editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

YouTube ads are about to get a little less skippable

September 19, 2018 No Comments

You might soon be seeing less of that “skip ad” button over on YouTube.

In a video titled Want to earn more money from ad revenue?, posted on the platform’s official Creator Insider channel, YouTube announced a big change for its YouTube Partners.

Any channel that can monetize its videos will soon be able to implement non-skippable ads. Previously, as mentioned in the video, only select YouTube channels were able to run non-skippable ads.

In the video announcement, YouTube points out that advertisers pay more money for non-skippable advertisements, which in turn means more money for the creators who run these ads.

Earlier this year, YouTube set the maximum video length for non-skippable ads at 15-20 seconds, depending on a viewer’s location.

YouTube seems to be pushing its non-skippable ads as the preferred ad format over TrueView, ads viewers can skip after 5 seconds. Older video content that has TrueView ads enabled will be switched over to non-skippable ads by default, even if a channel wasn’t previously eligible for non-skippable ads. This means that if YouTube creators want their viewers to still be able skip ads on their video archives, they need to take action and switch the default or change the video ad settings in bulk.

While more money for creators obviously sounds good, a number of commenters on the video announcement point out that their audiences might completely click away from their video instead of waiting for the non-skippable ad to finish, thus denying them any ad revenue from that viewer at all.

Reached for comment, a YouTube spokesperson pointed Mashable to a support page detailing how creators can have control, somewhat, over what type of ads run on their videos. Via Adsense, they can block specific advertisers as well as entire ad categories. Creators will also be able to track non-skippable ad performance in their YouTube analytics to determine whether this ad format is best for monetizing their audience.

By Matt Binder

Sourced from Mashable

In News

Google image search is now a design tool

September 19, 2018 No Comments

By Katharine Schwab

Picular analyses the top Google image search results to suggest colours that relate to any topic you search for.

A new design tool called Picular is built around an unlikely data source: Google image search.

Picular is a new color search tool that lets you enter any search term and presents you with a slew of options, basing all of its color choices on what pops up first in Google image search. It’s a color-picker, courtesy of internet hive mind.

For instance, if you type the word “desert” into Picular’s search bar, the tool scrapes the top 20 image results from Google and finds the most dominant color in each image. It presents these results in a series of tiles: A sea of sandy browns and oranges, with a few blues (presumably from the sky) thrown in. Each tile has the color’s RGB code that instantly copies to your clipboard when you click on the tile, making it easy to instantly try out the colors in your work.

Picular is a quick and handy way to get color ideas for a design project, especially because you can type in more emotional, evocative words and see what Google instantly associates with each idea. “Peace” conjures a bunch of cool colors, like grays and blues, with a couple brighter colors in the mix. “Dreamy” is almost entirely blues and purples, while “desire” returns warm reds and browns. “Dynamic” has an eclectic jumble of blue, yellow, and red.

The tool is the brainchild of the Sweden-based digital design studio Future Memories, which now uses the tool on a daily basis. According to the studio, about 15,000 other creatives frequently use the tool to test whether search terms are strongly related to particular colors. Of course, it still requires a designer’s eye and aesthetic to make any final decisions, but Picular serves as a crowd-sourced answer to which colors a certain topic corresponds with.

You can check out the tool here.

By Katharine Schwab

Sourced from Fast Company

In News

Getting personal with SEO: how to use search behavior to transform your campaign

September 18, 2018 No Comments

By Polly Pospelova

In order to meet the needs of today’s consumers and a more intelligent digital market, creating value in optimization campaigns requires innovative thinking and a personalized approach. Adverts, landing pages, and on-site messages that feel tailor-made are becoming the norm for many brands, contributing to higher response rates, visibility, and value.

Arguably, in today’s post-truth era, creating a personal message that can tap into the emotions and needs of a consumer is exactly the direction in which we will continue to progress. It’s also likely that in the near future, this will become the only way that optimization campaigns can be successful.

