The latest Mozcon took place in July 2015, in Seattle.
The conference is over, the dust has settled, but now it’s time to refresh your memory on exactly what was it that made this conference matter. Let’s see what the first day brought: some thoughts on content strategy, brand strategy, what to do in order to make your working hours as effective as possible and much much more.
Let’s see what the first day brought: some thoughts on content strategy, brand strategy, what to do in order to make your working hours as effective as possible and much much more.
Now why don’t we have a closer look?
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Major players are willing to sacrifice a lot in order to innovate, because they realize how crucial innovation is: Facebook, Google and Microsoft – they all take measures to stay in the game.
What about web marketers?
Typically, web marketers follow the trends, play by the rules. But is this an option in the industry that is constantly changing:
Google is showing fewer ads, but charges more per ad;
Mobile has become huge, but desktop survives nonetheless?
Lots and lots of other changes – it can be overwhelming – so Mozcon is here to help!
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Your brand is broken, so let’s fix it. Your brand is your promise. Brand strategy is the future of marketing.
People like consistency. Good marketing always feels right, but it is not so easy to achieve. That’s why we need brand strategy and the strategy should be led by digital marketers.
So what’s the plan? Here you go:
Always start with your core values.
Analyze why it failed before.
Think about what your brand IS and what it’s NOT.
Define what tone and voice should be used.
Get HR on board, get international on board.
Keep in mind that you are selling the dream: this is the way to sell your content.
Get service on board, go beyond the document.
Always be coaching.
...and most importantly: drive forward with purpose!
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It’s getting more and more complicated to define what content strategy is.
What is content strategy now? It contains both content components and people components.
Content components: substance (story, topic, brand elements, voice, tone – helping the business by meeting audience needs) and structure (organization, categorization – makes content usable and easy-to-find for users)
People components: workflow (roles, structure, processes, tools – puts structure around your content) and governance (policies, standards, guidelines – empowers, facilitates)
What kinds of content strategies are there?
Content strategy for user experience;
Adaptive content strategy;
Enterprise content strategy.
What does a content strategist do?
In order to create and manage content, a lifecycle content strategist needs to assess, to strategize, to create, to design and to maintain.
What is the content strategy process?
Assessment, Analyses, Strategy.
Architecture and Editorial – you can find all sorts of templates here:
The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right (Voices That Matter) by Meghan Casey.
Implementation.
Maintenance.
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Slides
Matthew discussed content strategy and then moved on to the changes in B2C sector:
content strategy is one of the most popular services offered by professional agencies;
there is an incredible level of noise - 2.5 million of blog posts created daily.
Changes in B2C:
In order to keep up, most companies are trying to create more and more content, usually by posting it on Facebook.
This tendency has given 25% of social traffic to Facebook.
The biggest content-related problem now is the noise level. 79% of marketers report their organizations are shifting to branded content (paid content). And this works: there is no drop in engagement to be seen.
One of the other problems is content fatigue - with all that information, the content around us, we simply stop responding to it.
The way to deal with the all the difficulties is to develop content loyalty and to build brand awareness through this.
How to develop content loyalty? First of all you need to figure out what “great content” is:
Relevant and recent.
Long form: create highly specific content for your audience - it will pay off in the long run.
Target a specific persona.
Truly evergreen.
How do YOU stand out?
Let users control their experience, make it about them, personalize the content based on your user’s IP address, break the standard article template, don’t forget about linkable assets, and don’t underestimate the power of a good joke - give your user something to laugh about. Fit your content to every device.
What is the goal of content distribution? There is no goal, there are no metrics.
The better way to distribute your content is BuzzFeed's POUND (process for optimizing and understanding network diffusion). Network diffusion brings backlinks, therefore the better you are able to diffuse your content, the less time you will spend link building. So the new way to deal with link building would be to publish to all streams that might work for your audience.
Content loyalty: the average pageview peak for articles is 2.6 days. You will get to that peak and then the traffic will decline. It means that you don’t have a lot of time to have your content seen. In order to ensure content loyalty, you need to understand what makes your users come back, identify what attributes improve that metric, optimise for these attributes and measure the progress.
Implementing this strategy can take about 12-17 months to see a good ROI.
The plan:
Start with your content audit.
Use SEMrush to benchmark your organic value.
Scope out your potential ROI.
Use BuzzSumo to identify which content is popular on social media.
Measure social performance.
Add traffic and on-page engagement into one on-page performance score.
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What is delightful remarketing and how do we create it?
Remarketing is about connecting to visitors who may not have already purchased, by targeting ads to these visitors. The problem is with doing that (since remarketing can obviously help you increase the revenue and profit) without "creeping out" your visitors, who often find these ads a bit weird.
