchain’s processing speed is a “serious issue,” but she pointed to various other developing distributed ledger technologies — such as Tangle and Hashgraph — that could dramatically change that factor.

    Then there’s the matter of decentralized governance. Many blockchains process transactions through the use of electricity-demanding computer processing run by human “miners.” It’s decentralized because many people are involved, but that also won’t scale.

    Ledgers that are completely run by software could solve the scaling problem, but blockchain’s purported trust factor has been driven in part by the fact that every participant is checking everyone else.

    At any rate, this report has pointed out the huge, hidden drawback in the emerging world of constantly signaling Things. Some fabric of awareness has to be listening to all the time, and it can’t be humans.

    Source