Anyone can enhance and deliver stronger campaigns by picking insights from search behaviours and using them to directly address your digital customers. But how can you maximize the effectiveness of doing this? Using Delete’s European Search Award-winning campaign for Leeds Beckett University as a case study, this article will take an in-depth look into profiling and understanding your browsers to attract and convert new customers.

Why utilizing user search behaviour is necessary in campaigns

From Google’s personalized search algorithm that was launched in 2005, to 2015’s RankBrain, search results have consistently shifted towards searcher satisfaction rather than the needs of a webmaster or business. As users began to demand more intelligent, considered content (keyword stuffing is now a definitive no-go), we’ve had to adapt by creating engaging content that is authoritative in terms of knowledge and information.

There are clear signs that behaviour signals are on Google’s radar. Google now elevates the results that it considers to be more relevant to a searcher based on profile information that it gathers about them. So, when it comes to creating your own outreach campaigns, it is only logical to harness and use this profile information to influence post-click user experience.

Harness search behaviour to create customer profiles and develop positive relationships

Using search behaviour information and user profiles is important because of the phenomenal results you can achieve, particularly at a time when advertising is becoming more challenging by the day.

Splitting users into customer profiles is a method that will enable the creation of targeted, tailor-made advertising and content that is more likely to result in conversions. There are a variety of ways that user behaviour can be tracked and profiled, varying from more in-depth and specific methods to quicker, cheaper options that may benefit a brand looking to boost a current campaign or alter the way that their advertising is completed in-house. Not only will customer profiles ensure that only relevant content is delivered to users, but it can also contribute to the development of customer trust and loyalty.

Delete’s Leeds Beckett campaign saw the development of delivering tailor-made landing pages and adverts to international students in an aim to encourage verbal contact with the university as early in the cycle as possible and to make an easier, less daunting application process. By using geographical data, we were able to create customer profiles for international students, which then meant we were able to serve carefully selected imagery to visitors from China, India, and Europe, as well as clear and relevant calls to action.

Splitting apart potential customers by geography, interests, and type of content consumption on the site is the most efficient way to create customer profiles. It can be done through both organic searches and paid searches, with both outlets leading to different customer bases across a variety of platforms. Leveraging existing data is also a practical and simple solution that will help develop stronger relationships with a current customer base. You can then lead users to dynamic pages and imagery that are reflective of organic searches, geolocation, and paid advertising clicks.

The value in creating customer profiles from paid or organic searches

Advertisers now have to look for ways to outsmart the competition. Unfortunately, managing a campaign well is no longer anything special, but a default expectation. Try going beyond the boundaries of just “best practice” SEO or PPC and show real innovation and creativity; it will really pay off.

Using data from users’ organic searches enables a valuable customer profile of people who are already invested or interested in a brand. When it comes to applying this behaviour to SEO, it results in the opportunity to tap into a receptive audience who will benefit from additional information and who may have abandoned conversion if they hadn’t been given access to the information that they were looking for.

Delete’s campaign with Leeds Beckett University experienced phenomenal results. For a typical budget for a campaign of its calibre, we were able to generate approximately £6.9 million revenue in one year and an ROI of 10,403.00%. The use of customer profiles undoubtedly played a large part in this.

Use geographical data to deliver direct and relevant information

In an aim to target potential customers and increase conversion, Delete used an innovative method of developing a live map that would plot the addresses of past enrolments, prospects gathered at educational fairs, and open day registrations. This completely changed their geographical targeting in all marketing campaigns, resulting in a 691.67% increase in traffic to the clearing section.

By creating customer profiles based on geography, there is the opportunity to attract and cater to people who may have less initial interest as well as reduce abandoned conversions due to unrelated content. As well as this, it can encourage behaviours that are natural and reflective of the user with a lower cost per click and a higher volume of leads.

Revolutionize the way you use paid and organic search behaviour for remarkable results

To maximize results in a marketing campaign, create dynamic landing pages and website experience based on recorded search behaviours and the profiles that can be subsequently created using this information. When it comes to paid ads, you can pass targeting and settings to a website and use this information to personalize the website.

