The Only 4 Reasons Agencies Should Care About Their Own Content Marketing
Posted on 05. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, content marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media metrics, Web Analytics
Mimicry is not a strategy. Compulsion is not a strategy. Yet, far too many agencies are devoting resources to content marketing and social media solely because they feel they have to do so. Other agencies have a blog, and Webinars, and an active Twitter feed, so we need some of that too!
To what end? What are you really trying to accomplish – as an agency – with all of this content and social media? You’re not selling ads, so website traffic isn’t inherently valuable. Do clicks and retweets or Facebook fans really build your business? Not in a linear way.
There are only four reasons agencies should be spending even one scintilla of time on content and social media.
4 Reasons Agency Content Marketing Might Be Worth It
I’ve listed these in order of importance and feasibility.
1. Retain More Clients
With the exception of SEO-driven blog traffic (more on that later), the majority of agency content and social interactions will be with people who already know and support the firm. Who reads the blog? Clients. Who follows the agency on Twitter? Clients. Who is a Facebook fan? Clients (and employees).
Agencies need to stop looking at content creation solely as a customer acquisition vehicle, and start looking at first and foremost as a customer retention vehicle. Every single day your clients are thinking (perhaps subconsciously, but it’s still there): “Are these the best guys to help build my business?” The agency’s content initiative helps ratify and perpetuate the decision-making of clients.
“Look at that smart blog post, and Webinar, and infographic. These guys really do know what they’re talking about, and I’m glad they’re in my corner.”
That’s what you want clients to be thinking.
Measure It: Establish a baseline retention rate. After your agency truly commits to content, determine how that retention rate changes. Also be aware of which clients are consuming your content, and run reports showing retention rate of clients who do and do not habitually engage with your content and social efforts.
2. Up-Sell New Services to Clients
Like Justin Bieber to Usher, this is a companion benefit to retention.
One of the traps many agencies fall into (especially in blogging) is putting too much thought into thought leadership. Nobody wants to read your open-ended manifesto, Kaczinski. Blog posts need to have a takeaway.
At least one agency blog post per week should be tactical, describing how marketing can be improved in some fashion (software, process, thinking, etc.). It shouldn’t be a commercial, but should indirectly highlight a service the agency provides. (Convince & Convert provides social/digital consulting for agencies throughout U.S. and Canada – see how that works?)
For clients that might benefit from that particular product or program, make sure that blog post gets seen. Consider having your account manager or agency CEO email it to key clients.
Remember, content is not just for new customers. Even a big content machine like ExactTarget (client) has their sales reps send ebooks and white papers and Webinar invites to current clients – often before they are publicly released.
Measure It: Closely track client up-sell and cross-sell, noting which add-on services you sell, and which of them you have created content about on the blog and elsewhere.
3. Improve Your Conversion Rate
The worst thing that can happen in an agency is to consistently finish second in pitches and RFPs. (I lived through a streak of about 6 in a row once. Ouch).
Second is more damaging that seventh in almost every way, as to get to the finals your agency has to expend significantly more unpaid effort than if you’re knocked out in the early rounds. The only upside is being able to have more and closer dialog with the potential client, who may decide the victor is actually a sheep in wolf’s clothing someday, thus turning back to you in a “if Miss America is unable to fulfill her duties, the scepter and sash shall pass to the first runner-up” scenario.
But, sharp content and social engagement can help close business. You know who else reads blogs, beyond clients? Potential clients, during the comparison shopping and due diligence process.
If you’re pitching a telco, you damn well better be creating some brilliant blog posts about marketing advances in the telco industry. Surprise, surprise, those posts will be found and read by the selection committee. It’s like adding an unspoken section to your capabilities pitch. You have to be wise about the timing of this content, and you can’t make it too obvious – clients only like agencies to pander after they’ve been hired.
You’re starting to see how strategic your content calendar needs to be, right? You can’t just assign a date to each agency team member and ask them to blog about whatever they want on their special day.
Measure It: Establish a baseline conversion rate (win rate), if you don’t already have it calculated. After your agency truly commits to content, determine how that conversion rate changes. Also be aware of content created purposefully for a particular vertical, and measure conversion rate by vertical accordingly.
4. Generate More Leads
This is often the sole reason agencies offer for their blogging and social engagement efforts. But it’s by far the hardest execute, and requires far more time than most agencies are willing to devote.
To successfully use content as a lead generator, your agency needs to be very focused about what types of clients it wants, and specific services it wants to provide. Then, you need to create focused content that is exceedingly well-optimized for search. (we recommend inboundwriter.com for this).
It also helps if your agency (and more importantly, its personnel) are active in social media and other online communities, giving them the ability to contextually drive eyeballs back to the agency blog.
Also consider mixing content curation with content creation, as being the arbiter of what’s good and worthy can be valuable to the professionals you seek to impress. Note that this only works if the agency has a fairly tight niche. It’s a lot more realistic to build a following for your agency as curator of important content in health care marketing, or marketing for the bicycle industry, than it is to be the curator of insights about marketing in general.
Measure It: Several potential metrics here, including new visits to the blog/website; visits to the blog/website from search; social interactions – especially with people working at target accounts; social mentions; and volume of branded “agency name” searches.
Notice that number of Twitter followers and Facebook fans didn’t make the list.
Next week: What it takes in staffing and resources to do it right.
Focus on The Business Model
Posted on 04. Feb, 2012 by Aaron Wall in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Google’s Take on Search Plus Your World
A few weeks ago Google announced the launch of Search Plus Your World, which deeply integrates social sites (especially Google+) into the Google search experience to make it more personalized.
While Google claimed that the socialization was rather broad-based, the lack of inclusion of Facebook & Twitter along with the excessive promotion of Google+ raised eyebrows. While the launch was claimed to be social for personalizing results, the Google+ promotions appeared on queries where they were clearly not the most relevant result even when users are not logged into a Google account.
Google+ Over-promotion
A couple weeks ago when Google announced Google Search Plus Your World competitors collectively complained about Google over-promoting their own affiliated websites.
Twitter was perhaps the loudest complainer, highlighting how Google basically eats all the above-the-fold real estate with self promotion on this @WWE search.
It is no surprise that folks like Ben Edelman, Scott Cleland & Fair Search chimed in with complaints, as this is just a continuation of Google’s path. But the complaints came from a far wider cast of characters on this move: the mainstream press like CNN, free market evangalists like the Economist, Google worshipers indoctrinated in their culture who wrote a book on Google & even ex-Googlers now call into question Google’s transparently self serving nature:
I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.
Google is too powerful, too arrogant, too entrenched to be worth our love. Let them defend themselves, I’d rather devote my emotional energy to the upstarts and startups. They deserve our passion.
The FTC’s Google antitrust probe is to expand to include a review of Google+ integration in the search results.
Facebook & Twitter launched a don’t be evil plugin named Focus On The User, which replaces Google+ promotion with promotion of profiles from Facebook& Twitter.
For the top tier broad social networks framing the idea of integrating promotion of their networks directly in the search results is a natural & desirable conclusion, but is that just a convenient answer to the wrong question?
- Whether Google ranks any particular organic result above the corresponding Bing ranking in Google’s now below-the-fold organic results is a bit irrelevant when the above the fold results are almost entirely Google.com. But is the core problem that we are under-representing social media in the search results? According to Compete.com, Facebook & YouTube combine to capture about 16% of all downstream Google clicks. Do we really need to increase that number until the web has a total of 5 websites on it? What benefit do we get out of a web that is just a couple big walled gardens?
- If Facebook is already getting something like 20% of US pageviews & users are still looking for information elsewhere, doesn’t that indicate that they probably desire something else? Absolutely Facebook should rank for Facebook navigational queries, but given all their notes spam, I don’t like seeing them in the search results much more than seeing a site like eHow.