Over 60% of customers abandon a shopping cart each year: next to email, remarketing is the only other ward lead generation channel to bring customers back.
Ecommerce only represents 6% of retail revenue in the USA, but some data suggests it might be up to 9.5%. Either way, the opportunity to grow is right there, by stealing market share from your competition and growing the overall market base by remarketing to your visitors.
Now let’s talk about the next 7 years. 1 billion people will be going online by 2020. Many of those people will go online using only mobile devices - so you need your remarketing to be on point or you will be left behind.
What is delightful remarketing?
it’s a message between your advertising and your visitors; you need to make your ad cut through the noise: your brand needs to be seen and only your brand;
context - where are the ads going to be seen, when are your visitors going to see them, etc;
make sure that what you create will bring the users a delightful remarketing experience.
Commerce+burn pixel = A-team
Burn pixel is a pixel that fires after your visitor has purchased an item. This puts the visitor in a list, to avoid having them targeted by ads for things that they have already bought.
It’s important, because this can get highly annoying. And this is what we would like to avoid.
Saas+Intercom = Marketing Nirvana
Remarketing can help show your products' sticky features, while also showing off the benefits. You can use Intercom to pull lists of customers who haven’t taken the certain actions. These actions can turn your users into loyal visitors. Upload those lists to Facebook or Twitter and create a remarketing campaign aiming at them. You can show them articles about these features, how they can make their life much easier or improve their communication, etc.
AdWords Customizer
AdWords customizer adds a countdown timer (in days or hours) to your AdWords text ads. Normally, you’d use this to promote a sale you’re having. Not every company has a sale, especially if you’re in the B2B space. The traffic you send to this launch page could be used to build a remarketing list of the people that were interested in your brand and remarket to them at a later date, past your launch date. This is delightful, because you can make sure that you are only speaking to the audience that is interested in your service in the first place.
The DOs of delightful marketing:
Frequency - 2-3 times per day on one brand; keep in mind that you would want to avoid brand fatigue.
Age - if possible, always segment per age; you can save time targeting people who would never convert anyways.
Location - try targeting based on it, you might get better results.
Creative - try to show people something they want to see, listen to your customers, see why they use your product; if that hasn’t been put on your homepage, it’s a golden opportunity to put it into remarketing.
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In theory, SEO and PPC go great together, but in reality... not so much.
So how do we use PPC to improve SEO strategies? There are four ways:
Test effective metadata
Use PPC ads to test title tags and meta descriptions. By doing so, we can get a well optimised website, that responds quicker. Use the search analytics report in Google Webmaster Tools to identify the pages that perform poorly and the ones you want to test. The landing page used to test metadata should be the landing page for each ad. Ad Rotation: optimize for clicks. When you get conclusive data, apply the winning headline and body text from the ad to your website’s pages as title tags and meta descriptions.
Identify content gaps
Begin with the top conversion paths from the MultiChannel Funnels report in Google Analytics, look back on 90 days, look at the top conversion path, then set the secondary dimension to "keyword" and filter on paths that begin with “Paid Search”. We are looking for paths that don’t include organic traffic. So the questions are: Are we even targeting these terms at all with our organic keyword strategy? If not, why? If so, why isn't it working? Do we need to expand the existing content to address these topics? Or do we need to create new content altogether?
Define ranking opportunities
What you need to do is to export the top keywords in Google AdWords. Select a time frame. Pay attention to keywords, clicks, impressions, CTR and conversions.
Tier I opportunities mean we rank on page one in Google search results. Tier II opportunities mean we rank on page two.
Leverage PPC for CRO
When deciding which keyword theme to assign to a specific landing page, we should take the buyer's journey into consideration. Consider the type of information a user would expect to see when searching for this theme.
Use your Organic Sandbox Campaign to create a new ad group (at least three ad variations) to test different landing pages for the same keyword theme. Run the test. Identify your top performing page in your PPC campaign, based on Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Conversions.
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We want to know how our content works, but it’s difficult to measure content success. Is the content great or not so much?
We aren’t tracking interactions - we are tracking Page Views only, but what about the users reading it? Content reporting is difficult - the solution is to get more technical: we need to collect the right data and report on it in a meaningful way.
So what can you do to start collecting this data?
Add some additional javascript to the page. Google Tag Manager can help you with that, but first you might need to get familiar with:
Tags – what should fire;
Triggers – when should tags fire;
and Variables – values used within tags and triggers.
The first step is to set up a Tag: you need to choose and configure it. Then set up a Trigger based on clicks, form submissions etc. – using Chrome's DevTool would be a good choice, as it can help identify HTML elements by title, id, target or else.
What else can you track? Scrolling, outbound links, don’t forget about YouTube and Vimeo tracking, URL fragments, etc. – track as much as you can.