With organic listings, you can glean user interests from entrance pages from organic search and what users do once they are on a page. If you create your landing pages right, so that they target the desired keywords well, you can also make assumptions from people landing on these pages from organic search and then interact with them in whichever way you want, even targeting certain interests.

For example, in our campaign with Leeds Beckett, if a user indicated an interest in a Civil Engineering degree (by clicking on a PPC ad from Civil Engineering for Undergraduates ad group), the landing page or the whole website would start surfacing an image of a work placement student standing on a building site, wearing a hard hat and high visibility jacket. This brings the individual student’s interests to the surface, highlighting the best relevant features that the university has on offer. Ultimately the aim here is to shorten the user journey and increase the chance of a conversion.

This can be applied to almost any marketing area or industry, and it will transform the way that your users are able to engage with your content.

By Polly Pospelova

Sourced from Search Engine Watch

In News

Attribution: The Secret Sauce of Digital Marketing

September 18, 2018 No Comments

By James Mathewson

One thread that binds my career is top-of-funnel content. I’ve co-written two books on the importance of early-stage content and how to identify and capitalize on those opportunities. I’ve also had a lot of success launching content for the early phases in the customer journey: What some people call the “awareness” or “learning” phases. And I’ve written extensively about what success looks like for top-of-funnel content. But I have rarely led sustainable upper-funnel content efforts for a simple reason: It’s difficult to track the first touches in a multi-touch customer journey to revenue.

As I said in the referenced blog post:

When I have been successful in educating executives on recognizing their successes, I have convinced them to focus on optimizing the experience to get a higher share of users to take the next steps in their customer journeys. That kind of growth is much more valuable, as you can attribute it to revenue.

I should have added, “in theory.” In practice, few digital marketers I talk to have attribution working well enough to give each touch point in a customer journey the credit it is due. Upper-funnel content is expensive. It’s an easy line item on a budget to cut if there is no way to track it to revenue. Most of my upper-funnel content efforts were ultimately redesigned out of existence because there was no way to prove they generated revenue.

This is the paradox of upper-funnel content. Without attribution, you can’t prove it was instrumental in generating leads. But redesign it out of existence and suddenly, your lead volume goes way down. Why? Because no one becomes a lead until they’re ready. And they only get ready by first learning the what, why, and how of their topics of interest. These are the basic building blocks of upper-funnel content. Attribution modeling is the solution to the paradox. When you develop an attribution model, you figure out how important the content is to the leads you generate and give it the credit it is due.

We have developed some methods at IBM to give all the content in a journey the credit it is due, including upper-funnel content. I can share the basic methods with you now. Before I do that, however, I want to highlight a common dead end, so we can move on from it.

Last-touch attribution

Most people I talk to at conferences say they have attribution. But after I grill them for information on how they do it, they ultimately acknowledge that they mostly use “last-touch” attribution. That means giving all the credit for the last thing a prospect did before becoming a lead.

For several reasons, last-touch attribution doesn’t work. The main reason is the last thing a prospect sees before becoming a lead might not be the most important. If it is treated as such, a disproportionate amount of resources go to developing it, and you end up with a very bottom-heavy experience.

Last-touch is also bad because you never fill up the pipeline for bottom-of-the-funnel interactions without having top-of-funnel experiences. For example, the last thing many of our high quality leads did was to take a free trial. In last-touch attribution, you would give all the credit to the trial. But nobody takes a free trial without first learning about what they want to try. And nobody sets out to learn about what they want to try without first understanding what problem the tech solves. The more complex the product, the more touch points are necessary just to get to the point of wanting a free trial. In this example, top-of-funnel experiences contributed to the quality and quantity of the lead, but get no credit.

Last-touch attribution is really no attribution. So the question becomes, how do you move towards a true attribution model?