- The he said / she said data deals are also highly irrelevant. What is really needed is further context. Before Google inserted Google+ in their search results the Google+ social network was far less successful than MySpace (which recently sold for only $35 million). If social media is added as an annotation to other 3rd party listings then I think that has the opportunity to add valuable context, but where a thin “me too” styled social media post replaces the publisher content it lowers the utility of the search results & wastes searcher’s time. Further, when those social media results are little more than human-powered content scrapers it also destroys the business models of legitimate online publishers.
Over-promotion vs “Search Spam”
At any point Google can promote one of their new verticals in a prominent location in the search results & if they are anywhere near as good as the market leader eventually they can beat them out of nothing more than the combination of superior search placement, monopoly search marketshare, account bundling & user laziness. What’s more, they can make paid products free and/or partner with competitors 2 through x in an attempt to destroy the business model of anyone they couldn’t acquire (talk to Groupon).
Amit Singhal is obviously a brilliant guy, but I thought some of the answers he gave during a recent interview by Danny Sullivan were quite evasive & perhaps a bit inauthentic. In particular, …
- “The overall takeaway that I have in my mind is that people are judging a product and an overall direction that we have in the first two weeks of a launch, where we are producing a product for the long term.” If the product wasn’t ready for prime time you were not required to mix it directly into the organic search results right off the bat. It could have been placed at the bottom of the search results, like the “Ask on Google” links were. Bing has been working on social search for 18 months & describes their moves as “being very conservative.”
- “The user feedback we have been getting has been almost the other side of the reaction we’ve seen in the blogosphere.” Of course publishers who see their content getting scraped & see the scraped copy outranking the original have a financial incentive to care about a free & automated scraper site displacing their work. They don’t get those pageviews, they don’t get that referrer data, and they don’t get those ad impressions. Google’s PR team is anything but impressed when another company dares do that to Google.
- “The users who have seen this in the wild are liking it, and our initial data analysis is showing the same.” Much like the Google Webmaster Tools shows that pages with a +1 in the search results get a higher CTR, this Google+ social stuff also suffers from the same type of sampling bias & giving the listings a larger and more graphical stand out further help them pull in much more clicks. Any form of visual highlighting & listing differentiation can lift CTR. I might be likely to click on some of my own results more, but when I do so you might just be grabbing a slice of navigational searches I was going to do anyway where I was looking for something else I posted on Google+ or my Google+ account or the account of a friend & so on. Further, aggregate data hides many data points that are counter to the general trend. I have seen instances of branded searches where the #1 organic site was getting a CTR above 70% (it even had organic sitelinks, further indicating it was a navigational search) and for such a search in some cases there were 2 Adwords ads above the organic results & then the Google+ page for a brand outranked the associated brand in the SERPs for those who followed it! That is a terrible user experience, particularly since the + page hasn’t even had any activity for months.
- “Every time a real user is getting those results, they really are delighted. Given how personal this product is, you can only judge it based on personal experiences or by aggregate numbers you can observe through click-through.” First, publishers are not fake users. Secondly, as mentioned above, there is a sampling bias & the + listings stand out with larger & more graphical listings. If they didn’t get a higher CTR that would mean they were *really* irrelevant.
- “out of the gate, whereas we had limited users to train this system with, I’m actually very happy with the outcome of the personal results.” They could have been placed at the bottom of the search results or off to the side or some such until there was greater confidence in the training set.
- “People are coming to a conclusion about the product today, within the first two weeks, and they’re not fully seeing the potential where we can build this product around real identities and real relationships.” If a publisher promotes a site to the top of the search results & then says something like ‘we will improve quality later’ they are branded as spammers. In the past Google has justified penalizing a site based on its old content that no longer exists on the site. Investing in depth, quality & volume is a cycle. If others get prohibited from evolving through the cycles due to algorithms like Panda then it becomes quite hard to compete with a new start up when Google can just insert whatever it wants right near the top & then work on quality after the fact.
- “We don’t think of this as a promotional unit now. This is a place that you would find people with real identities who would be interesting for your queries.” If this is the case then why does it only promote Google+?
- “We’re very open to incorporating information from other services, but that needs to be done on terms that wouldn’t change in a short period of time and make our products vanish.” The problem is, if a company builds a reputation as a secretive one that clones the work of its partners & customers then people don’t want to do open-ended transparent relationships. Naive folks might need to see the blood and tears 3 or 4 times to pick up on the trend, but even the slowest of the slow notice it after a dozen such moves.
- “I’m just very wary of building a product where the terms can be changed.” Considering Google’s lack of transparency & self-promotional bias on the social networking front, would you be fully transparent and open with Google? If so, then aren’t the search algorithms complex enough that it would make sense to make those transparent as well? How can you ask other social networks to increase transparency at the same time Google is locking down their search data on claims of protecting user privacy?
- “It’s not just about content. It’s about identity, and when you start talking about these things and what it takes to build this, the data needed is much more than we can publicly crawl.” This is where being trustworthy is so crucial. Past interactions with Yelp, TripAdvisor & Groupon likely make future potential partners more risk adverse & cautious. Outrageous “accidents” like those that happened with Mocality & Open Street Map from playing fast and loose further erode credibility. And even when Google hosts the media & has full access to user data they still rank inferior stuff sometimes (like the recent Santorum YouTube cartoon fiasco), even on widely searched core/head keywords.
The big issue is that if people feel the game is rigged they won’t have much incentive to share on Google+. I largely only share stuff that is irrelevant to tangentially relevant to our business interests & won’t share stuff that is directly relevant, because I don’t want to be forced to compete against an inferior version of my own work when the deck is stacked so the inferior version wins simply because it is hosted on Google.
As we move into the information age a lot of physical stores are shutting down. Borders went bust last year. Sears announced the closure of many stores. And many of the people shopping in the physical stores that remain are using cell phones for price comparisons. Given Google’s mobile OS share this is another area where they can build trust or burn it. A friend today mentioned how their online prices on Google Product search almost always show a lower price near the header than the lowest price available in the list – sometimes by a substantial margin.
Identity vs Anonymous Contractors
In the past we have mentioned that transparency is often a self-serving & hypocritical policy by those atop power systems who want to limit the power of those whom they aim to control.
When Google was caught promoting illegal drug ads there was no individual who took the blame for it. When the Mocality scraping & the Open Street Map vandalism issues happened, all that we were told was that Google “was mortified” and it was “a contractor.” If people who did hit jobs could just place all the blame on “the contractor” then the world would be a pretty crappy place!
Eric Schmidt warned that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” That sage advice came from the same Eric Schmidt that blackballed cNet for positing personal information about him. Around the same time Eric offered the above quote, Google was engaged in secret & illegal backdoor deals with direct competitors to harm their own employees.
What happened to Google recruiters who dared to go against the illegal pact? They were fired on the hour:
“Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?” Schmidt wrote.
Google’s staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer “will be terminated within the hour.”
When Google+ launched they demanded that you use your real name or don’t use the product. They later claimed that you can use a nickname on your account as well, but there is a difference between a nickname and pseudonyms.
What is so outrageous about the claims for this need for real identities is that past studies have shown that pseudonymous comments are best & Bruce Schneier highlighted how we lose our individuality if we are under an ever-watchful eye:
Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies — whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
In many markets ads and content are blended in a way that is hard to distingush between them. Whenever Google wants to enter they can demand greater transparency to participate (and then use the standard formatted data from that transparency to create a meta-competitor in the market.)
Increasingly Google is placing more of their search data & their webmaster-related functions behind a registration wall. If you are rich & powerful they will sell you the data. If you are the wrong type of webmaster that aggregate data can be used in *exceptionally* personal ways.
User Privacy
Ahead of Google updating their privacy policy Google has directed a large portion of their ad budget toward ads about how they protect users online.