What’s next? You need to understand GA event reporting (don’t forget to use shortcuts and dashboards), configure your perfect report, then create a shortcut and/or add to the dashboard.
Connect content interaction conversions using Custom Segments in GA. Use the “sequences” tab in Custom Segments to start tracking a particular user path or sequence of user behaviour.
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It’s getting harder and harder to do good work and concentrate on it in the overwhelming information flow: on a normal day we interrupt our work process once every 8 minutes. That's 7 interruptions per hour, adding up to 50-60 interruptions per day! Most interruptions are 5 minutes long and have little or no value for you. This gives us 3 hours of wasted time per working day.
What can be done? In order to change the current situation we will have to implement some new habits, and it usually takes 21 days to do that.
49% percent of workers agree that meetings are the biggest cause of wasted time.
We need to take back control of our work time:
Stop mindlessly accepting all meetings you are invited to.
Make sure to create blocks of 2-4 hours of uninterrupted work – avoid distractions by switching off all notifications and popups, don’t check emails – just focus on work.
Systematically planning your work process will help you immensely – create a master list of things you need to do and then categorize them into those which are the monthly priorities and those that need to be done during the week; this will give you a list of things to focus on a daily basis.
Time yourself, to understand how long the actual work takes.
Organize your information: use clear naming conventions, highlight the actions with custom labels.
Your inbox is not a storage facility – extract the critical information from it.
Label your files with clear purpose and intent.
Set up a master client knowledge database – add to it daily.
Understand interdependencies – use a "change" sheet, to track team actions.
Rethink your email communication – write meaningful and articulate subject lines.
Compartmentalize your communication.
Use a shared Google doc to collaborate.
Seconds will save hours – here are some practical tips:
Bookmark frequently used programs,
Pocket articles/whitepapers/blogs to read them later,
Use a password management tool.
Standardize:
Every time you complete a repeatable task – add instructions to it.
Use a project brief for all new projects, tests, campaigns.
Set 30 minutes to update your skills.
Your 21 days start now – it’s time to change how you work.
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Personalization is something that we all experience online, but how are we going to use personalization in our businesses?
Today, email is still one of the most powerful channels for personalization. Cara tells a story from her own experience, to illustrate that.
The future is in personalization, but how to do that?
Framework for personalization:
WHO to target, WHAT to show them, HOW to prioritize.
1. WHO to target – slice your audience in segments:
behavioral (the things your visitor has done on your website)
demographic (you know these to be true about your visitor)
contextual (where are they coming from, are they logged in, etc)
2. WHAT to show them - This is really more of a hypothesis, as there is not one specific thing that’s always going to work for both old visitors and new visitors.
New visitor – onboarding experience, with tour of site
Return visitor – sign up for the email newsletter
Don’t ignore the location factor – suggest local in-store pickup options
For those who didn’t visit for a long time, e.g. 90 days – bring the audience back, by giving promotional offers for a limited time
But please – try not be unpleasant: be careful about how you approach personalization and stay true to your company values.
Again, remember ‘what’ a hypothesis is. Personalization will come naturally when thinking about what to do that’s best for a certain segment of your audience.
3. HOW to prioritize
Prioritize each personalization by these factors:
Potential business impact
Technical effort to execute
Requirements to sustain
So just remember to take big bites for big impact. Be realistic about the technical effort. Don’t slice your audience too thin (it might create a content problem: you might not have the content resources available or be spending too much time on unique content for each of those audiences).
Pick who to target, what you’re going to show them and how you’re going to prioritize it.
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Let’s talk about advertising to users via paid advertising and how you can hyper target specific psychographic user profiles by using readily available huge-social-data.
Selling with internet wide social psychographic data (personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests and lifestyles).
You can use any and all available data to segment your marketing lists. Don’t just focus on big networks like Facebook.
Social Goals - why we care about social:
- Scalable psychographic traffic.
- Attributable conversion.
- Real links from good authority sites.
- Social signals from strong users.
- Focused likes, follows, shares.
- Insulation from harsh SEO algorithm updates.
- PR Distribution to bloggers & Media.
1. New expectations for social marketers
Remarketing lists for search ads should give higher conversion rates than regular keyword targeted ads.
Curate Lists as valuable brand assets - “Owned Assets”. How you target is completely up to you. What you need to keep in mind: use the available data to segment deep enough to target the customers who are most likely to convert.
2. Filtered retargeting from social cookie pools
Psychographics --> retargeting filter by Search.
Search --> retargeting filter by Psychographics.
Search --> retarget filter by Search.
Psychographics --> retarget filtering by Psychographics
Keep in mind that your main task is to turn available social data into attributable conversion:
And this was it for just the first day! Stay tuned for Day 2 and Day 3! There are dozens more interesting talks to come.