Start with response scoring

The first step is to score all your content in terms of how it contributed to leads and wins. If a white paper is downloaded often, and a high percentage of the respondents who register to take the download become sales, that white paper should be scored relatively highly. Let’s say you have 100 white papers, you can rank sort them on the number of high quality leads they generate, and give them scores on that scale from 0 to 100. Now you have a way to measure the relative value of those white papers.

But assets like white papers don’t generate leads by themselves. They have to be part of campaigns, which puts them in front of the audience using paid, owned, or earned means. If you use the same white paper in multiple channels, it is bound to generate more responses in some channels than others.Let’s say a particular white paper about migrating to the cloud gets a lot of quality responses through organic search. For example, a lot of people query “how do I migrate to the cloud?” and visit the page where the paper can be downloaded. When they visit, they download the white paper and give quality information about themselves in exchange for the asset. This indicates that the paper does its job in early-stage education.

Now let’s say you try to use the same white paper in a paid search campaign that focuses on a product name like IBM Cloud Migration Services. When prospects click the ad, they get a single-offer landing page with the same white paper on it. Here, most of the users abandon the experience before filling out the form, and the paper does not generate a lot of quality responses.

How can the same paper do well in one context and poorly in another? In this case, the paper is useful for early-stage prospects but not for late-stage prospects. By the time someone searches for a brand name, chances are they have already learned all the basics and are ready for a deeper conversation. So a paper that tells them what they already know is no longer relevant.

This example illustrates why simple response scoring is not enough. You need an attribution model that helps you understand the value of assets when they are most useful. Once you have this more nuanced response scoring method, you can begin to pay attention to other variables in the mix.

Every time I have done studies like this as part of campaign optimization, I have also found that the same paper performs differently in two early-stage experiences. Perhaps in one, users have to scroll to get the link to the download whereas the other experience is easier. You never learn how changing UX can change performance until you try to score your assets in the mix. If you have attribution, they become markers to help improve the whole experience, including the asset itself.

From response scoring to attribution modeling

The first step in moving to attribution modeling is to look for patterns in the responses you are getting for your assets. In the example above, the white paper performed well in the early stages of the customer journey and poorly in the late stages. The hypothesis is white papers tend to do better in the top-of-funnel. Test that by looking at all your white papers to see if that pattern is consistent. If so, you can tune your experience by moving your white papers to top-of-funnel and move other things, like product demo videos, later.

This tuning is important prior to implementing attribution because the data can be very noisy if you don’t havewell-tunedned experience design first. If you implement attribution prior to tuning, it’s not the end of the world, but you will need to cut through the noise to tune the attribution. And this can be difficult because there are so many variables to control, it’s difficult to draw valid conclusions from the data.

When we started doing this at IBM, we found that five out of the 1000 or so white papers we had in market generated any kind of quality responses. The temptation was to say, “white papers don’t work.” But when did a further analysis of the five that worked, we found that they were highly technical in nature, not just delivering strategic points of view, but giving tactical guidance of how to implement a solution. Also, all our testing was done on late-stage offers, when tactical information is relevant but strategy is not.

Instead of jumping to conclusions, we started looking at how strategic white papers performed in early-stage experiences, and found that they performed better. All we needed to do was wire up the tracking system to show that people who downloaded those white papers also did late-stage activities leading to quality responses. When those leads closed, we could attribute the early-stage white papers to both leads and wins.

This example illuminates how attribution modeling works best. It doesn’t work to try to make all kinds of assumptions and wire something up based on the assumptions. That leads to conclusions like, “white papers don’t work.” But if you want to know how well a particular white paper is working, you have to take all these variables into account. Assuming the context in which the white paper is delivered to the audience conforms to best practices (landing page UX, right asset type, etc.), you can compare their response scores on an apples-to-apples basis.

A note on gating

Another variable you will need to control is whether or not your assets are gated. In early stages, prospects are less likely to fill out a form with their correct information to download an asset. Also, gating can prevent them from finding the assets in the first place, because the gate prevents search engines from indexing the assets independently of the experiences where they live. So the best practice is not to gate assets in early-stage experiences.