What better way to ensure user privacy than to allow them to register their accounts under psydonyms? The real name policy on Google+ was part of what made Google want to stop providing referrer data for logged in users who search on Google. This has had a knock on effect where other social sites are framing everything, requiring registration to read more of public user generated content & sending outbound traffic through redirects.
Google’s new privacy policy allows them to blend your user data from one service into refining the experience (and ads) on another:
If you’re signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you’ve expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We’ll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you’re searching for and get you those results faster.
Google & Facebook’s war (against) user privacy is catching media and governmental attention. Microsoft highlighted some of Google’s issues in their “putting people first” ad campaign & the blowback has caused Google not only to publish PR-spin “get the facts” styled blog posts, but to launch yet another ad campaign.
EU regulators have asked Google to pause their privacy policy changes.
Bogus Testimonials & Social Payola
Is social media a cleaner signal than links? If search engines put the same weight on social media that they put on links it would get spammed to bits. It won’t be long until a firm like Ad.ly offers sponsored Google+ posts.
Some have suggested that you won’t be able to buy Google+ followers however Google already includes user pictures on AdWords ads (even when they desire not to be & even when they didn’t endorse the product that Google suggests they endorsed). In due time I expect Google will indeed sell followers & other user interactions as ad units (just like Twitter & Facebook do).
Further, celebrities sell Tweets to advertisers. When they are hot their rates go up:
When Ad.ly introduced self-destructing Charlie Sheen to Twitter, he was paid about $50,000 per tweet. It was worth it. Sheen’s tweet for Internships.com generated 95,333 clicks in the first hour and 450,000 clicks in 48 hours, created a worldwide trending topic out of #tigerbloodintern, attracted 82,148 internship applications from 181 countries, and added 1 million additional visits to Internships.com.
Search engines might consider these to be clean signals if those same search engines were not busy buying the manipulation of said “relevancy” signals.
Attention is purchased to create demand. It isn’t comfortable to put it this way, but we are trained to obey authority & to like what others like:
The average Facebook user has 130 friends, which equates with four degrees of separation to thousands of people, Mr. Fischer said. Metrics like that led him to believe that if Facebook could figure out a way to capitalize on “social endorsements,” it would be like creating a word-of-mouth campaign that could reach millions of people simultaneously. Since the campaigns would come from a friend, they would theoretically be taken more seriously than, say, a TV commercial, he said.
On an individual basis reviews and ratings get faked everywhere. Even stodgy old slow-moving institutions like colleges game their ranking systems.
There recently was a question raised about how Google’s rating systems skewed high on the underlying data. Surely Overstock (the same Overstock Google penalized earlier this year) wouldn’t promote Google’s trusted stores aggressively on their own site if it made their business appear worse than it actually is, thus a positive bias must be baked in to the system.
Entire categories of demand are created by those tied in with power cost shifting to create bubbles. The US government is propping up home prices & the government bailed out a company that is now shorting the housing market (when that company was about to get bailed out the secretary of treasury leaked it to some of his criminal investor buddies).
Millions of kids take drugs that address the symptoms of being a child full of energy, imagination & entusiasm. In some cases they may need them, but in most cases they probably don’t. The solution with the highest economic return gets the largest ad budget, even if it only treats symptoms.
Web Scrape Plus+ (Now With More Scraping)
When the +1 button & Google+ launched, Google highlighted how they would use the + button usage as a “relevancy” signal. Google recently started inserting + pages directly into the search results for brands & right from the very start they were using it as a scraper website that would outrank the original content source.
Google used the buy in from their promised relevancy signal to create a badge-based incentivized system which acts as a glorified PageRank funnel to further juice the rankings of these new pages on a domain name that already had a PageRank 10.
I recently read a blog post about how anyone could do the above & the opportunity is open to everyone. But the truth is, I can’t state that something will become a relevancy signal that manipulates the search results in order to get buy in. Or, if I did something which actually had the same net effect, Google would likely chop my legs off for promoting a link scheme.
Recently the topic of Google+ as a scraper site came up yet again via Read Write Web & on Hacker News a Googler stated that it was “childish” to place any of the blame on Google!!!!!!
Google determines how much information is shown near each listing & can create “relevancy” signals in ways that things tied to Google get over-represented (look at the +1 count here). When they do that & it destroys other business models *of course* Google deserves 100% of the blame.
Thin Content & Scraper Sites
Remember the whole justification for Panda was that thin content was a poor user experience?
In spite of sites like eHow getting hit, Google is still pre-paying them to upload content to Youtube.
Now that the (non-Google hosted) thin content has been disappeared (and the % of downstream traffic from Google to Youtube has more then doubled in the past year) it is time for Google to take another slice of the search traffic stream with Search Plus Your World:
The Google vs Facebook locked down walled garden contest will retard innovation. As the corporate internet silos grow larger the independent web withers. Them going after each other may leave room for Twitter, but it doesn’t leave lots of room is left for others, as the economics of publishing have to work or the publishers die.
Start ups that were on a successful trajectory were killed by Panda:
The startup had been on a roll up until last February when Google altered its ranking algorithm with the release of “Panda.” The changes decimated TeachStreet’s traffic, and the company never quite recovered.
“We lost a lot of our traffic, and overnight we started talking to partners for biz dev, not for acquisition,” he said. However, many of the potential partners wanted to know about an outright acquisition.
About.com was also smoked by Google:
The biggest worry, though, is that the decline of About.com itself may be irreversible. Fewer people are clicking on About ads placed by Google and the site’s own display ads have dropped in value.
The company has attributed this decline in value to Google’s decision last year to downgrade About pages in its search results. With more than 80% of traffic coming from search, the Google denigration was indeed a blow but About’s problems may be rooted in something deeper.
Keep in mind that the reason these websites were hit was that they were claimed to be thin & thus a poor user experience. When the NYT bought About.com one of the top competing bidders was Google!
Now that the “thin content” has been demoted in the search results Google can integrate deep content silos from Google+, like this one:
That is an 8-word Google+ post about how short another blog post is. I like Todd & do like to read his writings, but here Google is clearly favoring the same sort of content they would have torched if it was done on an independent webmaster’s website.
How Google has raters view other websites that redirect traffic is based upon those sites having a substantial value add. Clearly in the above example there was nothing added to the interaction beyond sharing a bookmark with a punchy tagline.
If Google wants to use the + notation to pull up that other referenced page then perhaps that can make sense, but to list an 8-word Google+ page in the search results nearly a year after the Panda algorithm is outrageous. This sort of casual mention integration in the search results occurs on expensive keywords as well. Not only do they list your own Google+ posts…
…but they also list them from anyone you follow…
In addition to information pollution, the other big issue here is time. Google wants to make forms more standardized to make filling them out faster & they give regular sermons on the importance of fast search results. Yet when I do a navigational search, Google delivers two AdWords ads, a huge Google+ promotion, and then the navigational search result barely above the fold.*
*Since I thought the above was obnoxious, I renamed our Google+ company page to S_E_O Book to help Google fix their relevancy problems.
Can anyone explain how Google’s speed bias is aligned with putting plus junk right at the top, even on brand searches? Yahoo! has been pretty aggressive with putting shopping ads in the search results, but their implementation is still a better user experience than what Google did above.
And Bing offers an even cleaner experience than that.
Due to how Google integrates Google+ in such a parasitic way I see no incentive for participating on their network except when I have something that is outside of my domain of expertise, something that I am not targeting commercially, something that is thin, or something irrelevant to say! That incentive structure combined with Google’s photo meme feature will ensure that content marketers will help plenty of people see Star Wars stuff ranking for mortgage loan search queries.
When you own search/navigation you own language. that position can easily be extended into any other direction/market in a way a social graph can not:
“The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English,” McNealy said. “All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business.”