But if you don’t gate, how do you know the asset contributed to a lead? The answer is tracking. You can cookie the user anonymously and track their activities through the point where they fill out a form. When they do fill out the form, you can add all those other touches to the client reference, with the name and email you capture. All those touch points contribute in some way to the lead. Your attribution model can then take those touch points into account.

I have intentionally avoided the question of how much weight to give individual touches in a multi-touch client journey. Weighting can add bias to the algorithm, which obviously affects the results. But it is up to you to weight things the way you think measures your touch points accurately. I would start with giving equal weight to all the touch points, and then look for patterns in the data to determine that you want to weight certain items higher than others.

Conclusion

Attribution modeling is as much art as science. I hope after reading this, you are not so intimidated on getting started. It’s not that hard. You make hypotheses (based on best practices) about what you think is working, and you test it. You learn a lot in this process, and eventually you are able to attribute any page or asset (or combinations) you publish to the business results that matter. If you have a working attribution model, you can learn how to focus on the things that matter more. Most importantly, you can get the funding you need to do more of the things that work. In particular, you can build sustainable top-of-funnel content marketing programs.

By James Mathewson

Sourced from Business 2 Community

In News

Mobile shopping app usage has doubled in 2018, survey shows

September 17, 2018 No Comments

By Jonathan Greig

Synchony’s latest consumer survey found that a whopping 83 percent of consumers were happy with their favorite retail app.

Retailers have upped their app game in 2018, prompting a surge in consumer interest in mobile apps specifically designed to handle online shopping.

Two recent surveys from Synchony found that 47 percent of retailers were focused heavily on improving their apps and online shopping experience, and consumers have responded overwhelmingly, adopting double the amount of apps they did last year.

According to the survey, smartphone users now carry and shop regularly on at least 4 apps from their favorite retailers. Retailer investment in apps has paid off handsomely, as 83 percent of survey participants were happy with the app experience and continue to use it more often.

Retail app users said they use it primarily to browse for products, access savings coupons and make purchases.

Maya Mikhailov, head of marketing at GPShopper, a subsidiary of Synchrony, told Business Insider the apps allow companies to build brand loyalty and track what their most devoted customers seek to buy on a daily basis.

“In today’s competitive landscape, a mobile application is not just another piece of technology for retailers, it is a vital tool to engage shoppers with their brand,” Mikhailov said.

“Done well, retail apps engage both in and out of stores with personalized experiences and easy credit solutions.”

Companies have been able to merge the bevy of online payment services with their own apps, making it easier for people, especially older millennials with increasing buying power, to pick a produce and check out quickly. Macy’s, Best Buy and Nike all have mobile apps linked to Apple Pay and other services.

Last month, a Juniper Research report found that in-store mobile wallet payments will reach $2 trillion by 2020, accounting for one third of all transactions. Juniper added that mobile wallet payments are going to reach $1 trillion for the first time in 2018, proving that they were one year off from their past predictions.

The survey touches on the trend of mobile payments, with the majority of the survey’s 1,255 respondents saying they believed that by 2025, physical wallets will no longer be necessary. Synchrony said 60 percent of those surveyed said that within 7 years smartphones will be the primary mode of payment in most settings.

“For retailers who have not thought about enabling mobile wallet acceptance, now is the time to start making plans. Our Retail Survey showed that most large retailers ($100M+ in sales) have implemented mobile wallet technology (75 percent), yet only about half of smaller retailers ($10M or less) have done so,” they wrote in the survey.

“A future of digital payments is approaching. Smaller retailers are well advised to put plans in place to accept a digital wallet in the future.”

In spite of consumer satisfaction with apps, there are signs that some may be more conflicted than others. More than 40 percent said they still did not feel comfortable putting all of their credit cards and IDs on their smartphone, yet 55 percent said they have retailer apps with credit card capabilities.

Nearly 80 percent said they thought credit card servicing features were extremely valuable to any retailer app.

Takeaways

Mobile shopping app adoption and usage has doubled compared to last year, according to a Synchrony survey.
Consumers place a high value on retailer apps and more than 80 percent said they were happy with their current mobile shopping apps.

By Jonathan Greig

Sourced from Download

In News

Realistic Small Business Marketing: 5 Strategies for Branding and Sales

September 17, 2018 No Comments

By Jane Brown

There are countless marketing strategies one can explore as a small business owner. With that said, it’s unrealistic to explore all possibilities due to budgets, time, and resources. In fact, spreading too thin is a disservice to the marketing efforts as it never truly allows a realistic return on investment from a particular technique.

It’s the notion of “Jack of all trades, master of none”, or, “The shiny object syndrome”. A small business owner’s high impressionability and thirst to succeed often leads to hopping from topic to topic, never truly completing projects and marketing campaigns. Let’s dial it back and explore realistic small business marketing strategies worth exploring.

5 Small Business Marketing Strategies for Branding and Sales

1. Social Media Marketing

Every business should create accounts on:

These provide free platforms to connect with the business’s audience. Their usage is 1-for-1 as done for personal accounts: find interested parties, start discussions, and share content. Except, a small business will inject promotional offers and sales on occasion.

These platforms should funnel users to one’s email newsletter as this mutes the social “noise”. The newsletter and social account work in tandem building brand awareness and lead generation.

Plus, it’s free.

2. Merchandising

Merchandising creates three awesome benefits:

Unifies the workforce through branding
Mobilizes employees and fans to passively promote the brand
Provides incentives for contests, giveaways, and outreach

Utilizing customized business merchandise is the best option for providing items like branded work shirts for employees, gizmos for around the office, or novelty items for customers and fans. These items constantly remind others about the business brand, creating opportunities to bring past customers back into-the-fold between purchases.

3. Referral Systems

This is called by many names:

Word-of-Mouth
Affiliates/partners
Refer-a-Friend

The idea is creating an incentive when interested parties and customers help drive new leads and customers to the business. This is accomplished through low-tech flyers or business cards, or high-tech with referral systems and apps.

What you’ll need:

A unique code for each, active participant
A worthwhile incentive (cash, points, discounts)
A way to track the referrals and participants

Give participants the tools and resources and they’ll help in several ways. Their methods could include writing online reviews about the business, sharing their code/links on social platforms, or distributing branded print materials to acquaintances.

The cost? A few bucks for cards or $10 – $20/mo for a simple tracking app/plugin.

4. Search Engine Marketing

There are two avenues. They are:

Improving organic traffic through optimization
Getting instant traffic & leads with advertising

Got a website? Good, the business is already halfway there.

DIY or outsource SEO work to improve the website’s page by including its relevant keywords, expanding its content, and building backlinks from relatable, trusted websites. Then, conduct outreach efforts to create an online presence increasing its odds of being shared, linked to, and being the topic of discussion.

Likewise, leverage website & business data to develop an advertising campaign on popular channels like Google Ads. Or, advertise directly on relevant websites in the business’s industry & market. This involves writing ad copy, developing creative banners, and funding the PPC/CPA platform.

Search marketing costs vary but range from free (DIY methods) to thousands (professional). A middle ground, about $500 – $1000/mo, provides ample, realistic returns.

5. Email Marketing

Starting an email marketing campaign begins with:

Subscribing to an email marketing provider
Creating and populating an autoresponder
Adding opt-in forms to the website or landing page(s)
(Optional) Creating an incentive to increase list building efforts

Email marketing campaigns are among the best forms of outreach and sales. Your continual effort to collect emails creates a hedge against wild swings your website may experience from search engine algorithm changes (as we see often).