Further, Google can chose at any point to respond to or ignore market regulations in accordance with whatever makes them the most money. They can also fund 3rd parties doing the same (like undermining copyright) to force others to strike an official deal with Google to be “open.”
A lot of businesses live on small profit margins, so Google’s ability to insert itself & fund criminal 3rd parties aligned with Google’s internal longterm interests is a big big big deal. Companies will learn that you either work with Google on Google’s terms or you die.
When a public relations issue brews they can quickly change their approach and again position themselves as the white knight.
Brand Equity & Forcing the Brand Buy
Yahoo! put out a research paper highlighting activity bias, stating that the efficacy of online advertising is often over-stated because people who see ads about a topic were already more closely tied in with that particular network & that particular topic before they even saw the ad. As an example, any person who sees an AdWords ad for hemorrhoid treatment was already searching for hemorrhoid-related topics before they saw your ad (thus they were in the subset of individuals that might have came across your site in some way if you were in the search ad ecosystem or not).
This sort of activity bias-driven selection bias (homophily) exists on social networks online & offline.
Google did research on incrementality of ads & they came to the opposite conclusion as Yahoo! did. Google suggested you should buy, buy, buy, even on your own branded keywords. They suggested that testing was expensive (no mention that the only reason it is expensive is because Google chooses not to make such tools easily accessible to advertisers) & that the clicks were so cheap on branded keywords that you should buy, buy, buy. Many advertisers who mix brand & non-brand keywords together don’t realize that they are using the “returns” from bidding on their own brand to subsidize over-paying for other keywords.
Google Analytics is the leading & most widely used web analytics program. They can share whatever metrics help them sell more ads (defaulting to crediting the last click for conversions, even if it was on a navigational search to your site) & pull back on features that are not aligned with their business interests (SEO referral data anyone?)
This goes back to Scott McNealy’s quote: “The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English. All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business.”
Analysts didn’t understand why Google CPC rates were down 8% last quarter while overall search clicks were up 34%. The biggest single reason was likely more clicks on adlinks on branded AdWords ads. While a brand buying its own keyword typically pays far less per click than what some of the biggest keywords go for, the branded keywords typically have an exceptionally high CTR. Those additional clicks dragged down Google’s average CPC, but the extra revenue they offered was a big par of the reason why Google was about to grow at 25% even though their display network only grew at 15%.
That slow growth of display is in spite of Youtube now serving over 4 billion video streams per day & Google adding display ads to log out pages.
Online views are not the same as TV views. A comScore study found that 31% of display ads are never seen. In spite of that, US online advertising will reach nearly $40 billion this year.
Google wants to insert itself as a needed cost of business in the same way credit card companies have.
On Google Maps they put an ad inside your location box.
Even if most people don’t participate on Google+, Google can still force advertiser buy in through over-promotion of the network in the search results. On your branded keywords they may drive your organic listing below the fold & put Google+ front & center.
Facebook earnings are still growing much faster than Google’s & Facebook encourages advertisers to advertise their Facebook pages, so even when you pay for the click Facebook still keeps the user. Facebook is adding apps to the timeline & is trying to win VEVO music video hosting from YouTube.
While Google is primarily known as a search company, it is getting harder to get off of Google though any channel other than a toll booth. Google keeps driving the organic search results downward, while Google verticals fill up many of the organic results that remain. Many companies already buy Google ads on their own YouTube content. Some buy ads on Google to drive them to their Youtube videos & then buy ads on their own Youtube video to promote their websites. Soon Google will try to push you to buy them on your Google+ page as well. Google is becoming a walled garden:
Google wants to control more elements of your social world now. They don’t just want to be a search engine.
Is that so bad? Maybe not. It’s certainly no different from how other companies, from AOL, to Microsoft, to Apple, to Disney, to Facebook, have viewed the world — as ideally a walled garden, an all-consuming platform that most people use for pretty much every form of entertainment and social interaction.
A lot of people thought that Google was somehow different. They were, of course, wrong.
…
To move forward either as the old Google or Google+, Google needs to be capable of making fair deals with the partner ecosystem. It needs to curb its instinct to kill competing media companies that were actually producing great content that Google helped you find.
I suspect there will be plenty of bloodshed before Google figures that one out.
“This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.” – Larry Page
Google no longer believes in the concept of the open web. Blame it on Larry Page becoming the CEO, blame it on him talking to Steve Jobs & Steve telling him to make fewer and tighter products, blame it on Google funding eHow, or blame it on basically anything. But if you go back far enough, much of the stuff that is going on now was clearly envisioned a decade ago:
I was lucky enough to chat with Larry one-to- one about his expectations for Google back in 2002. He laid out far-reaching views that had nothing to do with short-term revenue goals, but raised questions about how Google would anticipate the day sensors and memory became so cheap that individuals would record every moment of their lives. He wondered how Google could become like a better version of the RIAA – not just a mediator of digital music licensing – but a marketplace for fair distribution of all forms of digitized content. I left that meeting with a sense that Larry was thinking far more deeply about the future than I was, and I was convinced he would play a large role in shaping it. I would rather jump on board that bullet train than ride a local that never missed a revenue stop but never.” – Douglas Edwards
What happens when the Google+ version of your content outranks the version on your own site? And what happens when your branded channel and/or your fans become a vertical ad silo Google sells to your competitors?
I tested submitting a couple posts to Google+ with a Wordtracker top keywords list & valuable keywords (on a cpc*traffic) basis in posts about top keywords. Those posts rank #2 or #3 in Google for many people that follows me. No harm to me since those posts were irrelevant to this site, but if they were about my theme & topic I just would have out-competed myself. When Google outranks you (even with a copy of your content) they get to taste the data again and sell off the attention another time. You only get a slice of that monetization, even when it is your work that is being monetized. Maybe it is great for stuff that is somewhat less relevant and/or keywords that are so competitive that you otherwise wouldn’t score for them, but we have to be really careful we don’t out-compete ourselves. Though if Googke keeps this up they won’t be the only ones monetizing it. Give it a few months and celebrities will be selling sponsored Google+ posts based on some metric created by multiplying search volume, CPC & how many followers they have.
Is Bing Better? Will Enough People Ask That Question to Matter?
For years Google built their reputation as being the search engine that offered the cleanest & fastest search results. They were known for monetizing less aggressively than the competition. But over the past couple years Google has dialed up their ads to where they now send a greater ratio of ad traffic than organic search traffic. One Google engineer recently described the ability to rank highly in Google without buying their ads as being a bug that was getting fixed!
Google’s big risk in their coupling of aggressive monetization, aggressive self-promotion & changing how users feel about user privacy is that they can create the perception that users should go elsewhere for for an honest or trustworthy search. This not only builds momentum for smaller search services like DuckDuckGo & Blekko, but has also won praise for Bing from Gizmodo, Dave Winer & The Next Web.
Why It’s Critical For Your Business To Have Uniqueness for “Individual Products and Services”
Posted on 04. Feb, 2012 by Sean D'Souza in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
It’s easy to say that every individual product or service needs a uniqueness of its own, but what if it doesn’t?
Would Adobe Photoshop CS5 have the same uniqueness as CS4? Or CS3? Or CS2?
No, it wouldn’t, right?
And would Adobe Photoshop have the same uniqueness as Adobe Acrobat even though both products come from the same company? Stupid question, huh?
In case you missed the announcement, for the last three weeks we have been giving away a lot of goodies absolutely free.
Goodie 1: Learn how to create your Uniqueness. Find out the biggest mistakes and how to avoid them.
Goodie 2: What Good Is Uniqueness If A Competitor Can Easily Copy It?