Email marketing costs anywhere between $0 – $20 to begin with most providers. The setup process is easy enough for any small business owner — requiring little to no technical skill as it provides WSYWIG form builders. Once set up, the opt-in form is placed in strategic areas of interest enticing visitors to sign up for a newsletter.

What can you do with an email list? Consider regular discounts & deals or blog updates & exclusive content.

Treating the email list as its separate business entity transforms the platform from a passive feed to a marketing machine. Sending an email takes less than 10 minutes but can deliver thousands of site visitors and potential sales!

Realistic Marketing Methods Grounded in Reality

These marketing methods are fundamental strategies used throughout the business world for good reason: they work. Reexamine the business’s efforts and investments — is it chasing shiny objects or trying to do everything without succeeding at any?

Get realistic with marketing strategies.

By Jane Brown

Sourced from FINCYTE

In News

The 100 Most Searched Keywords on Google in the Past Year [Infographic]

September 17, 2018 No Comments

By Irfan Ahmad

Search trends are, logically, always changing, which can make it hard to keep up with what’s happening in your industry – and impossible to stay on top of the broader shifts overall.

But knowing the biggest picture can be helpful, not only to see what’s trending based on topical interests, but also based on where things are headed – which is particularly relevant for industry and niche related terms.

To help with this, the teams from Ahrefs and Siege Media have teamed up to analyze the most searched terms on Google among U.S.-based users over the last 12 months (finishing June 1st, 2018).

There are some off ones, but also some interesting trends – check out the full list below.

A listing of the top 100 most search keywords on Google over the last year

A version of this post was first published on the Digital Information World blog.

By Irfan Ahmad

Follow Irfan Ahmad on Twitter

Sourced from Social Media Today

In News

Why is Content Marketing Essential for Digital Marketing Success?

September 14, 2018 No Comments

Sourced from TECHsling

The digital boom has changed the way companies interact with customers, making content marketing a crucial strategy for attracting customers and boosting loyalty. Recent research has revealed that two-thirds of people consider content marketing useful, significantly outweighing the 33% who consider it biased. Even when customers know they are reading marketing material, they continue to express interest, with over 50% of those surveyed being more likely to research a company’s products or services after consuming its content. In this post, we highlight the reasons why content is key to any business wishing to remain competitive.

Establishing Brand Authority

Many leading companies are hiring savvy content writers to produce content that will establish them as authorities in their field. By providing white papers, blog posts, insider tips and other content that is actually useful, companies can build trust, which is key when it comes to acquiring and retaining clients. As noted by Forbes, “Having brand authority means consumers will feel confident that you know what you’re doing, and thus that their money is well spent with your company.” Content not only needs to be informative but also curated to clients. Analytics can help companies determine a strategy that includes personalizing content to different target or client groups.

Encouraging Consumers to Engage

As noted in a thesis by J Denham-Smith and P Harvidsson (Content Marketing’s Effect on Customer Engagement), “The goal of content marketing is to provide consumers with content that they are willing to engage with. Ways of engaging in content mean sharing, liking, commenting and adapting the message, then spreading it, thereby creating user-generated content.” In essence, valuable content marketing leads to sharing and recommendations. Create excitement around content enables a company to reach the sites of social influencers, who can significantly boost its brand awareness.

Content Marketing Drives Sales

Over 82% of people make purchases from a company after consuming its content. This statistic highlights the value of investment in content. Your blog may have thousands of visitors and your social media hundreds of likes, but these figures need to be converted into sales if content marketing is to meet its aim. According to Moran (2016), content marketing should possess four key qualities: it should be credible, targeted, differentiated, and measurable.

We have mentioned the key reasons why content marketing is currently a big priority for most businesses that invest in digital marketing strategies. To stay at the top of your game, it is important to produce quality content, but also to curate it to your clients. Ensure your content is shared, commented on, and liked, and measure whether or not it is making a difference to your conversion rate.