Goodie 3: Brand Positioning: Why The Right Uniqueness Is Built On A “DNA”
Goodie 4: Brand Positioning: Do You Need To Carve Out a Uniqueness
-Sean
Weekend Favs February Four
Posted on 04. Feb, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, DTM Favs, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Weekend Favs February Four
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.
I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or from my own travels.
First run of the day Telluride
Good stuff I found this week:
Quipol – Easily create and embed social polls that are very easy to use and very good looking
Transcribe – free online tool that makes it much easier to transcribe an audio – type and listen in the same place and keyboard shortcuts let you slow the audio down and skip around.
SocialBro – Great piece of software that allows you analyze and manage your Twitter following, including the best times to Tweet when your following are on Twitter.
7 Super Social Media Marketing Links
Posted on 04. Feb, 2012 by Robert Bruce in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing
This week on The Lede …
- What really works on Twitter
- One thing social media copywriters should never do
- 9 productive social media hacks
- A reminder of the power of the original social media
If you just can’t wait for The Lede every Saturday, and you want even more practical, useable links than the seven we highlight here every week, follow @copyblogger on Twitter. It’s painless. Really.
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9 Social Media Hacks You Need to Embrace Now
Mr. Baer makes a good case that though social media is inexpensive in monetary terms, it can get good and costly when it comes to spending your time and brain power. His 9 “hacks” can help keep you sane and productive in the fast, fast digital world we run in.
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100 Ways to Become a Twitter Power User
Mr. Patel is on a content tear lately, not just cranking it out, but cranking out the good stuff. The headline of his article says it all, and you’d do your Twitter efforts a service to give it the once over. From how to generate more retweets, to becoming a more interesting Twitter writer, this one is well worth an hour.
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The Basics of Pinterest for Content Marketers
Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest. It’s on the tip of many tongues these days, for good reason: it’s driving quality traffic. If you’re a content marketer with a visual bent, you should get over there and start pinning. But first check out the infographic above …
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Copywriters Should Never Try to Change the Prospect’s Mind
Remember that person you used to date, how you tolerated certain personality quirks or behaviors because you were sure you could change them … eventually? Veteran copywriter Nick Usborne shows you why it didn’t work back then, and why you shouldn’t try to do it now, in your business. Hint: It’s impossible.
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What Works on Twitter: The Definitive, Data-Driven Guide
It’s official, people on Twitter don’t care what you ate for lunch. What works? If you’ve been reading Copyblogger for any amount of time, the answer to that question won’t come as a surprise. At all. We’ve been preaching this very thing for more than six years …
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Email Newsletters are a Serious Business
Email: the original social media. By collecting and briefly analyzing a few top email newsletters publishing today, Mr. Baptiste has given us an important reminder — sexy does not always sell (best). Do you publish an email newsletter? Are you reaching out to your customers and fans on a regular schedule via email? If not, you’re leaving money on the table, and why would you want to do that?
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How to Create a Powerful Password You Can Actually Remember
The greatest plague that Social Media hath wrought? Passwords. There are a few great password management tools out there (that you should definitely be using), but xkcd brings us back to the old school in this cartoon. As always, the old school is simple, and it confuses the hell out of hackers and their big, bad hacking machines. Yeah.
Did you miss anything on Copyblogger this week?
- How to Grow Your Freelance Writing Business by Working Less
- 5 Ways Writers Can Break Out of the Tired Old Social Media Box
- 10 Content Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing
- What Zappos Can Teach You About Becoming Irresistible to Customers
- Even if Blogging Drools, Online Content Rules
About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s copywriter and resident recluse.
How to Build an Advanced Keyword Analysis Report in Excel
Posted on 04. Feb, 2012 by Dan Peskin in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Posted by Dan Peskin
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Analyzing keyword performance, discovering new keyword opportunities, and determining which keywords to focus efforts on can be painstaking when you have thousands of keywords to review. With keyword metrics coming from all over the place (Analytics, Adwords, Webmaster Tools, etc.), it’s challenging to analyze all the data in one place regularly without having to do a decent amount of manual data manipulation. In addition, dependent on your site’s business model, tying revenue metrics to keyword data is a whole other battle.
This post will walk you through a solution to these keyword analysis issues and provide some tips on how you can slice and dice your data in wonderful ways.
With Microsoft Excel, we can create a report with all the keyword data you will need, all in one place, and fairly easy to update on a weekly or monthly basis. Then with all this data we can easily categorize segments of it to more quickly determine the better performing sets of keywords.
What we will need to do is push Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Adwords, Ranking data, and Revenue data all into one excel spreadsheet. Then we will put it all together into one master report and one categorized pivot table report.
To start, you should be especially familiar with pivot tables, the Google Adwords API, the Google Analytics API, and keyword research of course. Utilizing these APIs and being consistent in the formatting of the data you put into your spreadsheet will make it easy to update. If you aren’t familiar with these tools, I have provided resources below and some steps to organizing this data.
Here are some resources for learning to use pivot tables in Excel:
Excel for SEO
Microsoft Pivot Table Overview
Now let’s go fetch that data.
I Got 99 Problems, But A Keyword Visit Ain't One
First off we need to get our keyword traffic metrics through the Google Analytics API. I suggest using Mikael Thuneberg’s GA Data Fetch spreadsheet. You can follow the instructions, read the how to guide, and download the file here.
Make sure to build off the GA data fetch file or a copy of it, as it has the proper VBA functions (the Visual Basic code that allows for the API to work) installed for API calls. Once you have your API token and the spreadsheet setup you can perform your first API call.
We will be using the more complex query to extract organic keyword visits for a specific date field and filter by the number of visits. The query I use for example, will output visits, average time on site, page views, and bounces for any keyword with 5 or more visits in the last 30 days. However, you can modify the parameters to your liking. To see what other metrics can be used, check out the Analytics API documentation.
Your Analytics data should look something like this:
Google Analytics data called through the API in Excel.
Now select the whole keyword column and create a pivot table of the keyword list in another sheet. In the adjacent column create a table where the cells equal the values in the pivot table column. Label this table “KeywordList” or whatever you like. We now have the keyword table to reference for extracting Adwords data.
Pivot tables don’t have the same referencing abilities as regular tables, so the table in column B is what you will reference in future steps.
To Be, Or Not To Be Searched, That Is The Question
Next up is pulling in search volumes for our keyword table. Thanks to the wonderful Richard Baxter, there are a couple articles on using and installing the Adwords API Plugin. One on SEOmoz and one on Seogadget.
I know the Adwords API access is a bit of an issue for some, so if you cannot use the API, utilize the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (gathering data from this tool will unfortunately require a lot more work).
In a new sheet, use the Adwords API array formula called “arrayGetAdWordsStats” to pull in the average and seasonal monthly search volumes for your keyword table. Your formula should look something like this:
=arrayGetAdWordsStats(KeywordList,”EXACT”,”US”,”WEB”)
You should now have 12 months of historical search volumes and averages for all your keywords.
Results from an Adwords API call usually look like this.
Note: If your keyword list is greater than 800 keywords, you will have to break out the list into a few separate tables just to perform API calls for those keywords. If this is the case, make sure to keep each array of search volumes aligned in the same columns.
The Impression That I Get
No API required here, Google’s Webmaster Tools provides a pretty easy way to download its search query data. If you open up the Search Queries report in Webmaster Tools there is an option to “download the table” at the bottom. Download the table for the same date range you used earlier and drop it into a new sheet.
The report downloaded from Webmaster Tools. Note the “-“ is used for zero values, in the yellow columns I simply cleaned that up with an IF statement.
Impressions, CTR, and Average Rank can now been added to our metrics.
If You Ain't First Page, You're Last
Since we all know how accurate average rank is from Webmaster Tools, let’s get some current rankings into this report .Grab your main keyword list from the spreadsheet and run rankings for them with your application of choice. I usually use Rank Tracker, but I am sure everyone has their own preference. Once you have your rankings drop it into a new sheet.
The More You Know
The number of metrics we can add to the report are limitless, but there comes a point where adding too many can create more work for updating the report or create analysis paralysis. The only other metric I suggest adding in is the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty if you have a PRO account. Again this may be very time consuming to add for large numbers of keywords, hopefully you have an intern for that.
Mo Money Mo Metrics
Revenue data may come from different places dependent on how your business works, so I unfortunately don’t have a one stop solution to importing that data. However, most applications usually allow you to download that data to CSV or Excel. If you have Ecommerce enabled in Google Analytics, you can use the API to pull in this data. As long as you have some metrics to relate to your keyword such as Average Order Value or Conversion Rate, drop it in a new sheet and you will be good to go.
Some of you may be asking yourself what to do if your revenue data does not tie back to the keyword visit. This is where the categorization of keywords plays an extremely important part in this report. In this case, we want to create a bridge between the revenue data and keyword data. This can be done through categorizing your keywords into a category that relates back to a field in your revenue data. For example, you might be able to associate keywords with product names or landing pages. These products or landing pages would then become categories. Once you have determined what your categories will be, you can assign them to keywords in a new sheet that simply contains keywords in one column and the category tag in the other. You can learn more about keyword categorization here.
Categorizing the keywords above not only lets me group them to aggregate metrics for analysis, but it allows me to bridge the gap somewhat between the keywords and conversions in this example.
One Report To Rule Them All
Finally we have all the data; we just have to put it all together. Create a new sheet and pull in your master keyword list by using =NameOfTheTable, drag this down until you reach the last keyword on the list (paste values after if you want sorting capabilities). Now select your keywords and create a new table. In the columns next to the keywords all you have to do is a VLOOKUP of each metric you would like to add to your report. Once you fill in the first cell of each column, the column should automatically be added to the table and populate the other cells with the equation. Repeat this process until all your metrics are in this table.
There will also be a need to calculate some metrics such as the Bounce Rate or Conversion Rate if you pulled in revenue data. Those should be added in adjacent columns as well. Additionally, if you didn’t need to categorize your keywords earlier, I suggest categorizing them now in an adjacent column. When completed your master report should look something like this:
The master report.
Amazing. We have all the data in one place in a simple to sort and use table! Just wait…it gets better.
Pivotal Success
Now you may be wondering how this report can get any better. Two words my friends: Pivot Tables.
Creating a pivot table of your master report will allow you to segment your data in a number of ways that weren’t possible before. In the Pivot Table Field List, the Row Labels, Column Labels, and Values will define the layout of your report. What we first need to do is drag and drop the Category and Keyword fields into the Row Labels respectively. This will set your top level metrics to summarize at the Category level and allow you to drill down into each Category to see the associated keywords and their individual metrics.
Next you will want to start dragging your metrics into the Values section, which will automatically populate the Column Labels section with the Values field. As you add your metrics in, you can edit their names and the way they are aggregated. You will want to think carefully about how you will aggregate certain metrics so that viewing those summarized numbers at a Category level makes sense.
This shows you how best to setup your pivot table fields and their value settings.
For instance, I might summarize Impressions and Visits, but average CTR and Bounce Rate. Seeing the average CTR and Bounce Rate for a Category will allow me to narrow down which sets of keywords are performing better than others. Then looking at the total Impressions and Visits for those well performing categories will allow me to see where there might be a higher potential to increase traffic to my site. While this may not be an absolute rule to determine keyword focus, it is a good rule of thumb and can be a way to prioritize which ones to focus on.
Pivot table reports also allow you to add report filters, letting you filter out data by any metric or even multiple metrics. With this you could analyze keywords that only rank on the first page of SERPs using the current ranking as a filter. Hell, you could add a field to the master report calculating the number of words in each keyword phrase, then filter by that and bounce rate, giving you your well performing long tail keywords. Get creative, let loose, play with the metrics, you will be surprised at what kind of conclusions you can make about your site’s keyword traffic.
The final product.
Conclusion
Updating the report is simple. Rerun the API calls with the new date range, rerun your rankings for the new keyword list, and export the other reports you need with new date range. As long as you kept your formatting and equations the same, the rankings and other reports should be dropped into their respective sheets without having to change anything. The master report should automatically be updated once you update the keyword column and the pivot report should update once you hit refresh under the pivot table menu. That’s it!
Well I should probably stop talking now and let you get to your hours upon hours of keyword analysis fun. Hopefully this was informative enough to make building a report such as this fairly easy. I would love to hear your feedback and will gladly answer any questions or comments about the post below. If you have issues later on, you can always contact me via Twitter.
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25 Things You Could Buy With a Super Bowl Ad Budget
Posted on 03. Feb, 2012 by Corey Eridon in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
A 30-second commercial advertisement for Super Bowl XLVI is going for $3.5 million. Can you imagine what you as a marketer could do for your company if you had that kind of budget? If you can’t even fathom what you’d do with a marketing budget that big (and just think, this is just one of many campaigns they’re running this year!), we’ve come up with some ideas for how you can better spend that chunk of change. And if you’re thinking you’d spend it on a commercial during the Super Bowl, well, maybe these ideas will give you some perspective on just how far $3.5 million can go in the marketing world.
25 Ways to Spend the $3.5 Million Budget of a Super Bowl XLVI Commercial
1.) Buy 1,458 years of HubSpot Basic Inbound Marketing Software. Tweet This!
2.) Direct mail the entire country of Sweden. Tweet This!
3.) Hire someone to blog for you for the next 70 years. Tweet This!
4.) Put up a billboard along the highway from Boston to D.C. every one mile. Tweet This!
5.) Purchase 2,333 years of Salesforce Enterprise CRM. Tweet This!
6.) Buy inbound links from enough web pages to fill the Oxford English Dictionary 16 times. Tweet This!
7.) Use PPC to buy a search presence for 2,333,333 keywords after Google dings you for purchasing links. Tweet This!
8.) Give 2,060 employees their own personal version of the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!
9.) Send those 2,060 employees to classes so they know how to use the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!
10.) Buy the email list of the entire population of Chile and SPAM them; try to do it before your IP is blacklisted. Tweet This!
11.) Repair your company’s spamtastic image by plastering your company logo and tagline across 35,000 park benches. Tweet This!
12.) Hire Al Gore to be your company’s celebrity spokesperson for a full 24-hour day. Tweet This!
13.) Let everyone know Al Gore is your spokesperson by, ironically, printing enough flyers to stick to every single household door in the United Kingdom. Take that, environment. Tweet This!
14.) Buy the stamps to send out your 2012 holiday cards. Let’s hope you have 7,777,777 customers. Tweet This!
15.) Purchase about 35,000 shares of Facebook after it IPOs. Tweet This!
16.) Keep a web designer on call 24 hours a day for 4 years to change your website whenever you want. Tweet This!
17.) Commission enough content from the Zerys Content Marketplace to post a new blog to your website every hour of every day for the next 26 years. Tweet This!
18.) Hire the entire graduating class of Emerson College’s Masters of Marketing program to work in your department. Tweet This!
19.) Or, if you’re happy with your current team, you could send 23 of them to get their MBAs. Tweet This!
20.) You should probably also buy them all brand new MacBook Airs for their studies; you’ll have enough money left over to hoard 3,477 for yourself. What? Marketers love Apple products! Tweet This!
21.) Hire Lady Gaga to follow your CMO around all day, singing “Happy Birthday” on repeat, every year for the next 145 years. Tweet This!
22.) Develop 542 mobile apps. Because the other 541 just weren’t good enough. Tweet This!
23.) Purchase enough color toner to print brochures that can span the Atlantic Ocean from Dublin to Boston. And then back again. Tweet This!