Sourced from TECHsling

In News

P&G – not the first brand to attempt WTF trademarking

September 14, 2018 No Comments

By Katie Deighton

P&G has filed to trademark LOL, WTF, NBD and FML

Procter & Gamble’s attempt to connect with a millennial audience by trademarking acronyms such as WTF, LOL and NBD has raised eyebrows, but the practice of laying brand claim to everyday slang is not as unusual as it may seem.

P&G has filed to trademark LOL (laugh out loud), WTF (what the fuck), NBD (no big deal) and FML (fuck my life).

Initially reported in AdAge, the news has drawn the attention of global outlets such as the BBC and Bloomberg, which have questioned if owning such colloquialisms will really end entice a younger customer base.

However, the conglomerate is not the first company to attempt to brand everyday slang.

“Trademarking colloquial language is nothing new – McDonald’s somewhat depressingly trademarked Maccy D’s, for one – and other than it being an interesting headline, I’m not sure there’s not much to see here,” said Rich Leigh, founder of Radioactive PR.

“A quick search of the US Patent and Trademark Office shows that there are multiple other live trademarks for the term ‘WTF’, for instance, across a handful of goods and services categories, including hand tools and fashion.”

Indeed, there have been 246 trademarks filed for LOL or phrases containing LOL, 147 for WTF and its offspring, 71 for NBD and 61 for FML. Many of the files have been labelled as ‘dead’, meaning the application was ‘refused, dismissed, or invalidated by the office’ – all potential outcomes of P&G’s attempt.

Leigh added: “I can understand that the suits at a big corporate entity like P&G even being aware of slang is jarring, like when your mum asks if you’d like to be in a selfie (and then asking somebody else to take the ‘selfie’), but bless them, they’re trying. Whether it helps them hoover up all that sweet, sweet MilleXZial cash remains to be seen, but that’s no doubt their intent.”

David Born, director of entertainment licensing firm Born Licensing, agrees that P&G’s interest in the acronyms is driven by a millennial targeting strategy that a number of brands are actively undertaking.

“This also appears to be the reason why we are seeing emojis almost everywhere we turn, whether on product or in advertising,” he said. “We recently worked with Just Eat who licensed emojis as part of their Real Reviews campaign, and have a number of other advertisers that have shown interest in using emojis as a way to communicate with their target audience.”

Melissa Robertson, chief executive of Now, is cynical that the tactic will work, however: “WTF P&G! They must have a GSOH if they really think they can claim ownership of generic text language IMO. WTF is going on when marketeers become that greedy? Are they going to sue our Whatsapp groups for using their owned language?

“FWIW, I think it’s ridiculous. Don’t make me LOL.”

Feature Image Credit: P&G has filed to trademark LOL, WTF, NBD and FML

By Katie Deighton

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Google to automatically verify your Google Search Console account if you are the property’s owner in Google Analytics

September 14, 2018 No Comments

By Barry Schwartz

Google is opening up Google Search Console automatically, so countless webmasters and site owners will have more access to data and important website alerts.

Google has announced that it will soon automatically verify you for a website in Search Console if you are already a verified owner of the same property in Google Analytics.

This means you don’t have to request manual verification within Google Search Console if you’ve already set up Analytics, and it streamlines the process of giving site owners access to Google Search Console.

Even more importantly, those with Google Search Console access will get emails and notifications of issues in their inboxes. These messages can include manual actions, hacks, WordPress and other CMS upgrade alerts, as well as other notifications — all aimed at helping you keep your website healthy, indexed and ranking.

Google said, “If you don’t want to be verified for Search Console, simply delete the property in Search Console.”

Google explained why Google Search Console is important and useful:

Search Console is a free tool that provides website owners with information which can be critical to performance in Google Search. Once verified, Search Console compiles reports on the website’s performance in Search, including search queries, the website’s rankings, and the number of clicks and impressions. Additionally, there’s information about a site’s indexing, the status of various implemented features on the website, as well as reports and notifications of critical issues.

Here is a screen shot showing the notification when someone is automatically verified via this method:

By Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.

Sourced from Search Engine Land