24.) Pay to rank for the rarely searched keyword phrase, “best company in the world” for 11,666 years. Tweet This!
25.) Air 17 regular commercials on network television any other time of the year. Tweet This!
Now just think of what you could do with the additional $1-2 million you’d spend actually producing the commercial…
If you had $3.5+ million to spend on marketing, how would you use the money?
Image credit: Images_of_Money
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How the Third Wave of Media Is Transforming Marketing Content
Posted on 03. Feb, 2012 by Kipp Bodnar in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
As a society, how we watch, read, and consume information is fundamentally changing. News, information, and entertainment will never go back to “the way it was,” and this change will have a powerful impact on all aspects of inbound and outbound marketing. In 2012, marketing is publishing, so let’s learn how to be a great publisher in an industry under constant disruption.
This week, some of the most intense shots yet were fired in the battle for the eyes and mind of the world. Stop. Listen for a second. Do you hear the cries and confusion? Those are the cries of the publishing and broadcast executives.
As a marketer, you should be cheering.
Amazon’s Unwavering Assault on the Publishing Industry
Brick and mortar bookseller Barnes and Noble announced this week that it would no longer stock books published by the digital book juggernaut, Amazon.com. “What’s that?” you ask? “Amazon publishes books? But I thought they only sold them.” That’s right — Amazon is a book distributor AND publisher.
In the fourth quarter of 2011, Amazon said it sold millions of Kindle electronic reading devices, but the business still came in a billion dollars in revenue below Wall Street expectations.
But Amazon doesn’t care.
As reported by the New York Times, Amazon published 122 books in the fall of 2011. This number is seemingly insignificant when compared to the total number of books published by all publishers during the same time period. But what doesn’t matter, because a secret about the publishing industry is that it makes most of its money from a small group of best-selling books and authors. Amazon understands this and seems willing to lose money in order to take the best and brightest writers away from traditional publishing houses. And with more than $6 billion in the bank, it can.
Barnes and Noble, citing the lack of ability to sell ebooks from Amazon’s published works, has decided to return the favor by not selling the print versions of those Amazon-published books in its stores. This marks a continued battle for control over distributing the words of the world.
The Third Wave of Media
Salar Kamangar, CEO of YouTube, believes that we are in a third wave of media. At an event in California this week Kamangar said, “The first wave was the broadcast networks. The second wave was cable networks. Now, it’s about giving people exactly what they want to watch today.”
Mashable reports that YouTube has invested more than $100 million into premium content channels around niche topics including food, fashion, pets, and fitness, making it clear that YouTube is willing to spend money to be a major player in this third wave of media. This week, YouTube hired Bruce Seidel, who oversaw shows on the Food Network and Cooking Channel, to lead programming for YouTube’s new food-focused channel. According to a New York Times article, Seidel hopes to “discover new stars and galvanize the niches that are driving the internet food conversation.”
User Experience and the Third Wave of Media
Since the early beginning of the internet, pundits have discussed the rise of internet-based entertainment, but the fact of the matter is that online video has never really made it into the living room. One core barrier that is too frequently ignored is the user experience of watching online video compared to watching television. People watch television to relax, and having to click a new video to watch on YouTube every three minutes is not relaxing. Plus, you have the added anxiety that, for many people, the computer equals a device, and devices subsequently mean stress.
It is the deficiency of user experience that third wave media companies have to overcome in order to infiltrate the living room. But Kamangar, who plans to launch 100 niche content channels on YouTube this year, says, “The idea is that you’ll subscribe to a channel, and you’ll go and just keep watching.”
Niche AND Quality
The knock against many ebooks and online video shows is quality. The fact of the matter is that because anyone with a computer or video camera can create an ebook or online show, the quality and production value in many cases is much lower than that of traditional publishing houses and cable networks. That’s why Amazon is signing top-quality authors and YouTube is hiring some of the best minds in cable programming. Both of these companies understand that, to take over the living room, the core content has to be remarkable.
The idea of remarkable content isn’t anything new. However, content has the potential to become even more remarkable when it is applied to a niche. And that niche factor is the leverage third wave media companies have over the first and second wave media companies. Imagine if 100 new cable networks launched this year to cover niche topics. It simply wouldn’t happen. Online video providers and ebook authors’ best shot at disruption comes from a laser focus on increasing content quality standards while still serving and representing niche communities currently underserved by cable networks.
Change Is Hard: AKA Why This Hasn’t Already Happened
The fact that the world is constantly changing isn’t news to any of us. We write it off as a fact of life. Despite this constant change, we are at a paradox. Change is easy to hate, especially major disruption to our daily routines and habits. And it’s not that we as people or as a society don’t want to change. It’s the simple fact that change is exhausting.
Chip and Dan Heath explain this idea perfectly in their book, Switch. The Heath brothers write: “Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.”
The way we read, watch, and consume information is changing at the pace of a rapid turtle. This means that you won’t blink and suddenly live in a world where no publishers exist, but every couple of months, a stack of small changes starts to become noticeable, and the media world becomes slightly different. Before you know it, a few years have passed, and the media world is completely different.
Marketing in a Transitional Media World
It’s time to find your niche. The way information is distributed is gradually yet radically changing around us, which means you can’t wake up years from now and decide that it’s time to change. It’d be too late. Instead, you need to take action now to be an active part of this transitional media world.
Start executing on these four action items today to not only survive, but also succeed in the next generation of media.
1. Find Your Niche – Your niche isn’t the product you sell. Rather, your niche is the subject matter that is of greatest interest to your prospective customers. If you sell supplies to auto body shop owners, then your niche is content about operating a successful auto body shop in every facet of the business, even those for which you don’t have products to sell.
2. Balance Quality and Velocity of Content – The challenge of content in the online media landscape is that content has to be high quality enough to stand out, but also be agile enough not to be out of date the moment it’s published. The only real way to know what a good quality/velocity balance is for your business is to test different options to understand what works the best for your niche. You can do this by changing the frequency in which you publish blog posts and other content. Do you get more leads and engagement when publish a blog post every day, or once a week? Do blog posts that you spend more time polishing and improving generate more traffic and leads than other posts? These are the elements to test as part of your marketing content.
3. Have a Personality – Don’t be bland. Look at the text or videos that capture your attention. They probably have a clear point of view and an interesting tone. Don’t be afraid to be fun, sarcastic, edgy, or any other tone that aligns with your brand and products.
4. Start Planning Beyond the Desktop Computer Screen – For most of us, we still think of a computer as the device that sits on our desk with a big screen that isn’t touch-sensitive. But from the Kindle, Nook, and iPads to iPhone and Andriod smartphones, the definition of a computer has changed. Yes, these changing devices will impact your marketing content. And it isn’t just about their size, but it’s also that they all have one key element in common: touch. Start thinking about what your content looks like in a world without mice (the computer kind). It will have a huge impact on how we design our content and collect information from our leads.
Success of digital-only magazines like the Daily demonstrate that consumers are willing to not only consume but also pay for touchable content that is personalized for their devices. Survey your target audience, and understand what devices they are using to consume information. Then make sure your content works well on the most popular devices.
Change is here.
Image Credit: Ariane Middel
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Kill The Bugs!
Posted on 03. Feb, 2012 by Aaron Wall in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
You can learn a lot more about what Google really thinks by reading what their new hires say. They are not yet skilled in the arts of public relations & make major gaffs like this one:
Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That’s a good thing because SEO can’t scale, and SEO isn’t good for users or the Internet at large.
If you look at the Google experience from the standpoint of customers, it’s pretty good. Users get relevant search results and ads. Advertisers get their content on top of everything else. It’s a good compromise between advertising and usability, and it works really well. It’s a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug. Manipulating Google results shouldn’t be something you feel entitled to be able to do. If you want to rank highly in Google, be relevant for the user currently searching. Engage him in social media or email, provide relevant information about what you’re selling, and, generally, be a “good match” for what the user wants. – Googley Jon Rockway
Would love to hear someone more senior confirm this as the official Google company position, however they are too skilled at public relations to make that blunder (at least outside of foreign AdWords ads that tell you to “forget SEO”).
How to Tackle Your 5 Toughest Email Marketing Challenges
Posted on 03. Feb, 2012 by Magdalena Georgieva in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Email is a powerful marketing channel, but it’s also one that presents many questions and difficulties. In its 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, MarketingSherpa surveyed 2,735 companies and asked them to rank the significance of 12 common email marketing challenges. In this blog post, we will focus on the top five challenges and suggest some ideas through which you can address these issues.
The best inbound marketers like to amass valuable data across their different channels. For instance, they might like to see the possible relationships between landing pages and emails or track the sales process of an email conversion. In addition to the obvious reporting benefits such integrations provide, they also open the door to a much more enjoyable experience for email subscribers.
Just think about it: if you could bridge the gap between email marketing performance and social media activities, landing page conversions, or new customer acquisitions, you are that much closer to improving your sales funnel and delivering content that your community loves.
‘Other data,’ including form submissions and activities on site, can point you to the resources your recipients are truly interested in. In that way, you have a clear understanding of how to further engage them through careful targeting and segmentation.
Solution: Integrate Your Data Systems
In order to integrate your email marketing with your other data systems, you need to use marketing software that allows for that integration to take place. In fact, integration is the foundation on which HubSpot’s software was built as it connects SEO, blogging, social media, lead management, and reporting with email marketing and lead nurturing.
Combining your different marketing databases allows for clear segmentation and the ability to better target your customers and prospects with relevant email messages. Once you have access to an integrated marketing system, keep your buyer persona in mind and focus on the opportunity to target the right audience with the right message.
The more targeted your email campaigns, the more content you’ll need. The key to promoting relevant content in email is to provide an offer that is connected to the initial request. What action have your contacts taken on (or even off) your website? Offer them content that fits with their intent and their needs.
Deliverability rate is the percentage of email messages delivered to your recipients’ inboxes
versus the total number of messages sent. It tells you how many of the emails bounced back,
and it’s a sure sign of inactivity. The two factors that influence deliverability rate are soft bounces and hard bounces. The soft bounce is temporary and occurs when an email server rejects an incoming message (for instance, when your recipients’ inboxes are full). A hard bounce, on the other hand, is less benign and represents a permanent error to deliver an email. This generally occurs when the addresses you send to are bad or don’t exist.
A low deliverability rate might get you blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). If your list is full of inactive emails, you don’t really know what your complaint rate is. Sure, you probably look at the total complaints over total list size, but ISPs are actually registering the total number of complaints over the number of active email users.
In addition, ISPs can mark abandoned email addresses as spam traps. So even if you have acquired emails legitimately, the abandoned addresses may have turned into spam traps. Aside from all the ISP problems, low deliverability rate also means you are wasting money sending messages to nonexistent addresses.
Solution: Practice Good Email Hygiene
Start by cleaning up your email list by removing the unengaged addresses. (You can identify these addresses with metrics such as opens, clicks, or website activity.) If you have a really serious problem with deliverability, you might want to redefine your opt-in process to prevent invalid emails from getting on your list. Either ask people to enter their email twice or experiment with double opt-in. Lastly, make sure your recipients have an opportunity to update their email addresses. Invite them to your preference center from every email you send. That might also help you with segmentation and achieving higher engagement overall.
In MarketingSherpa’s survey, marketing professionals shared that their third most serious challenge in respect to email marketing is growing and retaining subscribers. No wonder! Increasing the size of your email list and keeping your contacts engaged in your messages is no easy task. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, the average email list depreciates by 25% every year.
Unfortunately, companies often battle this problem by purchasing lists. This practice will surely get you into trouble: it might add invalid addresses to your list, and thus, pollute your entire database. Even if the addresses you acquired are valid, the new recipients will most likely not be interested in your content and either unsubscribe or not engage with your emails altogether.
To retain subscribers, a lot of companies also send fewer emails, thinking that the communication frequency might in some way define engagement. A few emails means they are more special, right? Wrong. Frequency of emailing, as we have established in our Science of Email Marketing research, doesn’t necessarily negatively impact subscriber retention.
Solution: Earn Your Email Subscribers
Don’t purchase email lists; instead, earn your subscribers. Be clear to your target audience about what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give them a clear description of what the value proposition is. For example, will your emails offer: (1) tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently, (2) product updates from your company, or (3) special offers via email? Your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.
Are you concerned that you are emailing your subscribers too often? Give this thought a break and instead ask yourself if you are emailing the right people with the right message. In order to retain your email subscribers, you’ll need to provide them with ongoing value that is targeted to their needs. Make sure you are segmenting based on knowledge you have about your recipients.
Don’t limit your email testing to subject lines. Embrace testing of various elements in your email marketing efforts to optimize email performance. For instance, you can do A/B testing of the landing pages you’re promoting in your emails.
Achieving measurable ROI (return on investment) is another challenge that marketing professionals face in the land of email marketing. It’s difficult for them to connect the dots between the messages they send out to prospective customers and the moment when these subscribers get further engaged and turn into customers.
Interestingly enough, this problem is tightly connected to challenge number one — integrating email marketing with other data systems. When your marketing channels are not speaking to one another, it’s hard to identify how they affect conversions. For instance, you might see that your email blast got a 3.4% click-through rate (CTR), but can you also see if that communication contributed to generating new leads? What is more, do you see if it resulted in any new customers?
Solution: Closed-Loop Marketing
The solution to achieving measurable ROI from your email marketing campaigns is to practice closed-loop marketing. Follow a contact from the point of visiting your website through further engagement (viewing other web pages, downloading resources, clicking on your emails), to her final conversion into a customer. Implementing closed-loop marketing empowers you to track leads from their initial channel through a first conversion all the way to becoming customers. Such intelligence, in turn, enables you to identify your most powerful marketing channels and assign clear value to each of them. In this way, you will be able to measure the ROI not only of your emails, but also of your other efforts, which might include social media marketing and blogging.
Your email campaigns should only be a part of your holistic marketing approach. The real power comes from achieving a strong marketing mix. Email cannot be truly as fruitful just by itself; rather, it should also strengthen your other initiatives, just like you shouldn’t use social media in a vacuum, only rely on blogging, or trust that search engine optimization is enough to meet your goals. This, however, seems to be a challenge for marketers. How do you optimize your sales and marketing funnel with emails?
Most marketing professionals are accustomed to sending one-time email blasts that are not necessarily related to the actions of their email subscribers, their interests, or needs. Such a practice doesn’t help push leads down the sales funnel, and it can actually alienate them.
Solution: Nurture Your Leads
Lead nurturing sometimes goes by other names: marketing automation, drip marketing, auto-responders, etc. Simply put, lead nurturing is a system that allows you to send an automated series of emails to an early stage lead in order to better qualify them before handing them over to your sales team.
If it typically takes your leads a month to make a purchasing decision, then make sure you’re spreading out your communications to keep them engaged throughout the month. By taking this approach, you save your sales organization time because you educate and qualify the lead overtime.
Among some of the key benefits of lead nurturing is that it enables marketers to establish contact with their fresh leads fast and stay top of mind for potential, and even current, customers. In comparison to email marketing, lead nurturing is also relatively easy to set up because it is automated and doesn’t need a ton of maintenance over time.
What are some of your top email marketing challenges? Do you have any to add to this list?
This blog post is an excerpt from the ebook Introduction to Email Marketing. To gain a better foundation on executing and measuring successful email marketing, download your free copy of the ebook.
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